_Question._ Is it easy to become a dramatist?
_Answer._ As easy as anything else.
_Q._ What are the requisites?
_A._ A West-end theatre, a first-rate troupe of artists, a trained
audience, and a personality.
_Q._ What do you mean by a trained audience?
_A._ An assembly accustomed to accept everything as wit, and to laugh
at anything.
_Q._ Would such a gathering consider it amusing for someone to say
"Flirting with one's husband is quite indelicate: it is like washing
one's clean linen in public"?
_A._ Certainly; and would find much to admire in a dialogue given over
for something like ten minutes to an exhaustive consideration of
muffins.
_Q._ And what do you mean by a personality?
_A._ More or less--an _insouciant_ manner, and a rather startling
button-hole.
_Q._ Does the personality require a speech or a cigarette?
_A._ Neither now, as both have ceased to be the fashion.
_Q._ Given the requisites you have specified for creating a dramatist,
what is the product?
_A._ A trivial comedy for serious people.
_Q._ Why give a play such a title?
_A._ Why not?
_Q._ Can a comedy occupying two or three hours in representation be
entirely trivial?
_A._ Not to the members of the audience.
_Q._ And are they serious people?
_A._ That depends upon the condition of their brains and their
capacity of enjoyment.
_Q._ Does the trivial comedy require a plot?
_A._ Nothing to speak of.
_Q._ Or characterisation?
_A._ No, for the same kind of dialogue will do for all the
company--for London ladies, country girls, justices of the peace,
doctors of divinity, maid-servants, and confidential butlers.
_Q._ What sort of dialogue?
_A._ Inverted proverbs and renovated paradoxes.
_Q._ Is this kind of dialogue entirely new?
_A._ Not entirely, as something rather like it has been heard at the
Savoy for the last ten or twenty years.
_Q._ But is it good enough for a British Public?
_A._ Quite good enough. They will laugh when a London lady expresses
surprise at finding flowers growing in the country, and roar when they
hear the retort, that plants are as common in the provinces as people
in town.
_Q._ But surely this vein of sarcasm, satire, or whatever it is, will
some day be worked out. What can the dramatist then do?
_A._ Act upon precedent, and try something else.
* * * * *
[Illustration: A PURIST IN ENGLISH.
"YOU CALLED ME VERY _LATE_ THIS MORNING, JENKINSON!"
"YES, SIR, I'M SORRY TO SAY I _OVERLAID_ MYSELF!"]
* * * * *