“‘Well, I’m but a poor crittur (not being member of a club), but I think I can tell you to make your mind easy on that head. You’ll get in, I’se uphaud—and your thirty pounds will get in, too.’”
And so on. Humour, of course! The sagacious, garrulous mother, the highly diverted, patient son! The picture has pleased the Scotch and English-speaking nations of two hemispheres. Yet is it of the stupidest and the most foolish.
On another page we get the following pretty piece of curtain lifting: ‘So my mother and I go up the stair together. ‘We have changed places,’ she says; ‘that was just how I used to help you up, but I’m the bairn now.’ She brings out the Testament again; it was always lying within reach.… And when she has read for a long time she ‘gives me a look,’ as we say in the North, and I go out, to leave her alone with God.… Often and often I have found her on her knees, but I always went softly away, closing the door. I never heard her pray, but I know very well how she prayed, and that, when that door was shut, there was not a day in God’s sight between the worn woman and the little child.’
We can do without such books, Dr. J. M. Barrie, even though they sell well.
Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in Paradise Lost an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’s J. M. Barrie and his Books an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of Scotch opinion not only as to Dr. Barrie, but also as to other matters. First let me string together a few pearls about Dr. Barrie.
“I have seen it argued [says our excellent author] that the publication of such a book as this is a reprehensible practice [sic], in that it implies the elevation of its subject to the rank of a classic.… A sufficient answer to this charge would seem to be that in such writers as J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, ‘Ian Maclaren,’ Rudyard Kipling, and several others [sic], the public that reads books is vastly more interested than it is in its mighty dead.”
The collocation of “such writers” in this passage is as ingenious as it is absurdly Scotch.
“Among the literary men of the present day there is none who has been more personal in his writings than Dr. Barrie; he is as personal in prose as Byron was in poetry. His own heart, his own experiences, the lives of his ‘ain folk,’ these have been the subjects out of which his genius has made literature.”
The italics are our own.
“The main distinction of Nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it is associated with the name of Dr. J. M. Barrie.… To-day the so-called ‘Press House’ is a tavern a few yards removed from the ‘Frying Pan,’ and there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of Billy Kirker and that bright Bohemian band. But there are no Barries among them.”