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.
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