AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest
dust. Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from
one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss
Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which
makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts,
they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their
souls.
LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?
AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I
will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this
road from Moutier.
LECTOR. By all means.
AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly
bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!
LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!
AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night.
LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman.
AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction.
LECTOR. Yes, indeed.
AUCTOR. Indeed, yes.
LECTOR. I cannot go on like this.
AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One cannot treat of
common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I were the
editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of
dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would
count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some
quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to
pad out their work.
So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next time I come to a bit
of road about which there is nothing to say, I will tell a story or
sing a song, and to that I pledge myself.
By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you know those books and
stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no words at all?
Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I wonder what
the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn a mint of money,
for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this -
There. That seems to me worth a good deal more money than all the
modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense ever written.
What verve! What terseness! And yet how clear!
LECTOR. Let us be getting on.
AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more enduring things.
After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed through another gap
in the hills and -
LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon that little tragedy
of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess?
