n the intellectual muscles of the
audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic
literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own
language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in
which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could
name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which
might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make
of them.

Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread
of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very
difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in
getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style,
without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give
concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still
seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they
will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to
them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's
constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he
has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it
plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may
snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting
of common speech.

It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal
naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing
which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English
dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer
beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge.
But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,[1]
while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even
before his genius took hold of it.

It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition
the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie
("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming
play, _The Ambassador_; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that
her next play, _The Wisdom of the Wise_, was singularly self-conscious
and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in
any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or m