Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/94

68 68 THE AMBITIONS OF SIR JAMES BARRIE wee, which had caught his eye and winked at him as he stood a-painting in the upper world and felt a sudden sinking of the heart. He had dived. Now, why did he dive? For precisely the reason that made another novelist, Sandys, fling himself con- vulsively into this identical stream in the ninth chapter of Tommy and Grizel. Because he feared sentiment. And if you press me further and ask why he was afraid of sentiment, I am afraid I must just make a clean breast of it, fellow-countryman though I am, and confess that it was because he was a Scot. But do not misunder- stand this : do not take it to mean that he shrank from sentiment because, as a Scot, he hated it. It was the opposite of that : Barrie feared sentiment because, being a Scot, he loved the seductive thing too well. Ours is a queer country. Caresses being rare in it, we gloat furtively over the idea of them. Prettiness and daintiness seldom appearing among our dour, bare-backit hills, it is we who write passionate poems in praise of tiny daisies and gemmy-eyed field- mice. Endearments and graces which you think nothing of in the South, making free with them with a wondrous hardihood every day, are invested for us with a dark, dreadful deliciousness ; there is a real correspondence between the queer numerousness of Lowland chance-children, the way our Burnses treat their Jeans, and the excessive way Barrie makes his Grizel rock her arms ecstatically and cry out constantly nutives in her dour daily life, Scotland makes her poets use them for her : the Barries and the Burnses are urchins whom she sends to rob the orchard she won't touch herself, so that she may at any rate enjoy herself by proxy, with a queer vicarious voluptuousness, watching them munching the forbidden fruit shame- lessly, full in the world's face, all day long. And Barrie felt the impulse. The moment he began to write, it
 * ' Oh, you siveet ! " Forbidden to use these dear dimi-