(1860-)
James Matthew Barrie was born May 9th, 1860, at Kirriemuir, Scotland
('Thrums'); son of a physician whom he has lovingly embodied as 'Dr.
McQueen,' and with a mother and sister who will live as 'Jess' and
'Leeby.' After an academy course at Dumfries he entered the University
of Edinburgh at eighteen, where he graduated M.A., and took honors in
the English Literature class. A few months later he took a place on a
newspaper in Nottingham, England, and in the spring of 1885 went to
London, where the papers had begun to accept his work.
[Illustration: "JAMES M. BARRIE"]
Above all, the St. James's Gazette had published the first of the 'Auld
Licht Idylls' November 17th, 1884; and the editor, Frederick Greenwood,
instantly perceiving a new and rich genius, advised him to work the vein
further, enforcing the advice by refusing to accept his contributions on
other subjects.
He had the usual painful struggle to become a successful journalist,
detailed in 'When a Man's Single'; but his real work was other and
greater. In 1887 'When a Man's Single' came out serially in the British
Weekly; it has little merit except in the Scottish prelude, which is of
high quality in style and pathos. It is curious how utterly his powers
desert him the moment he leaves his native heath: like Antæus, he is a
giant on his mother earth and a pigmy off it. His first published book
was 'Better Dead' (1887); it works out a cynical idea which would be
amusing in five pages, but is diluted into tediousness by being spread
over fifty. But in 1889 came a second masterpiece, 'A Window in Thrums,'
a continuation of the Auld Licht series from an inside instead of an
outside standpoint,--not superior to the first, but their full equals in
a deliciousness of which one cannot say how much is matter and how much
style. 'My Lady Nicotine' appeared in 1890; it was very popular, and has
some amusing sketches, but no enduring quality. 'An Edinburgh Eleven'
(1890) is a set of sketches of his classmates and professors.
In 1891 the third of his Scotch works appeared,--'The Little
Minister,'--which raised him from the rank of an admirable sketch writer
to that of an admirable novelist, despite its fantastic plot and
detail. Since then he has written three plays,--'Walker, London,' 'Jane
Annie,' and 'The Professor's Love Story,' the latter very successful and
adding to his reputation; but no literature except his novel
'Sentimental Tommy,' just closed in Scribner's Magazine. This novel is
not only a great advance on 'The Little Minister' in symmetry of
construction, reality of matter, tragic power, and insight, but its tone
is very different. Though as rich in humor, the humor is largely of a
grim, bitter, and sardonic sort. The light, gay, buoyant fun of 'The
Little Minister,' which makes it a perpetual enjoyment, has mostly
vanished; in its stead we feel that the writer's sensitive nature is
wrung by the swarming catastrophes he cannot avert, the endless wrecks
on the ocean of life he cannot succor, and hardly less by those
spiritual tragedies and ironies so much worse, on a true scale of
valuation, than any material misfortune.
The full secret of Mr. Barrie's genius, as of all genius, eludes
analysis; but some of its characteristics are not hard to define. His
wonderful keenness of observation and tenacity of remembrance of the
pettinesses of daily existence, which in its amazing minuteness reminds
us of Dickens and Mark Twain, and his sensitiveness to the humorous
aspects of their little misfits and hypocrisies and lack of proportion,
might if untempered have made him a literary cynic like some others,
remembered chiefly for the salience he gave to the ugly meannesses of
life and the ironies of fate. But his good angel added to these a gift
of quick, sure, and spontaneous sympathy and wide spiritual
understanding. This fills all his higher work with a generous
appreciativeness, a justness of judgment, a tenderness of feeling, which
elevate as well as charm the reader. He makes us love the most grotesque
characters, whom in life we should dislike and avoid, by the sympathetic
fineness of his interpretation of their springs of life and their
warping by circumstance. The impression left on one by the studies of
the Thrums community is not primarily of intellectual and spiritual
narrowness, or niggardly thrift, or dour natures: all are there, but
with them are souls reaching after God and often flowering into beauty,
and we reverence the quenchless aspiration of maligned human nature for
an ideal far above its reach. He achieves the rare feat of portraying
every pettiness and prejudice, even the meannesses and dishonors of a
poor and hidebound country village, yet leaving us with both sincere
respect and warm liking for it; a thing possible only to one himself of
a fine nature as well as of a large mind. Nor is there any mawkishness
or cheap surface sentimentality in it all. His pathos never makes you
wince: you can always read his works aloud, the deadly and unfailing
test of anything flat or pinchbeck in literature. His gift of humor
saves him from this: true humor and true pathos are always found
together because they are not two but one, twin aspects of the very
same events. He who sees the ludicrous in misfits must see their sadness
too; he who can laugh at a tumble must grieve over it: both are
inevitable and both are coincident.
As a literary artist, he belongs in the foremost rank. He has that sense
of the typical in incident, of the universal in feeling, and of the
suggestive in language, which mark the chiefs of letters. No one can
express an idea with fewer strokes; he never expands a sufficient hint
into an essay. His management of the Scotch dialect is masterly: he uses
it sparingly, in the nearest form to English compatible with retaining
the flavor; he never makes it so hard as to interfere with enjoyment; in
few dialect writers do we feel so little alienness.
'Auld Licht Idylls' is a set of regular descriptions of the life of
"Thrums," with special reference to the ways and character of the "Old
Lights," the stubborn conservative Scotch Puritans; it contains also a
most amusing and characteristic love story of the sect (given below),
and a satiric political skit. 'A Window in Thrums' is mainly a series of
selected incidents in detail, partly from the point of view of a
crippled woman ("Jess"), sitting at her window and piecing out what she
sees with great shrewdness from her knowledge of the general current of
affairs, aided by her daughter "Leeby." 'The Little Minister' is
developed from the real story of a Scotch clergyman who brought home a
wife from afar, of so alien a sort to the general run that the parish
spent the rest of her short life in speculating on her previous history
and weaving legends about her. Barrie's imagined explanation is of
Arabian-Nights preposterousness of incident, and indeed is only a
careless fairy-tale in substance; but it is so rich in delicious
filling, so full of his best humor, sentiment, character-drawing, and
fine feeling, that one hardly cares whether it has any plot at all.
'Sentimental Tommy' is a study of a sensitive mobile boy, a born
_poseur_, who passes his life in cloud-castles where he always
dramatizes himself as the hero, who has no continuity of purpose, and no
capacity of self-sacrifice except in spasms of impulse, and in emotional
feeling which is real to itself; a spiritual Proteus who deceives even
himself, and only now and then recognizes his own moral illusiveness,
like Hawthorne's scarecrow-gentleman before the mirror: but with the
irresistible instincts also of the born literary creator and
constructor. The other characters are drawn with great power and truth.
The judgment of contemporaries is rarely conclusive; and we will not
attempt to anticipate that of posterity. It may be said, however, that
the best applicable touchstone of permanency is that of seeming
continuously fresh to cultivated tastes after many readings; and that
Mr. Barrie's four best books bear the test without failure.