Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/178

152 152 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI liance is but the last of a long list ; but his attitude in all of them, and especially the later ones, is that of a man who takes the actual play-making con- temptuously because he is so sure of the importance of the creed. It is another of the many anomalies of this most amazing man, this most unreasonable rationalist. Because Shaw's characters have solemn truths to tell, he lets them play about absurdly ; there is the keenest of logic in everything they say, but the most reckless incoherence in their actions. The structure of Misalliance, for example, is all over the shop — it is even more like a pantomime than Pygma- lion ; it really is a misalliance — a most immoral union of spiritual sobriety and dramatic misbehaviour. Confidently aware of his own rectitude and keen ethical purpose, he feels at liberty to dodge the toil of honest drama. His work is our latest and greatest example of the way moral convictions can lead to technical licentiousness. But Mr. Barker is quite incapable of these con- tempts. He takes his work with a fine seriousness and (Scotch blood, perhaps) he jokes about morals with difficulty. Waste is the ironic example. For to satisfy his artistic honesty he had to make that political motive an absolutely integral part of the human action of the play ; and the result is an intricate alternation of the abstract and the visible, a microscopically close mesh of party theories and personal passions, that defies any attempt at instinc- tive separation, and so keeps the attention hovering ambiguously between the pure excitement of a drama of ideas and the excitement of a drama of individuals. It is wonderfully wrought — a triumph of weaving ; the more closely one peers into the texture, the more one is amazed by the patient fineness of the thread ; the way Trebell's belief in the future and his blood- less passion for his policy is brought at last into