Jesse Lynch Williams

“ Barrie has accomplished has not been due to the repression of himself to meet the measure of English classical tradition, on the one hand; nor, on the other, has he extended himself in order to catch the popular fancy—and he has got them both. He is pronounced literature by those who know it when they see it, and he would be pronounced a successful man even by those to whom money is the measure of success. ”

“ Shaw acquired the title of his play.
At any rate, whatever he has done for society as a dramatizer of social tracts, or for art as simple dramatist, is due to the expression of himself and would have been lost if he had attempted to compress himself into the ready-made molds of opinion and play building.
In the case of Mr. Barrie's piece, it is, of course, a very different triumph of personality—different as the two subjects are. It is not a loud, swaggering rebellion against the traditions of the English stage; there is no apparent rebellion at all; he simply ignores them. ”

“ Barrie has the narrowest field of any of the prominent authors in this age of globe-trotting writers. It seems to be a pretty rich one, and he works it for all it is worth; he repeats his crops; but it is quite constricted. If he ever traveled as far east of England as across the Channel to Paris, there is nothing to indicate it in his work. He came to America once, but if he kept a notebook, he has kept it to himself. All the important scenes in his books and most of his plays are Thrums or London. ”

“ Barrie, who does not proclaim himself in his work, or even in his prefaces, for more than a reluctant page or two, and perhaps by reason of that very fact reveals his real self the more accurately, would make the better text for preaching a sermon on the salvation of personality, which is the gospel of art. ”

“ But, for that matter, when this motif does give place entirely to purer satire, it is merely a reflex manifestation of the same personality. A man who takes the real things of life so seriously would naturally regard the sham things in the way we are made to see them in "The Admirable Crichton," one of the most telling satires on English existence ever written by Barrie or anyone else. ”

“ It helps to clear the atmosphere of sham, like certain of the famous court jesters, who used to say what no one else dared express, even if others had the cleverness. He makes us think, he makes us turn our inherited opinions over and look at them from the other side where the mold has gathered. ”

“ One is tempted to predict that he, together with Stephen Phillips and that same Shaw (aided, of course, by Mr. Pinero, and one or two other playwrights, whose work may also be included as literature) , will, before they finish, rehabilitate the English theater—which has been divorced from literature quite long enough—bringing these two great branches of art together where they belong and thus establishing a new régime somewhat similar to what already thrives so harmoniously just across the Channel. ”

“ Finally, so economical with his material is this careful Scotchman—probably because he loves it rather than because he is impoverished by his narrow, insular experience of life—that he works it and reworks it into new and various forms. ”

“ An impulse from in front may lead one to write historical novels when "they" want historical fiction; and sometimes rather good ones; still oftener it brings great material returns, but it will never bring literature. ”

“ He bears no family resemblances, and he has no family relationships. He is not a member of any group. He is not particularly a product of his own time. He does not logically fit in at the end of any literary "movement" so that we may call him the "flower" of it. ”

“ And it is the more remarkable and pertinent to the subject that the ideas expressed by their personalities are among the last which experts in dramatic affairs would be apt to single out for exploitation on the stage, and most of all the English or American stage. ”

“ But they can bring tears, even to sleepless eyes, and that is more than most of the child writing can do. It is not the sad parts that accomplish this feat with some of us, but certain other things. He seldom becomes maudlin or symbolic about his children ”