A man will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person whom he is embracing.  Not infrequently in a conversation between two characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other, before replying to it.  The convenience of this method of proceeding is manifest.  It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters.  But it is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in farce.  In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown.  It is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and audiences what to make of it.  In an ambitious play produced at a leading London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage, announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside, severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not frustrating her intention.  About the same time, there occurred one of the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept conventionalism.  The hero of the play was Eugene Aram.  Alone in his room at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters of the window.  Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do?  He went up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to be heard in the next parish.  It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on the other side of the shutters.  He proceeded with his work, opened the window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow.  Then, while Houseman peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness!  Such are the childish excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he begins to dally with facile convention.

An aside is intolerable because it is not heard by the other person on the stage:  it outrages physical possibility.  An overheard soliloquy, on the other hand, is intolerable because it is heard.  It keeps within the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of thought which would in reality remain unuttered.  This point is so clear that I need not insist upon it.

Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies?  A few brief ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no one will cavil at them.  The approach of mental disease is often marked by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions, be put to artistic use.  Short of actual derangement,