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150 150 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI — would have thought of it, indeed, as a mere back- stairs to actual life — it was inevitable that, having once explored it in such company, it should become a fixed and vital part of his mental picture of reality — the central court, indeed, round which the rest of the rooms of the national house were arranged, or at any rate the stokehold, the engine-room, the power- chamber, without a knowledge of which nothing else could be understood, no remotest drawing-room or draper's shop or studio ; and without a representa- tion of which, therefore, no reproduction of actuality could possibly be genuinely complete. That is why we got dramatized social economics used as the material for that mainspring in The Voysey Inheritance, And that is why (to move on) the subject-matter of the next play. Waste ^ is com- plicated and (as I think) to some extent clouded by a dramatized projection of another of Mr. Shaw's visions — his noble conception of the teacher as the priest of the future and the child as the world's appointed pioneer — the creed he happens to have restated in Misalliance, " What is a child ? " he asks, in the Preface to that play ; answering, with the precision of poetry, " A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect, that is, to make humanity divine . . . the child feels the desire of the Life Force (often called the Will of God) and you cannot feel it for him." And " My point is this," said Horace Trebell in Waste, ten years earlier (his part being played, by the way, by Mr. Barker himself), " My point is this : A man's demand to know the exact structure of a fly's wing, and his assertion that it degrades any child in the street not to know such a thing, is a religious revival, a token of spiritual hunger. . . . Give power to the future, not to the past. Give responsibility, give responsibility, give the child power." " The Church," he says again, amplifying his