THE AUTHOR OF " HINDLE WAKES."*
TOGETHER with at least two plays that one may postulate as deserving of life, Stanley Houghton, by his lamentably early death, left behind him a fascinating problem for the brains of the literary world. Had his genius reached the zenith of its powers, or had he only just set foot on the threshold of a brilliant career ? To the wider literary world Houghton was known as the author of one brilliant play, Hindle Wakes, with whose production in June, 1912, he burst into fame. And it was duly noted that nothing which he afterwards accom- plished deserved to live. The ordinary critic, contemplating his work from the external and detached point of view, which is the only standpoint open to him, may be pardoned for think- ing that Hindle Wakes represented at once the perfection and the end of Houghton's genius. To those who knew the author in a more intimate aspect, who were his friends before he achieved fame, and had some knowledge of the well-ploughed field of shrewd observation, technical study, and hard work of which Bindle Wakes was the richest harvest, Houghton's literary record gives rather the impression of an ascending curve of achievement. Such observers deplore not only the death of Houghton, but the loss of those works that he might have lived to write.
Houghton bad within him the makings of a great dramatist. To this conclusion the ingenious technique and the bold spirit of innovation that characterized his dramatic work inevitably point. He was himself an amateur actor of some promise. Indeed, it was his predilection for theatricals that first induced him to write playlets—none of which, of course, are included in his published works—destined for private representation by himself and his friends. And it was in this humble sphere • The Works of Stanley Houghton. Edited, with an hltredltetIOn. by Retold Brighouse. 3 'vols. London: Constable and Co. 25s. net.] that he first learned how to set a stage and to " bring off " situations. How well he studied his craft is apparent in the often brilliant settings that are embodied in the stage direc- tions to his works. Witness the clever arrangement of the first act of The Younger Generation, where, by a daring stroke of stage-craft, the blank side of the stage picture represents the fireside wall of the dining-room, where the scene is laid, and the characters are shown seated in front of an imaginary fire-grate, warming their bands at an invisible blaze: The arrangement creates an impression of intimacy not incomparable with that produced in such a play as Maeterlinck's Interieur. The spectator feels almost like a privileged eavesdropper, favoured to see and overhear things which thus strike his senses with a double impression of reality. Similar great qualities of technique are illustrated in the second act by the exceedingly picturesque procession of the characters as they go to chapel, each couple vignetted in turn against the dining-room window, and by the quiet descent of a slow curtain, at the end of the play, on the same lonely pair whom the opening drama disclosed, isolated from their surroundings by a failure to grasp the essential current of an age's ideas. In other plays Houghton works on a triangular stage, arranged to show a corner only of a room, and the innovation produces an astonishing impress of realism.
It is as a realist that Houghton deserves an abiding place in dramatic annals. He is a painter of genre pictures. Rightly considered, his work does not belong to the drama of ideas. It belongs to the comedy of manners. His studies were not of theories or ideals, but of human types. His great know- ledge of stage-craft was a long way second to his knowledge of humanity. And the fact that he entered on the inheritance of his proper labours only just before the close of his career makes one all the more convinced of the great work that he could have accomplished had he been spared. He would have been the literary prophet of the life of his native Lancashire, where alone he found the types of character that really interested and amused him. It is significant that he only " looked in " on London on his way to Paris, and that his stay in the French capital was responsible for a fragment of a novel about Manchester and some notes for yet another Lancashire drama. Houghton cleverly satirized the genera- tion of his own friends when be wrote of Alan Jeffcote in Hindle Wakes that he looked upon London "as a place where rich Lancashire men go for a spree if they have not time to go to Monte Carlo or Paris."
It is true that Houghton never consciously set out to be the artist of Lancashire life. His aim was something much more modest. He simply desired to write plays that might amuse the small circle of his own friends. He chose Lancashire as his milieu because it was the only place whose people he professed to understand, and because he had no conception that his works were destined for a wider audience than was provided by his home circle. The foundation of the Gaiety Repertory Theatre in Manchester gave a wider ideal to his ambitions. Instead of delighting a domestic circle, he would write for the pleasure of his fellow-citizens. And all the time his capacities were growing almost without his knowledge; his powers of observation were becoming wider and stronger. So far as he himself realized, he was flirting with social theories, depicting ideas and tendencies, preaching doctrines of feminism or of social readjustment, or satirizing human nature, as in The Dear Departed and Independent Means. In reality he was deepening his comprehension of the human types around him, strengthening his hold on character, and painting little studies of Lancashire life and manners. With the production of The Younger Generation in 1910 Houghton turned the corner of his course. Henceforth he bade farewell to philosophies and theories. He had become the pure pictorial artist. The Xennion family find their prototypes in hundreds of Manchester homes. Considered politically, the play is young Manchester's final kick at the doctrines of the old " Manchester School." Pictorially its scenes are an abiding delineation of life as it is lived in half- a-dozen Manchester suburbs. From this admirable work it is only a step to the finest production of Houghton's genius— Bindle Wakes. Here the scene is changed from the author's city to the wider area of the county, and the play is a dazzlingly vivid picture of the whole farrago of life in the cotton districts. There is not one of its types but comes straight out of life, from the independent mill-girl to the successful cotton manufacturers, Nathaniel Jeffcote and Sir Timothy Farrar. Ben Brierley and Edwin Waugh wrote and sang of these characters before Houghton was born. But Houghton was the first to rescue them from the unexplored recesses of dialect sketches, to cut them bodily out of life and to put them in tangible form on the English stage, to repre- sent a type of existence previously uncelebrated in art.
It is impossible to believe that this rich and scintillating vein of talent was worked out with the production of Hindle Wakes. Houghton, had be lived, would have perpetuated yet other abiding pictures of the life that so vividly appealed to him. Perhaps he would have forsaken the dramatic form for the novel, though his unfinished fragment in this class bears the impress of a weaker and less familiar medium. But that longer life would have allowed him to put forth even more perfect work there is abundant evidence, not only in the pro- gressive strength and insight of the dramas, but in the often charmingly sympathetic character of the little sketches which close the last of the three volumes now issued.
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