notably Shakespeare himself, are abundantly capable. When Barrie refers to the beating of a lover’s heart as a "palp," or when he talks with a smirk of "Little Mary," he is perhaps not more coarse in the usual sense than is Mercutio when telling Juliet's nurse the time of day, but he is certainly more coarse-grained. It is this same coarseness of grain that makes Barrie incapable of depicting true passion. The poetic intensities of love are outside his scope, and he therefore takes refuge in sentimentalism, though somewhat more subtly, no doubt, than his own Sentimental Tommy. The lover whose romance has poetic quality transmutes by a sovereign alchemy the baser metal of fleshly desire to pure gold; but the desire is not destroyed: it never can be. The sentimentalist, with his thinner and weaker emotions, is ashamed of that element of desire which his lesser love lacks strength to interfuse. So he tries hard to pretend it is not there; he lies to himself about it, and the whole tissue of his feeling is tainted by the morbid blight of this pretence. Lack of poetic strength is the original cause.
Nor is this lack, in Barrie, any the less evident when we turn from the "love-interest" in his work to those more fantastic and whimsical excursions which some regard as providing his chief claim to recognition. How little of the glamour of Celtic fairyland has the sugar-sweet magic of this Lowland Scot! Peter Pan is no Ariel: he can wake not even the most distant echo of that fairy music that sounds from the yellow sands of an island veritably enchanted. "Pretty touches," it is true, abound in Peter Pan, and children will probably always like the play because of the pirates, but of beauty it has no single touch, no single thrill. Poetry and prettiness—a gulf lies in between; and think of Mary Rose—Mary Rose, not for remembrance! Only the poet can be fantastic without being absurd. Contrast, with Barrie, Walter de La Mare.
But the author of Mary Rose and Peter Pan is not a negligible figure. He serves a purpose. In a rather curious and quite illuminating way he shows what comes of that kind of fancy that does not strike deep roots in heart or head. He shows us make-believe and whimsy falling just short of imagination, sentiment just missing romance, humour ranging just outside the arena of laughing philosophy. He has never felt passion, nor poetry's "wand-like touch," and so, for all his success, he fails; fails, in all his pleasantness and prettiness, in all his sterile charm.
