Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/189

THE REAL STANLEY HOUGHTON One naturally turns to the three volumes contain- ing the Collected Works of Stanley Houghton for the purpose of discovering the plays which they cannot possibly enclose. What would Houghton have done next? Where was he heading? Granted another five years of life (which would yet have left him another five younger than Mr. Bennett was when he wrote his Old Wives Tale), what kind of work would his have been then ? All who knew him knew that he was still developing furiously. " He developed as far in six months of London and Paris as in six years of Manchester," says his friend and editor, Mr. Harold Brighouse. "To the end he was, in his own judgment, still the industrious apprentice with his maturer work to come." Instead of accepting success as a signal that he had "found himself" at last, he thankfully seized it as a means for really making that discovery. He used it as a key to open a door that gave him room, for the first time, to live at the full pitch of his capacity and desires. So that all the bright scenes in these three books, so skilfully set, inevitably seem to us to-day to be merely a suc- cession of ante-chambers leading excitingly to some ultimate hall whose shape and size we have to guess from their gradually changing construction. And, given so much of a man's work, it surely ought to be possible, by the aid of some imaginative rule of three, 163