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.
By practicality—not a happy term, I confess, and one which I use only because I cannot think of any other single word—I mean the quality of helping the play forward, either by getting on with the evolution of the situations, or by exhibiting the drama which is the result of the situations (I must add, parenthetically, that by situations I do not mean merely external happenings—the term properly includes both characters and events, and their reciprocal action on one another). A play is a very short thing; a very solid four-act play—I am talking of the modern theatre now—will not cover more than 140 to 150 ordinary type-written sheets; a novel of the ordinary length will cover from three to four hundred. The obvious result is that the author has not, to put it colloquially, much time to play about. He may allow himself a little of what is technically termed ‘relief’. A good line pays for its place. But broadly speaking, all the dialogue has to work—each line has its task of advancing action or exhibiting character. Now only so many lines being possible between the rise and the fall of the curtain, it is clear that there is no room for digression or for rambling—things that are often most delightful in a book, where space and time are practically unlimited. More than this. Not only is there no space for rambling and irrelevant talk, but the necessary talk—the talk that is helpful and pertinent—must at the same time carefully consult the limits of space. There are a lot of points to be made in every act—aye, in every scene. The playwright cannot afford too much space to any one point. And the point must not only be made with all possible brevity—it must be made with all possible certainty, so that there may be no need of going back to it, no need of repetition; it should be stuck straight into the audience’s mind, as one sticks a pin into a chart. Hence there is need of directness—a certain quality of unmistakableness—one might almost say bluntness, when one compares theatrical dialogue with some of the minutely wrought novel dialogue to which I have referred to-night. But what then—I’m afraid you will be beginning to ask—what then, if you are right, is to become not only of the literary graces of style, but also of the intellectual quality of your work—of its profundity, of its subtlety, of its delicacy? Well, I can make only one answer—and being to-night, as I say, in the happy pastures of theory—I can give it light-heartedly. You must keep all those, and manage to harmonize them with your brevity and your certainty. That is one of the reasons—not the only one—why it is distinctly difficult to write good plays, not very easy to write even what are often contemptuously referred to as commercially successful plays—and not absolutely easy to write anything that can be called in any serious sense a play at all. There is a great deal of difference between just being a bad play and not being a play at all. The real playwright sometimes writes a bad play—but it is a play that he writes. Yes, your beauty, your profundity, your subtlety, your delicacy, must submit to drill—they must toe the line—they must accept the strait conditions of this most exacting medium. Conciseness and certainty—a quality of clean-cut outline—is demanded by stage conditions. The writer must know with accuracy where he is going at every minute and just how far. He ought to do the same in a book, you’ll say, and I admit it. But in the latter it is an ideal, and many a successful and even many a delightful book has been written without the ideal being reached—or perhaps even aimed at. On the stage the ideal is also the indispensable—for there a writer in the least of a mist wraps his audience in the densest fog.
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 (often the latter is the case), 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.