(Lady Bracknell Sweeps Out in Majestic Indignation.)69
The Way of the World
Enter Mrs. Millamant, Witwoud, Mincing
Mirabell. Here she comes, i’faith, full sail, with her fan spread and streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders; ha, no, I cry her mercy.
Mrs. Fainall. I see but one poor empty sculler; and he tows her woman after him.
Mirabell. (To Mrs. Millamant.) You seem to be unattended, Madam—you us’d to have the beau monde throng after you; and a flock of gay fine perukes hovering round you.
Witwoud. Like moths about a candle,—I had like to have lost my comparison for want of breath.
Mrs. Millamant. Oh, I have denied myself airs today, I have walk’d as fast through the crowd—
Witwoud. As a favourite just disgraced; and with as few followers.
Mrs. Millamant. Dear Mr. Witwoud, truce with your similitudes; for I am as sick of ’em—
Witwoud. As a physician of good air—I cannot help it, Madam, though ’tis against myself.
Mrs. Millamant. Yet again! Mincing, stand between me and his wit.
Witwoud. Do, Mrs. Mincing, like a screen before a great fire. I confess I do blaze today, I am too bright.
Mrs. Fainall. But, dear Millamant, why were you so long?
Mrs. Millamant. Long! Lord, have I not made violent haste? I have ask’d every living thing I met for you; I have enquir’d after you, as after a new fashion.
Witwoud. Madam, truce with your similitudes—no, you met her husband, and did not ask him for her.
Mrs. Millamant. By your leave, Witwoud, that were like enquiring after an old fashion, to ask a husband for his wife.
Witwoud. Hum, a hit, a hit, a palpable hit, I confess it.
Mrs. Fainall. You were dress’d before I came abroad.
Mrs. Millamant. Ay, that’s true—O but then I had—Mincing, what had I? why was I so long?
Mincing. O mem, your La’ship staid to peruse a pacquet of letters.
Mrs. Millamant. O, ay, letters—I had letters—I am persecuted with letters—I hate letters—nobody knows how to write letters, and yet one has ’em one does not know why—they serve one to pin up one’s hair.
Witwoud. Is that the way? Pray, Madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies.
Mrs. Millamant. Only with those in verse, Mr. Witwoud, I never pin up my hair with prose. I think I try’d once, Mincing.
Mincing. O mem, I shall never forget it.
Mrs. Millamant. Ay, poor Mincing tift and tift all the morning.
Mincing. ’Till I had the cramp in my fingers, I’ll vow, mem. And all to no purpose. But when your Laship pins it up with poetry, it fits so pleasant the next day as anything, and is so pure and so crips.
Witwoud. Indeed, so crips.
Mincing. You’re such a critic, Mr. Witwoud.
Mrs. Millamant. Mirabell, did you take exceptions last night? O ay, and went away—now I think on’t, I’m angry—no, now I think on’t I’m pleas’d—for I believe I gave you some pain.
Mirabell. Does that please you?
Mrs. Millamant. Infinitely; I love to give pain.
Mirabell. You wou’d affect a cruelty which is not in your nature; your true vanity is in the power of pleasing.
Mrs. Millamant. O I ask your pardon for that—one’s cruelty is in one’s power; and when one parts with one’s cruelty, one parts with one’s power; and when one has parted with that, I fancy one’s old and ugly.
Mirabell. Ay, ay, suffer your cruelty to ruin the object of your power, to destroy your lover—and then how vain, how lost a thing you’ll be! nay, ’tis true: you are no longer handsome when you’ve lost your lover; your beauty dies upon the instant; for beauty is the lover’s gift; ’tis he bestows your charms—your glass is all a cheat. The ugly and the old, whom the looking-glass mortifies, yet after commendation can be flatter’d by it, and discover beauties in it; for that reflects our praises rather than our face.
Mrs. Millamant. O the vanity of these men! Fainall, d’ye hear him? If they did not commend us, we were not handsome! now you must know they cou’d not commend one, if one was not handsome. Beauty the lover’s gift—Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? Why, one makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and then if one pleases, one makes more.
Witwoud. Very pretty. Why, you make no more of making of lovers, Madam, than of making so many card-matches.
Mrs. Millamant. One no more owes one’s beauty to a lover than one’s wit to an echo; they can but reflect what we look and say; vain empty things if we are silent or unseen, and want a being.
Mirabell. Yet to those two vain empty things you owe the two greatest pleasures of your life.
Mrs. Millamant. How so?
Mirabell. To your lover you owe the pleasure of hearing yourselves prais’d; and to an echo the pleasure of hearing yourselves talk.
Witwoud. But I know a lady that loves talking so incessantly, she won’t give an echo fair play; she has that everlasting rotation of the tongue, that an echo must wait ’till she dies before it can catch her last words.
Mrs. Millamant. O fiction! Fainall, let us leave these men.70
Is not the dialogue of Congreve the finer because one feels in Wilde the ringmaster showing off his figures, and with Congreve is not conscious of the author at all? That is, the wit of the first passage is an assisted wit, edged, underscored, selectively phrased by a skilful author. In the second, everything springs seemingly unassisted from the characters. The range of accomplishment from obvious search for beauty in consciously made similes, through such relatively fine accomplishment as Wilde shows, to such perfect work as that of Congreve, should be carefully studied by the would-be dramatist. John Ford’s wonderful lines
Parthenophil is like to something I remember,
A great while since, a long, long time ago
hold the memory not merely because of the loveliness of their haunting melody, but because they are in character and help to portray the wistful bewilderment of the moment. Why go far afield searching for the phrase that shall give charm, grace, beauty? Look into the souls of your characters and find them there. Either you haven’t seen them or, not being there, they cannot properly appear in your text. Mr. W. B. Yeats tells of rehearsing a young actress who stumbled constantly over the line
And then I looked up and saw you coming toward me, I know not whether from the north, the south, the east or the west.
She gave it with no sense of its contained rhythm, and always came to a full stop after “toward me,” adding the last words almost unwillingly. When asked why she did this, she said that all which followed seemed to her unnecessary: the important fact was contained in what preceded. It took much rehearsing to make the young woman see that the music of the line is characteristic of the dales people, and so has characterizing value, and that she had totally forgotten the situation of the woman speaking. A peddler has come to the only hut in a lonely valley. The woman welcomes him heartily, not that she may buy, but because after days in which she has seen no one except her “man,” she is greedy for talk. Having bargained as long as she can, very regretfully she sees the man departing, and, other topics being exhausted, she tells him of her pleasure in his coming, spinning out her phrase as long as she possibly can in order to hold him. Out of that set of conditions springs a highly characterizing phrase that also has beauty. If Synge had done no more by his plays than to make us recognize in the speech of the peasant the characterizing power and the beauty for him who has “the eye to see and the ear to hear,” his work would deserve permanent fame. He states his ideas in the preface to The Playboy of the Western World.
In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers near Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk-imagination of these fine people. Any one who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller’s or the playwright’s hand as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege. When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of importance for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; and on the other Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality. In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by any one who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.71
As Ibsen says, “Style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the representation.”
You are of opinion that the drama ought to have been written in verse, and that it would have gained by this. Here I must differ from you. The play is, as you must have observed, conceived in the most realistic style; the illusion I wished to produce was that of reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he was reading was something that had really happened. If I had employed verse I should have counteracted my own intention and prevented the accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary, insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into the play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the same rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. Speaking generally, the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the representation. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation; what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk “the language of the Gods.”72
The dramatist who would write dialogue of the highest order should have not only an inborn and highly trained feeling for the emotional significance of the material in hand; a fine feeling for characterization; ability to write dialogue which states facts in character; and the power to bring out whatever charm, grace, irony, wit, or other specially attractive qualities his characters permit; also he should have, or develop, a strong feeling for the nicest use of language. Dumas fils said, “There should be something of the poet, the artist in words, in every dramatist.”
1 The Far East, June 6, 1914, p. 295.
2 The Devonshire Hamlets, pp. 1-2.
3 The Devonshire Hamlets, pp. 26-27.
4 Act I. Scene 1. Belles-Lettres Series. Austin Dobson, ed. D. C. Heath & Co.
5 Hindle Wakes, Stanley Houghton. J.W. Luce & Co., Boston; Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London.
6 York Plays, p. 363. L. T. Smith, ed. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
7 Ludus Coventriæ, p. 322. J. O. Halliwell, ed. Shakespeare Society.
8 Plays, pp. 71-72 Copyright, 1915, by Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York.
9 B. W. Huebsch. New York.
10 Julius Cæsar, Act III, Scene 3.
11 The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell, Act I, Scene 1. George Lillo. Sir A.W. Ward, ed. Belles-Lettres Series. D. C. Heath & Co., Boston and New York.
12 Works, R.W. Bond, ed. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
13 Selected Dramas of John Dryden. Conquest of Granada. G. R. Noyes, ed.
14 Belles-Lettres Series. Sir A. W. Ward, ed. D. C. Heath & Co., Boston and New York.
15 L’Année Psychologique, 1894, p. 120.
16 The Nigger, Act I. Edward Sheldon. The Macmillan Co., New York.
17 The Devonshire Hamlets, p. 99.
18 Letters of Bulwer-Lytton to Macready, p. 130. B. Matthews, ed.
19 Fortune by Land and Sea. T. Heywood and W. Rowley. W. B. Clarke Co, Boston.
20 From Ibsen’s Workshop, p. 162. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York.
21 Prose Dramas, vol. 1, p. 377. Idem.
22 From Ibsen’s Workshop, p. 171. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York.
23 Prose Dramas, vol. i, p. 386. Idem.
24 The Ambassador. T. Fisher Unwin, London.
25 Samuel French, New York.
26 Mistress Beatrice Cope. M. E. Le Clerc. D. Appleton & Co., New York.
27 The Devonshire Hamlets, pp. 4, 6.
28 Becket. Tennyson. The Macmillan Co.
29 Becket. Arranged by Sir Henry Irving. Idem.
30 George Riddle’s Readings. Walter H. Baker & Co., Boston.
31 The Origin of the English Drama, vol. II, p. 48. T. Hawkins, ed. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1773.
32 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene 1.
33 Belles-Lettres Series. K. L. Bates, ed. D. C. Heath & Co., Boston and New York.
34 Pre-Shakesperean Drama, vol. 1, p. 300. J. M. Manly. Ginn & Co., Boston.
35 Early Plays, p. 72. C. G. Child. Riverside Literature Series, No. 191. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.
36 Samuel French, New York.
37 Note that this is a literary detail effective for readers only. At best the first row of spectators alone could identify the title of the book.
38 Justice. Copyright, 1910, by John Galsworthy. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York.
39 Die Frau im Fenster. Theater in Versen. H. von Hofmannsthal. S. Fischer, Berlin.
40 The final scene of Act IV of Nathan Hale shows effective use of pantomime.
41 Walter H. Baker & Co., Boston; W. Heinemann, London.
42 The Great Divide, Act I. The Macmillan Co., New York.
43 Translated by Arthur Symons. Brentano, New York.
44 For such skilful substitution of pantomime for words, see pp. 388-89, Lady Windermere’s Fan.
45 Robert Louis Stevenson, the Dramatist, p. 15. Sir A.W. Pinero. Chiswick Press, London. For the play see Three Plays, Henley and Stevenson. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York.
46 Samuel French, New York.
47 The Duchesse of Malfi, Act V, Scene 4. Belles-Lettres Series. M. W. Sampson, ed. D. C. Heath & Co., Boston and New York.
48 Othello, Act II, Scene 1.
49 Othello, Act III, Scene 3.
50 Drama League Series. Hannah Lynch, tr. Doubleday, Page & Co.
51 Plays, vol. 1. J. W. Luce & Co., Boston.
52 Plays, vol. 1. J. W. Luce & Co., Boston.
53 Introduction to Browning, pp. 85-86. H. Corson. D. C. Heath & Co.
54 The Ring and the Book. Robert Browning. Tauchnitz ed., vol. IV. Leipzig.
55 Act II, Scene 2. Samuel French, New York.
56 Plays, vol. II, pp. 150-51. J. Tonson. London, 1730.
57 The Foundations of a National Drama, p. 23. H. A. Jones. George H. Doran Company, New York.
58 Concerning Humour in Comedy. A Letter. European Theories of the Drama, pp. 213-214. Ed. B. H. Clark. Stewart and Kidd Co., Cincinnati.
59 The Devonshire Hamlets, p. 28.
60 Belles-Lettres Series, pp. 271-273. A. Bates, ed. D.C. Heath & Co., Boston.
61 Plays of Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, Lady Windermere’s Fan. J. W. Luce & Co., Boston.
62 Idem, vol. II. The Importance of Being Earnest.
63 Plays of Oscar Wilde, vol. 1. J. W. Luce & Co., Boston.
64 Walter H. Baker Co., Boston.
65 Dramatic Works, vol. II, pp. 222-223. London, 1773.
66 Geo. Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Selected Dramas of John Dryden, with The Rehearsal, p. 399. G.R. Noyes, ed. Scott, Freeman & Co.
67 Richard the Second, Act IV. Scene 1.
68 Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 5.
69 Plays of Oscar Wilde, vol. II. J. W. Luce & Co., Boston.
70 Dramatic Works of William Congreve, vol. II. pp. 111-117. S. Crowder, London, 1773.
71 J. W. Luce & Co., Boston.
72 The Letters of Henrik Ibsen, p. 269. Letter to Edmund Gosse, January 15, 1874. Fox, Duffield & Co., New York.