the birth of a living idea and a creating of the phantasy figure, but we must view it from without. The journey to the mind is Act II. It proves to be a dreamy, misty figure of an island: a little world that creates its phantoms "in the image of their maker," a "miniature land" of reveries and phantasies-the island of the Unconscious. Thus, "it is not always there" and when not under the full focus of consciousness ("the sun" that plays "hide and seek with it"), the Island, like our attention, wanders "and goes for a jaunt," there in the north, the misty Hebrides. If that island is the mind, it is there that Mary Rose was created and into its substance is suddenly 'called' back, lost and all forgotten like some frail phantom of a dream in the glaring light of day. (It will be fully discussed later, p. 199.)

Coming back to reality from out the shadows, we are invited to listen to our author's presentation of his theme in some of its different phases. For the plain man, perhaps a little undiscerning, oblivious of ghosts and not particularly interested in dreams, comes the story of an Individual Life which might be detailed somewhat as follows:

The Latent Content of the Play (one aspect).

It is thirty years ago. In an isolated old manor house on the Sussex downs, lives a middle-aged, affluent J.P., James Morland. He is a squire, a good shot and interested generally in sport, but with a passion for drawings and rare prints which he collects on occasional visits to London. Fanny, his wife, is an amiable, affectionate, motherly soul who well understands him, and the two seem happily married, but childless. They see few people, but an agreeable diversion is the local parson (Mr George Amy), himself a horseman, 'sport' and print collector, of the same age. His wife we never see. Mr Morland is an impressionable man and his reflections and attitude to life are moulded on the sport he indulges in, the scenes he has passed through, and the curious appeal of the old house in which he lives. The couple have conceived the idea of bestowing their parental longings on an adopted child, a sailor; twenty-three years old when the story opens, Simon Blake1. [And a little later comes a further adoption of a boy of 23 yr. for Simon's pleasure: but as he is mostly away at sea, the child lives in the home and care of the soi-disant Grandfather.] While the squire has been watching the first grow to manhood, he has long secretly cherished the idea of a young daughter of his dreams having come to life out of the 'misty land of reverie.' She is to live with him and be in all respects a member of his house, whose barren interior he so regrets, and is, as he promises himself, to be the life spouse of his adopted boy. She is not Mary Morland, but Mary Rose, a blossoming flower; and so is she called throughout the play. Mary is sufficiently real a Galatea to be the beloved plaything of father, mother and 'son'; but is left sadly to remind us of her illusory nature by fading suddenly from sight and memory when the focus of attention and concentration upon her, necessary for existence, fails. For twice in his lifetime Morland forgets his beautiful illusion-in his youth for three weeks, and in middle-age for a third of his life-and comes to realise what a miserable affair life becomes without a daughter. For all this time she has become lost within the

1 The assumption that he is adopted is dealt with, p. 190. Each of the other surmises has direct support in the play, when it is carefully studied, and we will refrain from a mass of quotations here.

substance of an island beyond the mists-a beautiful miniature world that, like her, is ephemeral; and after all, only a land of shadow, an image of the mind. These three (mother, father and son) alone then are real amid that dreamy play of life of which she, radiating sunshine, in all her innocent girlish perfection, was once the centre figure....Thus Morland turns his mind to other things, hunting, judicial decisions, and collecting drawings (which he fondly imagines might be his daughter's, and are preserved in a drawer) until, with old age, she is successfully forgotten. Just before the old man dies, when perhaps he is too old to cherish the delusion longer she, like other forgotten things of childhood, comes back to mind. Yes, unexpectedly returns, and amid all things aged, she alone is young; and her image seems to possess the home.' So much so, that when the old inmates die, the story gains credence among the superstitious villagers that her likeness (her ghost) haunts the old house still; which, in her presence, wears the quiet "disturbing smile of the Monna Lisa's, which came surely of her knowing what only the dead should know." And so it happens that when Simon's adopted child (now grown to manhood) comes home from the wars, and from a country where the "Angels of Mons," the spirit of Jean d'Arc, and visions of the Madonna are common hallucinations, he picks up the local mysterious gossip, and on entering the old house late at night, seems to see the curious ghost again, with the manner of a little girl he might wish for as his child.

THE LATENT CONTENT. In the Guise of a Sacred Drama.

Moving away next from this simple story, we must allow ourselves to ascend to a higher plane, and see what greater drama and bigger lesson Barrie has in store for us. It has been shown (p. 179), that it is in part a parable of life. It is more Mary Rose is a mystery play, a religious drama. Without claiming for a moment that this is the secret of the whole play, we are surely right in assuming that such is its essence; and that the intention of the author, in the presentation he adopts, is to place the characters on a high spiritual level, out of the way of normal men and above the petty incidents just recorded. The scene is laid in Heaven and Earth; it is a sacred drama, and the characters are the Virgin Mary, Simon the fisher, the Father in Heaven and (more indistinctly) the Child of the Virgin, or perhaps, in this case, the Prodigal Son; and in the background of little opportunities here, the Holy Ghost in its maternal significance.... The story has as its prologue:

"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. ... You and I know that to be true."...And its moral is to propound and “to justify the ways of God to men."

The island from which Virgin Mary (the Rose) voluntarily falls-her single lapse, which "should be overlooked by now"-is that "glory place" the island of Paradise and Heaven1. Her father is now in heaven (Heavenly Father); He is her Creator and she is formed in His own (mental) image; but she is left to remain a ghost-for she is shut out of His thoughts and forgotten-remain a ghost till the Master Creator draws her back into His heaven, into His mind. Indeed, as the last

1 Vide, p. 202, Island-symbol.

curtain falls, and the last (trumpet)-'call' is heard, amid a night of stars, the ascension of the Virgin into heaven takes place peacefully before our eyes. Meanwhile, in the brief space she is shut out of eternity, Mary has come to earth. In reality, Mary has not so much come down but sprung up from earth (for the Kingdom of Heaven is upon earth), albeit in an island in the mists beyond our ken. It would seem that Mary rose from the deep, "that which drew from out the boundless deep" -a Lady from the Sea; and has scrambled on to earth, languishing on dry land, 'out of her element,' where "the sound of the sea is not heard at all." She thus makes this one appearance on earth to have the problem of eternity once and for all solved before our eyes, no less than the personal problem of the author. The solution is, of necessity, an individual one and his own, with the final lesson "unless ye be like little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom." Then her spirit (ghost) is "laid" to rest for ever, and the island amid the stars reclaims its erring child.

What is the problem Mary Rose really endeavours to settle when she comes to earth? It is stated in the play as the question of eternity which is, of course, 'How can man live for ever, how reclaim his lost youth and be born again, how come to be a little child once more to enter the kingdom of heaven?' Or, expressed in the 'projected' form, "What is it Mary is ever searching for and longing for, and returned for? -a baby." Indeed she goes through a “nightly travail that can never be completed" till this Harry is here "to provide the end." Now the latent content of this question is the personal heart-searching: "How can a man tear himself away from the mother, and yet be one with her...?" Mary herself is eternal, always virgin, ever young. She has solved the problem, but she is of another world, from which 'the loch' and the 'vale of the shadow' separate us. ("There was a door for which I had no key; There was a veil past which I could not see.") How is it with us? We cannot be Peter Pans, that is certain; reverie and dream are not enough, if as men we would live again we must recreate ourselves; go back to the womb whence we came and this must mean reunion with the mother. Or man may create himself by 'being one with' his own grandchild-by union with his daughter. Of course, this is but deep, unconscious reasoning; in life it is but metaphor, it satisfies the mind's censor in the guise of religious drama; and on the stage it is but the enacting of a dream; and so again may pass the world's censorship. Now it is the peculiar solution of the play and the unique formula of Barrie, as distinct from Ibsen, that the former phantasy is to be openly

rejected. Man for him does not seek union with the mother, and his answer to the immortality problem is "Through the creation of a daughter," i.e. that the immaculate conception of the virgin by the spirit of the Father in heaven-a sound into her ear ("Quae per aurem concupisti" says a hymn) or the visit of a bird, is alone the righteous course: the union of the Father with the daughter and the rise of the Immortal Son and Lord. Simon the fisher (like Joseph) may be the mortal consort of the Virgin, but he never has lien of her. He makes love to her; the sparks of the fire he has made 'leap up as often as they are trampled down,' but as he approaches her, "an unholy organ" of another "increasing in volume" rakes the bushes for her.... The Father has drawn her in unto Himself; she is no more. Then we see that Simon's "fire is gone out," "the sun has set," "the island is quiet" and at peace. This means also the Ascension of the Virgin; and only her divine Son remains on earth (the other island) as witness to her motherhood. Again, the incident is to be repeated when the child himself is grown to manhood. He returns to the "old home," the fabric of the mother, and dandles on his knee a little girl spirit; whose childish patter and babyish girlish ways show best what age Mary Rose has reached. As for this warrior, home from the wars (of life), he is about the same age as her Father when the first "calling away" of his daughter at puberty took place, and his intentions are no less the same. He creeps through the drawing room to the dark passage and throws his blade of the trench-his "visiting card" for "the favoured ones" straight at her door "for her if she can get it," and clasp it she does. He, too, has a "call" to make and like the Father's "call" on the island, it is alone heard by "those for whom it is meant." And thus the son lay (with) the ghost, and the 'something' she is seeking for is found, ere her final ascension back to Heaven....And so the tale repeats itself anew and the immortality of the Father of Creation is assured.

In both calls, Act II, Act III, it can readily be seen that the daughter represents the beautiful, youthful maiden form the mother unconsciously is ever thought to be: in both incidents it is the mother that is intended for his attention. Harry unwittingly hurls his blade at the door of her chamber, "the oldest room" in the fabric of the mother. Mr Morland, on "calling" her to himself is thinking of Mary Rose rather as "the old lady with wrinkles," and of the name on the island trunk which ever stops short at MAR (the knife breaks in the middle of her)-perhaps Mar of Margaret. In neither case, however, is this consciously given expression; and we are left to assume that the problem of the ages can

only be settled on earth as it is in heaven; this the Virgin is here to teach us, and "to justify the ways of God to men." This is Mary Rose's secret; she has "broken some law" of heaven in returning to reveal it; but, says the Son, "He would surely send for you" again, as he does in the end, when "He wanted you."

In reality the solution is a poor one as far as the human race is concerned: it is toying with a big problem and is, of necessity, but doubtfully successful. It is an ideal of a kind, harboured by many desperate minds who would fly in the face of conventions of racial evolution, and eventually be their own unwitting slayers. It may hold for the phantasy of the family in heaven; it must fail for the families on earth. But with Barrie, the earthly family is, for himself, seemingly in the nature of a phantasy; and his solution may be granted. But the complete discussion pro and con of the problem is beyond the limits of his simple play and beyond the limits of human understanding and the mind that is finite.

Justification for Identities of Characters as belonging to a SACRED Drama.

It may be convenient at this point to see what indications in the play point to the characters of a holy drama, and how far the author's intentions were realised. The whole life and rhythm of the play centres round Mary Rose and it is right that she should first engage our attention. As a woman she is certainly not of this world, "she is different from other girls," "a little odd" with that peculiar "attribute of her that never plays with them." Like the Madonna, she is likened to a flower, "a rare and lovely flower," and her parents were never anxious "to take the bloom off her." Like the Virgin [likened to a blood red rose], Marythe-Rose is her name. Her little calyx (bassinette) holds the Babe; but that flower has inherited eternal youth by the cold finger of fate-a "cold finger had once touched my Mary Rose," as "frost may stop the growth of a plant and yet leave it blooming."... Her saint-like purity is hinted at in many places. "What you are worrying about is just her innocencewhich seems a holy thing to me."..."Marriage...it is so fearfully solemn." "We'll try to be good, won't we?" says Mary Rose; and while Simon is craving for her hand, Mary is sitting in the cold room above "thinking holy things" about love; and in her simple way, says Barrie, is worlds above the average "secret women, so much less innocent than she." Her island, which embodies herself (her soul) is a bird sanctuary; silent and "still as an empty church": and when in the shadow of a church she is buried, that site is a "holy spot." That is the dust, but