BOOKS OF THE DAY
Barrie's Letters
Letters of J. M. Barrie. Edited by Viola Meynell. (Peter Davies. 15s.) MISS VIOLA MEYNELL has edited some of Banie's letters with great skill and discretion. He must have written many more than are here published, but her selection is sound for several reasons, of which the chief is that it denotes the man's mind and manner truly, revealing not only his nature, but, in an odd, inexplicable fashion, something of the nature of the people to whom the letters are addressed. By and large, a man of genius and unusually complicated character emerges from them, and the reader can see this strange, unhappy writer in all his aspects more clearly than he is to be perceived in Mr. Denis Mackail's condescending biography. He criticises himself and his work better than they are criticised by other people. He writes to "Q," who brought out of him some of his best epistles, all of them as creditable to their recipient as they are to their author: "I'm glad you got some entertainment out of What Every Woman Knows. The first act I always thought really good, and the second also as a whole (with the English ladies to spoil it a bit). The rest is rather of the theatre somehow, ingenious enough, but not dug out of myself. It isn't really the sort of man I am. I fancy I try to create an artificial world to myself because the one I really inhabit, and the only one I could do any good in' becomes too sombre. How doggedly my pen scratches for gaiety. My last chuckle will be got from watching it."
It is known to his friends that the failure of The Boy David, a play which was most unjustly treated by the London reviewers, deeply wounded him ; but no sign of his sorrow is seen in any of these letters. I fancy that his bequest to Bergner was an act of defiance to those who belittled her and the play. "Be damned to you all," he cried to the tune of £2,000 to the dismal doctrinaires and Smart Alecks who were then the critics.
The book is full of good sentences, some of them showing how plainly he perceived himself. His curious passion for maintaining impoverished peers did not deceive him. He knew his own vanity too well for such deception. "I think the chief reason I felt at home, at St. Andrew's University," he wrote to Mrs. E. V. Lucas, "was that I was again among rather poor people, to whom I truly belong." "I always hang on to the side of the working-man as long as I can," he wrote to her in another letter. His aphorisms on authorship were always illuminating in respect, at least, to him- self. "Blessed is the novelist who has no idea how he does it." "Nothing wearies more, I believe, than satire the moment it ceases to be attractive. It is such a confoundedly unlovable vehicle." "It is the long novel, where you can lose yourself for nights, that gives the most delight ; with the short story it is more difficult to forget to be a critic. How delightful to enjoy oneself without in the least knowing why." He was exceptionally felicitous in his ability to brighten his letters with good tales. The night before his baronetcy was announced he bade his adopted nephew, Nicholas, "to look in the papers next morning for surprising news, and he was up betimes and searched the cricket columns from end to end." Who but he could have written this: "I feel sure that when any English public schoolboy shot a Boche he called out Sorry.' If he himself was hit, he cried out, Oh, well shot.'"
It was his misfortune to be denied or deprived of the things he most desired, to be given lavishly the things, such as money, that he least liked. He lot what he loved. How pitiful was his state after his beloved "nephew," Michael Llewellyn Davies, was drowned. "Do you know," he wrote to Mrs. Lucas, "that this day a year ago Michael was alive and as well as any of us, and that next day he was dead. . . . I feel that he is at Oxford today in his rooms, and that tomorrow he is going out to be drowned, and doesn't know it." That sorrow suffused and discoloured the rest of his life. The mounting pile of cheques only made his loss more obvious.
My meetings with him were few, but fortunate. I came to our first encounter, at lunch with the Bernard Shaws, in trepidation for I had heard that he was morose and uncommunicative, and such people unnerve me. But I found him genial and full of conversa- tion. Even when I met him in a silent mood, his silence was not embarrassing, but companionable. His friends liked him ; his enemies did not know him ; his detractors belittled themselves. I fancy he was overcharged with boyish emotion. All his admirations were for active men, explorers, cricketers and soldiers, though he was curiously indifferent to Kipling. He never became quite "adult, and still, when he was old, moved as swiftly as a lad. He landed at my feet once in an enormous leap, straight out of the mouth of a furious taxi-cab that sought to run over him, and my last glimpse of him was taken one night from a cab as I drove down the Strand after a revival of one of his plays. Looking up, I saw Barrie, smoking as furiously as Battersea Power Station, pounding down the street at a terrific pace, and almost outstripping my cab. I suppose the play had worked him up, though I had not seen him at it. It is the fashion to sneer at him now, and a poor fashion it is, but his turn will come again. He will outlive the drunks and nervous wrecks of he years between the wars who per- sistently belittled him. He could not cheer himself, but he could make other people cheer for him ; and that is something that his detractors cannot do, for themselves 'or any other person.
ST. JOHN ERVINE.
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