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 achieved art only when they have stood naked in the market-place.  But men in general are not withheld by a similar hesitance from saying what they feel most deeply.  No woman could have written Mr. Barrie’s biography of his mother; but for a man like him there is a sort of sacredness in revealing emotion so private as to be expressible only in the purest speech.  Mr. Barrie was apparently born into the world of men to tell us what our mothers and our wives would have told us if they could,—­what in deep moments they have tried to tell us, trembling exquisitely upon the verge of the words.  The theme of his best work has always been “what every woman knows.”  In expressing this, he has added to the permanent recorded knowledge of humanity; and he has thereby lifted his plays above the level of theatric journalism to the level of true dramatic literature.

IX

THE INTENTION OF PERMANENCE

At Coney Island and Atlantic City and many other seaside resorts whither the multitude drifts to drink oblivion of a day, an artist may be watched at work modeling images in the sand.  These he fashions deftly, to entice the immediate pennies of the crowd; but when his wage is earned, he leaves his statues to be washed away by the next high surging of the tide.  The sand-man is often a good artist; let us suppose he were a better one.  Let us imagine him endowed with a brain and a hand on a par with those of Praxiteles.  None the less we should set his seashore images upon a lower plane of art than the monuments Praxiteles himself hewed out of marble.  This we should do instinctively, with no recourse to critical theory; and that man in the multitude who knew the least about art would express this judgment most emphatically.  The simple reason would be that the art of the sand-man is lacking in the Intention of Permanence.