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.