Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/201

175 THE REAL STANLEY HOUGHTON 175 The tramcars go swinging down the street as regular as Fate, and in their wake the mob. In the gutter the newsboy cries aloud, and the cheap-jack publishes his wares in the doorway. You, too, who are of the mob, pass along with the rest of your kind. You do not hear the racket because you have heard it so often, nor do you look to right or left, because you have seen a thousand times all that there is to be seen. You have seen, for instance, but have not noticed, that narrow tunnel burrow- ing its way between a couple of shops with the air of merely serving back premises ; or if you have noticed it you have sus- pected it, probably, of providing furtive access to some lurking public-house, too disreputable to venture into the open. But the tunnel is a thoroughfare. Penetrate it far enough, and you find yourself, unaccountably, in a nook amongst the houses, sudden as a clearing in a jungle. Something of the jungle quiet hangs over the tiny square. The roar of the neighbouring traffic is dulled and softened to the music of distant surf. Steep buildings rise like cliffs all above this dim pool of silence, shutting out the common noises of the town — shutting out the sunlight, too, save at high noon in summer. There is no escaping the inference. It was the romance of the stage that had mainly attracted Houghton at first ; he had now begun to turn towards the romance of real life. His interest had shifted from the people sitting inside the theatre to the humanity walking outside it ; and in order to express these new perceptions, broader visions, he had to discard the special technique of the stage. He found it— or at any rate he found the special form of it he had cast — too fixed and rigid for these finer, fuller registrations. The characterization in Hindle Wakes is faithful so far as it goes — but it was not allowed to go very far, very deep ; for the effects which Houghton knew counted most on the stage, the sort of construction he perfected, demanded a material of broad relationships and simplified emotions, and a lack of subtleties and semitones. Perhaps, indeed, the