"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.
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