Dialogue

Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created from the title page by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION
Anthony Hope Hawkins, M.A.
Sometime Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford
(Privately Printed)
November, 1909
As this leaflet is privately printed by special permission of the Author, no additional copies can be sold.

Although it is probable that the subject I have chosen to speak about this evening is rather outside the ordinary scope of your proceedings, I have thought it better to take that risk than to attempt to address you on some topic which I, as a working novelist and one who has made experiments in the dramatic line also, have had less occasion to study, and therefore should be less likely to be able to say anything deserving of your attention—not that I am at all confident of doing that even as matters stand. Yet perhaps it is not altogether alien to the spirit of this Association to consider sometimes a more or less technical aspect of literature itself, even though its main object may be to promote the study of literature; such a discussion, undertaken from time to time, may foster that interest in literature, on which in the end the spread of its study must depend. With that much said by way of justification, or of apology, as you will, I proceed to my task.
Some months ago I happened to read a novel in the whole course of which nobody said anything—not one of the characters was represented in the act of speaking to another with the living voice. One remark was indeed quoted in a letter as having been made viva voce on a previous occasion, but this sudden breach of consistency did not command my belief—it seemed like an assertion that in an assembly of veritable mutes somebody had suddenly shouted. The book was not in the main in the form of letters—it was almost pure narrative. The effect was worse than unreal. An intense sense of lifelessness was produced; you moved among the dead—or even the shadows of the dead. It was a lesson in the importance of dialogue in fiction which no writer could ever forget.