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.

Let us take a sample or two of "Saki, 1911."

"The earlier stages of the dinner had worn off. The wine lists
had been consulted, by some with the blank embarrassment of a