BARRIE, SIR JAMES MATTHEW, O.M. 7 ) British novelist and dramatist, was born at Kirriemuir, in For farshire, Scotland, May 9, 1860. He began to write even before he went to school and, while he was a student at Edinburgh Uni versity, almost finished a three-volume novel. In 1883 he became leader-writer on the Nottingham Journal, and his career as a man of letters may be said to have begun in the following year with the appearance of an article, entitled "An Auld Licht Com munity," in a London paper, the St. James's Gazette. Frederick Greenwood, editor of the paper, gave the young writer such en couragement that he moved to London in 1885; and in 1887 ap peared his first book, Better Dead, a jeu d'esprit based on his contributions to journalism. In 1888 Auld Licht Idylls, a volume of sketches of life in his native village, revealed to the world the genius of a new master of humour and pathos, and the same year saw the publication of When a Man's Single, a novel of journal istic life, and An Edinburgh Eleven, sketches of famous Edin burgh men. A Window in Thrums, published in 1889, set the seal on his fame as a master of what has been called Kailyard fiction (q.v.). Two further books appeared in 1891—My Lady Nicotine, which contains some of the most amusing literature ever written about smoking, and The Little Minister, in which he in terwove the humours of Thrums with a romantic love-story. It was about this time that Barrie began to write for the theatre, and his first play, Walker, London (1893) , won immediate suc cess, with J. L. Toole in the chief part. There was more of the idyllic and sentimental genius of the author in his next successful comedy, The Professor's Love-Story (1895) . Meanwhile, in 1894, Barrie had published his beautiful autobiographical study of his early life with his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, and we suspect the presence of an autobiographical element again in Sentimental Tommy, a novel at once sympathetic and mocking, about a young Scot with an "artistic temperament," which was published in 1895. This and its sequel, Tommy and Grizel (1900), were Barrie's last essays in prose fic tion, and with all their merits they showed that he was aiming at something outside the range of his genius. He was more happily inspired in The Little White Bird (190 2) in which we get our first introduction to the fantastic world of Peter Pan.
It was on the stage, however, that Barrie was to pour out his genius in the greatest abundance and variety. His early plays, in cluding the stage version of The Little Minister (1897), contain only faint hints of the dramatist who in the year 1903 was to hold the stage with no fewer than three plays (Quality Street, The Ad mirable Crichton a n d Little Mary), and who in 1904 was to endear himself to the nursery with Peter Pan, which has been described as "a kind of poetical pantomime." This was followed by Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire (1905), and by What Every W oman Knows (1908) . Peter and Wendy, which was published in 1911, was only a kind of pendant to Peter - - - - - Pan. As for the plays written since that time, Barrie became more expert, as he grew older, in preserving the balance between comedy and pathos, and more daring in preaching from the stage the very simple gospel that is to be found in his rectorial address, delivered at St. Andrews University, on Courage. In that address (192 2) he described his business in life as "playing hide and seek with angels," and in most of his later work will be found an under lying appeal to make life, as far as is possible, a game with angels, to become as little children, and to prefer a heavenly failure to a too-worldly success. This is the dominant theme in The Will, a short and sentimental play produced in 1913, where we see the folly of success expounded in terms of commonplace life without the author's usual fantastic elaborations. The Twelve Pound Look, which belongs to about the same period, is a more comic treatment of the same theme.
Barrie is, in the general opinion, more infallibly an artist in his comedy than in his pathos, and The Twelve Pound Look is, perhaps, the most successful of all his one-act plays. Pantaloon and Rosalind are two other one-act pieces which are published in the same volume with The Twelve Pound Look in the collected edition. They are both plays of mixed comedy and pathos. An other and longer play written during this period was The Adored One, which was censured by a number of critics on the ground that it was a joke about a murder. Barrie's war plays are of no permanent importance. A Kiss for Cinderella (1916) , though in some respects a comedy of the World War, does not depend on the War for its chief appeal, but is the fullest expression of the genius of Barrie that playgoers had had since those marvellous years, 1903 and 1904. In A Kiss for Cinderella we realize how near is the author's genius to that of Hans Andersen, on the one band, and of Dickens, on the other. Like Hans Andersen he mixes the everyday world with fairyland, and like Dickens he entices us to that borderland of laughter where we suddenly find ourselves in tears. There surely never was a play in which the dramatist played "hide and seek with angels" to better purpose. In 1917, he produced Dear Brutus, a comedy with tragic impli cations, which takes us into still remoter regions of dreamland than we visit in A Kiss for Cinderella. In Mary Rose (1920), as in A Kiss for Cinderella, and Dear Brutus, we travel from reality into dreamland or into ghostland, and his comedy more than ever seems to be tinged with a deep sense of human tragedy. His only play since Mary Rose has been his one-act enigma, Shall We Join the Ladies? (1922). Barrie received a baronetcy in 1913, and the Order of Merit in 1922. He died June 19, 1937. See J. A. Hammerton, Barrie: The Story of a Genius (1929) .