Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/162

136 136 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI it is the others who are the proxies — and though they have doubtless played into his hands a little, they have held those hands far more ; and a truer statement of the relationship would be to say they owe the high distinction of their methods, the astonishingly civilized intelligence they display, to the fact that they have always had the unprecedented luck (unprecedented, that is to say, in English actor-managerdom) to be continually primed, and prompted, and fastidiously steered, by an absolutely pure-bred man of letters. Granville Barker is primarily a penman. He is fully visible only in his books. To take the other men for him, the triumphant, famed, effective ones, is to make the mistake of identifying an actor with his part. The real Barker, not triumphant yet, is an eager, wist- ful figure, wandering and working in a province nobody yet has troubled much to praise. And if you want to know the kind of man he really is, and what fine things he still will do, you must move the actor care- fully aside, and the manager, and the producer, and rely solely on the signs of his caligraphy. He is just as much an actor-manager as Shakespeare was ; no more. His natural kingdom is between boards, not upon them. I sound jolly certain. How can one be so sure ? Well, partly, I must own (though it is absurdly inconsistent), because I have just been wringing a confession of the truth of this suspicion from the lips of one of the other Barkers — the Great Adventurous, Kingsway Theatre one. " Yes," he admitted ruefully, " yes, more than anything, that is what I really want — to be allowed to write. I always have wanted that, and I suppose I always will. But what's the use ? Until just recently I don't suppose my stuff earned the cost of typing it. I gave up writing for producing when I was thirty ; and I always nurse a kind of half-determination that when I'm forty I'll give up producing again for writing.