then he has written three plays,--'Walker, London,' 'Jane
Annie,' and 'The Professor's Love Story,' the latter very successful and
adding to his reputation; but no literature except his novel
'Sentimental Tommy,' just closed in Scribner's Magazine. This novel is
not only a great advance on 'The Little Minister' in symmetry of
construction, reality of matter, tragic power, and insight, but its tone
is very different. Though as rich in humor, the humor is largely of a
grim, bitter, and sardonic sort. The light, gay, buoyant fun of 'The
Little Minister,' which makes it a perpetual enjoyment, has mostly
vanished; in its stead we feel that the writer's sensitive nature is
wrung by the swarming catastrophes he cannot avert, the endless wrecks
on the ocean of life he cannot succor, and hardly less by those
spiritual tragedies and ironies so much worse, on a true scale of
valuation, than any material misfortune.

The full secret of Mr. Barrie's genius, as of all genius, eludes
analysis; but some of its characteristics are not hard to define. His
wonderful keenness of observation and tenacity of remembrance of the
pettinesses of daily existence, which in its amazing minuteness reminds
us of Dickens and Mark Twain, and his sensitiveness to the humorous
aspects of their little misfits and hypocrisies and lack of proportion,
might if untempered have made him a literary cynic like some others,
remembered chiefly for the salience he gave to the ugly meannesses of
life and the ironies of fate. But his good angel added to these a gift
of quick, sure, and spontaneous sympathy and wide spiritual
understanding. This fills all his higher work with a generous
appreciativeness, a justness of judgment, a tenderness of feeling, which
elevate as well as charm the reader. He makes us love the most grotesque
characters, whom in life we should dislike and avoid, by the sympathetic
fineness of his interpretation of their springs of life and their
warping by circumstance. The impression left on one by the studies of
the Thrums community is not primarily of intellectual and spiritual
narrowness, or niggardly thrift, or dour natures: all are there, but
with them are souls reaching after God and often flowering into beauty,
and we reverence the quenchless aspiration of maligned human nature for
an ideal far above its reach. He achieves the rare feat of portraying
every pettiness and prejudice, even the meannesses and dishonors of a
poor and hidebound c