Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/190

164 164 THE REAL STANLEY HOUGHTON to predict the unwritten next page. Sort these plays into their written order, link their lines of develop- ment — continue those lines into the emptiness — measure the figure they map out — and manifestly there you are ! It is at any rate a tempting experi- ment for criticism to try. Suppose we have courage and make it. II It may be said at once that it requires courage to carry through. The lines to be ruled will leap like lances at opinion, they will shatter the approved impression of Houghton's powers ; you will be hurried, as the horoscope takes shape beneath your hands, into all the embarrassments and conspicuousness of heresy. The official feeling about Houghton is that he was, first of all, an audacious young rebel, a ruthless Lancashire Ibsen, laying human nature bare with a merciless realism ; and secondly, that he was the born, perfect playwright. Mr. William Archer called him an Ibsen with the poetry left out ; *' his technique is superior to Pinero's," said Mr. Baugham ; Mr. J. T. Grein heard tocsins sounding when he watched Hindle Wakes — " It heralds the movement of the future," he cried — it would help to determine " the Battle of the sexes " ; The Younger Generation was received as a rebel manifesto. Well, the conviction forced upon you, if you telescope these scenes and then peer down them to discover what their next extension would have been, is that Houghton was not a rebel, not a realist, not a playwright ; that on the contrary he was trustful, romantic, and shy — a dreamer by tem- perament, submissive in his methods, a respectful student of precedent and precept ; that it was this very docility and idealism that led him to the stage and clamped him in a medium that misfitted him ; that far from being a born playwright, he pined there like