3 advantage They have met us,and the mischief is done.

The sheer industry of Barrie's early years as a -journalist is phenomenal. In four years he wrote eight hundred articles and produced five books): Better Dead, Auld

Licht Idylls, When a Man's Single, .An Edinburgh Eleven and A Window in Thrums. Of S

the three novels Better Dead, When a Man's Single and A Window in Thrums, the 1 ANDREW BIRKIN : J M BARRIE AND THE LOST BOYS (LONDON : 1980) pp 154 & 155 2 CYNTHIA ASQUITH : PORTRAIT OF BARRIE (LONDON : 1954) P 26

148

second is of biographical interest, detailing Barrie's journalistic experience, and the third is worth consideration as a novel mainly due to the realism of the princi­ pal characters,based on Barrie's mother and his sister, Jane Ann. Auld Licht Idylls, consisting largely of previously published newspaper articles, is interesting on account of Barrie's use of sympathetic satire in describing the inhabitants of Thrums.

Barrie's ability to enter "for the space of a column" into the minds of other people, combined with those other characteristics which he had developed as a journalist, his fancy and his habit of looking back at the past, stood him in good stead as a public speaker. Although he claimed to despise this branch of his art, it enabled Barrie to express himself as an actor and it seems to me that the theatre is his natural milieu, but before I turn to his career as a dramatist I shall deal with what I consider to be his failure as a novelist.

In a speech to the Edinburgh Institute of Journalists in 1932 Barrie recounts an incident which occurred when he was six:

A few of us boys were playing out of doors at a very messy game, but one was not01 us allowed^in it because he was in his 'blacks', and I suppose the sad way in which he looked at us in play appealed to my better nature, and I offered to change clothes with him. We went up a passage and did this, and then he disported him­ self playfully and messily in the game, while I sat on a cold stone and wept sadly for I never knew whom. That, 0 mothers of poets,was literature.

Beware of Barrie when he professes to be opening "the innermost doors", but the point he makes here is repeated elsewhere, illustrated throughout his works and seems to me to be crucial in assessing him as an artist. His description of himself as a child who wept deliberately and without good reason is echoed in his descrip­ tion of Tommy Sandys, the central character in Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel. Tommy is "a man of sentiment only" and Barrie's Mr Hyde. It is Barrie's sentimentality in its worst sense which mars him as a writer. In this instance sentimentality is to be understood as the display of emotion^ or the deliberate ex­ ploitation of the emotions of others, without genuine cause, and sometimes denying or falsifying the existence of unpleasant truth.

Barrie's success as a journalist stems from his ability to enter the mind of another "for the space of a column" but his inability to sustain this impersonation for any length of time is responsible for his failure as a novelist. Our study of his life has shown that Barrie had a great capacity for friendship and was a phil­ anderer on paper, but his capacity for love was limited to his mother. Similarly, 1 J M BARRIE : McCOMACHIE AND J M B (LONDON : 1938) p 237

in the creation of characters in his novels he is only successful when he is writing about himself and the one woman he really knows, Margaret Ogilvy.

In his novels Barrie never escapes his mother's influence, not only in the creation of character but also in their setting,which is the Kirriemuir of his mother's childhood, apart from Rob Angus's sojourn in Silchester (alias Nottingham), but When a Man's Single also begins and ends in Thrums. Barrie's novels, including Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel^which are the two most deserving of study, revealing most about their author, consist of thinly-veiled autobiography, and such plots as they have are improbable; the melodramatic happenings of The Little Minister are the most striking example. The poor construction of A Window in Thrums is due to the fact that it was originally based on newspaper articles but it is saved by the characters who represent Barrie's parents and sister, Jane Ann. The serialisa­ tion of When a Man's Single helps to explain its deplorable construction^and The Little Minister has a curious history; the first version of this novel was sent off to be serialised in "Good Words" as soon as it was completed and a revised version was later published in book form. The Little White Bird was published as a novel but it stands rather in a class by itself and is of great value because of the in­ sights which it gives into Barrie's character and artistic development, and it con­ tains the germs of what were later to be his most successful plays.

It is as a dramatist that Barrie comes into his own. In Courage, the address which he gave at his installation as Rector of St Andrews University on May 3» 1922, Barrie invented 'McConnachie', to explain the dichotomy in his own nature:

McConnachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to.open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half. We are

complement and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful half; my desire is to be the family solicitor, standing firm on my hearthrug among the harsh realities of the office furniture; while he

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