A Note on the Soliloquy

WHENEVER our Juvenile Highbrows are lured into a consideration of midVictorian drama, they are likely to denounce it, not because it was unduly theatrical and pitiably empty, but because it bristled with asides and with soliloquies; and whenever one of their diatribes happens to fall under my eye, I wonder why they fail to distinguish between these two devices. They may say what they will against the aside, and I shall not be moved to protest; but when they scoff at the soliloquy, I ask myself if they are not a little too sure, as is the wont of youth, that this device dear to our grandfathers is not going to be found useful by our grandchildren. I am inclined to believe that the protest against the soliloquy is shrill only in the mouths of those who write about the theatre, and that those who write for the theatre are less emphatic, to say the least. Few dramatists to-day dare to let their characters soliloquize; but I doubt if they are all of them convinced that they ought to respect the sentence of death which has been imposed on the soliloquy by the criticasters.

I was confirmed in this dubiety when I recently read a charming essay on ‘Realism on the Stage’ by Mr, George Arliss, an accomplished actor who is also a skillful playwright. Mr. Arliss asserted that ‘The soliloquy has passed away during my own time on the stage; I should say, roughly, within the last twenty-five to thirty years. That is generally regarded as a step forward in construction whether it is, or is not, seems to me open to question. It is true that the soliloquy was artificial; but was it any more so than the thing which has taken its place?’

What gives piquancy to Mr. Arliss’s question is the fact that he propounded it in an article written at the time when he was impersonating the Rajah of Ruhk in the Green Goddess of Mr. William Archer, and while he was at every performance ending the play with a soliloquy. Mr. Arliss was so deft in his acting that the audience did not notice that his final speech before the curtain fell was not addressed to any character in the play and was, in fact, addressed directly to the spectators. I note also that Mr. Archer, in his stimulating study of the ‘Old Drama and the New,’ was severe in his strictures on the mid-Victorian playwrights who were given to a clumsy and unintelligent employment of the abhorrent trick; and yet here he is, using it himself— but so dexterously that he was not caught in the act. And when the soliloquy is utilized with this unobtrusive felicity it justifies itself; and it reveals itself as too useful a device to be discarded merely because bunglers have misused it.

I am reminded also that Bronson Howard, a popular playwright, who might have been one of the modern masters of the drama if he had not been born two or three decades too soon to profit by the advance in dramaturgic technic, and who was also one of the rare artists capable of doing the right thing in the right way and of being able to explain why he had so done it — I recall that Howard once said to me, ‘I believe so strongly in the necessity of the soliloquy that if I were to write a play without one, I should go over it to find a fit place to insert it; thus asserting my right to employ it when I needed it!'

When he said this, he was engaged on the last play of his to be produced, Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of New Amsterdam (in which I was his collaborator). As I recall it now our play did not contain a single soliloquy — but it was none the less unsuccessful.

Mr. Arliss admits that the soliloquy is artificial, that is to say, out of nature, not in accord with the facts of life. So is the blank verse of Shakespeare, so is the rimed hexameter of Molière, so is the compact prose of Ibsen; so is the room with its fourth wall removed, that the spectators may behold the action on the stage; so is the raised voice of the hero when he makes love to the heroine; so are all the other conventions which are necessary to the existence of the drama and to its fullest effect. No author ever risks the prolixity of real life; and no actor (if so be he knows his business) ever stands or walks or talks as he would in real life; on the stage he can seem real only by skillfully disguising the unreality imposed on him by the theatre. I doubt if there ever was an actress who conveyed the impression of absolute veracity more adequately than Duse did; but hers was the essential reality of consummate art, not the reproduction of unpremeditated nature.

No one can deny that the soliloquy is artificial, although Victor Hugo did attempt a futile defense, alleging that in moments of emotional stress a man is likely to speak aloud. This is true enough; but what a man utters at these moments is, more often than not, ‘unfit for publication.’ Hugo’s feeble plea does not validate the long soliloquy of the King in Hernani, with its hundred couplets of rimed Alexandrines. But, if Hugo’s excuse is invalid, is there any other more acceptable? And the answer to this is that there are two different kinds of soliloquy; that for one of them it is difficult to find a good word, and that for the other there is much to be said. The one kind, being beyond justifical ion, has properly fallen into disrepute, and the other has unfairly suffered for the villainy of its double.

In the Conférences chez Beaubichon, a light and lovely little farce, acted at the Variétés, in Paris, in the sixties of the nineteenth century, the scene is laid in the apartment of M. Beaubichon, and when the curtain rises he comes down to the footlights and begins at once to explain the delicate situation in which he finds himself. This opening speech of his is addressed to no one in particular, and he is alone on the stage. When he has put the spectators in possession of all the facts needful for them to apprehend the action of the play, he concludes by remarking: ‘They say the soliloquy is unnatural. Well, it may be— but just see how convenient it is!’ Then another character enters, and the soliloquy is succeeded by dialogue.

That is as simple and as frank as the prologue of any one of the plays of Plautus; and the writers of the French farce had not the excuse of the Latin author, since the Parisian audience was not as dull or as illiterate as the mob of freedmen which noisily assembled in the Roman theatre. The French collaborators— I think there were three of them — had shown an impudent ingenuity in compacting their exposition into a single speech; and the joke was on the audience, which was willing enough to laugh with them. While these collaborators were franker than was customary sixty years ago, they had precedents for utilizing the soliloquy as the swiftest method of supplying the information that the audience would have to have if it was to understand the events about to be set forth. Molière had done it before them, and he had been only following in the footsteps of the Italian performers of improvised comedy. And the Italians had been carrying on the tradition of the mediæval drama, in which it was not uncommon for each of the chief characters to name himself and to describe himself at his first appearance on the stage.

This mediæval method survives to this day —or until very recently — in the so-called ‘mummers’ plays,’ inherited from the Middle Ages and performed annually in out-of-the-way corners of England. In Mr. E. K. Chambers’s solidly documented account of the Medi7#339;val Stage, he records that in one of these degenerate dramas, the Devil comes before the spectators and immediately informs them who he is: —

In another of these mummers’ plays the speaker of the prologue, begins by saying, —

Was it from the mummers’ plays, I wonder, that W. S. Gilbert borrowed this device? Certainly he used it in more than one of his merry balladoperas. Sir Joseph Porter narrates in verse his origin and his rise to power, until he has become at last ‘the ruler of the Queen’s Navee.’ Of course, Gilbert did not venture to employ a device as crude as this in those of his plays which were to be said and not to be sung, in Sweethearts, for example, or in Pygmalion and Galatea. Yet Shakespeare had done it as unhesitatingly as Molière. Iago and Richard III, when they are alone on the stage, talk straight to the spectators, to the gallants on their threepenny stools, and to the groundlings standing in the yard. Both of these bold bad characters unbosom themselves in soliloquy, revealing their dark designs and letting us see into their black hearts.

The reason why no modern playwright would dare to do this is twofold. First, the bare platform of the Tudor theatre (with a part of the audience seated on the stage and almost touching the performers) has slowly evolved into the picture-frame stage of our twentieth-century playhouses, equipped with scenery, furniture, and properties, all chosen to produce an effect of reality, whereby the actor is admonished not to ‘get out of the picture,’ as he would do if he were to come down to the footlights to take the audience into his confidence. A change of theatrical conditions makes imperative a change of dramaturgic methods; and the comfortable theatres of the twentieth century are as unlike as may be to the rude and unroofed playhouses of the early seventeenth century. What was tolerable to our forefathers of three hundred years ago would be intolerable to us to-day, accustomed as we have become gradually to a subtler mode of conveying information.

Then there is a second reason for the disappearance of the explanatory soliloquy: our playwrights are more adroit than their predecessors of the nineteenth, eighteenth, seventeenth, and sixteenth centuries. They may not be equal to their elders in poetic power or in creative imagination, but they are more consciously and more conscientiously artistic in their construction. Mr. Archer carries conviction when he asserts that the craftsmanship of today is far more expert than the craftsmanship of yesterday. Our modern playwrights recognize the difficulty of solving the intricate and delicate problems of playmaking, of planning the unseen steel frame which supports the stories they set before us on the stage. They do not take short cuts across lots; rather do they strive diligently and successfully to force stumblingblocks to serve as stepping-stones. They have the joy of the artist in grappling with technic; and they find their profit — their artistic profit — in overcoming obstacles which may seem insuperable. Here they are treacling the trail blazed by Molièere, who did not allow Tartuffe any of the self-revealing soliloquies such as Iago indulges in whenever the spectators need to be reminded that he is a villain of the deepest dye. Tartuffe never drops the mask of piety even when he is alone; and yet Molière has so ingeniously presented him to us that we know him for what he is — that we know him better than he knows himself.

In other of his comedies Molière is not so scrupulous; and in some of his more farcical ones he uses the soliloquy for exposition almost as frankly as the authors of the Conférences chez Beaubichon were to do two centuries later. He even goes so far in one play as to let a character who is soliloquizing discover another character about to enter, whereupon he concludes his soliloquy by hoping that the newcomer has not overheard what he has been saying. And Shakespeare lets Romeo in the garden below overhear the soliloquy of Juliet in the balcony above.

Juliet’s soliloquy is not for the purpose of conveying information which the audience needs to have; it has a wholly different purpose; it is to reveal to us the state of the heroine’s heart, and to let us know what she is thinking. What she says then, when she is alone with the night, is what she would not say to any other character in the play; it is too intimate, too sacred for actual conversation. So Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ conveys to us the thoughts which were surging in his brain, and which could not be conveyed to us unless Hamlet was permitted by the poet to think aloud. These two soliloquies, therefore, of Juliet and of Hamlet, are entirely unlike the soliloquies of Iago and Richard III. They are not merely methods of allowing the spectators an insight into the real characters of these two villains — they are windows to the souls of Juliet and of Hamlet at those crises of their several fates. Juliet and Hamlet tell us what they are feeling at the moment, whereas Iago and Richard III express opinions about themselves which it is inconceivable that they should hold — since they are made to describe themselves as they really are and not as they probably believed themselves to be. So it is that the speeches of Iago and Richard III to the spectators are not thinkingaloud, as are the speeches of Juliet and Hamlet; and that these soliloquies disclose themselves as false in psychology as they are primitive in dramaturgy.

Professor Bradley puts the case concisely when he tells us that ‘in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are being addressed.’ Now the soliloquy in which the character unpacks his heart and lays bare before us his inmost thoughts belongs plainly to a different class from the soliloquy which has been used mainly to convey information. In listening to the one we do not feel that we are being addressed, and in listening to the other we cannot help feeling that the author is talking to us through the mouth of the character. It is the informationsoliloquy which strikes us nowadays as absurdly artificial, as an artistic anachronism, as a device unworthy of any self-respecting modern dramatist. And it is the thinking-aloud soliloquy which Mr. Arliss regretted, which Mr. Archer utilized subtly at the end of the Green Goddess, and which Bronson Howard desired to reserve the right to use.

That even the thinking-aloud soliloquy is artificial, that it is ‘unnatural,’ in the sense that it is contrary to the facts of everyday life — this must be admitted. And what of it? The drama can exist only when it is allowed to depart from the facts of everyday life. In everyday life rooms have a fourth wall; a lover proposing does not so pitch his voice as to be heard by an audience of a thousand; heroes and heroines do not express themselves in blank verse; and Hamlet and Juliet and Julius Cæsar do not speak English. These departures from the facts of everyday life, and a host of other departures, we accept without cavil when we go to the play. We accept them without remarking them; and if our attention happens to be called to them, still we accept them because they conduce to our pleasure. We want to understand Hamlet and Juliet and Julius Cæsar, so we want them to speak English; and if the theme is lofty, we want them to speak also in blank verse, the cadence of which enhances our delight.

Now that the picture-frame stage is the only one we know, the informationsoliloquy has departed, never to return; and there are none so poor as to regret its leaving. But the thinkingaloud soliloquy will be needed whenever there is a revival of the poetic drama, whenever we shall be blessed by the possession of a playwright who is a poet, or of a poet who is a playwright. And in the meantime it can be employed without discovery by dramatists as dexterous as Mr. William Archer.