Peter Pan E-Book

J.m Barrie

• Herausgeber: Longseller Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 254

Beschreibung

In the Longsellers collection, you will find the most read and loved books of all time.Published in 1911, Peter Pan, became a classic whenever we talk about the challenges of growing up. In the story, Wendy and her brothers are taken to the magical world of Neverland by Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn't grow up.The author, J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and playwright, also known for Margaret Ogilvy, Jane Annie (with Arthur Conan Doyle) and the play Dear Brutus. This book includes the biographical note "Barrie: A Triumph of Personality" by Jesse Lynch Williams.We hope you'll love this book as much we do, and don't forget to check the rest of the collection for more beloved classics.

Leseprobe

Barrie: A Triumph of Personality

Jesse Lynch Williams1

In New York, on the evening this is written, two plays are being acted at theaters not far from each other. One is Mr. J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan"; the other Mr. Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman." The former is a sort of fairy story; the latter deals with grown-up people, very much grown up. These two pieces are as different from each other as both are different from all the rest of the plays by other dramatists in New York or London. Both have run night after night "to capacity," and each "draws" chiefly from the same class of theatergoers—including many who seldom go to the theater—namely, the "intelligent and refined" element. The reason for their success, popular and artistic, is the same in both instances: the free expression of a real personality.2

1

In the case of Mr. Shaw, it is a loudly shouted personality, a conscious rebellion against everything conventional in sight. Instead of whatever is, is right, his guiding principle seems to be—so far as he is guided or has any principles at all—whatever is, is wrong. If you see a head, hit it. That is his chief stock in trade. He is the walking delegate of the social organism, the professional striker, the naughty boy of the school of civilization, who plays truant and scrawls his opinions devilishly on the fence. That is as far as he has gone as yet. What he would mean to do, if anything, after he had knocked down all our institutions, remains to be seen; perhaps he would stick them up again. Probably it will always remain to be seen.

But even if he does not succeed in getting them all down, it is needless to add here that the effect of his sort of effort must be, on the whole, good. It helps to clear the atmosphere of sham, like certain of the famous court jesters, who used to say what no one else dared express, even if others had the cleverness. He makes us think, he makes us turn our inherited opinions over and look at them from the other side where the mold has gathered. He makes us say: "Why, to be sure!" and helps us reassort our "values" and cling more tightly to those that are worthy—the process so mightily urged by his master Nietzsche, from whom Mr. Shaw acquired the title of his play.

At any rate, whatever he has done for society as a dramatizer of social tracts, or for art as simple dramatist, is due to the expression of himself and would have been lost if he had attempted to compress himself into the ready-made molds of opinion and play building.

In the case of Mr. Barrie's piece, it is, of course, a very different triumph of personality—different as the two subjects are. It is not a loud, swaggering rebellion against the traditions of the English stage; there is no apparent rebellion at all; he simply ignores them. He does not try to break them down; he slips around on the other side, with the guileless smile of the boy who never grew up, and writes what he wants to write in the way he wants to write it.

But, whether unconsciously or otherwise, he has made a far greater departure from the established order of things (referring now to the two playwrights as craftsmen rather than as human beings in a moral universe) than has his neighbor, preaching and profaning on Broadway. In "Peter Pan," effects are achieved across the footlights of a kind never even attempted before on any stage. There is the sheer poetry of childhood, the delicate flavor and fragrance of the state of being young—hitherto strictly literary material as distinguished from dramatic; and, at that, material which but few writers have used successfully even in the pages of books, where your characters' thoughts can be described, and what you think about it yourself, together with what is happening elsewhere, and yesterday, and where accrue all the other advantages the fiction writer has at his command and the dramatist lacks.

Obviously this should not be taken to mean that either of these playwrights can transcend the laws of dramatic construction, which are as immutable as the multiplication table or the fact of specific gravity—though each seems to coquette with them at times. Even "Peter Pan," we learn in "The Little White Bird," like the Darling children in the play, had been obliged to have his shoulders touched with fairy dust before he could learn to fly. But these are two playwrights who have learned to use those laws, instead of being used by them, for the free expression of their own personalities. And it is the more remarkable and pertinent to the subject that the ideas expressed by their personalities are among the last which experts in dramatic affairs would be apt to single out for exploitation on the stage, and most of all the English or American stage.

Mr. Barrie, who does not proclaim himself in his work, or even in his prefaces, for more than a reluctant page or two, and perhaps by reason of that very fact reveals his real self the more accurately, would make the better text for preaching a sermon on the salvation of personality, which is the gospel of art.

2

And yet for this very reason—that he is so very much himself—he is difficult to define in terms of anything else. There are so few names to call him; it is like trying to describe a new color. Here is a writer without any background. He had no literary lineage. He bears no family resemblances, and he has no family relationships. He is not a member of any group. He is not particularly a product of his own time. He does not logically fit in at the end of any literary "movement" so that we may call him the "flower" of it. He does not stand at the head of some new school, so that we might hail him as a prophet; for no one is by way of following in his footsteps; the cleverest imitators are too clever to try that He is as nearly sui generis as any sane human organism can be. He is the Peter Pan among the runaway children that follow the beautiful fairy art of make-believe.

Mr. Barrie has the narrowest field of any of the prominent authors in this age of globe-trotting writers. It seems to be a pretty rich one, and he works it for all it is worth; he repeats his crops; but it is quite constricted. If he ever traveled as far east of England as across the Channel to Paris, there is nothing to indicate it in his work. He came to America once, but if he kept a notebook, he has kept it to himself. All the important scenes in his books and most of his plays are Thrums or London.

Again, his themes are almost as limited as his field is narrow. They could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, it might almost be said that he has but one serious theme, the love of parent and offspring, which recurs in about all his important work, even sometimes in his satirical phantasies. But, for that matter, when this motif does give place entirely to purer satire, it is merely a reflex manifestation of the same personality. A man who takes the real things of life so seriously would naturally regard the sham things in the way we are made to see them in "The Admirable Crichton," one of the most telling satires on English existence ever written by Barrie or anyone else.

Finally, so economical with his material is this careful Scotchman—probably because he loves it rather than because he is impoverished by his narrow, insular experience of life—that he works it and reworks it into new and various forms. Even so, he has written less than most of his contemporaries who have been writing a considerably shorter time. His collected works take a little less than half the space on the library shelf that Mr. Kipling's occupy, who is five years his junior. It should be borne in mind, however, that the former has devoted most of his recent time to writing plays, not included on the shelves as yet. Kipling's authorized edition contains twenty-four volumes; Barrie's, eleven.

But despite the limitations cited—if limitations they be—see what he has accomplished. He has written literature. He has introduced imagination to the modern English drama. He is the first English novelist, old or modern, to become a playwright at all, except such as Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins, who worked more or less with collaborators, though Mr. Shaw, if his early sociological narratives can be called novels, might be included. In any case, this playwright has pretty nearly changed the whole aspect of the British stage. One is tempted to predict that he, together with Stephen Phillips and that same Shaw (aided, of course, by Mr. Pinero, and one or two other playwrights, whose work may also be included as literature), will, before they finish, rehabilitate the English theater—which has been divorced from literature quite long enough—bringing these two great branches of art together where they belong and thus establishing a new régime somewhat similar to what already thrives so harmoniously just across the Channel.

If that is the overstatement of enthusiasm, this much, at least, may be coolly affirmed: What Mr. Barrie has accomplished has not been due to the repression of himself to meet the measure of English classical tradition, on the one hand; nor, on the other, has he extended himself in order to catch the popular fancy—and he has got them both. He is pronounced literature by those who know it when they see it, and he would be pronounced a successful man even by those to whom money is the measure of success. According to excellent authority he had made, up to three years ago, £50,000 out of one play alone, "The Little Minister," which at that time was being performed by five different companies in various parts of the world at the same time. This takes no account of his other plays, nor of his other royalties from books, which latter may not have amounted to very much in comparison. Only one of his books, however, failed to prove more or less of a popular success, and that, strangely enough, was his worst, namely, "Better Dead," his well-named earliest effort, the sale of which he has since suppressed in England. Though none of his other seven or eight plays has duplicated the remarkable popularity of "The Little Minister," all have proved successful, either at home or here, of both, except "The Wedding Guest," which failed, strangely enough, notwithstanding it was a problem play, produced at a period given to problem plays. This is as surprising as everything else about Mr. Barrie.

3

In the reluctantly written introduction to the American edition of his books, he relates how no editor at first wanted his Scotch dialect stories, and no publisher would risk his book of "Auld Licht Idylls" until the editor of the St. James Gazette took some of them and asked for more. But let him tell it:

"In time, however, I found another paper, the British Weekly, with an editor as bold as the first (or shall I say he suffered from the same infirmity?). He revived my drooping hopes and I was again able to turn to the only kind of literary work I now seemed to have much interest in. He let me sign my articles, which was a big step for me, and led to my having requests for work from elsewhere, but always the invitation said: 'Not Scotch—the public will not read dialect.'"

There are two points that bear hard on our text in this excerpt; the first is the obvious one, that he was determined to do the thing he was interested in, to follow the lines of his own personality; the second is that for a while he did not do it. When he says, "I was again able to turn to the only kind of literary work I now seemed to have much interest in," he discloses rather eloquently the hiatus in the logical development of his personality, a period of literary hack work, which was the bridge between his obscure past and his brilliant future. There would have been no particular virtue in starving merely because he could not write about Thamas Haggart and Thrums; it seemed better to live until he could do so. This interval supplied most of the illegitimate creations afterwards gathered in from oblivion and given their creator's name in unauthorized editions which he has disowned, as fathers of respectable families are sometimes compelled to do.

But as soon as he was able he was back in the kail yard once more, writing the thing he wanted to write in the way he wanted to write it.

It is fortunate for modern English literature that he was not shunted off; "A Window in Thrums" was the outcome. It is worth repeating what his friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, said to him about this book in one of the first of the letters these two Scotchmen exchanged; the two friends never met: "Jess is beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirts; I have no such glamour of twilight in my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself for my sake."

In explaining the sadness of the conclusion of "A Window in Thrums," the consistent and persistent artist is again disclosed. "When the English publishers read the manuscript," Mr. Barrie says in his introduction, … "they begged me to alter its end. They warned me that the public do not like sad books. Well, the older I grow and the sadder the things I see, the more I do wish my books to be bright and hopeful, but an author may not always interfere with his work, and if I had altered the end of 'The Window in Thrums,' I think I should never have had any more respect for myself."

In telling how he happened to write this book, he explains that as the love of mother and son had written everything of his that he considered of any worth (and there lies the real reason for the criticised existence of the book about his own mother—he considered it a debt he owed her memory), it was only natural that the awful horror of the untrue son should dog his thoughts and call upon him to paint the picture. He adds: "That, I believe now, though I had no idea of it at the time, is how 'A Window in Thrums' came to be written, less by me than by an impulse from behind."

"An impulse from behind" explains the whole matter in a nutshell. An impulse from in front may lead one to write historical novels when "they" want historical fiction; and sometimes rather good ones; still oftener it brings great material returns, but it will never bring literature.

In "The Little Minister" the author made up his mind to give us a bright, hopeful book. All went well for a while, but presently his characters began to run away with him. He tells in one of his other introductions of their willful behavior. "'Come back,' I cry. 'You're off the road.' 'We prefer this way,' they reply. I try bullying. 'You are only people in a book!' I shout, 'and it's my book and I can do what I like with you, so come back.' But they seldom come, and it ends in my plodding after them. Unless I yield, they and I do not become good friends, which is fatal to a book." Nevertheless, in "The Little Minister" he braved them, having set out on a pleasant sentimental journey—with a set smile. And this brought him the famous literary spanking from his older brother Scot in the South Seas: '"The Little Minister' ought to have ended badly; we all know it did; and are infinitely grateful to you for the grace and good feeling with which you lied about it. If you had told the truth I, for one, could not have forgiven you."

4

It is a very persistent personality and potent, but what the charm of it is would be much harder to tell. Go to "Peter Pan," and if you like it you will know; if you don't, you never can. But it is no more to be described than the face of Tinker Bell, the fairy in the piece who appears only as a ray of dancing light. You can't put your finger down on any one quality, such as whimsicality, humor, satire, or fancy, and say that here is the most characteristic Barrie, for just when you think you've got him, he's off and laughing at you, dancing and playing around you and your idea, as Tinker Bell flashed about the Darling's nursery.

There are some things about Barrie that one could wish were otherwise. His art is at times too persistently artless. His unexpected humor, if you read much of him at once, becomes expected. His children seem more like those observed by bachelors than those known by expert parents kept awake by them. But they can bring tears, even to sleepless eyes, and that is more than most of the child writing can do. It is not the sad parts that accomplish this feat with some of us, but certain other things. He seldom becomes maudlin or symbolic about his children; so far as I can recall he does not call them "tots." Nor does he sentimentalize about "lit-tle children's voices," or the "patter of little feet." In certain respects they are very real kids—delightful little egotists, like yours and mine. Peter crows every time he kills a pirate, and one of the other lost children shouts "I'm in a story! I'm in a story! Tell all about me." That is the sort of thing to make us love his children and their father.

There are people who do not like "Peter Pan" at all. I know this to be a fact, for I am acquainted with three of them—a good sort they are, too, whom you would not think it of. For such, of course, it is a closed book—you love the thing, or you don't, and there is no sense in arguing about it. One of them thinks he can convince me that the entire play is artificial, false, and immoral. Perhaps he can also demonstrate that dessert is better than salad, but I do. not care; for sweets.

Peter Pan

1

PETER BREAKS THROUGH

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

Of course they lived at 14 [their house number on their street], and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door.

Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks and shares. Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know, and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that would have made any woman respect him.

Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a Brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces. She drew them when she should have been totting up. They were Mrs. Darling's guesses.

Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.

For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed. Mr. Darling was frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the edge of Mrs. Darling's bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses, while she looked at him imploringly. She wanted to risk it, come what might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions he had to begin at the beginning again.

“Now don't interrupt,” he would beg of her.

“I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the office; I can cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven—who is that moving?—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don't speak, my own—and the pound you lent to that man who came to the door—quiet, child—dot and carry child—there, you've done it!—did I say nine nine seven? yes, I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on nine nine seven?”

“Of course we can, George,” she cried. But she was prejudiced in Wendy's favour, and he was really the grander character of the two.

“Remember mumps,” he warned her almost threateningly, and off he went again. “Mumps one pound, that is what I have put down, but I daresay it will be more like thirty shillings—don't speak—measles one five, German measles half a guinea, makes two fifteen six—don't waggle your finger—whooping-cough, say fifteen shillings”—and so on it went, and it added up differently each time; but at last Wendy just got through, with mumps reduced to twelve six, and the two kinds of measles treated as one.

There was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a narrower squeak; but both were kept, and soon, you might have seen the three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom's Kindergarten school, accompanied by their nurse.

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her. She had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had become acquainted with her in Kensington Gardens, where she spent most of her spare time peeping into perambulators, and was much hated by careless nursemaids, whom she followed to their homes and complained of to their mistresses. She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse. How thorough she was at bath-time, and up at any moment of the night if one of her charges made the slightest cry. Of course her kennel was in the nursery. She had a genius for knowing when a cough is a thing to have no patience with and when it needs stocking around your throat. She believed to her last day in old-fashioned remedies like rhubarb leaf, and made sounds of contempt over all this new-fangled talk about germs, and so on. It was a lesson in propriety to see her escorting the children to school, walking sedately by their side when they were well behaved, and butting them back into line if they strayed. On John's footer [in England soccer was called football, “footer” for short] days she never once forgot his sweater, and she usually carried an umbrella in her mouth in case of rain. There is a room in the basement of Miss Fulsom's school where the nurses wait. They sat on forms, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference. They affected to ignore her as of an inferior social status to themselves, and she despised their light talk. She resented visits to the nursery from Mrs. Darling's friends, but if they did come she first whipped off Michael's pinafore and put him into the one with blue braiding, and smoothed out Wendy and made a dash at John's hair.

No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr. Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the neighbours talked.

He had his position in the city to consider.

Nana also troubled him in another way. He had sometimes a feeling that she did not admire him. “I know she admires you tremendously, George,” Mrs. Darling would assure him, and then she would sign to the children to be specially nice to father. Lovely dances followed, in which the only other servant, Liza, was sometimes allowed to join. Such a midget she looked in her long skirt and maid's cap, though she had sworn, when engaged, that she would never see ten again. The gaiety of those romps! And gayest of all was Mrs. Darling, who would pirouette so wildly that all you could see of her was the kiss, and then if you had dashed at her you might have got it. There never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan.

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John's, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other's nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles [simple boat]. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very real. That is why there are night-lights.