moult no feather of your respectability. But when we remember, in contrast, the individual and revealing, the philosophic humour of writers of genius—such as Sterne or Ben Jonson—we may react somewhat from our enjoyment of Barrie's little jokes.
A writer may be judged by his humour: he may also be judged by his view of women and by his feeling for romance. Now to many there is no doubt something very attractive in Barrie's chivalry; something very charming in his tender self-deceptions about maids and wives and mothers and domestic felicities. He appears, in this regard, as a susceptible and high-minded adolescent to whom the more advanced volumes of feminine psychology are fast sealed. But many women enjoy adolescent devotion, many women like being idealized. They accept with ironical enjoyment—most profoundly concealed!—the tributes of the sentimental male; and they read Barrie novels or witness Barrie plays with an enjoyment of precisely the same kind. None the less most of them know well enough in their hearts that Barrie and his kin are not really their best friends. "How like you in the plan is woman, Knew you her as we!" wrote that true feminist, George Meredith. Barrie does not agree. "Oh, man!" he cries, in an orgy of abasement before the glimpses of those vistas of spiritual beauty which the name Woman discloses to him: "Oh, man! selfish, indelicate, coarse-grained at the best!" He would cherish, at all costs, in women, that "purity infinite, spotless bloom," in the male demand for which Meredith detected an "infinite grossness."
Is there, perhaps—the disconcerting reflection must sometimes have occurred to some of his admirers—is there not perhaps, after all, a certain element of grossness, of vulgarity, even, in Barrie's treatment of sex—a sort of obscene decency, one might call it? Though he never offends "nice" susceptibilities, does he not offend other susceptibilities which are characterized by a delicacy of a different kind? Witness the emphasis—the particular sort of emphasis—that he gives to certain passages in the conversation of the childred in Peter Pan; witness the particular quality of his comments on certain innocent observations that occur in The Young Visiters.
There is, in relation to sex, a special sort of respectable and discreet facetiousness that is altogether alien to great writers. It is, to finer taste, infinitely more offensive than sheer ribaldry, of which, indeed, numerous men of the highest literary genius, including
