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there is in her some vague stirring toward a worthier life. She knows her chance lies in

If there is something good in him, what is good in her finds it, and they join forces against the baser parts. So I did n't give you up willingly, Harry. I invented all sorts of theories to explain you-your hardness; I said it was a fine want of mawkishness: your coarseness; I said it goes with strength: your contempt for the weak; I called it virility: your want of ideals was clear-sightedness; your ignoble views on women; I tried to think them funny. Oh, I clung to you to save myself, but I had to let go: you had only the one quality, Success. You had it so strong that it swallowed all the others."

Doubtless in the pages of Barrie's writings is to be had the last glimpse of the old-fashioned "clinging woman," the woman who is many women in one, and at her finest the mainspring of man's chivalry. Sterne's "Dear Prue," Thackeray's "Amelia," Meredith's "Rose," and Barrie's "Jess" or "Leonora" or "Margaret," mark the chief stages of man's increasing understanding of fine womanhood shown in English fiction; while each of these characters, drawn after women in real life, illustrates what a lift English fiction has invariably taken whenever, as Barrie would say, "There have been hairpins of fine women" in its pages.

IX

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As to his own heroine, Barrie says, "Margaret Ogilvy had been her maiden name. And after the Scotch custom she was still Margaret Ogilvy to her old friends. Margaret Ogilvy I loved to name her." Fancy a little shaver, knee-high, as grave as a church elder, standing at the foot of the stairs calling up to his mother, "Margaret Ogilvy, are you there?" In the Barrie home at Kirriemuir, "within cry of T'nowhead Farm," mother and son used to sit for hours playfully plotting what he should be when he grew up. “To be a minister, that she thought was among the fairest prospects; but she was a very ambitious woman,' says Barrie, “and sometimes she would add, half scared at her appetite, that there were ministers who had been professors, but it was not canny to think of such things." Finally she Finally she came round to siding with his ambition

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to be a writer. They had read together somewhere "that a novelist is better equipped than most of his trade if he knows himself and one woman.” And Barrie's mother said, "You know yourself, for everybody must know himself; but I doubt I 'm the only woman you know well."

"Then I must make you my heroine," he answered her.

"A gay, auld-farrant-like heroine," she replied. And they had both laughed, little realizing the truth of what had been said; for under many names Margaret Ogilvy is the heroine of all Barrie's writings. But from his mother Barrie inherited more than matter for his writings. estimable spiritual aid she gave him, too, Barrie inherited from his mother is his and genius along with it. For the fortune whimsically gay vision on life, as if always through the kindly eyes of a comic. mask.

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What Barrie's mother was like we know well from "Margaret Ogilvy"; but it was of her, too, he was thinking when he wrote these lines descriptive of Margaret Darling, mother of Wendy:

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She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet, mocking mouth.' Her romantic mind was like the little boxes one within the other, that come from the puzzling East; however many you discover, there is always one more, and her sweet, mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corThe way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her and they all ran to her house to propose, except Mr. Darling, who took a cab, and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her except the innermost box and the kiss, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I could picture him trying and then going off in a passion and slamming the door.

It was the tragedy of motherhood, or, perhaps, better, its bitter sweetness, that Margaret Ogilvy most indelibly stamped upon her son's early mind, and in nearly all his subsequent work she is the symbol or that idea.

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ing man. him?"

Photograph by L. N. A., London

KILLIECRANKIE COTTAGE, OVERLOOKING THE PASS OF KILLIECRANKIE, OCCUPIED BY BARRIE IN THE SUMMER OF 1913

Do you know anything about

"The coming man," said Meredith, emphatically, "is James Matthew Barrie."

When Meredith and Barrie first met, what instantly bound them to each other was an almost identical quality of mind. Both loving the fantastic, in both glowed the same fervency of spirit, a similar reflectiveness, vigorous seizure of theme, and fresh humanness. Even in their earliest writings both were ardent devotees of the comic spirit, knowing no other way of reading life except in terms of "that love

cles in the Nottingham "Journal," many of which were afterward brought together in the volume called "Auld Licht Idylls." Later Meredith crystallized in the "Essay on Comedy" that look on life. held in common by himself and Barrie"to laugh at those you love without loving them any the less." Read that essay if you would know as personally as if you had met him that George Meredith who to this day in spirit sits with J. M. Barrie.

Barrie's fireplace is flanked on one side by an old-fashioned sofa; and on the other by his favorite brown, upholstered easy

chair. Next the chair is a stand for a single electric light, with many feet of extra cord, so that the bulb itself can be carried about the room. As Barrie talks, he winds and unwinds the loose electric cord very systematically about the stand. "One thing that always amuses me," he may be saying, "is that the scientist thinks he is the only person who has anything to say; but I've observed that he is usually the only person who can't say it"; and all the while his eyes will be soberly riveted on the cord, which is meantime pretty well around the light-stand.

On the wall, at the end of the sofa, hangs a charmingly delicate, vivid oil-portrait of George Meredith. Not once in the last ten years of Meredith's life did Barrie ever miss a birthday dinner at Flint Cottage, Box Hill; usually he journeyed there once or twice every week.

"I had barely a shilling when I first came to London," Barrie says of his first sight of Meredith; "but if I did nothing else, I determined I should see Box Hill and Dorking. I got out there, a good long journey, partly by bus, partly on foot, and at last I stood in front of the house. It was a fine, bright afternoon. I leaned aver the fence, gazing at the house within, and presently a white-bearded figure appeared at the door, stopped a moment, and then saw me, and started forward as if to greet me, though I was strange to his eyes. I stood still until the figure nearly reached me, then I turned and ran. Long afterward I told Meredith of our first sight of each other."

Barrie's attachment for Meredith, one of his earliest, naturally remains one of his strongest; but there is never sadness or a lament, but always gaiety and the fine play of the "comic spirit," in his reminiscences of his chief literary idol.

game with us was to sit together vying with each other improvising imaginary autobiographies. It was good fun, each knowing that the other was making it up. Meredith was always grateful to the young men in America for their recognition and appreciation of his books, things he could not thank England for. Much of his time he gave gladly to young, struggling writers.1 I have seen heaps of their manuscripts at Box Hill. He would read them from first page to last, and always in the end find something for which to commend the writer, 'that this chapter is good or that one, though the whole can be bettered by revision; by developing this idea or that special character.'

XI

UNACCOUNTABLE silences in the midst of Barrie conversations and Barrie shyness are popular exaggerations, if not myths. He has his silences, but they are significant silences. His own countrymen would call him a grand man to be silent with. As for the Barrie seclusiveness, it is best explained by Barrie himself as a trait typical of his race.

"You only know the shell of a Scot," he says, "until you have entered his homecircle. In his office, in clubs, at social gatherings, where you and he seem to be getting on so well, he is really a house with all the shutters closed and the door locked. He is not opaque of set purpose; often it is against his will. It is certainly against mine; I try to keep my shutters open and my foot in the door, but they will bang to."

If he is seated in his brown easy-chair for a talk, Barrie is pretty sure to be holding a well-filled, well-lighted brier pipe, "a hanger," beside his left cheek. Every now and then it is taken out of his mouth, as when he says: "These books around us are books of favorite writers of mine or gift books. They accumulate, you see. I have only one book of reference; that 's 'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.' I like that by me. If ever I am tempted to use a quotation, I look to see if it is in Bartlett; and if it is, I don't use it."

"Meredith got very deaf and frail in his later years," says Barrie. "His last novels were written not in the little Swiss chalet on the grounds where most of them had been written, but in the study to the right of the door as you enter the house. He had an old housekeeper who bossed the place, and would say to me in his presence, perhaps counting on his deafness, "They tell me he writes endless books about men and women; but, man, he knows IN London, when Barrie is out after midnothing at all about women.' A favorite night, it is either a banquet from which

1 A fact equally true of Barrie.

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