ECHOES OF THE WAR.* SIR Dams BARRIE is almost unique
among contemporary writers in his appeal to youth. Peter Pan is shortly to resume his annual sway for the fourteenth year in succession. But these fanciful and pathetic sketches are addressed to a grown-up, if not indeed to a middle-aged, audience. It is not that the writer forgets to pay due homage to heroic youth—to those of whom Shakespeare, "who had been there before," wrote the perfect epitaph, if we alter a single word, in the lines on Norfolk in Richard II.
" In France he gave His body to that pleasant country's earth, And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ, Under whose colours he had fought so long."
But here the scene is laid at home. We sea nothing of war at close quarters. We are shown its effect on the elder generation, gentle and simple, homely and sophisticated. In " The Old Lady Shows her Medals" we begin at the foot of the social ladder, with a char- woman for horoine, while all the action takes place in a slum base- ment. The idea of the play is the competition of pride in their sons among poor women. Mrs. Dowey never had a husband or a son, so she had to invent one, palming off on her sister charwomen letters from the front which she had forged, and telling a clergyman that Private Kenneth Dowey, of the Black Watch (whose name she had seen in the papers), was her son. By a coincidence, quite justifiable in the circumstances, Mx Willings the clergyman, runs across Private Dowey at a soldiers' rest-house and brings him along to his supposed mother. Private Dowey comes out of curiosity, resolved to denounce the fraud, and their tite-d-lete begins stormily enough. But he is without friends in London or a home anywhere. So the sequel describes how from indignation he passes to acquiescence, gratitude, and finally devotion to the old " criminal," who gives him a home, and from being a probationary mother is finally adopted with full
military honours, for Kenneth tells her that in taking him over she has, " in a manner of speaking, joined the Black Watch," and that he has sent in her name as his next-of-kin. He goes back never to return, and we part from Mrs. Dewey, splendide mendax, looking over her " son's " medals before going out in decent mourning to her daily labours. It may be urged that the conversation of the charwomen is slightly idealized, but it is full of human touches, and gives an admirable appieciation of the class distinctions which exist even amongst the very poor.
In " The New Wcird " we move to a middle-class household. It is a study of the relations of fathers and sons as affected by the war. Mr. Torrance is an official at the Law Courts, a dry, rather sarcastic man, averse from sentiment, feared in his household. We make his acquaintance at the moment when his son is putting on his uniforni upstairs for the first time ; his wife begs him to be "nice" to the boy. But when the Second Lieutenant appears the transports of his mother and sister only drive the father still further into his shell. He disparages and cavils—simply because he is
afraid of letting himself go. Yet when the women folk retire, the
SW• Beams of the War. By I. M. Little. London : Hodder and Stoughton. lieu ice is slowly broken by a process of mutual confession. Roger's reluctant admission that he likes his father best leads on to further intimate self-revelations on both sides, culminating in Mr. Torrance's request that his son will be " nice " to him before his mother. Thus the war is the means of breaking down the barriers bettreen the two generations instead of heightening and strengthening them as in Mr. Wells's last novel. In " Barbara's Wedding " the milestones are still further apart, and the social status higher. The Colonel, the principal character, is "very old and sometimes bewildered." The war has been raging for three years, his grandson has been killed, yet we find him in his country house seeing in a vision things as they were on the day of his grandson's marriage, dimly conscious that things are not what they seem, asking for explanations from his gardener of strange sounds- anti-aireraft guns—of which the garder-er (of three years back) is wholly unconscious. Then the vision fades, the dead disappear, and the Colonel's wife breaks to him what the bells mean. It is not for Barbara's wedding to his grandson that they are ringing, but for her second marriage to the gardener, Daring, now a Captain. " The world is all being re-made, dear," his wife tells him. " He is worthy of her." So what was impossible in The Admirable Crichton is accepted without a murmur in the fusion of classes brought about by the war. The Colonel's lucid interval, however, does not last long, the vision of the past returns, and we leave him asking his wife to read him " something funny " out of Pickwick. It is a subtle and tender fantasy with one or two jarring notes. Subtler and more ingenious is the last of these informal plays, " A Well- Remembered Voice," which deals with communications with the dead. The mother of a young officer killed in the war, with the girl he might have married and two friends, are holding a table-rapping stance. Mr. Don, the father, an artist, is present, but he is an unbeliever ; all the rest are much impressed by the results, which are negligible and even trivial. Then, as the father is left alone, his son appears to him, vividly alive, with all his old tricks and humour. In their talk, free and unrestrained, he explains, why he came to see his father rather than his mother, who had been all in all to him in life—because his father needed him most. The boy is entirely ignorant of the table-rapping experiments ; he dwells on the difficulty of penetrating the veil ; explains how he can only appear to one ; how the living can affect the dead by their cheerfulness or gloom ; and how the revenants " get a good mark," so to speak, if they succeed in brightening up those whom they visit. The conversation continues after his mother and the girl re-enter the room, but they neither see nor hear him. Mr. Don's triumph over the failure of the table-rapping is dashed by his son's mentioning that the " password," which " it was awfully difficult to get," was identical with that rapped out by the table, and when he asks for further explanations his son disappears, leaving him to think it all out. This is clearly not a dogmatic pronouncement on " Speak. ing with the Dead " (the title of a practical handbook recently . published), but an allegory in which both sceptics and believers can find consolation.
Sir James Barrie's method is too well known to need description. It is the very antipodes of the rigorous detachment, the austere self-effacement, of that school of artists of which Turgenieff is perhaps the supreme exemplar. Sir James Barrie plucks continually at our heart-strings, and the constant alternation of pathos and comedy is apt to be disconcerting. As regards the form of these "Echoes," they are practically plays, but the stage directions are expanded at times into a running commentary. The skill with which trivial, homely, and even ridiculous incidents are turned to account amounts to genius. It is easy to criticize ; but it is impossible to deny the charm of these whimsical yet moving illustrations of " the courage of these young things " and the love and camouflaged pride—for we are driven to use this much overworked word—of the old.
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