THE HUMOUR OF BARRIE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 77, 26 February 1930, Page 2

THE HUMOUR OF BARRIE.

HIS VIEWS ON LOVE. ADDRESS TO LUNCH CLUB. “Men, women and Peter Pan,” was the piquant title of an interesting address delivered by Mr J. A. Brailsford, 8.A., at yesterday’s meeting pt tiio Citizens’ Luiicii Club. Mr G. G. Priest was in, the chair. Tho speaker pointed out that one ot the peculiarities of Peter Pan, was that ho must never be touched by Wendy or any other mortal woman. While this was simply Barrie’s way of portraying the boy’s mind which preferred playing pirates to “sweethearting,” there was something in it of Barrie’s Puritanism. Barrie’s feeling toward women was a mingling of Puritanic restrain with a reverence which, in the case of his mother, became a worship. His writings were a wholesome protest against the ideas of “affinities” and “soul mates,” so common in the popular novels and melodramas. In his reaction against this, Barrie liked to show match-mak-ing as a very unromantic thing. Mr Brailsford gave readings from “Auld Liclit Idyll?,” “Margaret Ogilvie,” and “A Kiss for Cinderella,” to illustrate Barrie’s tendency to make courting a very homely affair, often merely incidental to the action of the play. Perhaps the most striking passage of this kind was the engagement scene in “What Every Woman Knows,” in which an ambitious young railway porter was given the choice of going to gaol or else marrying the plain, Maggie Wylie and being financed through a University course. Barrie made this match, so unpropitiously begun, work out into a union of true love. In several of his plays, the author had made fun of the idea of the “eternal triangle”—most notably in “Dear Brutus.” In tho fairy wood in that play, in which people had got their second chance in life, Purdie had found himself married to the inamorata whom he had been pursuing, and making love to his own real wife. He wakened up to conclude that his imagined noble passion was mere philandering. Barrie, said the speaker, seemed to draw his lessons of life more from children, than from the feelings of women and men, and his teaching seemed to be that however old we might be wo had still to go on learning and growing up. In conclusion, Mr Brailsford read, as an illustration of Barrie’s philosophy, a passage from the last chapters of “Tommy and Gfrizel,” telling tne heroine’s feelings after her beloved had met an ignoble death: “She saw that there is no great man on this earth except the man who conquers self, and that in some the accursed thing which is in all of us may be so strong that to battle with it and be beaten is not altogether to fail. It is foolish to demand complete success of. those we want to love. We should rejoice when they rise for a moment above themselves, and sympathise with them when they fall.” Mr P. L. Sim returned thanks to the speaker.