There are great ways of borrowing, as EMERSON said, and in his new
Fantasy Sir JAMES BARRIE has given us a very charming variation on
_A Midsummer Night's Dream_ (with echoes of _Peter Pan_ and _The
Admirable Crichton_). Certainly I got far more fun out of his deluded
lovers in the Magic Wood than I ever extracted from the comedy of
errors which occurred between the ladies and gentlemen of the Court
of _Theseus_.

In _Dear Brutus_ the contrast between real life and the life of
Magicland is sharply accentuated by the fact that there is not a
separate set of characters for each; the same men and women figure in
both, making abrupt transitions from one to the other and back again.
We have a house party of actual humans (not too obtrusively actual),
most of whom, including the butler, imagine that if they could have a
Second Chance in life they would not make such a mess of it as they
did with the First. One of them thinks he would never have taken to
drink and lost his self-respect and his wife's love if he had only had
a child; one that he would not have become a pilferer if he had stuck
to the City; others that they would have done better to have married
Somebody Else. Well, they are all whisked off into the Magic Wood, and
there they get their Second Chance. The pilferer becomes a successful
tradesman in a large and questionable way; the tippler finds himself
sober and attended by the daughter of his heart's desire; various
married folk get re-sorted; and so forth.

The moral purpose (if any) of the author, as conveyed to us through
the mouth of the leading humourist of the party, is to show that a
man's nature would remain the same even if he got a Second Chance.
Unfortunately--but what can you expect in the realm of Magic?--the
scheme does not work out with any logical consistency. It is true