Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/101

75 THE AMBITIONS OF SIR JAMES BARRIE 75 on Elfland. He began a serious novel and wound it up with a wild absurdity — his hero strangling himself by climbing a wall in a new overcoat. "When it is true it is dull," said Mr. Bennett of Tommy and Grizel ; and *'^ Windoio in Thrums is one long oscillation between making a certain class of people ridiculous by reason of their manners, and making them dignified by reason of their extraordinary trials and fortitudes." But Mr. Bennett did not see the real cause of this oscillation or of that uncharacteristic tedium of the true parts. It is caused by the passionate efforts of the suppressed Lowland longing for sweetness and fun and deliciousness to combat the solemn Lowland ambitiousness ; and the only conceivable treaty be- tween the two was the one finally established — the agreement that he must take his toys into fairyland and play his pranks there, parting with the title of novelist : a sad little exile from seriousness, compelled to abandon the hopes he held most dear — What shall I do to be for ever known And make the age to come my own ? Or so it seemed for a little — and then the Fates, too, warmed towards him. He was given exactly what he asked for — in the way he least expected " the age to come " was, literally, made his fown. When he crept into Kensington Gardens to make friends with the fairies he may well have felt he was resigning his great raid ; as it turns out he was actually assuming the captaincy of a multitudinous army, the appointed conquerors and overrunners of the world. For there is hardly a child in the whole of England who doesn't now hold his name in the same sort of mystical rever- ence that he once held the poets'. He rides into the Future, that is to say, this repatriated exile, at the head of a solid generation. To pop up into London through