dialogue--not mere stage dialect that may be scamped and ranted _ad
libitum_ by the "star" to suit his own taste, or want of it, but
real dialogue, which, while ideally reflecting the colloquial
language of the day, taxes the intelligence and feeling of the actor
to deliver properly.

This means real progress; for the dialogue is the very life of the
play. It alone can bring out the essential import of the situation,
the relation of character to character, at any given moment. An
action, an incident, may have a thousand different shades of meaning
or motive. Language, tone, and gesture give it its precise value.
Plot and situations are at best but the skeleton; character and
emotion are the flesh and blood. The treatment is everything.

We still want more of life, of the vital movements of our own time,
upon the stage; and we shall get it by degrees. Sentimental
melodrama, with its male puppet, who is hero or villain, its female
puppet, who is angel or devil, may still continue to flourish among
us; for it still satisfies the natural craving for romance,
ideality, which the drama is bound to supply. But these things
belong to a decaying phase of romance; and our so-called realism is
but the first wave of a new romantic movement, on the stage as
elsewhere. For when the old ideals become decrepit, we must go back
to nature to get the stuff wherewith to make new ones.

As our dramatists advance with the times, people begin to go to the
theatre to see plays, and not merely an actor in a part. The
"well-made play," which was a piece of mechanical contrivance into
which the puppets were ingeniously fitted, may some day develop into
a work of art--a thing born rather than made--growing up like a