by Unknown
Sir ‘James Barrie said in reply: —
Scum! Critics to right of him, critics to left of him, critics upper entrance at back leading to conservatory, critics down stage centre — into that Circle some one has blundered. How I wish I could keep it up, dealing blows all around in this author’s wellknown sledge-hammer style. ‘Barrie gives them Beans’ — Evening News. ‘A Roland for an Oliver’ — Daily Chronicle. ‘Swashbuckler Barrie swashes on his Buckler’ — Mail. ‘Barrie spells Walkley with a small w’ — Morning Post. That is the kind I should like to give you. But, alas! in the words of the poet Pewelli of the blessed isle, so familiar to you all, Poga, mema allalula, which means that your chairman has spiked my guns....
I remember once going the length of very nearly telling a critic that quite possibly he was mistaken. It was many years ago, before I had written any plays, when red blood boiled in my veins. It is not a bad story, though unfortunately the critic comes rather well out of it, indeed I would not repeat it here except that I come rather well out of it also. It marks the night when I decided upon a rule of conduct with regard to you gentlemen, which, so far as I can remember, I have never broken. A historic occasion for me, therefore, and I am sorry I cannot remember what the weather was like. The criticized was one of my first books, a Scotch novel, and the critic was a man to whom I suppose every one here would take off his hat in homage and in proud memory — Andrew Lang. He not only slaughtered my book, but attacked my Scotch and picked out one word in particular as not being Scotch at all. To be as particular as that is perhaps always a mistake in criticism, and I thought I had him. I wrote a brief letter to that paper saying that this word was not only good Scotch but was in frequent use in the Waverley novels, that I could tell Mr. Lang in which, but that as he was at present editing them he would find them all worth reading. I then put the letter in my desk and went exultantly to bed. But there was something wrong about it and I could not sleep, and somewhere in the early hours I made up my mind to tear up that letter and never in my life to answer criticism. These two vows I have kept, and in both cases with a happy result. A few days afterwards Mr. Lang wrote in that same paper — and you are good men if you can do what Lang did — saying that he was rather unhappy about his review because he considered, on reflection, that he had not been quite fair to the book. Well, that led to a friendship much valued by me, though the word was never, never referred to between us. As for the other half of my vow, I like to think it is part of the reason why you have done me the honour of asking me here tonight.
Not, of course, that there is anything objectionable in our arguing with one another, but the other way seems to suit me best. Sometimes I must admit it has been rather a close thing. Several times I have indited a reply saying ‘Oh indeed!’ or something stinging like that; but my post-box is at the far end of the street and there is also time for reflection when one is putting on one’s muffler. So the retort is never sent, though if the post-box were nearer or the muffler were not one of those that goes round twice, there is no telling. I have never even answered Mr. Shaw, though in the days when he was a critic he began an article on a play of mine with some such words as these, ‘This is worse than Shakespeare.’ I admit that this rankled. I wish I could think, gentlemen, that my forbearance towards you is owing to deeply artistic reasons; but no, it is merely because I for ever see the fates hanging over you and about to stretch forth a claw. However you may ram it in — I refer to the rapier — I have a fear that something disastrous is about to happen to you in the so much more important part of your life that has nothing to do with the pen — bad news, ill health, sudden loss; and so I forgive you and tear up. I am even letting you off cheaply tonight in case one of you is run over on the way home, as I have a presentiment is going to happen. How easy it would be for some incensed author to follow a critic or two to their office on a first night and give them a sudden push as a bus came along. But I dare say you are all rather nippy at the curbstones.
So you see it is no use my attempting to talk to you about the drama of tomorrow. That secret lies with the young, and I beg of you not to turn away from them impatiently because of their ‘knowingness,’ as Mr. Hardy calls it in his new book. The young writers know as much about nothing as we know about everything. Yet they suffer much from the abominable conditions of the stage. Through them only shall its salvation come. Give them every friendly consideration, if only because they belong to the diminishing handful which does not call a play a show. ‘Have you seen our show?’—’ I call that a nice little show.’ Heigho! Has the time come, gentlemen, for us all to pack up and depart? No, no, the drama will bloom again, though it will not be in that garden. Mr. Milne is a very fine tulip already, and there are others for you to water. Miss Dane has proved that the ladies have arrived. For my part, anything I can suggest for the drama’s betterment is so simple that I am sure it must be wrong. I feel we have all become too selfconscious about the little parts we play — they are little parts even in our own little lives. If we talked less about how things should be done there might be more time for doing them. Suppose we were to have a close season, in which we confined ourselves to trying to write our plays better, act them better, produce them better, criticize them better. But it can’t be so simple as that.
I wish I could write mine better, and I presume I am revealing no secret when I tell you that the only reason I don’t is because I can’t. If there were any other reason I should deserve the contempt of every one of you. I remember my earliest lesson in that.
For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure that the ink had not faded. I watched a bookshop where it was exposed on a shelf outside the window, and one day a lady — most attractive — picked up my book and read whole paragraphs, laid it down, went away, came back, read more paragraphs, felt for her purse, but finally went away without buying. I have always thought that if my book had been a little bit better she would have bought it. ‘The little more and how much it is.’ In that case a shilling. But what should be written up behind the scenes is ‘The little less and how much it is.’
You have all in the course of earning your livelihood applied adjectives to me, but the only criticism that makes me writhe is that observation of Mr. Shaw’s which I have already quoted. I wonder if he has changed his mind. He has changed all sorts of things. Here I must begin to be gloomy. None of your adjectives gets to the mark as much as one I have found for myself—’Inoffensive Barrie.’ I see how much it at once strikes you all. A bitter pill; but it looks as if on one subject I were the best critic in the room.
Your word for me would probably be fantastic. I was quite prepared to hear it from your chairman, because I felt he could not be so shabby as to say whimsical, and that he might forget to say elusive. If you knew how dejected those terms have often made me. I am quite serious. I never believed I was any of those things until you dinned them into me. Few have tried harder to be simple and direct. I have also always thought that I was rather realistic. In this matter, gentlemen, if I may say it without any ill-feeling, as indeed I do, you have damped me a good deal, and sometimes put out the light altogether. It is a terrible business if one is to have no sense at all about his own work. Wandering in darkness.
To return to cheerier topics. I don’t often go to the theatre though I always go to Mr. Shaw’s plays, not so much for the ordinary reasons as to see whether I can find an explanation for that extraordinary remark of his. But I will tell you what I think is the best play written in my time. My reason for considering it the best is that it is the one I have thought most about since; not perhaps a bad test. I mean Pinero’s ‘Iris.’ One more confession — I will tell you what has pleased me most about any play of mine. It is that everything included and the dresses coming from the theatre wardrobe, the production of one of them, a little one, it is true, ‘The Twelve Pound Look,’ cost just under £5.
My not going often to the theatre
is not because I don’t like it, but because the things I like best about it can be seen without actually going in. I like to gaze at the actors, not when dressed for their parts, but as they emerge by the stage-door. I have never got past the satisfaction of this and it is heightened when the play is my own. The stage doorkeeper is still to me the most romantic figure in any theatre, and I hope he is the best paid. I have even tried to dart past him, but he never knows me, and I am promptly turned back. I wait, though, in the crowd, which usually consists of about four or six persons, not of the élite, and when the star comes out they cheer and I hiss. I mean just the same as they do, but I hiss. This sometimes leads to momentary trouble with the other loiterers, but in the end we adjourn inoffensively to a coffee stall, where I stand treat, and where we were caught by a cinema machine a few months ago.
You may sometimes wonder why I write so much about islands, and indeed I have noticed a certain restiveness in some of you on the subject. There are more islands in my plays than any of you are aware of. I have the cunning to call them by other names. There is one thing I am really good at, and that is at slipping in an island. I dare say it is those islands that make you misunderstand me. I would feel as if I had left off clothing if I were to write without an island. Now could there be a more realistic statement than that. At present I am residing on an island. It is called Typee, and so you will not be surprised to hear that my companion’s name is Fyaway. She is a dusky maid, composed of abstractions but not in the least elusive. She is just little bits of the golden girls who have acted for me and saved my plays. There is not one of them whom I have not watched for at the stage-door and hissed ecstatically. She moves about my coral isle with the swallow-flights of Ellen Terry, and melts into the incomparable Maud Adams. She has Irene Vanbrugh’s eyes to light the beacons to scare the ships away; and there are bits in her of many other dear sirens who, little aware of what I have plucked, think that they are appearing complete tonight in London.
‘With here and there a Peter Pan
And here and there Fay Compton,
And everywhere Trevelyan.’
Forbes Robertson retired so that he could lend to us, on the island, his silver voice, and du Maurier pulls in with Bancroft to make sure that we are not acting. There is no theatre as yet, but Charles Frohman is looking for a site. For the dead are here also, and you can hardly distinguish them from the living. The laughing Irving boys arrive in a skiff, trying to capsize each other; and on magic nights there is Sir Henry himself pacing along the beach, a solitary figure. If Shakespeare were to touch upon our shores he would offer to sell us Fame at a penny the yard — no bidders. Sometimes a play is written and put into a bottle and cast into the sea. I expect it never reaches you; at any rate if it is whimsical that is not it. Fyaway has a native name for me which means ‘The Inoffensive One.’ Come to our island when you feel you have been sufficiently mauled by the rocks of life, and we will give you grassy huts. You can still write your criticisms. Bring your bottles. As I may not pass this way again, I may say that A. B. W.’s hut stands waiting him, a specially attractive one with palms and a running stream. We had a long discussion about Mr. Shaw, but we have decided to let him land.
I thank you heartily, gentlemen, for the high honour you have done me. Mutual respect is, I am sure, all we ask of each other. It must be obvious to you that in making such a long speech I had two main objects, to try a new title on you—’The Inoffensive Gentleman’; and to watch whether I thought you could stand one more island.
To Wallasey High School for Girls
AT WALLASEY TOWN HALL February 26, 1924
Miss BARRIE (Lilian Barrie, niece of Sir James Barrie, and Headmistress of the School) — my stiffest job is in calling her Miss Barrie. I suppose it comes quite easy to you, her pupils, to call her that — I dare say you would catch it if you didn’t. But I can recall her when she was much smaller than any of you, and it is with a queer mixture of emotion and awe that I see her now sitting there, as cool as you like, the head of a great school, and with an air of never having been anything else. We could get a moral for you by pretending that she had from her earliest years been this majestic spectacle. But no. I remember particularly one day when she was about a year old. I think she was dressed — our heroine was dressed in one of those white things that were so fashionable that year, and she wore such a pretty bonnet. The scene was a pleasant Scottish town, and a very great man was passing at the end of our road. So I whipped up our heroine in my arms and ran with her to the gate, in order that she might be able to say in afteryears that she had once seen Thomas Carlyle. In my schooldays I had often seen him myself, in his great shovel hat and cloak and thunderous staff — Jove come down for a stroll in his favourite county — and scores of times I had doffed my hat to him, but, alas, with no response. Some one, to boast of having been spoken to by Carlyle, once asked him on the road how far it was to Lockerbie, but he just pointed with his staff to a milestone and stalked on. I hoped he would bless your Miss Barrie that day, and perhaps he did, but it didn’t sound like that. In any case it is interesting to us to know that those two once met. When Miss Barrie’s biography comes to be written — perhaps by one of you girls (for, whatever else becomes of you, you will all write) — don’t forget to say that this was the turning-point of her life, and that from that moment she put away frivolous things, including the bonnet, and plucked triangles instead of daisies. I expect that Carlyle had pointed with his staff to Wallasey.
And now that she is here I should like to know what you girls really think of her. Instead of going on with these remarks I should prefer to set you an examination paper on Miss Barrie: —
(1) — Is her intimacy with the Differential Calculus quite seemly?
(2) — Give instances in which you have got round her (if any).
(3) — What are your feelings toward her (a) when you are well prepared, (b) when she asks you to remain behind?
(4) — What precisely does her uncle mean when he thanks his stars that he never had her for his teacher?
(5) — She is sitting there looking as pleased as if we were all mathematical problems that she had to solve before bedtime, but what is she really thinking?
I believe I am the only person in the hall who can answer that question. She is thinking it would be very nice if I would get on to some other subject. Her prayer is granted.
I understand that every one in my place is expected to say something about his own schooldays. That should not be difficult. But it should be something with a moral. That is more hampering. I attended a ‘mixed’ school in the South of Scotland, and on an unfortunate day for me the girls took a plebiscite about which boy had the nicest smile. I won — with the result that I lost my smile. I suppose it is still jigging about somewhere in the void, but it has never come back to me. A tragedy in a nutshell. The moral, the old one — Trustful little boys, beware of girls.
Here is something of a still darker character. In those tender days I used, when in funds, to devour secretly penny dreadfuls, magazines containing exclusively sanguinary matter. They were largely tales about heroic highwaymen and piracy on the high seas, but what most enamoured me were the stories of goings-on at English boarding-schools. How different from the hum-dreadful-drum of my school. The masters were sneaks and the boys blew them up with gunpowder. I felt that those were the schools for me. My mind became so set on explosions that when a Sassenach sent me a box containing mysterious little red and blue tubes, I placed them one by one near the fire and then darted back, in confidence that they would go off. I dare say I wept when I discovered that they were only coloured chalks. Soon came the awakening — and with it the moral, stalking toward me like two little policemen. In the pages of a very different sort of juvenile periodical, called Chatterbox — a word that makes me quake and look behind me still — I read an article on the dire future in store for those who read penny dreadfuls. I tried to stand up to it — but no, no, not when black night fell. On such a night — t
he better for my fearful deed — I stole off to a distant field, my pockets stuffed with back numbers — a shovel concealed up my little waistcoat — and deep in the bowels of the earth I buried the evidence of guilt. If you know how I felt for days afterwards I refer you to the similar story of Jonas Chuzzlewit.
Many years afterwards Robert Louis Stevenson, writing to me from Samoa of a visit he had lately paid to Sydney, described how he had gone into a bookseller’s shop where they showed him all the newest and choicest books. But he said to them, ‘I want no thoughtful works to-day; show me “Sixteen String Jack the Footpad,” or “Black Bill the Buccaneer.”’ If I had preserved that copy of Chatterbox I should certainly have sent it to Mr. Stevenson.
I noticed that after the war it was a common thing for distinguished generals to revisit their old schools — nearly always famous public schools — and to say, amid general rejoicings, that they had always sat at the bottom of their forms. Well, if I was like that, at least I shall never boast about it. If I was an idler I am very sorry for it now, as some day you will be if you are in the same case.
Even the generals might have been still more wonderful in the war if they had worked at school. Another handy moral — Not to work is to miss the best of the fun.
Your great English public schools! I never feel myself a foreigner in England except when trying to understand them. I have a great affection for one at least of them, but they will bewilder me to the end; I am like a dog looking up wistfully at its owner wondering what that noble face means, or if it does have a meaning. To look at, these schools are among the fairest things in England; they draw from their sons a devotion that is deeper, more lasting than almost any other love, and I well know that among their masters are men than whom there are no finer in this country. Those schools must be great — and yet I don’t quite see how it comes about. Of course, they send yearly on their way a few good scholars and not so few eminent in the games that we love in this land and are right in loving, but the other four-fifths or so, what do they get from their famous schools? The generals and other illustrious old boys answer that question triumphantly at the school festivities we have been speaking of, but leave the outsider still benighted. It is not scholarship — pooh! — it is not even physical prowess; it is not an awakened soul nor any exclusive manliness nor even a superior way of wearing waistcoats. They describe it briefly and unanswerably as a something, and perhaps wisely leave it at that, putting us in our place for ever, and satisfying the youth still at school who may have been worrying a little on the subject.