SIR JAMES BARRIE: CONFECTIONER
AND PARLOUR-MAGICIAN
SIR JAMES BARRIE is related, with peculiar intimacy, to the mind and the emotions, to the naiveties and idealisms of the American and British public. He loves easy pretty illusions, and so does the average Anglo-Saxon. As an anodyne for those modern discontents that are the besetting virtues of our introspective serious writers and readers he has been found invaluable. From the "unpleasant truths" of Shaw and Galsworthy and Wells the patron of the circulating library turns in relief to warm and cheer his heart with the agreeable fantasies, the dainty make-believes, the harmless friendly humour of this Scotch sentimentalist.
Barrie is never disquieting, he is never bitter. Though he may indulge us and himself in sarcasm, the sarcasm is always genial. To most readers he is seldom anything but charming and companionable. He is the most "taking" of playwrights or novelists, and he never offends the normal proprieties. Like Mr A. S. M. Hutchinson, whom he praises so highly and so significantly, Barrie can be read aloud in any drawing-room to any lady. His humour is very like the humour of Punch; middle-class drawing-room humour, reassuringly undistinguished, always wholesome, always safe. When we think of the husband who declared that "his first two wives were angels; and so is the third, in many respects"—of the other husband who "clapped his hands when his wife died, and exclaimed: 'Hip, hip, hurrah!' adding only as an afterthought: 'The Lord's will be done!'"—of the dour Auld Lichts who "always looked as though they were returning from burying a near relative"—of the minister who believed that "no other denomination could be saved, and not so many of his own"—we realize at once how well and how shrewdly such jests avoid the danger of giving any real offence. They are just daring enough; they are on the right side of the line: there is not implicit in them, as there is in the jests of Hardy or Shaw, any vital discontent with or any serious attack upon either orthodoxy or marriage. You may laugh and yet
