himself.  Even the driest scientific proposition may, under special circumstances, become electrical with drama.  The statement that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses; yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than that which some one invented for Galileo:  “E pur si muove!”?  In all this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie’s maxim.  I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation, it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any practical help to the practical dramatist.  He must rely on his instinct, not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.

We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the merely mechanical parts—­the connective tissue of the play—­should consist either of “mots de caractere” or of “mots de situation.”  But if we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French dramatists for models of practice.  It is part of the abiding insularity of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama.  Here, for instance, is a quite typical passage from Le Duel, by M. Henri Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his contemporaries.  I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbe and the Duchess: 

THE ABBE:  “In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why.  We feel it, that is all!—­fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.  Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with one of these moments!”

  THE DUCHESS:  “So I, too, believe.”

THE ABBE:  “We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis.  That is why I want—­Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you?  Where shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us?  All that you are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know.  You have opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind.  I am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose, calm as a lake.”

And so Monsieur l’Abbe goes on for another page.  If it be said that this ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.