Peter Pan opened in December 1904 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, and was warmly received by critics and public alike. Within days it had become a family Christmas outing, a tradition that has endured for a century and more. Writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, who was drama critic of the Saturday Review, considered it the best thing Barrie had written, though he attributed its cleverness to far from flattering aspects of Barrie’s persona.
Peter Pan; or, adds Mr Barrie, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. And he himself is that boy. That child, rather; for he halted earlier than most of the men who never come to maturity – halted before the age when soldiers and steam-engines began to dominate the soul. To remain, like Mr Kipling, a boy, is not at all uncommon. But I know not any one who remains, like Mr Barrie, a child. It is this unparalleled achievement that informs so much of Mr Barrie’s last work, making it unique. This, too, surely, it is that makes Mr Barrie the most fashionable playwright of his time.
Undoubtedly, Peter Pan is the best thing he has done – the thing most directly from within himself. Here, at last, we see his talent in its full maturity; for here he has stripped off from himself the last flimsy remnants of a pretence to maturity. Time was when a tiny pair of trousers peeped from under his ‘short-coats’, and his sunny curls were parted and plastered down, and he jauntily affected the absence of a lisp, and spelt out the novels of Mr Meredith and said he liked them very much, and even used a pipe for another purpose from that of blowing soap-bubbles. But all this while, bless his little heart, he was suffering …
Time passed, and mankind was lured, little by little to the point where it could fondly accept Mr Barrie on his own terms … Now, at last, we see at the Duke of York’s Theatre Mr Barrie in his quiddity undiluted – the child in a state of nature, unabashed – the child, as it were, in its bath, splashing, and crowing as it splashes …
Our dreams are nearer to us than our childhood, and it is natural that Peter Pan should remind us more instantly of our dreams than of our childish fancies. One English dramatist, a man of genius, realized a dream for us; but the logic in him prevented him from indulging in that wildness and incoherence which are typical of all but the finest dreams. Credible and orderly are the doings of Puck in comparison with the doings of Peter Pan. Was ever, out of dreamland, such a riot of inconsequence and of exquisite futility? Things happen in such wise that presently one can conceive nothing that might not conceivably happen, nor anything that one would not, as in a dream, accept unhesitatingly. Even as in a dream, there is no reason why the things should ever cease to happen. What possible conclusion can inhere in them? The only possible conclusion is from without. The sun shines through the bedroom window, or there is a tapping at the bedroom door, or – some playgoers must catch trains, others must sup. Even as you, awakened, turn on your pillow, wishing to pursue the dream, so, as you leave the Duke of York’s, will you rebel at the dream’s rude and arbitrary ending, and will try vainly to imagine what other unimaginable things were in store for you. For me to describe to you now in black and white the happenings in Peter Pan would be a thankless task. One cannot communicate the magic of a dream. People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table. You must go to the Duke of York’s, there to dream for yourselves.
The fact that Mr Barrie is a child would be enough, in this generation which so adores children, to account for his unexampled vogue. But Mr Barrie has a second passport. For he, too, even pre-eminently, adores children – never ceases to study them and their little ways, and to purr sentimental paens over them, and finds it even a little hard to remember that the world really does contain a sprinkling of adults …
The strange thing is the preoccupation itself. It forces me to suppose that Mr Barrie has, after all, to some extent, grown up. For children are the last thing with which a child concerns itself. A child takes children as a matter of course, and passes on to more important things – remote things that have a glorious existence in a child’s imagination … A little girl does not say ‘I am a little girl, and these are my dolls, and this is my baby brother’, but ‘I am the mother of this family’. She lavishes on her dolls and on her baby brother a wealth of maternal affection, cooing over them, and … stay! that is just Mr Barrie’s way. I need not, after all, mar by qualification my theory that Mr Barrie has never grown up. He is still a child, absolutely. But some fairy once waved a wand over him, and changed him from a dear little boy into a dear little girl. Some critics have wondered why among the characters in Peter Pan appeared a dear little girl, named in the programme ‘Liza (the Author of the Play)’. Now they know. Mr Barrie was just ‘playing at symbolists’.