; and one by one the characters retired, until at last old
Nathaniel Berry was left alone upon the stage. Slowly he locked the doors
and closed the windows and put all things in order for the night. Then he
took a candle and went upstairs to bed, leaving the room empty and dark
except for the flaming of the fire on the hearth.

Great progress toward naturalness in contemporary acting has been
occasioned by the disappearance of the soliloquy and the aside. The
relinquishment of these two time-honored expedients has been accomplished
only in most recent times. Sir Arthur Pinero's early farces abounded with
asides and even lengthy soliloquies; but his later plays are made entirely
without them. The present prevalence of objection to both is due largely to
the strong influence of Ibsen's rigid dramaturgic structure. Dramatists
have become convinced that the soliloquy and the aside are lazy expedients,
and that with a little extra labor the most complicated plot may be
developed without resort to either. The passing of the aside has had an
important effect on naturalness of acting. In speaking a line audible to
the audience but supposed to be unheard by the other characters on the
stage, an actor was forced by the very nature of the speech to violate the
illusion of the stage picture by stepping out of the frame, as it were, in
order to take the audience into his confidence. Not until the aside was
abolished did it become possible for an actor to follow the modern rule of
seeming totally oblivious of his audience.

There is less logical objection to the soliloquy, however; and I am
inclined to think that the present avoidance of it is overstrained. Stage
soliloquies are of two kinds, which we may call for convenience the
constructive and the reflective. By a constructive soliloquy we mean one
introduced arbitrarily to explain the progress of the plot, like that at
the beginning of the last act of _Lady Windermere's Fan_, in which the
heroine frankly tells the audience what she has been thinking and doing
between the acts. By a reflective soliloquy we mean one like those of
_Hamlet_, in which the audience is given merely a revelation of a train of
personal thought or emotion, and in which the dramatist makes no
utilitarian reference to the structure of the plot. The constructive
soliloquy is as undesirable as the aside, because it forces the actor out
of the stage picture in exactly the same way; but a good actor may easily
r