Anthony Hope

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Contrast with these the conversations in Tristram Shandy—to my mind some of the finest and, scientifically regarded, most perfect dialogue in English literature. Every character who speaks contributes—really contributes, and is not merely a feeder or a foil. Each has his own mind, his own point of view, and manfully and independently maintains it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Serious modern novels tend to deal with matters of debate more than their predecessors of corresponding rank did—at once to treat more freely of matters open to question, and to find open to question more matters than our ancestors thought—or at all events admitted—to come within that category. It is both more efficacious and less tedious to let A and B reveal their characters and views to one another than for the author to tell the reader A’s character and views, and then B’s character and views, and to add the obvious statement that the two characters and views differ. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [13] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a gain all round—in naturalness, in drama, in conciseness, and in shapeliness.
It remains, while we are on this point of the technical usefulness of dialogue, to note two or three other ways in which it serves the novelist’s turn. He finds it exceedingly to his purpose if he wishes to be impersonal, to be impartial, to keep a secret, or to hold a situation in suspense. It enables him to withdraw behind the curtain, and leave his characters alone with the reader. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have purposely chosen a simple—almost a trivial—instance, but it is not therefore, I think, a bad example of how the use of dialogue can not merely avoid tedium, though that is a supremely desirable and indeed a vital thing in itself, but can also give a natural effect instead of an unnatural, and add to the dramatic value of a fact by showing it in actual operation, producing results, instead of merely chronicling its existence, almost as an item in a list. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Speaking through A’s mouth, he sees only A’s point of view, and when he speaks through B’s mouth his knowledge of the state of events is only B’s knowledge, and no greater. He may often desire to do this, for much the same reasons as sometimes lead a writer to assume, altogether and throughout the book, the garb of one of the characters, to write in the first person, to see only what the hero sees, to know only what he knows, and to feel only what he feels. ”

“ 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. ”