Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/191

165 THE REAL STANLEY HOUGHTON 165 a prisoner, unconsciously strangled by an unsuitable technique ; and that when his good conduct and sub- missiveness won him extra liberty, when success gave independence and self-knowledge, his first independent impulse was to tear off the mask of playwright and mould another, in a different medium, subtler, softer. It was sheer docility, nothing else, that made him seem a rebel. His " realism " was to him a boy's romance. In another five years his fame would have rested not upon plays but on novels. The inferiority of the work that followed Hindle Wakes has been regarded as a symptom of slackening power. It was really a sign of exactly the reverse : their vitality was lessened because their author had grown out of them. He died too soon for his reputation, not too late. Death caught him just as he was beginning his real life. The process, as one sees it now, was this. The contents of these three volumes fall naturally into four sections, each sliding out of the last. Let us examine them in turn. Houghton in the first place, was a pure provincial ; his home was in a suburb of Manchester. That was both his great good fortune and his bad. As the reader will already have gathered, from my impressions of Mr. Bennett and Mr. Shaw, I am a firm believer in the privilege, to an artist, of provincialism. It teaches him proportion and per- spective, it teaches him humility, it persuades him, above everything, to that wordless belief in something finer than he has ever experienced, some splendid possibility in life, which is absolutely necessary in the absence of some more mystic faith to any who would observe the masked miracle of human nature with accuracy. Every writer, eventually, has to come to London ; but if he comes to it from afar he sees it, first of all, stretched colossally to scale against the sky ; he sees it massed triumphantly, a royal city of romance,