Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/168

and strangers' of the earth—not children, not organic products of it. His limitations, therefore, are severe, but their very severity gives him at his best a pungent force that enables us to see with our proper eyes some of his men and women, not, indeed, as they really are, but as they appear to him, and, in a manner, to themselves. Jess and Hendry, Jamie and Leeby—these actually live for him, and he has succeeded in making them live for us. Some of the others are failures. Haggart, the humourist, for example, is a dreadful failure. He ends with becoming intolerable, not because humourists are not frequently intolerable (and especially Scotch humourists), but because Mr. Barrie has not in the least succeeded in realising the character he would fain portray. The three chapters assigned to this conventional puppet are utterly below the level of the others in every way. So far for his first book. After the Window in Thrums, with such admirable work in it in different styles as 'Dead this Twenty Years' (chapter vi.), 'A Cloak with Beads' (chapter viii.), and 'Leeby and Jamie' (chapter xviii.), which gave something very like a harmonious totality of impression, Mr. Barrie, like the rest of them, was apparently smitten with 'the last infirmity of noble mind,' as that infirmity takes shape before the lower type of literary purveyor, and decided to write a full-blown