THRUMS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2317, 28 July 1898, Page 46

THRUMS.

ByM.

Again? Yes, friend, again: you're not compelled to read it! Ido not write for you this time, only for certain people— those to whom " Thrums "' is as unknown a vocable as that with which Amphion sang Thebes into being, and those to whom it is in very truth ju.it such a mantra: others may stop their cars. JNIy avocation for the last ten days has been re-reading Barrie, and so completely has his spell been over me that my day's work Ins been the dream and life in Barrie-Und reality. I thought his work was Lifting when first I studied it; now I am sure. Ho is an artist, every inch of him ; and more, his art is of so fine a quality that only those who have investigated earnestly and long the " how " of literature will understand as well as feel it. In " Auld Licht Idylls " and " A Window in Thrums" Barrie has given u& sudden, isolated gleams of insight into the depths of Scottish character. Worthy or worthless — nay, Barrie would never let me write that word, nor, truly, would my conscience suffer it: worthier oilers worthy, they stand, those men and women, uncouth and rugged often to the outer eye, even to the shallow judgment, but human at the core of them, or be it human-strong or human-frail. The tragicomedy of life is played as faithfully in Thrums as in the Seat of Empire, and it is good to turn awhile from the complexities of cultured sentiment, that sometimes seems to the philosopher to have lost all its depth in intricacy and wide-spreadness, to look upon the simple, primitive passions of a ruder race. Man}' who read this will recall the fascination of Verga's " Cavalleria P.usticana." An hour or two of village life; the play of love and loathing, hate and murder, frank and direct as a child's talk; no weighing scruple against scruple, no stopping short to analyse the feelings, no turning from the straight path after other interests — so marked a contrast to our conduct, who zigzag on enmesht in a refined morality netted of e.jual cords of truth and falsehood. That lesson of directness, what way soever taught, is one of the most valuable that man can learn in these sophisticated days when the world for the most part seems to have taken counsel of Polonius and would

By indirections find directions out. Jesus of Nazareth, you will remember, preached it Avhen his disciples lost their heads one day, a little child his text. I don't know that we quite appreciate his point. We are so apt to think the man outgrows the child that we lose sight of the distinction between "childish" and "childlike," the truth that adult virtue is not the diametric opposite of childly virtue, but its expansion in the light of wider knowledge. I think the fundamental claim of Thrums on heart and mind lies in tho truths hpic hinted.

The "Idylls'" and the "Window,' though charming in their kind, ore not. their author's highest reach. "The Little Minister " completes tho earls cr sketches, and, M'hilc enhancing all their values, goes itfcolf beyond them. In it we arc no longer taught by flii -.lies; there is developemenl ol character. Gavin is brought into relation with new circumstances, and we are shown the shaping o! hif> life both on the inner and the outer plane; not with the keen dialysis, the gorgeous panoramic synthesis of Meredith, peihap-3, yet with an easy, quietly insistent powei that very surely finds its goal. The slighter, but sufficient, pketch of Babbie's growth is an additional charm to those who, like myself, find the absorbing interest of this Era in the enthronement, both materially and mystically, of the Woman. I have heard some readers say that Babbie is unreal. Ii J could find a fault with the creation I think it would be that she is too real ! I personally have known her, the plaything of who called them men, the irresponsible unmoral Mignon, Avhose Sovl-self woke at call of a true love, killing the ugh ness the one life wrought, flooding the elfin side of her with glory. Don't tell mo Babbie is unreal !

For an example of the snbtilty and sweetness with which Barrie plays upon that ancient pipe wlio.-e reeds are humour, pathos, and whose capistrum sympathy, take up the chapters called " The Curling Season " and " Tragedy of a Mud House," where the old lion-roaring but lamb-headed Doctor takes Gavin Dishart with him to help in the sad duty of conveying Nanny to the poorhouse. The unfortunate old woman is not an AuliT Lichfc, but one of the U.P.'s. It is not Gavin's business properly at all, but the frost holds in the Rashie-bog, and Nanny's minister is a curler ! The Doctor takes the road that passes by the bog, offering an excuse that easify deceives both us and Gavin. They reach the rink, and the uproarious excitement almost undoes the Doctor, whose sense of duty only has kept him from the match. The U.P. minister is in splendid form, and Dr M'Queen's side miss him greatly : but he proves strong enough to master the teptation. They urge the Rev. Mr Duthie, the one with jibes, the other in his solemn, apostolic way, to leave the game and do his duty by poor Nanny. Vain effort ; the seductions of the rink are too, too strong for him — he falls. On goes the trap, and presently the Little Minister discovers why the short cut would not serve that clay.

"He's a decent man, the minister, but vain of his play — ridiculously vain. However, I think the sight of you, in the place that should have been his, has broken his nerve for this clay, and our side may win yet."

" I believe," Gavin said, with sudden enlightenment, " that you brought me here for that purpose."

"Maybe," chuckled the doctor; "maybe." Then he changed the subject suddenly. "Mr Dichart," he asked, "were you ever in love? "

"Neycr!" answered Gavin -violently. " "Well, well," said the doctor, " don't terrify the horse. I have been in love myself. It's bad, but it's nothing to curling." The stones still roaring in our ears, the Doctor's jibes and chuckles still twitching at our lips, we find ourselves at Nanny's. What follows I shall neither summarise nor mar by quoting piecemeal. The chapter is the fairest pearl of a fair rope of pearls, judged purely by its great humanity, or by its art, or, as the happy few will judge, by both. la " Sentimental Tommy " Barries genius feas readied so far. its highest point ; and that

it is so augurs well for future work— he Is still going up. " Margaret Ogilvie," his latest, has values of its own, but it in no way comes into the lists with " Sentimental Tommy" and "The Little Minister." The book that will, the book that Barrie-lovers hope to see wrest the prize even from " Sentimental Tommy "' is the book " Sentimental Tommy " should have been. " This is not," Barrie tells us, " m the smallest degree the book I meant it to be. Tommy ran away with the author. When we meet a man who interests us, and is perhaps something of an enigma, we may fall a-wondering what sort of boyhood he had ; and so it is with writers who become inquisitive about their own creations. It was Sentimental Tommy the man that I intended to write of here; I had thought him out os carefully as was possible to me ; but I suppose I saw the end more clearly than the beginning, for when I sat down to make a start I felt tint I could not really know him at one-and-twenty unless I could picture him at fifteen, and one's character is so fixed at fifteen that I saw I must go farther back for him, and so I journejed to his childhood. Even then I meant merely to .summarise his early days, but I wad loth to leave him, or perhaps it was he who was loth to grow up, having a suspicion of what was in store for him. ' Let us have one more game in the Den,' he cried, and I wps a tool in his hands. But though we may put off the evil day as long as we can, come it must in the end."

The manhood then of this " inventive sacket," this Artist Soul which is a puzzle to his little world, himself included, is not yet written. Like his own Tommy, Barrie conceived it first, but knew it for the crowning glory, and kept it for the last. One only fears the tosk may prove too heavy for him. The absolute success of his delineation of Tommy's boyhood is ground of hope to-day, and fear to-morrow, as one sees now the splendour of this first encounter, now the immensity of the achievement upon which his hope is fixed.

In Madime Sarah Grand's "The Beth Book " we have portrayed the girlhood of a genius In " Sentimental Tommy," which must have b?en upon the stocks at the same time, we have the boyhood of a genius limned. " The Beth Book " takes us on to the early womanhood of its protagonist, but "Sentimental Tommy" breaks off short upon the verge of Tommy's adolescence, bo that a full comparison of the two works is not yet possible. But everyone who has read both must have been struck by point in point, when, with "The Beth Book" on our knee, we smile and say, " Like Tommy !"• With " Sentimental Tommy " in our hand we smile and say, "Like Beth!" The methods of the books, however, differ greatly, and much that Sarah Grand inculcates of set purpose and well aware of what &he is about is to be found implicit in Barries more artistic pages. The twain might shake hands upon nine-tenths of their ethics, conceivably upon the whole ; for, ethics, unconceivably upon the whole ; ior, rising like t-he all-pervasive scent of springtide flowers from every chapter Barrio writes is the sweet savour of a pure morality. The history of Tommy begins with Magevful Tarn's fascination of Jean Myles. Bjorn&on has detailed such a case in one of h"s fine novels, but those who &cc need not seek proof in Norway of Barries truth to nature. Tommy, as certainly as Grizei, was "the child of evil passions," and one of the more manifestly admirable points of the whole story is the fine way that Barrie handles the phenomena which Western sages call Heredity, but which the Oriental scienliht has comprehended under the vastly greater formula, Reincarnation. The likeness of Tommy and his parents, of Grizel and her mother, and finally of the two children, strikes one as Tommy's " hantle "- struck the Dominie. Talent would have succumbed either to popular theory — if I may be excused for dignifying thus a maze of logicless assumptions ; or to the cry for "reolism" and "scientific accuracy." We should have had a demonstration of the latest savant's views upon the question, a thing to joy in till a greater Weisman rose and scattered its foundations to the winds of heaven. Genius has given us a picture of such truth that whatsoever theory comes out on top at la-st, Tommy and Grizel will not contradict it.

Tommy's b&liaviour at the S.R.J.C. supper ami in returning home from that bewildering experience strikes the first clear and definite note of the child's character; and we go back in thought ere we again go forwaid. Yes. it is all in keeping, from the first mention of his name; and onward through the years, from that heaitwringing Hogmanay to Tommy's banishment and selfdeceiving farewell to his little Elspeth — whom he was always good to — the pencil never falters. Line after line the Soul of Tommy pictures itself before us; its littleness, and its vague o'ershadowing greatness ; an irritation, a bewilderment, an object of umvilling interest and in the end unwilling admiration to his neighbours. Which of us all foresaw it at the poor lad's introduction to Thrums life? And yet now we do see ifc, how inevitable it appears ! The orphan ward of cowardly Aaron Latta — doubly a coward in that he dared not rise and slay his pitiful past self, but let it eat the heart of him ; trebly a coward in performing but what was in the bond to " Jean Myles's children "-— slowly becomes the centre round which Thrums revolves, and Thrums has never wakened to the fact. The Dominie of Glenquharity, himself a life-long worshipper at the pure shrine of Literature, is the one Soul that has an inkling of the truth. At tha great Hugh Blackadder competition the craftsman recognises in the beaten lad a brother craftsman, and in his heart proclaims him victor. I think when Tommy's subsequent career comes to be written we shall hear more of Mr Ogilvy.

A boy at the Lower Hutt was untying his boot with a Fork when the fork slipped and entered his left eje. A case was heard at Wellington on Monday before Mr Justice Edwards and a jury in which Kirkcaldie, a well-known draper, was sued by Atmore, an ex-employee, for £50, damages for injuries alleged to have been sustained by his falling through a floor in the warehouse, which it was contended wasin an unsafe condition. Contributory negligence was set up as a defence. The jury awarded Atmoro £50 damages, but several legal points jvero reserved for argument*