Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/175

MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI 149 It is this : that although Mr. Barker's attitude when writing is exactly the opposite of Mr. Shaw's, al- though he sits precisely on the other side of the table, yet, partly for that reason, whenever he glances up, his view of life naturally includes the figure of his virile vis-a-vis. There is not a scrap of Mr. Shaw in Mr. Barker's technique ; but there is all of him in Mr. Barker's world. The distinction is a deep one. I would like to draw it in red ink. It probably applies to more cases than our subject's. "I suppose I owe more to Shaw," Mr. Barker once said to me, " than to any other man alive. He is certainly my very greatest friend." Now, intimacy and debt would doubtless both be largely the result of the very divergencies of temperament we have been noting — the dissimi- larities which make the younger man a kind of in- terrogative spectator and the elder a spectacular asserter. You are to figure Mr. Barker, twenty years ago, approaching life with a charmed eagerness and wonder. He was eager, he was earnest, he had swiftness and sincerity, he had genius and the naivete of genius ; he was curious about ideas, he was humbly anxious to learn to live and to write ; and he was earning his living as an actor. It was humanly impossible for such a youngster to avoid being fascinated by the man who was at that time the most exhilarating literary figure in the Town as well as our most effective playwright ; and the world the young man contemplated became, therefore, pretty quickly a world thickly populated by his great friend's prophecies and projects and ideas. It was rather a beautiful relationship, I think. Old man and young man, dogmatist and dreamer, like some new Virgil and Dante of our day, they descended together all the circles of — the hell in Man and Superman ; and although Mr. Barker, left to himself, would prob- ably never have explored the metaphysical Avernu