bewildering abruptness, not less bewildering point; they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into daylight.  Some of the dialogue is, as the writer says of politics, “a game for clever children, women, and fools”; it is a game demanding close attention.  A courtly indolence, an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air; people walk, as it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on; it fills one with excitement, the excitement of following a trail.  It is a trail of ideas, these people think, and they act because they have thought.  They know the words they use, they use them with deliberation, their hearts are in their words.  Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting; but these people, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding one’s mind in suspense.

Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family, and he interests us in every member of that family.  He plays them like chessmen, and their moves excite us as chess excites the mind.  They express ideas; the writer has thought out their place in the scheme of things, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their heads.  They talk for effect, or rather for disguise; it is part of their keen sense of the game.  They talk at cross-purposes, as they wander in and out of the garden terrace; they plan out their lives, and life comes and surprises them by the way.  Then they speak straight out of their hearts, sometimes crudely, sometimes with a naivete which seems laughable; and they act on sudden impulses, accepting the consequences when they come.  They live an artificial life, knowing lies to be lies, and choosing them; they are civilised, they try to do their duty by society; only, at every moment, some ugly gap opens in the earth, right in their path, and they have to stop, consider, choose a new direction.  They seem to go their own way, almost without guiding; and indeed may have escaped almost literally out of their author’s hands.  The last scene is an admirable episode, a new thing on the stage, full of truth within its own limits; but it is an episode, not a conclusion, much less a solution.  Mr. Barker can write:  he writes in short, sharp sentences, which go off like pistol-shots, and he keeps up the firing, from every corner of the stage.  He brings his people on and off with an unconventionality which comes of knowing the resources of the theatre, and of being unfettered by the traditions of its technique.  The scene with the gardener in the second act has extraordinary technical merit, and it has the art which conceals its art.  There are other inventions in the play, not all quite so convincing.  Sometimes Mr. Barker, in doing the right or the clever thing, does it just not quite strongly enough to carry it against opposition.  The opposition is the firm and narrow mind of the British playgoer.  Such plays as Mr. Barker’s are apt to annoy without crushing.  The artist, who is yet an imperfect artist, bewilders the world with what is novel in his art; the great artist convinces the world.  Mr. Barker is young:  he will come to think with more depth and less tumult; he will come to work with less prodigality and more mastery of means.  But he has energy already, and a sense of what is absurd and honest in the spectacle of this game, in which the pawns seem to move themselves.