Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/185

159 uncompromised conditions. The obstinacy of Beauty is astonishing! She conies flying back to this play, a glittering invader, gloriously flushing and confirming all its action, at the very moment when Mr. Barker, the good Scotsman, doubtless felt he had grimly, nobly turned his back upon her lures. "It's a muddled country," says Philip in Act I, "and one's first instinct is to be rhetorical about it, to write poetry and relieve one's feelings." But the decent thing to do, he sees, is something sterner, harsher; pierrot must stop writing verse and Face the Facts. "We have to teach Mildred what love of the world means, Jessica," he concludes, facing his wife frankly, in the last scene. "Even if it's an uncomfortable business. Even if it means not adding her to that aristocracy of good feeling and good taste, the very latest of class distinctions. I tell you I haven't come by these doubts so easily. Beautiful sounds and sights and thoughts are all of the world's heritage I care about. Giving them up is like giving up my carefully created soul out of my keeping before I die." Neither knew it when they made the sacrifice—but that is of course the only way by which a soul can be given completest life. Bent only on being honest, Mr. Barker has never been more charming; the constructional device adopted simply for the sake of perfect candour and completeness—the desire of keeping Philip on mid-stage from first to last—produced spontaneously a scheme of composition even more decoratively delightful than the elaborately planned and measured parterre acts in Ann Leete. Much his least artificial play. The Madras House is also by far his most romantic. The "beautiful sounds and sights and thoughts" which he deemed it his duty to relinquish have been graciously replaced by others fairer still; and his very refusal to end his last scene with a ringing dogma or deduction, to round things off with a regular "conclusion," gives the close a quality