dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which
specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must
obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one
can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.
It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to
it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite
modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find
short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been
assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came
to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much
of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus "lisped in dialogue
for the dialogue came."

Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to
have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a
scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character
is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the
settee, or _vice versa_? There is no doubt that furniture, properties,
accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than
they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the
early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can
remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except
two or three chairs "painted on the flat." Under such conditions, it was
clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,
and even "positions" might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.
This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.
Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),
scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which
the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a
complete picture, with the figures, not "a little out of the picture,"