Oh, fiddles and footlights! cried Dawe, derisively. Youve got that old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When the man with the black mustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have the mother kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say: May high heaven witness that I will rest neither night nor day till the heartless villain that has stolen me child feels the weight of anothers vengeance!
Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.
I think, said he, that in real life the woman would express herself in those words or in very similar ones.
Not in a six hundred nights run anywhere but on the stage, said Dawe hotly. Ill tell you what shed say in real life. Shed say: What! Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! Its one trouble after another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the police-station. Why wasnt somebody looking after her, Id like to know? For Gods sake, get out of my way or Ill never get ready. Not that hat the brown one with the velvet bows. Bessie must have been crazy; shes usually shy of strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How Im upset!
Thats the way shed talk, continued Dawe. People in real life dont fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They simply cant do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up their words and ideas a little more, thats all.
Shack, said Editor Westbrook impressively, did you ever pick up the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a street car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips? I never did, said Dawe. Did you?
Shack, said Editor Westbrook impressively, did you ever pick up the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a street car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips? I never did, said Dawe. Did you?
Well, no, said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. But I can well imagine what she would say.
So can I, said Dawe.
And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the oracle and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and heroines of the Minerva Magazine, contrary to the theories of the editor thereof.
My dear Shack, said he, if I know anything of life I know that every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls forth an apposite, concordant, conformable and proportionate expression of feeling. How much of this inevitable accord between expression and feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to the influence of art, it would be difficult to say. The sublimely terrible roar of the lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent utterances of Lear are above the level of his senile vaporings. But it is also true that all men and women have what may be called a sub-conscious dramatic sense that is awakened by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion a sense unconsciously acquired from literature and the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language befitting their importance and histrionic value.
And in the name of the seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius, where did the stage and literature get the stunt? asked Dawe.
From life, answered the editor, triumphantly.
The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently but dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to formulate adequately his dissent.
On a bench nearby a frowzy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived that his moral support was due a downtrodden brother.
Punch him one, Jack, he called hoarsely to Dawe. Wats he come makin a noise like a penny arcade for amongst genlemen that comes in the square to set and think?
Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of leisure.
Tell me, asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, what especial faults in The Alarum of the Soul caused you to throw it down?
When Gabriel Murray, said Westbrook, goes to his telephone and is told that his fiancée has been shot by a burglar, he says I do not recall the exact words, but
I do, said Dawe. He says: Damn Central; she always cuts me off. (And then to his friend) Say, Tommy, does a thirty-two bullet make a big hole? Its kind of hard luck, aint it? Could you get me a drink from the sideboard, Tommy? No; straight; nothing on the side.
And again, continued the editor, without pausing for argument, when Berenice opens the letter from her husband informing her that he has fled with the manicure girl, her words are let me see
She says, interposed the author: Well, what do you think of that!
Absurdly inappropriate words, said Westbrook, presenting an anti-climax plunging the story into hopeless bathos. Worse yet; they mirror life falsely. No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms when confronted by sudden tragedy.