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at naturalness which is so pre-eminently its own where it is dealing with a clash of temperaments or with contrasted views of life. It seems to come at second hand, and the reader feels that he would sooner have been with A, who really saw the thing done, than merely with B, who is only being told about it by the actual witness.

Again, I think there is little doubt that the ordinary reader is fatigued by too much talking, and that a long novel, mainly relying on dialogue and reducing narrative to a merely subordinate position, is in great danger of becoming tedious. This it may do in one of two ways--or, if it is very unfortunate, in both--at different places. The writer may try to tell too much by dialogue, with the result that his characters speak at great length, and he topples over the line which divides dialogue from speech-making. Or, on the other hand, alive to the perils of speech-making, he may try to cut it all up into question and answer, and to enliven it by constant epigrams or some other form of wit. This latter expedient may not bore the reader so much as the speech-making, but it will probably fatigue him more. Dialogue does, in fact, make a greater claim on the reader than narrative. I think this is true even when it is good dialogue. Something may be done to help him by skilful comment or description--clever stage-directions in effect--but none the less he is deprived, or curtailed, of much of the assistance on his way which the narrative form can give him. I think that probably the best advice to offer to a novice would be: As few long conversations as possible--but as many short ones. Let the dialogue break up the narrative, and the narrative cut short any tendency to prolixity in the dialogue.

Now, so far as I know--but I hasten to add that I am not a wide reader of plays, though I am much addicted to seeing them acted--Mr. Bernard Shaw was the first among English dramatists to see and exploit fully the possibilities of stage-directions in helping the imagination of those who read, as distinct from those who see, his plays. Some of his stage-directions are, in my humble opinion, among the best things he has ever done--terse, humorous, incisive, complete--see, for example, his description of Mrs. Warren. But novelists were quicker to see the possibility of their stage-directions, their comments on moods, their descriptions of the actions or the gestures accompanying the spoken words. When you talk to a man or woman, you don't shut your eyes and merely listen to the voice. You do listen carefully to the voice--since he may say 'Yes' as if he really meant it, or as if he only half-meant it, or as if he meant just the opposite--but you also watch his eyes and his mouth--and in moments of strong excitement it is recorded of many a villain that his fingers twitched, and of many a heroine that her bosom heaved; so fingers and bosoms are worth watching too. Now the point is that a skilful use of these stage-directions can not only immensely assist the meaning of novel dialogue, but can also add enormously to its artistic value and merit. It can diffuse an atmosphere, impart a hint, create an interest by a dexterous suspending of the answer. This last is, from a professional point of view, a particularly pretty trick--it's not much more than a trick, but let us call it a literary device--and Sterne brought it to great perfection--and knew well what he was doing. I will make bold to quote a passage of his which bears on the whole subject, and shows both his method and the absolute consciousness with which he employed it--to say nothing of the shameless candour with which he laughs at his own trick. Corporal Trim is discoursing to his fellow servants on the death of Tristram's brother, Master Bobby. 'Are we not here now?' continued the Corporal 'and' 'gone in a minute?' Then Sterne digresses, and repeats--as his manner is. But he comes back--and is good enough to explain: 'Let us only carry back our minds to the mortality of Trim's hat,' he says. 'Are we not here now--and gone in a moment? There was nothing in the sentence--'twas one of your self-evident truths we have the advantage of hearing every day: and if Trim had not trusted more to his hat than to his head, he had made nothing at all of it.' And he proceeds: 'Ten thousand and ten thousand times ten thousand are the ways by which a hat may be dropped on the ground without any effect. Had he flung it, or thrown it, or cast it, or skimmed it, or squirted it, or let it slip or fall in any possible direction under heaven--had he dropped it like a goose, like a puppy, like an ass--or in doing it or even after he had done it, had looked like a fool, like a ninny, like a nincompoop--it had failed, and the effect upon the heart had been lost.' And he ends--most justifiably--'Meditate, I beseech you, upon Trim's hat!' Trim's hat may certainly stand as an instance of the value of stage-directions to novel dialogue.

Returning to actually spoken words--the real talk between the interlocutors--we may note the great adaptability and elasticity of the dialogue form. The hesitation, the aposiopesis, the interruption, are all ready and flexible devices, apt to convey hints, innuendoes, doubts, objections, apt to convey the sense of a balance inclining now this way, now that, to show one mind feeling its way towards a knowledge of the other, while sedulously guarding its own secrets. Or you may seek the broader effects of comedy with the sudden betrayal of irreconcilable divergence, or of an agreement as complete as it is paradoxical, or of the mutual helplessness which results from total misunderstanding of the one by the other, or, finally, of the well-worn but still effective device--a favourite one in the theatre--of two people talking at cross-purposes, one meaning one thing, the other a different one, and the pair arriving at an harmonious agreement from utterly inharmonious premises--the false accord of a hundred scenes of comedy.

Such are some of the arts of dialogue, as they are employed sometimes in the task of serious and delicate analysis, as for example by Mr. Henry James, sometimes in the cause of pure comedy, as by Gyp. That lady made an interesting experiment. She tried to indicate the gestures, wherein her countrymen are so eloquent, by a system of notation--so many notes of interrogation, or so many of exclamation, being B's response to A's spoken observation. But here, I think, she must be held to have resorted to 'business' as we have already discussed it, and to have passed beyond true dialogue. An 'Oh', an 'Ah!' or a 'Humph!' constitute about the irreducible minimum of that articulate speech which makes dialogue. Notes of exclamation won't quite do.

One other function of dialogue deserves especial mention. Unless an author adopts the drastic course I have already alluded to--that of sinking himself absolutely in the personality of one of his characters and writing in the name and garb of that character--as for example did Defoe--and as, for example, does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he plays Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes's 'lead' as they say in the theatre--unless he does this, dialogue alone will enable him to impart 'local colour', in other words, to set before his reader the speech and the mind of races or classes far different in their thoughts, in their modes of expression, and in their actual vocabulary and pronunciation, from what we may term the ordinary educated reader. Scores of Dickens's cockney characters, Mr. Hardy's Wessex rustics, Mr. Kipling's soldiers, live and move and have their being for us solely in virtue of what they say and the way they say it. In fact they couldn't be described--they must be seen and heard. They must be on the stage. Therefore they must use--their creators must use for them--that literary form which is, in the end, the link between novels and the stage--the form common to both--the form of dialogue.

That last observation leads me naturally to pass on to the literary vehicle in which dialogue is in its glory--in which it is the sovereign instrument, in which it reaches its highest level of independence, in which it leans its lightest on any other aid than that inherent in its own capacity. This is the drama--and the drama written for the actual stage. I do not think that what are called 'plays for the study' need detain us. It is really only a question of degree in each case. They either approximate closely to the true stage-play or, on the other hand, they are really books in which, by artifice and often by an effort which is rather too visible, those parts that would naturally assume a narrative form, are presented in the guise of dialogue--or rather not so much of dialogue as we are now discussing it, but, as I should say, of speeches which are, in essence, either narrative, or argumentative, or reflective, or hortative in character.

Still, all allowances made, it remains true that the stage offers the fullest, the fairest, and the most independent opportunity for pure dialogue--and it is necessary to ask the question--however hard the answer may be--what effect the medium of the theatre has upon dialogue. I admit at once that I think the question is very hard to answer. We are in presence of the indisputable fact that dialogue which is highly moving or amusing in a book may fall quite flat on the stage--while on the other hand dialogue which is very effective on the stage may sound either obvious or bald in a book. This is not to say, of course, that some dialogue will not be found good for both. Practical experiments are constantly being tried, owing to the habit of dramatizing novels which have achieved a popular success. The temptation is to carry over into the play as much of the dialogue of the novel as you can contrive to use; the object is to preserve as far as possible both the literary flavour and the commercial goodwill of the original. The result is interesting. The novelist, whether he acts as his own dramatist or not, will almost always notice, I think, that passages of dialogue which are most effective in the book are least effective on the stage--often that they need complete remodelling before they can be used at all. On the other hand, passages which he has little esteemed in the book--regarded perhaps almost as mere machinery, part of the necessary traffic of the story--make an immediate hit with audiences in the theatre.

It is a commonplace in the theatrical world that there is no telling what 'they' will like--'they' means the public--not even what plays they will or will not like, much less what particular scenes or passages--and nobody with even the least practical experience would care to back his opinion save at very favourable odds. If then it is impossible to tell what they will or won't like, it seems still more hopeless to inquire why they will or won't like it; but that is, in reality, not quite the case. It is not, I think, so much that the playwright does not know what he has to do to please them, as that it happens to be rather difficult to do it, and quite as difficult to know when you have done it. Happily, however, we are to-night not on the hard highroad of practice, but in the easy pastures of criticism, and may therefore be bold to try to suggest what are the main features of good theatrical dialogue--features which, though they may be found in and may assist novel dialogue, yet are not indispensable to it, but which must characterize theatrical dialogue and are indispensable to success on the stage. These indispensable qualities may in the end be reduced to two--practicality and universality.

The second quality which I suggest as pre-eminently required by stage dialogue and which I have called universality really goes deeper and affects more than the mere dialogue, though strictly speaking we are this evening concerned with its effect in that sphere only. Consider for a moment the different aim which a writer of novels and a writer of plays respectively may set before himself. Of course the novelist may set out to please the whole British public--and the American and Continental too, if you like, though for simplicity's sake we may confine ourselves to these islands. A certain number no doubt start with that aim. A few may have succeeded--very few. But such an ambitious task is in no way incumbent on the novelist. Whether he looks to his pride or his pocket, to fame or to a sufficient circulation, it is quite enough for him to please a section of the public. He may be a famous literary man and enjoy a large income, as fame and incomes go in authorship, without three-quarters of the adult population--let alone the boys and girls--knowing or caring one jot about him. And he may be quite content to have it so--content deliberately and voluntarily, and not merely perforce, to limit the extent of his appeal, finding compensation in the intenser, though narrower, appeal he makes to his chosen audience, and in the increased liberty to indulge and to develop his own bent--to go his own way, in short, happy in the knowledge that he has a select but sufficient body of devoted followers. For example, I don't suppose that Mr. Meredith expected or tried to please the boys who worshipped Mr. Henty, or that Mr. Henty, in his turn, had any idea of poaching on the preserves of Mr. Pett Ridge. In a word, a novelist can, if he likes or if he must , specialize in his audience just as he can in his subject or his treatment. If he pleases the class he tries to please, all is well with him; he can let the others go, with just as much regret and just as much politeness as his circumstances and his temperament may dictate.

Now, of course, this is true to some degree of the theatre also--at any rate in the great centres of population like London, where there are many neighbourhoods and many theatres. You would not expect to fill a popular 'low price' house with the same bill that might succeed at the St. James's or, in recent days, at the Court Theatre. Nevertheless, it is immensely less true of the theatre than it is of the novel. Take the average West End theatre--it has to cater for all of us. The fashionable folk go, you and I go, our growing boys and girls go, our relations from the country go, our servants go, our butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers go, the girls from the A.B.C. shops, and the young gentlemen from Marshall & Snelgrove's go--we have all to be catered for--we have all to be pleased with the same dinner! Across the footlights lies a miniature world, in which wellnigh every variety that exists in the great world outside has paid its money and sits in its seat. Is this to say that the theatre must rely on the commonplace and obvious? Not at all--but it is to say that it must in the main rely on the universal--on that which appeals to all the varieties in virtue of the common humanity that underlies the variations. It must find, so to say, the least common denominator, and work through and appeal to that. The things that will do it differ profoundly--

'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!'

That does it. Or Congreve's 'Though Marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves them still two fools!'--That does it, though obviously in quite a different way--or 'Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?'--again in a different way. Or again something quite elementary--even schoolboyish if one may dare to use the word of Shakespeare--may win its way by its absolute naturalness, as when Jacques says to Orlando--of Rosalind, 'I do not like her name'--'There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened'--an unanswerable retort to an impertinent observation which I have never known to fail in pleasing the house. The thing may or may not be simple, it may or may not be profound, it may or may not be witty, but it must have a wide appeal--it must touch a common chord. I imagine that very few plays--though I think I have known a few--get produced and then please nobody--absolutely nobody in the house. I have known some failures that have pleased very highly people whom any author should be proud to please. But they haven't pleased enough people--not merely not enough to succeed, but not enough to establish them as good plays, however much good literary stuff and good literary form there might be contained and exhibited in them.

Now this need for universality--for the thing with a wide appeal not limited to this or that class or character of intellect--has its effect, I think, on the actual form of the dialogue, though I freely admit that is an effect extremely hard to measure and define with any approach to accuracy. It in no way excludes individuality or even whimsicality, whether in situation or dialogue. The writer who is probably the most successful living British dramatist to-day is also probably the most individual and the most whimsical. It in no way demands undue concession to the commonplace--but it does, I think, require that the dialogue shall be in some sense in the vulgar tongue--that it shall be understanded of the people. The thing need not be seen or put as the audience would see or put it, but it must be seen and put as the audience can understand that character seeing and putting it. It must not be perverse, or too mannered, or too obscure. It may not be allowed so much licence in this respect as book-dialogue, if only for the reason that its effect has to be much more immediate--there can be no such thing as reading the speech over again the better to grasp its meaning--a necessity not unknown in novel reading. Its appeal is immediate, or it is nothing at all. It must also be, above all things, natural--and this again is on the stage even more pre-eminently requisite than in the written page--if only for the reason that the speaker is more vividly realized on the stage, and the author less vividly remembered--so that any discrepancy between the speaker as he lives before you and the particular thing he says is more glaringly apparent. And, as a corollary to this necessity for naturalness, follows the need for full and distinct differentiation of character. The dialogue must clearly attach to each character in the play his point of view and must consistently maintain it. On the whole therefore we may say that the universality of appeal which the stage demands operates on the form of the dialogue by way of imposing upon it certain obligations of straightforwardness of effect, of lucidity and immediateness in appeal, and of naturalness and exact appropriateness to the speaker--obligations which exist for book-dialogue also, but are less stringent and less peremptory there than in the theatre.

We arrive, then--as we draw near the close of these remarks--rather rambling remarks, I am afraid--at the conclusion, perhaps a conclusion with a touch of the paradoxical in it--that in dialogue the writer is always trying to do what in the nature of the case he can never do completely. He is always trying to present objectively a personality other than his own. He never fully succeeds, and it would be to the ruin of his work as literature, if he did. The creator is always there in the created, and it is probably true to say that he is there in greater degree just in proportion to the force of his personality and the power of his creative faculty. Is the greater writer then less true to life than the smaller? I am not going to be as surprising as that--for, though he puts in more of himself, the greater writer sees and puts in a lot more of the objective costermonger also. But it is, I think, true to say that what we get from him is not, in the strict use of words, anything that exists. It is a hypothetical person, if I may so put it--it is a compound of what the author takes from the world outside and what he himself contributes. The result is, then--to take an instance or two--in Diana of the Crossways, not an actual historical character, but what Mr. Meredith would have been had he been that lady--not an actual skipper of a coastwise barge, but what Mr. Jacobs would have been had he been skipper of a barge--not an actual detective, but what Gaboriau, or Wilkie Collins, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have been had he been a detective, or, to take extreme cases, not the inhabitants of the jungle, but all the varieties which Mr. Kipling's fertile genius would have assumed if he had had to people the jungle all off his own bat. True as this is of all imaginative writing, it is most true of dialogue. That is an attempt at direct impersonation, as direct as the actor's on the stage--and it is and can be successful only within the limits indicated. The author, like the actor, must go on trying to do what he never can and never ought to succeed in doing--namely, obliterating his own personality. The real process is not obliteration but transformation or translation--a fusion of himself with each of his speakers--he modifies each of them and is himself in each case modified by the fusion. And we may probably measure a man's genius in no small degree just by his susceptibility to this fusion. We talk of Shakespeare's universal genius, and say that he 'understands' everybody; that is to say, that he is at home in speaking in any man's mask--that he can fuse himself with anybody. Lesser writers can fuse only with people of a certain type, or a certain class, or a certain period, or a certain way of thinking. Some very clever people and accomplished writers fail in the novel or the play because they are deficient in the power of fusing at all, and their own personality is always the overpowering ingredient, so that they can preach, or teach, or criticize, but they cannot, as the saying goes, get into another man's skin--a popular way of putting the matter which will express the truth about what is needful very well, if we add the proviso that when the author gets in he must not drive the original owner out, but the two must dwell together in unity.

Thus we see dialogue fall into its place among the varieties of literary expression, as the most imitative and the least personal, yet not as entirely imitative nor as wholly impersonal. It carries the imitative and impersonal much further than the lyric coming straight from the poet's own heart, much further than the philosophic poem with its questioning of a man's own thoughts about the universe, further than narrative with its frankly personal record of how things appear to the narrator, and its unblushing attempt to make them appear in the same light to the reader. At its best it carries imitation to such a point that its own excellence alone convinces us that there is something more than imitation after all, and more than the insight which makes imitation possible--that among all the infinitely diverse creations of a rich imagination and an unerring penetration there is still a point of unity, which determines the exact attitude of each character towards the life which it is his to lead and the world which he has to live in. The point of unity is the author's voice, veiled and muffled, but audible still, however various, however fantastic, however transformed, the accents in which it speaks. The unity in multiplicity for which poetry yearns, philosophy labours, and science untiringly seeks--this is also the aim and ideal of dialogue, and of drama, its completest form--so that out of the infinite diversity of types and of individuals which pour forth from the mind of a great creator there shall still emerge something that we know to be his, something that he has given to, as well as all that he has taken from, the great scene about him, his view of life as it must present itself to all sorts and conditions of men, his criticism of a world in which all these sorts and conditions of men exist.

The following Publications have been issued by the Association, and can be purchased only by members on application to the Secretary, Miss ELIZABETH LEE, 8 Mornington Avenue Mansions, West Kensington, London:--

No. 1. Types of English Curricula in Boys' Secondary Schools. Price 6d.

No. 2. The Teaching of Shakespeare in Secondary Schools . Price 1d.

No. 3. A Short List of Books on English Literature from the beginning to 1832, for the use of Teachers. Price 6d.

No. 4. Shelley's View of Poetry. A Lecture by Professor A. C. Bradley, Litt.D. Price 1s.

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Transcriber's Notes:

--Text in italics is enclosed by underscores .

--Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

--Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

--Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.

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