the atmosphere of the
new, and dotted every here and there around him are the living mementoes
of the old--a dying age, which in a little while will cease to be,
and is already out of date and romantic. Steam and electricity and
the printing-press, and the universal provider and the cheap clothing
'emporium,' have worked strange changes. It was Mr. Barrie's fortune to
begin to look on life when all these changes were not yet wrought;
to bring an essentially modern mind to bear on the contemplation of a
vanishing and yet visible past, to live with the quaint, yet to be able,
by mere force of contrast, to recognise its quaintness, and to be
in close and constant and familiar touch with those to whom the
disappearing forms of life had been wholly habitual. That the mere
environment thus indicated was the lot of hundreds of thousands makes
little difference to the especial happiness of the chance, for, as I
have said already, we can't all be persons of genius, and it is only to
the man of genius that, the good fortune comes home.

If there is one truth in relation to the craft of fiction of which I
am more convinced than another, it is that all the genuine and original
observation of which a man is capable is made in very early life. There
are two very obvious reasons why this should be so. The fact that they
are obvious need not prevent me from stating them here, since I am not
writing for those who make a business of knowing such things. In the
first place, the mind is at its freshest; and all objects within its
scope have a keen-edged interest, which wears away in later life. In
the next place, the earliest observations are our own, unmixed with the
conclusions and prepossessions of other minds. A child has not learnt
the Dickens' fashion, or the Thackeray fashion, or the Superior Person
fashion of surveying particulars and generals. He has not begun to
obscure his intelligence by the vicious habit of purposed note-takings
for literary uses. He looks at the things which interest him simply,
naturally, and with entire absorption. It is true of the most
commonplace people that as they grow old their minds turn back to
childhood, and they remember the things of half a century ago with more
clearness than the affairs of last week. Lord Lytton's definition of a
man of genius was that he preserved the child's capacity for wonder.

One of the astutest of living critics tells me that he finds a curiously
_logical_ characteristi