Part 3
We arrive, then――as we draw near the close of these remarks――rather rambling remarks, I am afraid――at the conclusion, perhaps a conclusion with a touch of the paradoxical in it――that in dialogue the writer is always trying to do what in the nature of the case he can never do completely. He is always trying to present objectively a personality other than his own. He never fully succeeds, and it would be to the ruin of his work as literature, if he did. The creator is always there in the created, and it is probably true to say that he is there in greater degree just in proportion to the force of his personality and the power of his creative faculty. Is the greater writer then less true to life than the smaller? I am not going to be as surprising as that――for, though he puts in more of himself, the greater writer sees and puts in a lot more of the objective costermonger also. But it is, I think, true to say that what we get from him is not, in the strict use of words, anything that exists. It is a hypothetical person, if I may so put it――it is a compound of what the author takes from the world outside and what he himself contributes. The result is, then――to take an instance or two――in Diana of the Crossways, not an actual historical character, but what Mr. Meredith would have been had he been that lady――not an actual skipper of a coastwise barge, but what Mr. Jacobs would have been had he been skipper of a barge――not an actual detective, but what Gaboriau, or Wilkie Collins, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have been had he been a detective, or, to take extreme cases, not the inhabitants of the jungle, but all the varieties which Mr. Kipling’s fertile genius would have assumed if he had had to people the jungle all off his own bat. True as this is of all imaginative writing, it is most true of dialogue. That is an attempt at direct impersonation, as direct as the actor’s on the stage――and it is and can be successful only within the limits indicated. The author, like the actor, must go on trying to do what he never can and never ought to succeed in doing――namely, obliterating his own personality. The real process is not obliteration but transformation or translation――a fusion of himself with each of his speakers――he modifies each of them and is himself in each case modified by the fusion. And we may probably measure a man’s genius in no small degree just by his susceptibility to this fusion. We talk of Shakespeare’s universal genius, and say that he ‘understands’ everybody; that is to say, that he is at home in speaking in any man’s mask――that he can fuse himself with anybody. Lesser writers can fuse only with people of a certain type, or a certain class, or a certain period, or a certain way of thinking. Some very clever people and accomplished writers fail in the novel or the play because they are deficient in the power of fusing at all, and their own personality is always the overpowering ingredient, so that they can preach, or teach, or criticize, but they cannot, as the saying goes, get into another man’s skin――a popular way of putting the matter which will express the truth about what is needful very well, if we add the proviso that when the author gets in he must not drive the original owner out, but the two must dwell together in unity.
Thus we see dialogue fall into its place among the varieties of literary expression, as the most imitative and the least personal, yet not as entirely imitative nor as wholly impersonal. It carries the imitative and impersonal much further than the lyric coming straight from the poet’s own heart, much further than the philosophic poem with its questioning of a man’s own thoughts about the universe, further than narrative with its frankly personal record of how things appear to the narrator, and its unblushing attempt to make them appear in the same light to the reader. At its best it carries imitation to such a point that its own excellence alone convinces us that there is something more than imitation after all, and more than the insight which makes imitation possible――that among all the infinitely diverse creations of a rich imagination and an unerring penetration there is still a point of unity, which determines the exact attitude of each character towards the life which it is his to lead and the world which he has to live in. The point of unity is the author’s voice, veiled and muffled, but audible still, however various, however fantastic, however transformed, the accents in which it speaks. The unity in multiplicity for which poetry yearns, philosophy labours, and science untiringly seeks――this is also the aim and ideal of dialogue, and of drama, its completest form――so that out of the infinite diversity of types and of individuals which pour forth from the mind of a great creator there shall still emerge something that we know to be his, something that he has given to, as well as all that he has taken from, the great scene about him, his view of life as it must present itself to all sorts and conditions of men, his criticism of a world in which all these sorts and conditions of men exist.
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Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.