Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/98

72 72 THE AMBITIONS OF SIR JAMES BARRIE Well, we know now that there was only one way of escape from his underworld — and that was up through the crystal lid of the Round Pond. He could only be allowed back to real life again if he consented to come companioned and guarded by babies : he had to steal into our world once more at that extremest verge of it, on the very edges of Elfland, where everything is quaint and small already — there the houses are dolls' houses, and the mortals all wee, and capriciousness rules, and all things are elfin, and Grizel could rock her arms and smile her crooked smile and run no risk of being rebuked by Arnold Bennetts. But until the day he found that out Barrie made few luckier sallies than the one that brought him bobbing up in Phoebe's schoolroom. The idea will be evident. It was a kind of back-stairs. He would creep into England through an unguarded postern, through an entrance a hundred years old ; and then, having accus- tomed his forces to 1815, would creep down the years towards To-day. Many reasons made the ruse a good one. When he wrote grown-up modern English, the critics complained that it was stilted. Well, in Georgian days, seemingly, words always walked on little stilts : and so his own would pass muster there perfectly. Then, again, there was the schoolroom — and he had already begun to realize that his genius got on oddly well with youngsters. And finally there were all the darling quirks of decorum and costume — the ringlets and crinolines — the curtsies and chintz — the Whimsy cakes, pattens, and blue-and- white porce- lain — toys and treasures no fairy-bred art could resist, and no merely mortal-bred art use so well. Small wonder then that Quality Street, though it proved in part a cul -de- sac, made his genius feel perfectly at home. He had to fall back from it, take to his mines again, continue his subterranean galleries till they stretched beneath Kensington and he could