Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/200

174 174 THE REAL STANLEY HOUGHTON instinctive selection of a man reaching eagerly for the instrument best adapted to express the things he really wants to say. Hitherto, as we have seen, he has been rather rushed into his methods; circum- stances hustled him into certain styles. Now, for the first time, he is able to defy circumstance ; he is selecting to please himself, and with a completer consciousness than ever before of all the available alternatives. It is surely very significant that he should turn at once to prose fiction. And even more significant that the moods he now expresses, the interests to be confessed a,nd indulged, should be moods and interests totally different from those which are reflected in the plays. There is but little beauty in his plays. There is a great deal of beauty here — not verbal beauty only, silken phrases and soft refrains, but a charming tenderness of touch in dealing with mortal relationships, a constant, chivalrous, en- grossed and diffident care for fine discriminations and delicate truths. And the prose is everywhere eager to dwell on what, in one of his own earlier articles, he had called the "beautiful strangeness" of life. Of these little prose-impressions the more perfect all deal with the effort of some pale prisoned character, a crushed clerk or an incomplete oldster, to escape from his back-water, if only for an instant, and feel, for once, the full exciting surge of coarse existence. The Time of His Life, Revolt of Mr. Reddy, Out of Season, all repeat this idea of a sudden awakening to the wonder of reality ; Life itself was to tell of a girl's dash towards Life. Here is the opening para- graph of another sketch, Fritz's, ostensibly only a circumstantial street-scene, where the same delighted sense of ordinary life as a sort of fairy-tale, a fairy- tale he had just learned to read, keeps freshening and fascinating his pen : —