[From the Introduction to Bitter-Sweet and Other Plays by Noël Coward, Doubleday, Doran, 1929; reprinted in A Traveller in Romance, ed. John Whitehead, Clarkson N. Potter, 1984, pp. 27-30:]

The day is no longer approaching; the day has come. Henrik Ibsen put his own forebodings into the mount of his master builder. He foresaw that the younger generation would come knocking at his door and shaking their fists shout: make room, make room, make room. ‘Then there’s an end of Halvard Solness.’ For us English dramatists the younger generation has assumed the brisk but determined form of Mr Noël Coward. He knocked at the door with impatient knuckles, and then he rattled the handle, and then he burst in. After a moment’s stupor the older playwrights welcomed him affably enough and retired with what dignity they could muster to the shelf which with a sprightly gesture he indicated to them as their proper place. For my part I have made myself quite comfortable there. The knowing Lucretius in a passage that has given the world a little shiver ever since it was written remarked that it was sweet, when on the great sea the winds troubled the waters, to behold from land another’s deep distress; ‘not that it is a pleasure and delight that any should be afflicted, but because it is sweet to see from what evils you are yourself exempt. It is sweet also to look upon the mighty struggles of war arrayed along the plains without sharing yourself in the danger.’ But I look upon it as a very graceful attention on Mr Coward’s part to reach up to my shelf with a volume of his plays and flatter me with the request that I should write a preface to them. I sit up and let my legs dangle in the air. I let myself down cautiously to the floor and give it a stamp to feel that it is really solid under my feet. And now as with a palsied hand I take up my pen I have just the sort of sensation I can imagine a man having who goes to lunch with his former wife and her second husband. It must be curious and entertaining for him to see from another angle circumstances with which he is so familiar and I suspect that he allows himself an inward chuckle when he considers that in a few minutes after he has drunk his coffee he will find himself once more in the open street. But his successor remains behind.

Suave, magni maro turbantibus aequora ventis...[1]

[...]

Mr St. John Ervine published a few months ago a little book called How to Write a Play. Mr Ervine is a dramatist as well as a critic and his book is pithy and sensible. It is a work that any writer for the theatre can study with profit. He has exploded the fallacy that there is something mysterious in dramatic technique. Ponderous tomes have been written on the subject by people who did not know what they were talking about. It is evident that people who have no feeling for the theatre will find it very difficult to write a play, just as people who have no ear will never understand music, and I think it may be admitted that to write a play requires a specific gift. It is not a very exalted one, for it can exist without intelligence or originality (one of the most distinguished dramatists of the last generation had the mind and the education of a bartender and wrote notwithstanding clever and charming plays); I think it would be better to call it a peculiar knack. I suspect that the whole secret of dramatic technique can be told in a sentence: stick to the point like grim death. But I mention this book of Mr Ervine’s now because he has some interesting things to say about dialogue and especially about Mr Noël Coward’s. It is in his dialogue that Mr Coward has shown himself something of an innovator, for in his construction he has been content to use the current method of his day; he has deliberately avoided the epigram that was the fashion thirty years ago […], and has written dialogue that is strictly faithful to fact. It does not only represent everyday language but reproduces it. No one has carried naturalistic dialogue further than he. Mr St. John Ervine attacks it. He finds it commonplace and dull. He gives a passage from Home Chat and another from This was a Man to make his point and similar passages could certainly be found in any of the three plays in this volume. He contends that the dramatist should ‘heighten and lengthen and deepen the common speech, and yet leave it seeming to be the common speech.’

Dialogue has gradually been growing more natural. It was inevitable that some dramatist should eventually write dialogue that exactly copied the average talk, with its hesitations, mumblings and repetitions, and broken sentences, of average people. I do not suppose anyone can ever do this with more brilliant accuracy than Mr Coward. My only objection to it is that it adds greatly to the difficulty of the author’s task. It is evident that when he represents dull and stupid people they will be as stupid and dull on the stage as in real life and they will bore us in the same way. When he exposes his theme or joins together the various parts of his story (and I should think it was impossible to write a play in which certain explanations, of no interest in themselves, can be avoided) he will only with difficulty hold the attention of his audience. The author limits himself to characters who are in themselves exciting or amusing and to a theme which is from the beginning of the first act to the end of the last naturally absorbing. It is asking a great deal. I may point out in passing that as Ibsen’s dialogue grew more naturalistic he was led to deal with singularly abnormal characters. On the other hand I do not think it can be denied that when a scene is dramatic naturalistic dialogue vastly enhances its effectiveness. You have a very good example in the last scene of the second act of Easy Virtue. Its dramatic value is greatly heightened by the perfect naturalness of the dialogue. In the same play the value of the beautifully drawn character of Marian Whittaker is increased by the absolute fidelity with which her conversation is reproduced. I do not know that Mr Coward has ever created a personage more vivid, pathetic, abominable and true than this. When the characters and the theme allow, as in Hay Fever, the naturalistic dialogue can produce a masterpiece in miniature. But I have an impression that Mr Coward has gone as far as anyone can go in this direction. A blank wall faces him. There is less difference between Mr Ervine and Mr Coward than Mr Ervine seems to think. One seeks to reproduce dialogue; the other to represent it. I wonder if here too you do not come upon a blank wall. I wonder if the current fashion to be slangy and brief and incoherent has not blinded the dramatists to the fact that a great many people do talk grammatically, do choose their words, and do make use of expressions that on the stage would be thought ‘bookish’. It has seemed to me that during the last twenty years or so the increase of reading has affected current speech. If Mr Ervine read a shorthand report of his own conversation over the luncheon table he would be surprised to find how ‘bookish’ it was. If he spent an evening in a public house in Lambeth he would be surprised to discover how unusual were the words and complicated the phrases, learnt from the Sunday papers and the films, he would hear from the people standing around him. The present mode of dialogue debars the writer from introducing into his play educated people who express themselves in an educated way. It may be true that the English are a tongue-tied people but are they so tongue-tied as all that? Listen to the conversation of barristers, doctors, politicians, parsons, and you will find that they express themselves quite naturally in a way that on the stage would be called absurdly literary. Stage dialogue has been simplified out of relation with all life but that of the cocktail bar. It seems to me a great loss.[2]

[...]

It seems to me plain that if he is seeking to represent states of mind and affections of the soul the dramatist is handicapping himself unnecessarily if he confines himself to the baldness of contemporary speech. I am not convinced that it is true to life, for my impression is that persons under stress of emotion express themselves with more fluency, elaboration, and often with more eloquence than is generally suspected. I do not see why the dramatist should not put into the mouth of his characters what they feel rather than what they say. It is true that for a moment an audience used to naturalistic dialogue would think the words they heard strange, but an audience can be coaxed or driven to accept any formula. After all copying life, representation, is merely an aesthetic procedure like another: naturalism is no more to be preferred to formalism than a leg of mutton is to be preferred to a sirloin of beef. Now that naturalistic dialogue has been carried as far as it can go I cannot but think it might be worth trying a dialogue that does not reproduce the conversation of the day and only very vaguely represents it, but is deliberately and significantly formal. And since the future of the English drama is in the hands of Mr Noël Coward this, as I climb back laboriously on to my shelf, with my blessing is the suggestion I offer him.

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[1] Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book II, lines 1-4. This is the passage quoted by Maugham earlier:

Suave magni maro turbantibus aequora ventis
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
non quia vexari quemquamst jucunda voluptas,
sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.

The exact translation used by Maugham remains elusive. In the verse version of William Ellery Leonard (1916), the passage runs thus:

’Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds
Roll up its waste of waters, from the land
To watch another’s labouring anguish far,
Not that we joyously delight that man
Should thus be smitten, but because ‘tis sweet
To mark what evils we ourselves are spared;

Ed.

[2] Cf. The Summing Up (1938), Chapter XLII. Ed.