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, therefore, justified in applying to it the standard of what may be called literary illusion.  Second, when a playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of dramatic action and dialogue.  You cannot with impunity mix up two distinct forms of art—­the drama and the sociological essay or lecture.  To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven.  His stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer