in the orchestra while the action stands still on the stage.  Thus, he will have begotten a bastard, but highly entertaining, form of art.  My protest has no practical application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules.  It is to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his seductive example.  They have little chance of rivalling him as sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists.  By adopting his practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior sociological documents.  They will impair their originality and spoil their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done incomparably well.

The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be they short, or be they long, they ought always to be impersonal.  The playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion.  In preparing a play for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as is consistent with clearness.  Few readers will burden their memory with long and detailed descriptions.  When a new character of importance appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal.  Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first, such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader’s mental vision.  And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results.  Not merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author’s mind.  He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world.  The cultivation of this habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against theatricality.

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[Footnote 1:  Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas fils held it a waste of time to do so.  Pailleron wrote “enormous” scenarios, Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all.  Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper.  Sir Arthur Pinero says:  “Before beginning to write a play, I always make sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is a way of doing it; but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter.”  Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario.  He says:  “Before I start writing the dialogue