Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/180

154 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI modern as Denmark Hill, yet as human as Hamlet — quite as important as the Poor Law, yet as pas- sionate as poetry? — for such a subject, of course, does exist. In The Madras House all these questions are answered. Every wall of it announces that pierrot has won. It is true that its subject-matter is the same as that of Man and Superman and Getting Married. But that happens to be the theme of themes to dramatize emotionally ; it is also the sub- ject-matter of Romeo and Juliet " What's the purpose of it all ? " asks Philip Madras plaintively. " What do we slow-breeding civilized people get out of Love, and the beauty of women ? . . . for which we do pay rather a big price " — and the play's forma- tive effort, the general creative current which urges its characters into their successive relationships, is simply an attempt to reach forward to some new, sounder conception of this dreadfully obstinate instinct of Sex. Call it a force or a failing, there the con- founded element is, the most imperative quality in life, reducing lords of creation like poor old Con- stantine Madras (" with his view of life as a sort of love-chase") to ignominiously amorous absurdities, and turning exquisitely civilized creatures like Jessica ("with her beauty, her dresses, her music and art") into civilization's subtlest enemy ; and the question we have yet to answer honestly is how, exactly, we are going to utilize it, what mental attitude or fresh convention we mean to frame for its control now that the " romantic," the Victorian, way of regard- ing it has come to seem both too sentimental and too gross. "From seventeen to thirty -four," complains poor Constantine, with cause, " the years which a man should consecrate to the acquiring of political virtue, wherever he turns he is distracted, provoked, tantalized, by the barefaced presence of women. How's