I have tried to indicate the uses of dialogue to the writers of books—I must say a word or two about the stage later on—but it would be a mistake to suppose that its employment has no limits. One we have already touched upon—a man can’t talk dialogue to himself—well, unless he’s a ventriloquist, and in these days his right to soliloquize, or even to say ‘Hallo!’ when he’s by himself—except into the telephone, of course—is keenly canvassed or sternly denied. But even apart from this necessary limitation on dialogue, there are, I think, no doubt others. In the first place, dialogue, so excellent a means of exhibiting character and opinion, is on the whole not the most appropriate or effective mode of exhibiting action—unless, that is, the whole importance of the action depends on how it is received by one of the parties to the dialogue. Take the case of a murder. If the object is to tell an ingenious and thrilling story of a murder, it is in nine cases out of ten far better for the author to tell it himself. He gains nothing by putting it into the mouth of a character, and he probably loses directness and effect. But if the import of the murder lies not so much in itself as in the effect the news of it may have on A, B, then it is good to tell it to A, B; the reader can see the effect in operation. But with this exception I think it may be taken that books containing much external action, and much rapid action, will tend to rely less on dialogue, and more on narration. Not only is dialogue less quick-moving and direct, but when action is in the case, it loses just that 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.
Just now I referred to the possibility of assisting dialogue by comment or description, much as when you read a play you are assisted to follow and appreciate the lines written to be spoken on the stage by the directions inserted to guide the actor. This reference, I dare say, raised in your minds the thought that the dialogue I have been speaking of—dialogue as it is used in novels—is very rarely pure dialogue at all. The objection is well founded, and its application is wide, though the degree of its application varies immensely. You may find pure dialogue, without stage-directions, here and there, even in novels. George Borrow, for instance, is fond of it, and is a master of a peculiar quality of it. But far the more general form is dialogue assisted by comment and description—a hybrid kind of composition, in which the author plays a double part, speaking through the characters’ mouths at one moment, describing their actions, gestures, even their unspoken thoughts, at the next. This is the normal form of novel dialogue. The variations occur in the relative amount of this description or comment—of this stage-direction, as I have called it. And I call it that because this comment or description takes the place of what they call ‘business’ on the stage. The actor’s task is divided between his words and his ‘business’, and the playwright is entitled to rely on the ‘business’ to help out the words, just as the novelist describes or comments on the actions and gestures of his speakers, in order to assist and elucidate the meaning of the actual words they use. If you read a play—not seeing the actors—and if the author has given no stage-directions as to how the characters look or speak—as to whether they show anger or fright, or pleasure, or surprise, for instance, you will find, I think, that you have to read with an increased degree of attention—perhaps I may say of sympathetic imagination—and that, even with this brought to bear, you will sometimes be in doubt. So with novel dialogue. If the author denied himself description or comment interlarded with the actual words spoken, he would set a harder task both to his own skill and to the reader’s intelligence. The comments of the novelist, like the ‘business’ of the playwright, clothe the skeleton of the actually spoken words with a living form, expressing itself in action, in gesture, by frowns or smiles, by tears or laughter. I have little doubt that if we possessed not only Shakespeare’s words, but Shakespeare’s ‘business’, many a controversy as to the exact meaning of this passage or that, many a question as to the precise character or mental condition of this or that of his dramatis personae, could never have arisen—and many learned, and possibly some tedious, books would have gone unwritten.
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 (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an emblem of health and stability) ‘and’ (dropping his hat upon the ground) ‘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 (for matter and motion are infinite) 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.
We may come then to the theatre itself—but before I attempt to say anything on the relations between stage dialogue and book dialogue, I should like to remind you again that even this greater independence of stage dialogue is very far indeed from being absolute. We have already referred to the stage-directions. These are amplified by the actor, of his own motion or in pursuit of the instructions he receives at rehearsal. The result is his ‘business’—everything he does on the stage except what he does with his tongue. The ‘business’ counts for much, but what counts for even more is that the words are spoken there on the stage by living man to living man. I think it is hard to exaggerate the effect of this—the immense help it gives to the words. It is not merely a question of vividness, though that is important enough. It is equally, or even more, a question of appropriateness, of the words matching the personality from which they proceed. The novelist can make his words match the personality which he has created in his own mind. Where he is at a disadvantage compared with the playwright is that it is infinitely harder for him, in spite of all his stage-directions, and his descriptions, and his analysis, to set that personality as completely before his reader as the corporeal presence of the actor sets it before the audience in the theatre. Hence the match—the harmony—between the words and the personality—though it may exist, is apt not to be nearly so effective in the book as on the stage, and a line that misses its mark as written in the one may triumph in the other, thanks to the man who speaks it—to his skill, to his emotional power, not seldom, and especially in comedy, even to his personal appearance. In a word the independence of dialogue on the stage is qualified by its dependence on the actor. He has to do what the novelist does by descriptions and comments. He has to clothe the skeleton; and if it has been one’s fortune to see two or three great or accomplished actors play the same part, especially, say, in a classic play, where they are not guided—or trammelled—by too many stage-directions, and are not instructed—perhaps sometimes over-instructed—by the author, one will not, I think, doubt that the clothes they put on the skeleton may very considerably affect the appearance of its anatomy, sometimes seeming to alter the very shape of the bones.
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.