Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/173

MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI 147 Mr. Barker's critics gone more wildly wrong than on this one of the influence of Shaw ; and if I summon the old bogey here once more it is in the hope, if not of laying it, then of locating it so exactly that super- stition in the future will not imagine it detects it where it isn't. It is amazing, it is heartrending, it fills one with despair for common eyesight, to watch the wholesale way Mr. Barker has been bracketed with Mr. Shaw ; to read the ordinary comments that are made about The Voysey Inheritance or Waste you would conclude that G.B. was simply G.B.S. minus S. Whereas the truth (and to some extent the trouble, too) is that they are temperamentally and technically entirely unakin. They are as different as Ulster is from Ireland (Mr. Barker is mainly Scotch) or as dogma is from dream ; their dramatic methods are just as unlike as their collars or their clothes, or their respective ages, or their eyebrows. Especially the eyebrows ! Consider them, I beg. G.B.S.'s run trucu- lently upwards and outwards with the aggressive twirl of a born fanatic and fighter. Mr. Barker's slant precisely the other way about ; they rise towards the centre with a kind of quizzical perplexity to make an expression of whimsical interrogation. G.B.S.'s are the bristling eyebrows of a man who has made the Englishman's castle his home, and is intolerantly putting it to rights. Mr. Barker's are those of a kind of puzzled pierrot, of a man incurably capable of wonderment and whimsy — one of those who never can feel quite at home in the real world, to whom even the Englishman's castle is still a dark tower of romance, and who eyes it with a quaint and comical dismay. And their way of holding their pens is just as different. Their methods of expression are as un- like as their expressions. Mr. Shaw's sentences are arrowy, as rigid as ruled lines. Mr. Barker likes quaintly qualifying clauses — oblique parentheses that