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.

This question of naturalness, which is germane to the whole subject of dialogue and not merely to stage dialogue, is one of the most difficult things to lay down any rule about. It is not easy even to get any working formula which is helpful. On the one side there seems to lie the obvious rule—that all dialogue ought to be natural, appropriate to the person in whose mouth it is put—not merely what in substance he would say, but also said in the way he would say it. On the other side is the obvious fact that no two writers of any considerable merit do, as a fact, write dialogue in the same way, even when they are presenting the same sort of characters. Comparatively impersonal as the dialogue form is, when set beside the narrative, yet the writer’s idiosyncrasy will have its way, and in greater or less degree the author’s accent is heard from the lips of his imaginary interlocutors—and of each and all of them, however widely different they may be supposed to be, and really are, from one another. This appears to land us in an impasse; the obvious fact seems to conflict with the obvious rule. If it be so, I suppose the rule must go to the wall, for all its obviousness. But I fancy that some approach to a solution may be found in the suggestion that no two authors of creative power do, in fact, ever create characters of quite the same sort, and that we got into a seeming impasse by being guilty of a fallacy. When an author sits down at his desk to contemplate, criticize, and reproduce the world about him, it is natural at the first thought to regard the author as subject contemplating and reproducing the world as object—pure subject as against pure object. Here is the fallacy as I conceive. The author as subject does not and cannot contemplate the world as pure object. What he sees is object-subject—that is to say, he consciously sets himself to contemplate and describe a world which is already modified for him by the unconscious projection of his own personality into it—or, in more homely language, he always looks through his own spectacles. It follows that when two creative minds—say Dickens and Thackeray—both set out to describe a duke or a costermonger, it is never the same duke or costermonger—it is not the abstract idea of duke or costermonger, laid up in heaven—but it is a duke-Dickens or a duke-Thackeray—a costermonger-Dickens or a costermonger-Thackeray. Consequently again it is not in the end natural—and, therefore, as the Admirable Crichton would remind us, it is not in the end right—that these two dukes or these two costermongers should speak in exactly the same way—though no doubt both of the pairs ought still to speak as dukes and costermongers of some sort—be it Dickensian or Thackerayan as the case may be. Of course, if an author’s idiosyncrasy is so peculiar that the subjective infusion of himself which he pours into the objective costermonger is so powerful as to cause the human race at large to object that no costermonger of any kind whatsoever ever did or could speak in that way—well, then the world will say that the picture of the costermonger is untrue and the language of the costermonger is inappropriate and unnatural—a conclusion summed up by saying that the author can’t draw a costermonger. His personality won’t blend with costermongers—perhaps it will with dukes—he had better confine himself to the latter. The author may take comfort in the thought that there are sure to be a few persons enamoured of singularity, and perhaps liking to be wiser than their neighbours, who will declare that his costermongers are of a superior brand to all others, and are indeed the only complete and veritable revelation of the quiddity of the costermonger ever set before the world since that planet began its journey round the sun.

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:—

1907.
No. 1.Types of English Curricula in Boys’ SecondarySchools. Price 6d.
No. 2.The Teaching of Shakespeare in Secondary Schools(Provisional suggestions). Price1d.
No. 3.A Short List of Books on English Literature from thebeginning to 1832, for the use ofTeachers. Price 6d. (toAssociate Members, 1s.)
1908.
No. 4.Shelley’s View of Poetry. A Lecture by ProfessorA. C. Bradley, Litt.D. Price1s.
No. 5.English Literature in Secondary Schools. By J. H.Fowler, M.A. (Reprinted.)Price 6d.
No. 6.The Teaching of English in Girls’ Secondary Schools.By Miss G. Clement, B.A. (Outof print.) Price 6d.
No. 7.The Teaching of Shakespeare inSchools. Price 6d.
No. 8.Types of English Curricula in Girls’ SecondarySchools. (Out of print.)Price 6d.
1909.
No. 9.Milton and Party. By Professor O. Elton,M.A. (Out of print.)Price 6d.
No. 10.Romance. By W. P.Ker. Price 6d.
No. 11.What still remains to be done for the Scottish Dialects.By W. Grant. Price 6d.
No. 12.Summary of Examinations in English affectingSchools. Price 6d.
No. 13.The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare’s Art. By SidneyLee, D.Litt. Price 1s.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.