ountry village, yet leaving us with both sincere
respect and warm liking for it; a thing possible only to one himself of
a fine nature as well as of a large mind. Nor is there any mawkishness
or cheap surface sentimentality in it all. His pathos never makes you
wince: you can always read his works aloud, the deadly and unfailing
test of anything flat or pinchbeck in literature. His gift of humor
saves him from this: true humor and true pathos are always found
together because they are not two but one, twin aspects of the very
same events. He who sees the ludicrous in misfits must see their sadness
too; he who can laugh at a tumble must grieve over it: both are
inevitable and both are coincident.

As a literary artist, he belongs in the foremost rank. He has that sense
of the typical in incident, of the universal in feeling, and of the
suggestive in language, which mark the chiefs of letters. No one can
express an idea with fewer strokes; he never expands a sufficient hint
into an essay. His management of the Scotch dialect is masterly: he uses
it sparingly, in the nearest form to English compatible with retaining
the flavor; he never makes it so hard as to interfere with enjoyment; in
few dialect writers do we feel so little alienness.

'Auld Licht Idylls' is a set of regular descriptions of the life of
"Thrums," with special reference to the ways and character of the "Old
Lights," the stubborn conservative Scotch Puritans; it contains also a
most amusing and characteristic love story of the sect (given below),
and a satiric political skit. 'A Window in Thrums' is mainly a series of
selected incidents in detail, partly from the point of view of a
crippled woman ("Jess"), sitting at her window and piecing out what she
sees with great shrewdness from her knowledge of the general current of
affairs, aided by her daughter "Leeby." 'The Little Minister' is
developed from the real story of a Scotch clergyman who brought home a
wife from afar, of so alien a sort to the general run that the parish
spent the rest of her short life in speculating on her previous history
and weaving legends about her. Barrie's imagined explanation is of
Arabian-Nights preposterousness of incident, and indeed is only a
careless fairy-tale in substance; but it is so rich in delicious
filling, so full of his best humor, sentiment, character-drawing, and
fine feeling, that one hardly cares whether it has any plot at all.
'Sentimental Tommy' is a stud