The real playwright sometimes writes a bad play――but it is a play that he writes. Yes, your beauty, your profundity, your subtlety, your delicacy, must submit to drill――they must toe the line――they must accept the strait conditions of this most exacting medium. Conciseness and certainty――a quality of clean-cut outline――is demanded by stage conditions. The writer must know with accuracy where he is going at every minute and just how far. He ought to do the same in a book, you’ll say, and I admit it. But in the latter it is an ideal, and many a successful and even many a delightful book has been written without the ideal being reached――or perhaps even aimed at. On the stage the ideal is also the indispensable――for there a writer in the least of a mist wraps his audience in the densest fog. The second quality which I suggest as pre-eminently required by stage dialogue and which I have called universality really goes deeper and affects more than the mere dialogue, though strictly speaking we are this evening concerned with its effect in that sphere only. Consider for a moment the different aim which a writer of novels and a writer of plays respectively may set before himself. Of course the novelist may set out to please the whole British public――and the American and Continental too, if you like, though for simplicity’s sake we may confine ourselves to these islands. A certain number no doubt start with that aim. A few may have succeeded――very few. But such an ambitious task is in no way incumbent on the novelist. Whether he looks to his pride or his pocket, to fame or to a sufficient circulation, it is quite enough for him to please a section of the public. He may be a famous literary man and enjoy a large income, as fame and incomes go in authorship, without three-quarters of the adult population――let alone the boys and girls――knowing or caring one jot about him. 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. For example, I don’t suppose that Mr. Meredith expected or tried to please the boys who worshipped Mr. Henty, or that Mr. Henty, in his turn, had any idea of poaching on the preserves of Mr. Pett Ridge. In a word, a novelist can, if he likes or if he must (often the latter is the case), specialize in his audience just as he can in his subject or his treatment. If he pleases the class he tries to please, all is well with him; he can let the others go, with just as much regret and just as much politeness as his circumstances and his temperament may dictate.