There are good things which we want to share with the world and good
things which we want to keep to ourselves. The secret of our favourite
restaurant, to take a case, is guarded jealously from all but a few
intimates; the secret, to take a contrary case, of our infallible
remedy for seasickness is thrust upon every traveller we meet, even if
he be no more than a casual acquaintance about to cross the Serpentine.
So with our books. There are dearly loved books of which we babble to a
neighbour at dinner, insisting that she shall share our delight in
them; and there are books, equally dear to us, of which we say nothing,
fearing lest the praise of others should cheapen the glory of our
discovery. The books of "Saki" were, for me at least, in the second
class.
It was in the WESTMINSTER GAZETTE that I discovered him (I like to
remember now) almost as soon as he was discoverable. Let us spare a
moment, and a tear, for those golden days in the early nineteen
hundreds, when there were five leisurely papers of an evening in which
the free-lance might graduate, and he could speak of his Alma Mater,
whether the GLOBE or the PALL MALL, with as much pride as, he never
doubted, the GLOBE or the PALL MALL would speak one day of him. Myself
but lately down from ST. JAMES', I was not too proud to take some
slight but pitying interest in men of other colleges. The unusual name
of a freshman up at WESTMINSTER attracted my attention; I read what he
had to say; and it was only by reciting rapidly with closed eyes the
names of our own famous alumni, beginning confidently with Barrie and
ending, now very doubtfully, with myself, that I was able to preserve
my equanimity. Later one heard that this undergraduate from overseas
had gone up at an age more advanced than customary; and just as
Cambridge men have been known to complain of the maturity of Oxford
Rhodes scholars, so one felt that this WESTMINSTER free-lance in the
thirties was no fit competitor for the youth of other colleges.
Indeed, it could not compete.
Well, I discovered him, but only to the few, the favoured, did I speak
of him. It may have been my uncertainty (which still persists) whether
he called himself Sayki, Sahki or Sakki which made me thus ungenerous
of his name, or it may have been the feeling that the others were not
worthy of him; but how refreshing it was when some intellectually
blown-up stranger said "Do you ever read Saki?" to reply, with the same
pronunciation and even greater condescension: "Saki! He has been my
favourite author for years!"
A strange exotic creature, this Saki, to us many others who were trying
to do it too. For we were so domestic, he so terrifyingly
cosmopolitan. While we were being funny, as planned, with collar-studs
and hot-water bottles, he was being much funnier with werwolves and
tigers. Our little dialogues were between John and Mary; his, and how
much better, between Bertie van Tahn and the Baroness. Even the most
casual intruder into one of his sketches, as it might be our Tomkins,
had to be called Belturbet or de Ropp, and for his hero, weary
man-of-the-world at seventeen, nothing less thrilling than Clovis
Sangrail would do. In our envy we may have wondered sometimes if it
were not much easier to be funny with tigers than with collar-studs; if
Saki's careless cruelty, that strange boyish insensitiveness of his,
did not give him an unfair start in the pursuit of laughter. It may
have been so; but, fortunately, our efforts to be funny in the Saki
manner have not survived to prove it.
What is Saki's manner, what his magic talisman? Like every artist
worth consideration, he had no recipe. If his exotic choice of subject
was often his strength, it was often his weakness; if his
insensitiveness carried him through, at times, to victory, it brought
him, at times, to defeat. I do not think that he has that "mastery of
the CONTE"--in this book at least--which some have claimed for him.
Such mastery infers a passion for tidiness which was not in the boyish
Saki's equipment. He leaves loose ends everywhere. Nor in his
dialogue, delightful as it often is, funny as it nearly always is, is
he the supreme master; too much does it become monologue judiciously
fed, one character giving and the other taking. But in comment, in
reference, in description, in every development of his story, he has a
choice of words, a "way of putting things" which is as inevitably his
own vintage as, once tasted, it becomes the private vintage of the
connoisseur.