Conversation for conversation’s sake is the one thing, above all others that stamps a playlet as in vain.  I have seen producing manager after producing manager run through manuscripts to select for careful reading the ones with short speeches.  Those weighty with long speeches were returned unread.  Why?  Because experience had taught them that a playlet filled with long speeches is likely to be filled with little else.  They realize that conversation as an art died the day the first automobile did the mile in sixty flat.  Speed is what the playlet needs, and talk slows the track.  In the classic words of vaudeville, if you must talk, “hire a hall.”

Where is it you hear more clever lines than anywhere else?  In vaudeville.  Where is it that slang hits the hardest?  In vaudeville.  On what stage do people talk more nearly like you and I talk?  The vaudeville stage.  For vaudeville is up-to-the-minute—­vaudeville is the instant’s dramatic review.

And it is this speech of the instant that playlet dialogue needs—­ the short, sharp, seemingly thoughtless but vividly pulsating words of everyday life.  If today men talked in long speeches filled with grandiloquent periods, the playlet would mimic their length and tone, but men today do not speak that way and the playlet must mimic today’s shortness and crispness.  As Alexander Black says, “The language of the moment is the bridge; that carries us straight to the heart of the whole world, and all the past.  Life or fancy that comes in the language of the moment comes to us translated.  Fantastically, the language of the street is always close to the bones of art.  It is always closer to the Bible and to all the big fellows than the language of the drawing rooms.  Art is only the expression of ideas.  Ideas, emotions, impulses, are more important than the medium, just as religion is more important than theology.  There is just as much excuse for saying ‘theology for its own sake’ as for saying ‘art for art’s sake.’  The joy of a new word should make us grateful for the fertility of the street out of which most of the really strong words come.  The street doesn’t make us fine, but it keeps us from being too sweet and thin.  It loves the punch.  And the punch clears the path.”  It is the punch in dialogue that the playlet demands.

Before we agree upon what is fit and becoming dialogue, I think it advisable to condense into a few words all that I have said on the subject.  In its final analysis a playlet is a pantomime.  Dialogue is primarily employed to add emphasis to the plot.  It does this by conveying information of basic events at the opening; by bringing out the succeeding incidents clearly; by revealing character humanly; by winning laughter; by advancing the action; and by rounding out the plot in a finish line which thrills with human interest and, in the comedy playlet, with laughter.  And now, what is fit and becoming dialogue?  Fit dialogue is—­what fits the plot exactly.  Becoming dialogue is—­what makes the plot seem even better.  But dialogue cannot make plot better, it can only make it seem better—­it can only dress it.  Remember that.