Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play.  I should not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a reaction—­of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to character and situation.  In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.  Take this, for example, from The Profligate.  Dunstan Renshaw has expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that “marriages of contentment are the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild oats rather thickly”; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies—­

HUGH MURRAY:  Contentment!  Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no autumn in the life of a profligate?  Do you think there is no moment when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread them back into the earth which rejects the foul load?  To-day you have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!

  DUNSTAN RENSHAW:  Look here, Mr. Murray—!

HUGH MURRAY:  To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy—­but what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will have learned to covet!  You may drag her into the crowded streets—­there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks of the pavement!  In your house or in the open, the scent of the mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music but the wind’s rustle amongst the fat sheaves!  And, worst of all, your wife’s heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your profligacy has stored there!  I warn you—­Mr. Lawrence Kenward!

If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from Mid-Channel, we might think that a century of evolution lay between them, instead of barely twenty years.

The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference between what the French call the “mot d’auteur” and the “mot de situation.”  The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class ought to be added—­the “mot de caractere.”  The “mot d’auteur” is the distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention.  It survives in full vigour—­or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?—­in the works of Oscar Wilde.  For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of Lady Windermere’s Fan is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to the characters of the speakers.  The mark of the “mot d’auteur” is that it can with perfect ease be detached from its context.  I could