BARRIE
BY STEPHEN GWYNN.
• would inevitably fail on the stage. Mr. Shaw was the crucial case. No intelligent person, no moderately amusable person, who read Shaw could deny that he was an amusing writer : but Shaw approved of Ibsen ; he became suspect as a highbrow, and throughout the whole of the 'nineties London entirely refused to have Mr. Shaw on the stage. Large audiences saw his plays at private performances and laughed and enjoyed : but when at last some manager risked putting on You Never Can Tell, I remember well my difficulty in persuading a superior person, whose pose was to avoid the highbrow, that this was a thing to see. Well, of course, Shaw won ; and then came Galsworthy and others, and for years now there has been no prejudice against a play because it is by a writer distinguished in other kinds of work. The young will scarcely know that such a prejudice existed. But at its very height, one man slipped through. Barrie had earned reputation, great reputation, as a stylist and as a story-teller before he made his first hit on the stage. Yet nobody ever thought of calling him high- brow or intellectual. Nobody ever accused him of writing plays that were designed to make you think. There was never any controversy at all about him, and he has been an institution on the British stage for a quarter of a century. Now he is the institution. Literary people, those who care to see a play which shall be worth thinking about, scarcely realize what they owe him for insidiously persuading actor-managers to accept what they most disapproved : and the public, which thought it did not like to be made to think, and probably still thinks the same, never guessed that Barrie has been, with devilish ingenuity, goading it into thinking for the past five-and-twenty years.
The public is so unsuspecting. Unless your literary man who is a dramatist pushes his thought to a conclusion that can be expressed in a simple form of words— admitting the " yes " or "no " that answers a question— they do not readily attribute evil designs to him. Shaw, of course, puts them on their guard. But after denying themselves the pleasure of hearing him for years they found out that Shaw really could make them laugh and that reconciles them to thinking. Besides, he does the thinking for them ; he always puts two sides of a case, with ample exposition. Barrie has not this candour.
He very seldom lets you know exactly what he is thinking himself ; but treacherously he sets you thinking. A silly fashion has grown up of calling him a sentimentalist ; yet, name the author whose satire cuts deeper. Peter Pan is a children's pantomime with transformation scene at the end ; but do you happen to remember the passage between Mr. and Mrs. Darling before the lost children come home ? Mr. Darling, to show his contrition for having locked- up the faithful dog-nurse, goes to live in the dog-kennel ; and his spectacular grief has a huge popularity. "Are you sure you do not enjoy living in a kennel ? " asks Mrs. Darling. The plain man who has known losses and bewailed them suddenly feels a stab.
Has he not enjoyed bewailing them ? Has he not made himself- pleasurably -an object of sympathy ? Or, take that queer play, Mary Rose, surely a piece of War-time psychology, when the thought of death was so besetting. People wanted to keep in touch with their dead—with those who had suddenly gone from them. Suppose the wish were suddenly granted, would either the dead or the living be happy ? If we could at any point, in any detail, put back the clock, alter the accomplished, would we really do it ? Such uncomfortable thoughts as these Barrie will leave you with. In Dear Brutus he came, perhaps, nearer than elsewhere to the expression of a philosophy—or, at least, of a conclusion. Give any of us the second chance and the second time we should still go the same regretted road. Yet there is nothing merciless in his conclusion ; this philosopher admits exceptions to every generalisation ; he knows and shows us too much of life's variety to limit the range even of hopeful chances. Meanwhile, what he does in Dear Brutus is to put up a mirror in which the philanderer secs himself beside the drunken wastrel, who once was a man, and knows himself the less tolerable of the two. There may be things here and there in Dear Brutus, or in any Barrie play, justly stigmatized as sentimental ; but there is a hard biting grip in the thought : Captain Hook's claw.
Judging from retrospect The Admirable Crichton should be the best of them, and how remote that extravaganza seems from. all definite philosophy ; and yet how easily can it become the text for a discourse. And the mischief of these sermons of Barrie's prompting is that we are disposed to preach them -to ourselves. Mr. Galsworthy may make us furious with the stupid administration of justice : may even make us want to alter the marriage laws ; but he leaves our personal withers unwrung. Barrie is not so merciful.
For a little masterpiece- I should pick The Twelve Pound Look ; and how much more subversive that is than ever was The Doll's House. This serpent that public and critics warmed in their bosom approached them gently, with never the least suspicion of a hiss ; but, once established there, he began to plant stings, and never even rattled a tail for warning.
I saw the other day the revival of A Kiss for Cinderella„ frankly a War-time play, almost a piece of propaganda ; and yet there it is, holding its attraction. Who else can write propaganda that will survive the occasion ? The first act is, of course, the best : pure fantasy, matched with absolute control of technique : nothing could_ be more skilful than the opening, the policeman's night entry in the darkened room, his bull's eye lantern lighting up the first personage we encounter—the Venus of Melos, otherwise known as Mrs. Bodey. And then we meet Miss Hilda Trevelyan once more, being the Barrie woman. For there is a Barrie woman, just as there is a Shaw woman, but she does not so constantly dominate the scene ; there can be Barrie plays without her. But she is in both those now running ; for Wendy is she, in the nursery. One fact is clear about Barrie : he is a partisan. Women's foibles amuse and delight him, but he loves to scarify man's vanity. That is where he grows merciless.
But what a prodigality of invention tempts us there- to be scarified or laughed at. In these two plays that are now on for Christmas he just lets it do ground, and, lofty tumbling to amuse children, and all who like fables. Yet after all The Admirable Crichton was a fable, too, with a touch of Voltaire in it. No one else has made fables into comedies, through which there runs the mordant wit of an intellect too subtle, too whimsical; and, perhaps, too wise ever to pin itself to a sentence and say, "This is what I believe : agree with me."
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