Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/171

MR GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI U5 any signs of secret passages or dummy panels. And as we do this, as we examine the actual structure of these scenes, we do discover, beyond question, that all these poor characters are, literally, the victims of an elaborate Plot. Of the plot, in fact — the plot of the play, the story which drives the scenes round — the excellent invention of the elder Yoysey's machina- tions — as neat as anything of Poe's or Maupassant's. As ingenious, as artificial, as " romantic " as that — and therefore absolutely fatal as a mainspring meant to drive a middle-classical clock constructed to tell Chislehurst time with stolid truthfulness. You don't get " realism " by merely changing centuries, by sub- stituting a deed-box for duels ; and it is a fact that if you only move its mahogany furniture aside, the whole of this play will be found to have been laid out as artificially as that seventeenth-century garden at Marks way de. Offering itself to us as a simple '* slice of life," it is really impaled, all the time, on the most fantastic toasting-fork of criminal patho- logy and fairy-tale finance. And so, although the characters' reactions to the prongs are observed with the most scrupulous fidelity and reproduced with the most wonderful skill, though they wear unquestion- able top-hats and smoke real cigars, they still affect us as uncanny creatures, not exactly of our clay, for they are in fact being secretly goaded by dilemmas as abnormal as those which maddened Mr. Wells's Invisible Man. The mechanism that skewers them, spitting each of them in turn until we have the entire row displaying each his special squirm, is every bit as arbitrary as Carnaby Leete's rapier, as recondite as his political intrigues. If that were all, it would be deeply interesting — it is such a capital example of the way a man's sense of form must have its fling, unconsciously indulging itself by deftly shaping an intricate story Men of Letters. J J