fill this page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly comprehensible without any account of the situation.  Among them would be one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles.  “In the world,” says Dumby, “there are two tragedies.  One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”  This may rank with Lord Illingworth’s speech in A Woman of No Importance:  “All thought is immoral.  Its very essence is destruction.  If you think of anything you kill it.  Nothing survives being thought of.”  When we hear such sayings as these—­or the immortal “Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people”—­we do not enquire too curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.

It is useless to begin to give specimens of the “mot de caractere” and “mot de situation.”  All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or the other.  One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective examples of each class:  but as their characteristic is to fade when uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to very little purpose.

But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a sound style in dialogue.  Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an immensity of spiritual significance—­generally tragic—­was supposed to be concentrated into a few brief words.  The classic example is Ferdinand’s “Cover her face.  Mine eyes dazzle.  She died young,” in The Duchess of Malfy.  Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant, staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often resulted in dense obscurity.  Not many plays composed under this influence have reached the stage; not one has held it.  But we find in some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner, with a touch of euphuism thrown in.  This is mainly due, I think, to the influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher.  Meredith was a man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a medium much less suited to them—­that of the stage—­the result is apt to be disastrous.  I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the dialogue places a constant strain on 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.