entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French
windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your
doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain
language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior
scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a
measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite
meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to
avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a
stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of
the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when
the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered
and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb
his illusion.

A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more
recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The "L.U.E.'s," indeed,
are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be
warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is
precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow
sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of
expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues,
pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of
some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in
question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are
congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our
novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently,
though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of
coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or
preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should
not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of
the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to
lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact,
this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the
disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and
often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that
these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be
printed and read, and that we are,