Sir James Matthew Barrie

A Warning that Whimsicality, Pathos, Fantasy, are too Delicate to be Overworked

PHILIP GUEDALLA

IN the first place, of course, Queen Anne was to blame. It was a direct consequence of one of the few legislative indiscretions of that blameless reign. You have only to read the preamble (it fills a trifle under nine pages in the "Statutes at Large") of "an Act for the Union of the two Kingdoms of England and Scotland" to detect, beneath an apparently harmless drone of formal legislation, the beginnings of the trouble. The grave words, in their dignified context on the yellow page, seem meaningless enough. The Augustan drafting committee, in their high heels and their tall perukes, may have meant no harm. But behind their empty periods one seems to catch a sudden, disconcerting glint of red hair, of eager, determined eyes, of the slow gathering of the clans for the last and most successful foray over the Border into the defenceless English counties. The Act of Union (one can read it in every line) prepared the pervasion of English life by Scotsmen.

So, in the first instance, Queen Anne was to blame. But she has an obvious excuse, because her claim to the customary indulgence de mortuis is, if anything, a trifle stronger than most people's. In any case the pass which she has sold to the invader was not seriously congested by south-bound traffic during the Eighteenth Century. Such incursions as were organized under the auspices of the House of Stuart were firmly thrown back into Scotland, the form assumed by English criticism being normally a row of spikes over a gateway for the reception of Scottish heads. And even when the drastic immigration policy of this more than Ellis' Island was eluded by the furtive entry of individual Scotsmen, England continued to regard them with unconcealed distaste. They grossly mispronounced the language; their country was known to be of a grotesque and barbarous poverty; and they were not even foreigners. One might tolerate the presence in a polite circle of a dapper Mounseer or a learned German; but the constant company of a Scotsman was something that only the massive patience of the Doctor could bear— and even that had given way on occasion.

FOR that reason one reads with a thrill of mild surprise the astonishing claim of a Scots Rector at St. Andrews. He was addressing a passionately local audience in the full intellectual idiom of the Gael. There was a copious appeal to that light, unearthly fancy of which a monopoly is supposed to reside in the untidier portions of the Celtic fringe; the names of local worthies—Montrose, McConnachie, Hamilton—abounded in provincial profusion; and there was that mild sprinkling of Scottish colloquialisms—"fleggit" and "flichtered"— which is always intended to put the Englishman off his sentence. But in the midst of it all, among the little nudging references and the persevering elfishness and the light brush of sentiment that is like the soft sweep of showers among Northern hills, there came the astounding phrase, "our glorious Johnson". One hardly dares to conjecture what was said that afternoon in Elysium under: the tree where so many of them always gather for polite conversation—Mr. Garrick and Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Topham Beauclerk and Sir Joshua and Mr. Boswell, who takes no more little notes now because his memory is perfect. It was in May that the dreadful swords were spoken at St. Andrews; and that May there was thunder from a clear sky. "Our glorious Johnson" . . Scottish acquisitiveness could surely go no further.

THE embargo on Scotsmen lastedand almost survived the? Eighteenth Century. The reign of Sir Walter did . something to lift the ban. But His countrymen were found to be lamentably unlike him; and the repulsive dialect in which Mr. Carlyle elected to commune with his Maker in the presence of his startled readers did much to restore the old attitude of exclusion. But late in the reign of Queen Victoria, when Mr. Meredith had exposed to the full the feelings of a gentleman and Mr. Henry James had explored the furthest recesses of refined persons, there was a sudden interest in the simpler ornaments of the British countryside. Young ladies in circulating libraries went tripping westward with Mr. Hardy, went farther west with Mr. William Black. Every country (in some parts of the country the industry has survived into our own time) was found to be good for a movel. The muse of fiction was hastily fitted for a sun-bonnet; eager literary hands substituted the cow-shed for the drawing-room; whilst bare arms replaced the naked souls of an earlier fashion. Somewhere between the milk-pails and the fatois, a Scottish vogue crept in; the sentiment of peasant characters could be relied on to be sound; and the proximity of Balmoral seemed almost to give royal sanction to the vogue.

England turned a patient ear to interminable narratives of the slow journey of smallholders from the cradle to the grave; and their conversation was couched in an alarming idiom, in which the wildest misprints were barely noticeable. Somewhere in this strange movement Mr. Barrie had his beginnings. His work displayed a welcome brevity, and there was a pleasing play of mild sentiment. But he was far as yet, whilst his imagination still hung round Mirriemuir, from Baronetcy and the still more select company of the Order of Merit. Those bright perspectives did not beckon until he had transferred himself from the publisher's waiting-room to the stage door. In his first phase Mr. Barrie was only a writer among several, a friend of Henley, a delicate staccato little pen from Scotland. But his second career, among the draughts and bouquets of the London theatre, took him much further.

"Very soon," as he once told some undergraduates, "you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshmen come up." As a dramatist Sir James Barrie is (one says it without disparagement of a great age) essentially Edwardian. It is true that he produced two plays before Queen Victoria died; and his ennoblement was at the hands of King George. But the great mass of his dramatic work, the first sustained roar of public appreciation, the echoes of which reverberate annually in the ritual revival of Peter Pan, all fall within the reign of King Edward VII. One year of it alone saw him launch three new plays; and very soon that small, unobtrusive figure with a large pipe (one knew so little about him, except that he smoked too much) had unintentionally elbowed his competitors into obscurity at the side of the stage. He became the annointed king of the English theatre, although for the most part he was, like that elusive figure of Mr. H. G. Wells' theology, an Invisible King: it was a queer apotheosis.

HIS appeal to the age of King Edward was almost irresistible. It was a slightly jaded time, when the public taste turned wearily in the direction of a sweet, an almost too sweet simplicity. The fevered, -fin de siecle young gentlemen of the Yellow Book had given it all the sensations; the facile worldliness of Mr. Pinero and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones had taught it all that could be known about life. It had exhausted the possibilities of chrysoprase and hermaphrodites, and it had seen every conceivable permutation of two men and a woman. The subjects of Edward VII, like the languid courtiers of Louis XVI, were ready for buttercups and green fields; and with a charming gesture Mr. Barrie conducted them to their Trianon, to play at shepherds in the sunshine. The Admirable Crichton became their Robinson Crusoe; and his author was the little Rousseau of a new return to Nature.

That is really how one sees Mr. Barrie's triumphant advent to the English stage. At any other time those tender demonstrations that wives are frequently fond of their pwn husbands, that fathers feel a distinct preference for their sons, might strike one as a trifle obvious. It has been infinitely refreshing to see wives striking out boldly for .themselves and staying at home, instead of obeying convention and trotting demurely off in pursuit of another gentleman.

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But that charm was bound to fade. All that remains for a later generation is the quality of Sir James Barrie's imagination. That little twist of fancy may seem a small thing. But it has attained to the dangerous dignity of a national institution. Statues are erected to it in open spaces, and reference to it is frequent in public speeches—even in his own. With rare helpfulness he has explored his own elusive quality.

Now, there are few things more dreadful than a studied whimsicality; and when Rectors grow confidential about their own elfishness, one begins to be half afraid. Elves will not dance to order. Barrie is a master of mild sentiment and of that neat manipulation of stage figures which serves to keep the critics quiet. But tears and technique are the least important things about him. For those who can no longer laugh at his rather wry fun or weep when he evokes a glutinous might-have-been, there is still something in him which is not

... bred

Or in the heart or in the head.

That fancy, which is his own, must not be overworked or imitated, because it is ours also.