Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/167

141 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI 141 is why Mr. Barker writes so slowly. It is true that he and men like him (they are rarer than we think, perhaps) see nothing, feel nothing, that isn't a sentence ; but how they have to stare and strain before they feel and see ! They have to cut their way through the clogging half-actual that contents the placid rest of us, they have to turn their pens into two-handed swords. All their impressions are expressions — but they have to fight like fury to receive them: numb as death remains that nerve of theirs until it touches solid ore — it responds to nothing but pure metal. And so they have to lug and lever living obstacles, instead of lightly flickering the leaves of a dictionary. They are handling brute realities, not stringing little inky signs. Their alphabet is literally phenomenal. And a most beautiful instance of this breaks at once into view if we now take another step forward. The Marrying of Ann Leete has innumerable merits ; it is our one genuine modern tragedy of manners ; as the work of a young man of twenty-four or five it is astonishingly wise as well as clever ; and its dramatic deftness is a joy. But the special point to notice here is the way the movements of its characters reveal and illustrate its author's way of writing with lumps of life instead of nouns and verbs. The thing seen and the thing to say are for him so identical that he has in the strict sense no " medium " at all ; and the result is that his instinct for cadence and rhythm works movingly among the very bones of his subject. Men and women form his syllables, and their movements are his rhymes ; this play, for instance, is physically rhythmical, full of exquisite optical echoes and refrains. The most poignant of these recurrences, a kind of bodily allitera- tion, is probably Ann's unconscious repetition of her father's shuddering attitude of revulsion an Act before