Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/97

71 THE AMBITIONS OF SIR JAMES BARRIE 71 colonel's lips moved as if he were saying to himself words of love, and his arms went out to her who had been dead this many a year, and a tear, perhaps the last he ever shed, ran down his cheek. Much as we love our Barrie we have to admit that words like these are writ in butter. We are embarrassed as by an impropriety. And of course he guessed the danger, knew his weakness. He could not resist these occasional orgies (for he did so want to write real, grown-up romance), but when- ever he felt the seizure was getting too severe he used to take to the Bottle. He would counteract the tear with a smile, end the orgy with an antic, dose the emotion desperately till it dwindled and grew quaint. An osier wand dipped into the water under a weight of swallows, all going to bed together. The boy on the next house-boat kissed his hand to a broom on board the Tawny Owl, taking it for Mrs. Meredith's servant, and then retired to his kitchen smiling. Our relief is so great that we welcome it almost hysterically : the situation is saved with a laugh. But this was obviously a kind of game, like playing with fire, that could not go on for long. It tended to turn these early books into a teasing alternation of risk and rescue (" when he is neither humorous nor pathetic he is nothing," said Mr. Bennett ; "imagine a diet all salt and sugar!"), so that the reader never knew what attitude he was expected to adopt. With one sen- tence you were in Fleet Street, the next took you into fairyland. Stevenson, as we have seen, blamed it was the influence of Thrums. But something, plainly, would have to be done in the old wicked way, until it had to be called off in terror, hastily dosed with Alice's mixture, and set to some absurdity so as to pass off the excesses with a laugh.
 * ' the journalist at Barrie's elbow." It was not that,