Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created fromthe title page by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION
Dialogue
By
Sometime Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford
(Privately Printed)
November, 1909
As this leaflet is privately printed by special permission ofthe Author, no additional copies can be sold.
DIALOGUE[1]
[1] An address delivered to the members of the English Association, October 28, 1909.
Although it is probable that the subject I have chosen to speakabout this evening is rather outside the ordinary scope of your proceedings,I have thought it better to take that risk than to attemptto address you on some topic which I, as a working novelist and onewho has made experiments in the dramatic line also, have had lessoccasion to study, and therefore should be less likely to be able to sayanything deserving of your attention—not that I am at all confidentof doing that even as matters stand. Yet perhaps it is not altogetheralien to the spirit of this Association to consider sometimes a moreor less technical aspect of literature itself, even though its main objectmay be to promote the study of literature; such a discussion, undertakenfrom time to time, may foster that interest in literature, onwhich in the end the spread of its study must depend. With thatmuch said by way of justification, or of apology, as you will, I proceedto my task.
Some months ago I happened to read a novel in the whole courseof which nobody said anything—not one of the characters was representedin the act of speaking to another with the living voice. Oneremark was indeed quoted in a letter as having been made viva voceon a previous occasion, but this sudden breach of consistency did notcommand my belief—it seemed like an assertion that in an assemblyof veritable mutes somebody had suddenly shouted. The book wasnot in the main in the form of letters—it was almost pure narrative.The effect was worse than unreal. An intense sense of lifelessnesswas produced; you moved among the dead—or even the shadows ofthe dead. It was a lesson in the importance of dialogue in fictionwhich no writer could ever forget.
What, then, is this dialogue? Formally defined it includes, I suppose,any conversation—any talk in which two or more persons takepart; while it excludes a monologue, which one delivers while otherslisten, and a soliloquy, which one delivers when there is nobody tolisten—unless, perchance, behind the arras. But some dialogues are,if I may coin a word, much more thoroughly dialogic than others—thereis much more of what is the real essence of the matter. Thatreal essence I take to be the meeting of minds in talk—the reciprocalexhibition of mind to mind. The most famous compositions in theworld to which the title of dialogues is expressly given—Plato’s ow