THE AMBITIONS OF SIR JAMES BARRIE, BART. ♦* But Barrie is a beauty, The Little Minister and The Window in Thrums, eh ? Stuff in that young man; but he must see and not he too funny. Genius in him, but there s a journalist at his elboio — there s the risk.^* — R. L. S. in a Letter to Henry James, 1892. "Quality Street" is for "the quality" — let that be claimed, or confessed, right away. It is no book for your parvenu, your reader born yesterday, or for those frightfully clever young creatures, so precocious and cool, who take their first literary airings, quite self-possessed, in such new-fangled, strenuous, agitating thoroughfares as Sinister Street or The Street of To-day. Far away from these does it lie, in a different quarter of the town, in a mellow, faded faubourg full of dreams ; and only those can understand it who know something of its history, who remember the old lane which it led from and the hidden highway it joined, and who can recollect all the hopes which ran to make a breathless crowd round the little architect when he took the site in hand. Detach the book from these things and judge it intrin- sically and you get — pooh ! — a mere pretty game — a kind of make-believe bijou, absurdly befurbelowed, planned out, with droll seriousness, like a real four- roomed play — and then built, bless your heart, on a plot more like a child's garden-plot than a dramatic one — a plot from which the very plants have not even been cleared away, so that the place seems furnished with 63
