" But if
we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French
dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity
of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English
dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass
without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously
rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for
instance, is a quite typical passage from _Le Duel_, by M. Henri
Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even
more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his
contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbe
and the Duchess:
THE ABBE: "In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and
decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,
that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of
lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth
from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what
their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.
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