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.
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