A person in a crook play may have talked underworld patois which no self-respecting criminal would have allowed himself to utter, but he did not sit on a divan and evolve abnormal _bons mots_ with each and every breath. The misguided and misinformed daughter in the Self and Sex Play may have lisped words which only an interne should hear, but she did not offer a succession of brilliant but meaningless paradoxes as a substitute for real conversation.
Continuously snappy back-talk is now encountered chiefly in such acts as those of "Cooney & LeBlanc, the Eccentric Comedy Dancing Team."
And even _they_ manage to scrape along without the paradoxes.
But there was a time, beginning with the Oscar Wilde era, when no unprotected thought was safe.
[Illustration: "Snappy back-talk is now encountered chiefly in such acts as 'Cooney & LeBlanc, the Eccentric Comedy Dancing Team.'"]
It might be seized at any moment by an English Duke or a Lady Agatha and strangled to death. Even the butlers in the late 'eighties were wits, and served epigrams with cucumber sandwiches; and a person entering one of these drawing-rooms and talking in connected sentences--easily understood by everybody--each with one subject, predicate and meaning, would have been looked upon as a high class moron. One might as well have gone to a dinner at Lady Coventry's without one's collar, as without one's kit of trained paradoxes.
[Illustration: "The butlers served epigrams with the cucumber sandwiches."]
A late Autumn afternoon in one of these semi-Oscar Wilde plays, for instance, would run something like this:
SCENE--_The Octagon Room in Lord Raymond Eaveston's Manor House in Stropshire._
LADY EAVESTON and SIR THOMAS WAFFLETON _are discovered, arranging red flowers in a vase_.
SIR T.: I detest red flowers; they are so yellow.
LADY E.: What a cynic you are, Sir Thomas. I really must not listen to you or I shall hear something that you say.
SIR T.: Not at all, my dear Lady Eaveston. I detest people who listen closely; they are so inattentive.
LADY E.: Pray do not be analytical, my dear Sir Thomas. When people are extremely analytical with me I am sure that they are superficial, and, to me, nothing is more abominable than superficiality, unless perhaps it is an intolerable degree of thoroughness.