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 may not have many qualities, but it must be emotional.”  Here we have a statement which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance.  “My lord, the carriage waits,” may be, in its right place, a highly dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse no emotion in the person addressed.  What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it, was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing, direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon individual human destinies.  The dull play, the dull scene, the dull speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs. Craigie’s aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily fetter and restrict