The full secret of Mr. Barrie’s genius, as of all genius, eludes analysis; but some of its characteristics are not hard to define.  His wonderful keenness of observation and tenacity of remembrance of the pettinesses of daily existence, which in its amazing minuteness reminds us of Dickens and Mark Twain, and his sensitiveness to the humorous aspects of their little misfits and hypocrisies and lack of proportion, might if untempered have made him a literary cynic like some others, remembered chiefly for the salience he gave to the ugly meannesses of life and the ironies of fate.  But his good angel added to these a gift of quick, sure, and spontaneous sympathy and wide spiritual understanding.  This fills all his higher work with a generous appreciativeness, a justness of judgment, a tenderness of feeling, which elevate as well as charm the reader.  He makes us love the most grotesque characters, whom in life we should dislike and avoid, by the sympathetic fineness of his interpretation of their springs of life and their warping by circumstance.  The impression left on one by the studies of the Thrums community is not primarily of intellectual and spiritual narrowness, or niggardly thrift, or dour natures:  all are there, but with them are souls reaching after God and often flowering into beauty, and we reverence the quenchless aspiration of maligned human nature for an ideal far above its reach.  He achieves the rare feat of portraying every pettiness and prejudice, even the meannesses and dishonors of a poor and hidebound country 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.