JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2813, 12 February 1908, Page 79

JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE.

(Br Joshua Hakeis.) There are habits of mind that some into fashion and pass away exactly as habits of dresis do. And perhaps the habit of mind most characteristic of this decade is that common trick of searching for paradox in the . most ordinary and xisual of men and maffers which obßesses

so many of oui contemporary would-bs wits. Thus we have come never to expect the obvious interpretation of anything nowadays, Dut always that white will inevitably be proved to be black, really ; the most shallow of men the most profound ; and so on. Admitting, then, the existence of this literary cvil — which, nevertheless, may be tolerable when it is amusing — one is diffident about one's judgment when one finds this fatal touch of paradox in an actual living personality One is doubtful whether the truth may not be that the prevalent habit « ': mind has infected one and distorted one's judg« ment. And when the personality undei consideration is associated witb such a beloved and popular name as that of J. M. Barrie, then the misgiving becomes acute.

— Wisdom and Pathos. —

For in J. M. Barries work, at least, there are never any paradoxes. Hia humour is simple and direct^-TCnd sane and unaffected. It is often exceedingly subtle and suggestive — as the simplestseeming things can frequently be ; it makes demands both upon our sympathy and our intelligence ; it is curiously full of a tender wisdom; and sometimes it i« shot with most poignant pathos. But it is never perverse ar strained j it does viot smell of the lamp ; it is never duHed- by ifoo much handling, but always seems to have a bloom upon it,, like fruit freshly plucked from the tree. ' And his wit flashes in the sunshine of his humour like, a tasselled plume of grass hung with dew. Who, for example, has ever read the following passage from "When A Man's Single" without being struck by its extraordinary blending of laughter and tears with philosophy? Not I, foi one ; that is wny I cannot resist the temptation to quote it: "Mr Meredith now did things slowly as a good way of passing the time. He had risen to wealth from penury, and counted time by his dining-room chairs, having passed through a cane, a horse-hair, and a- leather period before arriving at morocco. Mrs Meredith counted time by the death of her only son." Personally, I can recall few passages in literature .in which such economy of means is used to such effective endß. But though Mr Barries is the art which tsonceals apt,, his actual personality is full of curious! tortuosities and baffling contradictions.

— A Personal Portrait. —

He is a- small, dark man, with a disproportionately large head,' very short of stature, very frail in appearance. Se koks extremely delicate : as i he were, indeed, in a perpetual state of convalescence. His movements are slew and languid. His expression is dull and tired. He has the face of a weary student, worn out by overmuch devotion to hie books. Yet he Is a good deal of an out^ door man, and a most enthusiastic, ardent, and whole-souled lover of sport. Usually one of the most reticent of mortals, ho will nevertheless forget his taciturnity, prick up his «ars, so to speak, and - wax almost garrulous at any mention of cricket. I think he has quite given up > playing now ; but he is still as staunch a follower of the game as he was 12 years ago when I travelled with him to Sheffield Park to witness the last match ever played on that historic ground between a team ol Englishmen and an Australian team.

— A Bundle of Paradoxes. —

It was a blindingly hot day in early; May. We had to tramp a goodish distance from the station, and 'the roads were ankle-deep in fine white dust. There were delays upon the road, too X for the King — then Prince of Wales — was there, and first his escort Mocked- the way,' and then we had to wait until his carnage passed. > Barrie, a lonely figure, unobserved and! inconspicuous, stood in the holiday crowd, trudged' with it up .the long, winding slope, and spent the long day lying on the grass, watching the fluctuations of the play. He did not smoke. He spoke to no one. He just lay there with his mournful eyes fixed on the 15 white figures. And even at the most exciting ciisis, when the welkin rang with cheers 1 or a groan of dismay went vp — as when F. S. Jackson sustained a broken rib— , he gave no sign of the excitement that I know was thrilling him. A painfully self-contained, subdued -creature, this tiny little Scotsman of genius, living an inner life of passionate feeling, of intense emotion, revelling in „ day-dreams most exquisitely sad, most radiantly beautiful, most quaintly and dwertingly humorous; and also living, at the same time, an outer life of severest restraint, of most carefully calculated moderation, conventional in thought and speech and manner to the verge of utter colourlessness. Yes : I must return to that first estimate of J. M. Barrie: a living bundle of paradoxes.

—His Wit.—

In casual conversation he ;s; s slow and unready of speech; yet his plays are so crammed with wit that no matter how, often you have seen them you can always discover fresh, gems of repartee, new de« licious touches of drollery, that have somehow escaped you on former occasions in the riotous welter of good things. Anq at .this point let me halt to remark that I am aware some readers will accuse m< of straining my case here ; they will say that a man may very well be quite wife* less in conversation, and yet most witty] with his pen. This, I know, is the accepted theory ; it happens, also, to be onqi that I don't agree with. My experience ia that a wit is always a wit, in th^ smoking-room as well as at his desk, given the opportunity and a fit audience.

—Mr Henley's Reproach. —

Some years ago, just after Barrie had come into his kingdom, Mr W. E* Henley, in his downright forcible way* told him to his face that he was "onljj a blooming journalist as yet," being pro>" yoked to that outspokenness by somey thing that Barrie had said about tlufc readiness and facility with, which ha wrote. ' I am not in Mr Barries. .confidence to the extent of knowing de< finitely what his present methods are; but in those bygone days he could turn

ou 1 ; ''copy" as fast as his hand could travel over the paper. Yet the last quality you would attribute to him, judging him merely from his published work, would be th*e inestimable journalistic faculty of turning out eas> , flowing periods. It all seems so leisurely, so Deliberate ; the woids seem to drawl themselves out into sentences, as it were, in his eailier r-ol!e< tious oi t-hoi t

pieces. Nevertheless, Ido know certainly that those particular books — "Auld Licht Idylls," "A Window in Thrums," and "My Lady Nicotine" — were written at a breathless rate : many of the chapters at one sitting. — Cynic and Sentimentalist. — Again, you would conclude from his work that Barrie was something of a sentimentalist. And yet, although he could

make one of his characters cry out in anguish of spirit : "My God ! I would write an article, I think, on my mother's coffin !"' he himself is such a cynic that he has done precisely that very thing in "Margaret Ogilvy." Then J. M. Barrie is identified with children. He understands them, and can portray them. His "Peter Pan" is an annually recurrent delight, and bids fair to become as much a part of Ohiistmas as holly and mistletoe. You would say that Barrie had great symnathy with children, as he has ; and you would probably go further and picture him as making friends with them, romping with them, taking them upon hie knee. But that is not his way. Himself a childless man, he is obviously ill at ease with other people's children ; and usually not at all popular with them. This, of course, is due to his secret shyness of temperament, shyness being a far greater bar to familiar intercourse with children than ■with adults.

— On Smoking. —

And a« a last sidelight into the bewildering maze of inconsistencies which go to make up Barries baffling individuality, I would cite his writing of a book all about smoking and smokers that is already quite a classic, and yet was written at a time when the author himself vrae a mere novice, nervously breaking in his first refractory pipe. It is a book that appeals to seasoned smokers as no other book of its kind has ever done. From title-page to colophon it contains only one error that betrays the author's inexperience ; the rest is absolutely on the spot all the time.

'That error? In chapter 21 Pettifer refills his pipe again and again whilst it is still hot, a thing no smokei- of any real calibre ever does.