(_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--n.o.body 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 gla.s.s is all a cheat.

The ugly and the old, whom the looking-gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage is an a.s.sisted wit, edged, underscored, selectively phrased by a skilful author. In the second, everything springs seemingly una.s.sisted 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._