Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/202

176 176 THE REAL STANLEY HOUGHTON stage never is the place for subtlety and semitones. Mr. Arnold Bennett says so, and Mr. Bennett has a way of being right. *' If the dramatist attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety he is merely wasting his time; what passes for subtle on the stage would have a very obvious air as a novel." Houghton's novel opens heavily, but it soon gathers pace, and before the end of the first fragment of six swiftly written chapters it is repro- ducing life more intimately, honourably, and discrimi- natingly than he was able to in any of his plays. He is still dealing with Lancashire — but he is dealing with it more finely — ^which is not at all necessarily the same thing as making it seem finer. He was cutting closer, amassing more minutely, mixing his ingredients in finer proportions, and the result would probably have been a representation of vigour, of coarseness, of jannock and all the rest of the North country virtues, as much more lifelike than Hindle Wakes as Hindle Wakes is more veracious than Independent Means. So that we are compelled to sum up in this way : the moment Houghton discarded the specialized technique which his resolve to do first-rate theatre work had thrust upon him, he began to write with a notable increase of originality and sincerity — in order to speak with his own voice he had to cease using the lips of marionettes and actors. It was a purely romantic impulse that made him write plays to begin with — it was romance, that is to say, that made him a "realist"; and beneath all the apparent sophistication and cynicism of his work there always lay concealed this longing for "a beautiful strange- ness." He was not a "dramatist of ideas" — he was simply a man of ideals. He was not an intellectual rebel nor a dogmatist. He was wistful and eager,