storyteller
has nothing whatever to do.)

It exactly happened moreover that my own material here was to profit in
a particular way by that extension of view. My idea was to be treated
with light irony--it would be light and ironical or it would be nothing;
so that I asked myself, naturally, what might be the least solemn form
to give it, among recognised and familiar forms. The question thus at
once arose: What form so familiar, so recognised among alert readers, as
that in which the ingenious and inexhaustible, the charming philosophic
"Gyp" casts most of her social studies? Gyp had long struck me as
mistress, in her levity, of one of the happiest of forms--the only
objection to my use of which was a certain extraordinary benightedness
on the part of the Anglo-Saxon reader. One had noted this reader
as perverse and inconsequent in respect to the absorption of
"dialogue"--observed the "public for fiction" consume it, in certain
connexions, on the scale and with the smack of lips that mark the
consumption of bread-and-jam by a children's school-feast, consume it
even at the theatre, so far as our theatre ever vouchsafes it, and yet
as flagrantly reject it when served, so to speak, au naturel. One had
seen good solid slices of fiction, well endued, one might surely have
thought, with this easiest of lubrications, deplored by editor and
publisher as positively not, for the general gullet as known to THEM,
made adequately "slick." "'Dialogue,' always 'dialogue'!" I had seemed
from far back to hear them mostly cry: "We can't have too much of it, we
can't have enough of it, and no excess of it, in the form of no matter
what savourless dilution, or what boneless dispersion, ever began to
injure a book so much as even the very scantest claim put in for form
and substance." This wisdom had always been in one's ears; but it had
at the same time been equally in one's eyes that really constructive
dialogue, dialogue organic and dramatic, speaking for itself,
representing and embodying substance and form, is among us an uncanny
and abhorrent thing, not to be dealt with on any terms. A comedy or a
tragedy may run for a thousand nights without prompting twenty persons
in London or in New York to desire that view of its text which is so
desired in Paris, as soon as a play begins to loom at all large, that
the number of copies of the printed piece in circulation far exceeds at
last the number of performances. But as with the printed pie