Parenting & Family Quote by James M. Barrie

Barrie flips the usual romance of power on its head. Strength, he argues, isn’t born in the heat of feeling; it’s forged in the awkward, unglamorous work of wrestling with feeling and winning. The phrasing does a lot of heavy lifting: “lusty child of passion” mocks the popular fantasy that intensity automatically produces fortitude. “Lusty” is deliberately bodily, almost comic, as if passion is a proud parent showing off a robust infant. Barrie punctures that pride by insisting the real origin story is conflict, not combustion.

The subtext is distinctly Edwardian: a culture that prized self-command, feared excess, and treated emotional spillover as social risk. Barrie, the playwright who could turn whimsy into a scalpel, isn’t selling repression so much as discipline. “Grappling” suggests an active, ongoing contest rather than moral purity. You don’t eliminate passion; you enter the ring with it. “Subduing” carries a darker edge, hinting at conquest, at the Victorian impulse to manage the unruly self the way the era managed everything else: by control, by rule, by performance.

As theater advice, it’s also practical. Actors and writers live on passion, but craft demands containment: timing, restraint, shape. Barrie’s intent is to separate raw emotion (cheap fuel) from earned power (usable energy). The line reassures anyone overwhelmed by their own inner weather: you aren’t weak because you feel strongly; you become strong when you can hold the feeling without letting it drive the whole plot.