Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/102

76 76 THE AMBITIONS OF SIR JAMES BARRIE the trap of the Round Pond might seem a very humble and sidelong sort of entrance, but it took him into the very heart of humanity, into the midst of the massed ranks of To-morrow ; he made a raid on Posterity and caught it when young, and he will probably remain its accepted leader for life. The fairies had proved their friendship in the most magnanimous way — they had granted him his earthly wish — they gave him a share of their own immortality. For there is no "ever" in the Never-Never Land, and a good fairy- tale cannot die ; it is absolutely the only kind of tale, indeed, that never "dates." To scan his life now, with its involuntary victories, its two motives, one grave and mortal, one childish, enchanted, is to be reminded irresistibly of the famous scene which sealed its best triumph — the great double-tiered scene in Peter Pan. Up above is the solid world with its grave forest aisles, down below the unsuspected land of magic ; Barrie enters, bent on wood-cutting, solemnly determined to excel, a good Gladstonian of letters. But the moment his axe cuts a notch he is seized by the resemblance to a letter-box, he has to try and post himself through the slot ; and so is duly delivered, half shamefacedly, into the kingdom of make-believe, his important task neglected overhead. And here it turns out, after all, that he had really got among the roots of things, that one way to climb is to descend. When the Woods of Westermain winked at him it was really a sign of special friendliness. When he seemed to be only climbing nursery stairs he was really scaling his colossal granite steps. And the whole elvish history has now been perfectly rounded off by the final fact of his official biography. In Margaret Ogilvy he told us how he and his mother borrowed the Arabian Nights from the Thrums village library, " but on discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we