We may come then to the theatre itself――but before I attempt to say anything on the relations between stage dialogue and book dialogue, I should like to remind you again that even this greater independence of stage dialogue is very far indeed from being absolute. We have already referred to the stage-directions. These are amplified by the actor, of his own motion or in pursuit of the instructions he receives at rehearsal. The result is his ‘business’――everything he does on the stage except what he does with his tongue. The ‘business’ counts for much, but what counts for even more is that the words are spoken there on the stage by living man to living man. I think it is hard to exaggerate the effect of this――the immense help it gives to the words. It is not merely a question of vividness, though that is important enough. It is equally, or even more, a question of appropriateness, of the words matching the personality from which they proceed. 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. 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. He has to do what the novelist does by descriptions and comments. He has to clothe the skeleton; and if it has been one’s fortune to see two or three great or accomplished actors play the same part, especially, say, in a classic play, where they are not guided――or trammelled――by too many stage-directions, and are not instructed――perhaps sometimes over-instructed――by the author, one will not, I think, doubt that the clothes they put on the skeleton may very considerably affect the appearance of its anatomy, sometimes seeming to alter the very shape of the bones.