Still, all allowances made, it remains true that the stage offers the fullest, the fairest, and the most independent opportunity for pure dialogue――and it is necessary to ask the question――however hard the answer may be――what effect the medium of the theatre has upon dialogue. I admit at once that I think the question is very hard to answer. We are in presence of the indisputable fact that dialogue which is highly moving or amusing in a book may fall quite flat on the stage――while on the other hand dialogue which is very effective on the stage may sound either obvious or bald in a book. This is not to say, of course, that some dialogue will not be found good for both. Practical experiments are constantly being tried, owing to the habit of dramatizing novels which have achieved a popular success. The temptation is to carry over into the play as much of the dialogue of the novel as you can contrive to use; the object is to preserve as far as possible both the literary flavour and the commercial goodwill of the original. The result is interesting. The novelist, whether he acts as his own dramatist or not, will almost always notice, I think, that passages of dialogue which are most effective in the book are least effective on the stage――often that they need complete remodelling before they can be used at all. On the other hand, passages which he has little esteemed in the book――regarded perhaps almost as mere machinery, part of the necessary traffic of the story――make an immediate hit with audiences in the theatre. It is a commonplace in the theatrical world that there is no telling what ‘they’ will like――‘they’ means the public――not even what plays they will or will not like, much less what particular scenes or passages――and nobody with even the least practical experience would care to back his opinion save at very favourable odds. If then it is impossible to tell what they will or won’t like, it seems still more hopeless to inquire why they will or won’t like it; but that is, in reality, not quite the case. It is not, I think, so much that the playwright does not know what he has to do to please them, as that it happens to be rather difficult to do it, and quite as difficult to know when you have done it. Happily, however, we are to-night not on the hard highroad of practice, but in the easy pastures of criticism, and may therefore be bold to try to suggest what are the main features of good theatrical dialogue――features which, though they may be found in and may assist novel dialogue, yet are not indispensable to it, but which must characterize theatrical dialogue and are indispensable to success on the stage. These indispensable qualities may in the end be reduced to two――practicality and universality.