Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/183

157 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI 157 are all dissembled or suppressed ; the wisdom gained in life's laboratories never leaves the hand that finds it, there is practically no racial accumulation of this lore ; Science itself frankly flounders helplessly among men- dacities and guess-work, its chief material plainly falsified phenomena. It is only by the aid of the miracle of imaginative creation that experiments can be attempted, possibilities examined and compared ; and since in matter so infinitely unstable no reliable generalizations can be made, since the exception is always here the rule, the results which art obtains, its divinations and discoveries, can only be presented in the individualized, undogmatic form of fictive art, the novel's or the drama's. " I am inclined to think," Mr. Wells has owned, in one of his tractates, "that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in terms of individuality, through the novel, the film, the play, autobiography or biography of the frankest sort." And he himself in The Passionate Friends and in Marriage has offered us, as we have seen, such dramatized discussions, not unprofitably. But just as much as a book like Marriage is superior to a work on Marriage, so is The Madras House method more reliable than Mr. Wells's. Marriage and Getting Married are exciting discussions conducted with plenty of picturesque movement and gesture by groups of characters appointed by their authors for that purpose ; but the dramatic briskness of these debates is largely due to the fact that the authors keep the game in their own hands, deal out opinions to the speakers, revise the pros and the cons, and know the conclusion that will be arrived at before they begin. The Madras House is much more wonderful than that. What goes on in it is not a symposium ; it is a stance. The author is not wiser than his char- acters, does not employ them as spokesmen to give utterance to his firmly formed opinions ; rather, he