so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would
depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author,
though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at
psychological truth.

A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter
which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself
aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but
it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has
an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the
character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the
actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to
speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any
other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only
that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no
real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or
emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at
all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a
greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken
letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.

Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an
extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which
is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry.
The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or
aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the
other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking
among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a
special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others
probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is
not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others,
that is apt to strike us as unreal.

* * * * *

This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally
encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be
playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried
to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than
one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a
play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.

Nothin