however, there are certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological justification.  In the third act of Clyde Fitch’s play, The Girl with the Green Eyes, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where Jinny says:  “Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out loud?  It’s really nothing—­Jack will explain once more that he can’t explain”—­and 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.

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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.