d consequently epitaphs can
never be. What he utters is of interest to the public, because his motive
for speaking is private and personal. Instead of telling people what they
think that they are thinking, he tells them what they have always known but
think they have forgotten. He performs, for this oblivious generation, the
service of a great reminder. He lures us from the strident and factitious
world of which we read daily in the first pages of the newspapers, back to
the serene eternal world of little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness
and of love. He educates the many, not by any crass endeavor to formulate
or even to mold the opinion of the public, but by setting simply before
them thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears.

The distinguishing trait of Mr. Barrie's genius is that he looks upon life
with the simplicity of a child and sees it with the wisdom of a woman. He
has a woman's subtlety of insight, a child's concreteness of imagination.
He is endowed (to reverse a famous phrase of Matthew Arnold's) with a sweet
unreasonableness. He understands life not with his intellect but with his
sensibilities. As a consequence, he is familiar with all the tremulous,
delicate intimacies of human nature that every woman knows, but that most
men glimpse only in moments of exalted sympathy with some wise woman whom
they love. His insight has that absoluteness which is beyond the reach of
intellect alone. He knows things for the unutterable woman's
reason,--"because...."

But with this feminine, intuitive understanding of humanity, Mr. Barrie
combines the distinctively masculine trait of being able to communicate the
things that his emotions know. The greatest poets would, of course, be
women, were it not for the fact that women are in general incapable of
revealing through the medium of articulate art the very things they know
most deeply. Most of the women who have written have said only the lesser
phases of themselves; they have unwittingly withheld their deepest and most
poignant wisdom because of a native reticence of speech. Many a time they
reach a heaven of understanding shut to men; but when they come back, they
cannot tell the world. The rare artists among women, like Sappho and Mrs.
Browning and Christina Rossetti and Laurence Hope, in their several
different ways, have gotten themselves expressed only through a sublime and
glorious unashamedness. As Hawthorne once remarked very wisely, women have
achi