there are two scotch books of biography, all published, i believe, within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. one of them is margaret ogilvy, by dr. j. m. barrie; the second is j. m. barrie and his books, by dr. j. a. hammerton. the first, dealing with a dead mother, is a work that nothing but a sense of duty could induce me to handle in the present connection. it has, however, been put before the public without so much as an attempt at justification or apology, and with the plain intention of being sold precisely in the manner of other literary wares, and it must therefore take its chance. margaret ogilvy appears to have gone into no end of editions. it is an account of the[143] character and sayings of dr. j. m. barrie’s mother, viewed in the light of dr. barrie’s own “literaryness.” i have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be one of the most snobbish books that have issued from the press any time this hundred years. it begins snobbishly, it goes on snobbishly, and it ends snobbishly. offered to the reading public as a piece of fictional sentiment, it would still have been open to the charge of mawkishness. offered unblushingly as a transcript from the life and for the perusal of all who care to purchase, deplorable is the mildest epithet one can justly apply to it. wordsworth writes somewhere of a person “who would peep and botanise about his mother’s grave.” this is exactly the feeling that a reading of margaret ogilvy gives you. comparisons in such a case would be doubly odious. yet one does not find that margaret ogilvy, in spite of everything that her son has done for her in the way of “keying-up” to literary requirements, was any the sweeter, or any the nobler, or any the more intellectual[144] than one may presume the mother of any other writer of dr. barrie’s parts to have been. she was a good mother, she gave birth to dr. barrie, she ministered to him in childhood, she denied herself for him; she took pleasure in his educational and literary progress, she offered him much advice; she believed in “god” and “love,” and she died in the faith. the mothers of most literary people have done as much. it has been left to dr. barrie to snatch away the decent veil which hides the sanctities of life from the common gaze, and to let all the world into the privacies of the filial and maternal relation at five shillings a time. if i understand margaret ogilvy aright, she would have cut off both her hands rather than permit some of the things in this book to become the property of strangers, sympathetic or otherwise.
of course, the excuse immediately forthcoming from dr. barrie’s friends and admirers will be “the lesson.” it is the only excuse that can possibly be raked up, and, like the majority of excuses, it is a poor stick[145] to lean upon. for “the lesson” of margaret ogilvy simply amounts to this, that conceit and self-advertisement may bring a man to the silliest and least dignified of passes. in point of fact dr. barrie’s “little study” is just as much a study of himself as of his mother. if it shows margaret ogilvy in the figure of an excellent mother, it also shows j. m. barrie in the figure of a preternaturally excellent and dutiful son. if it shows that margaret ogilvy was a simple, unsophisticated woman of the people, it shows also that j. m. barrie had compassion on her intellectual shortcomings and was ever ready to humour the poor body and to twinkle tolerantly on her whimsies, when he might, had he so chosen, have withered her with a word. to take a sample passage: “now that i was an author, i must get into a club. but you should have heard my mother on clubs! she knew of none save those to which you subscribe a pittance weekly, and the london clubs were her scorn. often i heard her on them—she raised her voice to make me hear,[146] whichever room i might be in, and it was when she was sarcastic that i skulked the most: ‘thirty pounds is what he will have to pay the first year, and ten pounds a year after that. you think it’s a lot o’ siller? oh, no, you’re mista’en—it’s nothing ava’. for the third part of thirty pounds you could rent a four-roomed house, but what is a four-roomed house, what is thirty pounds, compared to the glory of being a member of a club?’ … my wisest policy was to remain downstairs when these withering blasts were blowing, but probably i went up in self-defence.
“‘i never saw you so pugnacious before, mother.’
“‘oh,’ she would reply, promptly, ‘you canna expect me to be sharp in the uptake when i am no’ a member of a club.’
“‘but the difficulty is in becoming a member. they are very particular about whom they elect, and i daresay i shall not get in.’
“‘well, i’m but a poor crittur (not being member of a club), but i think i can tell you[147] to make your mind easy on that head. you’ll get in, i’se uphaud—and your thirty pounds will get in, too.’”
and so on. humour, of course! the sagacious, garrulous mother, the highly diverted, patient son! the picture has pleased the scotch and english-speaking nations of two hemispheres. yet is it of the stupidest and the most foolish.
on another page we get the following pretty piece of curtain lifting: ‘so my mother and i go up the stair together. ‘we have changed places,’ she says; ‘that was just how i used to help you up, but i’m the bairn now.’ she brings out the testament again; it was always lying within reach.… and when she has read for a long time she ‘gives me a look,’ as we say in the north, and i go out, to leave her alone with god.… often and often i have found her on her knees, but i always went softly away, closing the door. i never heard her pray, but i know very well how she prayed, and that, when that door was shut, there was not a[148] day in god’s sight between the worn woman and the little child.’
we can do without such books, dr. j. m. barrie, even though they sell well.
even as dr. archer has discovered in paradise lost an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have i found in dr. j. a. hammerton’s j. m. barrie and his books an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of scotch opinion not only as to dr. barrie, but also as to other matters. first let me string together a few pearls about dr. barrie.
“i have seen it argued [says our excellent author] that the publication of such a book as this is a reprehensible practice [sic], in that it implies the elevation of its subject to the rank of a classic.… a sufficient answer to this charge would seem to be that in such writers as j. m. barrie, thomas hardy, ‘ian maclaren,’ rudyard kipling, and several others [sic], the public that reads books is vastly more interested than it is in its mighty dead.”
the collocation of “such writers” in this[149] passage is as ingenious as it is absurdly scotch.
“among the literary men of the present day there is none who has been more personal in his writings than dr. barrie; he is as personal in prose as byron was in poetry. his own heart, his own experiences, the lives of his ‘ain folk,’ these have been the subjects out of which his genius has made literature.”
the italics are our own.
“the main distinction of nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it is associated with the name of dr. j. m. barrie.… to-day the so-called ‘press house’ is a tavern a few yards removed from the ‘frying pan,’ and there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of billy kirker and that bright bohemian band. but there are no barries among them.”
nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.
“it is well known that dr. barrie’s start was like that of so many others who have[150] won their way to greatness in the republic of letters: a brief spell of journalism, and then—the plunge into literature.”
one can hear dr. barrie splashing about for dear life.
“it had never occurred to him [barrie] that his task lay so near his hand; that to turn the lives of his fellow-townsmen into literature was the way that god had chosen for him to make the age to come his own.”
i should think not, indeed!
“in barrie’s case it was comparatively a short struggle, and two or three years after the time when he found that scots dialect was enough to damn a book, he had succeeded in making it an attraction; presently its charm became the most striking feature of contemporary letters, and what we may call the barrie school arose to accomplish feats unique in the literary history of the nineteenth century.”
prodigious!
“sydney smith was witty; so, too, was sheridan; dickens was a humourist; hood,[151] like barrie, was at once a wit and a humourist.”
who would have thought it?
“the noblest book which barrie has given to the world is none other than margaret ogilvy, in which—to use the vile and vulgar phrase—he has made ‘copy’ of his mother.… if he had done nothing more than draw that sweet picture of a good woman’s humble, happy life, he would have deserved well of his generation. it was a delicate, almost an impossible, task to take up, and only an artist of the first order could have dared to hope for success in it.… there is no passage in all that barrie has written more essentially scottish in character than the delightfully humorous account of his mother on the prospect of his election to a well-known london club, for which he had been nominated by the good fairy of his literary life—frederick greenwood.”
most interesting and most illuminating. now for dr. hammerton on smaller matters. he assures us that “if one will only read the[152] anecdotes of village ‘loonies’ with which scots literature abounds—especially dean ramsay’s reminiscences and the laird o’ logan—he will find that the average scots idiot was a creature of considerably more humour than the average englishman”—which is a palpable hit. also, “only once have i felt inclined to wince in reading anything of barrie’s, and that was one chapter entitled, ‘making the best of it,’ in a window in thrums; for here it seemed to me he was dwelling on an unworthy element of character which is more typical of the english rural and working classes than of the scots. i mean the flattering of wealthy fools with a view to largess.”
dr. hammerton is quite amusing. his notion of the tremendousness of dr. barrie and of the vast superiority of the scotch does him credit. one day, perhaps, he will wake up to the fact that dr. barrie is not among the persons who write literature. and even though dr. hammerton should never realise it, the fact remains.
