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The Development Of Method And Meaning In The Fiction Of 'Saki' (H. H. Munro)

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The Development Of Method And Meaning In The Fiction Of 'Saki' (H. H. Munro)

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Content This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 69-19,391 OTTO, Don Henry, 1922- THE DEVELOPMENT OF METHOD AND MEANING IN THE FICTION OF “SAKI" (H. H. MUNRO). University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1969 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE DEVELOPMENT OF METHOD AND MEANING THE FICTION OF "SAKE" (H. H. MUNRO) by Don Henry Otto A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) June 1969 UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CA LIFO RN IA TH E GRADUATE SCHOO L U N IV ER SITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CA LIFO RN IA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ............................ _Don„Henry„Otto.............................. under the direction of h.is.... Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Gradu ate School, in partial fulfillment of require ments for the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y Dean Date.. DISSERTATION COMMITTEE TABLE OP CONTENTS Chapter Page I. PRELIMINARIES.................................... 1 II. SKETCHES: SOCIETY OBSERVED ..................... 25 III. STORIES WITHOUT HEROES: SOCIETY IN ACTION . . : 69 IV. SAKI'S CHARACTERISTIC PLOT: THE ATTACK .... 105 V. SOCIETY KILLS A PAGAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 VI. A NOVEL WITHOUT A H E R O .................. 180 VII. THE DEVELOPMENT OP METHOD AND MEANING IN SAKI'S FICTION...................... 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................ 224; ii CHAPTER I PRELIMINARIES When I have borne in memory what has tamed Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart When men change swords for ledgers, and desert The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed I had, my Country!— am I to be. blamed? 1 William Wordsworth This dissertation will trace the development of method 2 and meaning in the collected fiction of Saki, Hector Hugh Munro. It will demonstrate his developing techniques as he moves from the plotless sketch to the fully-achieved short story and then to the novel form. Primarily the dissertation will describe Saki1s creation of a basic set 1 , "When I Have Borne in Memory, 1 1 The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Boston, 1904), p. 288. 2 For purposes of analysis in this dissertation, Saki1s "collected fiction" will mean all of the sketches, short stories, and novels included in The Short Stories of Saki (New York, 1958) and The Novels and Plays of Saki (New York, 1945), with the exception of the early political parody The Westminster Alice. 1 2 of characters, his use of these characters in what may be 3 termed his characteristic short story form, and his application of earlier techniques to the novel. Secondar ily the study will discuss his shift from wit to satire and finally to irony. The present chapter will briefly establish the relationship of this dissertation to other criticism of Munro's work. Then it will examine relevant elements of his Russian history, his plays, and The Westminster Alice. The first two belong to other genres, and the last to the period before Hector Hugh Munro adopted the mask of Saki? none of them, then, is appropriately a part of the major concern of this dissertation, but each of them merits examination in determining the genesis of Saki's method and meaning. Although Saki has been the subject of approximately fifty critical articles, book reviews, and introductory essays, most of them have been brief and merit only a passing reference later in the dissertation. For the most part, they have been well summarized in Robert Drake's 1962 3 "Characteristic" is here used to mean the typical plot and structure of Saki's best short stories, to be described in Chapter IV. 3 A 4 . bibliography and in supplementary reviews m subsequent numbers of the Purdue University periodical English Litera ture in Transition {formerly English Fiction in Transition). Drake himself, J. W. Lambert, and Peter Bilton have made important contributions to Saki scholarship, however, and each deserves a note at this point. Robert Drake's bibliography not only gives a synopsis of criticism by other scholars, but also reviews the principal events of Saki's life and states the case for regarding Saki as a serious writer. Most of this case, Drake explains in his earlier M. A. thesis, depends on the 5 importance of Saki's statements about society. Drake recognizes a consistency in theme between Saki's humorous and nonhumorous stories, but by excluding the novels from his study he fails to present a complete janalysis of Saki's statement. He further restricts his study to theme. Con sequently, he does not record the development of Saki's method and misses the concurrent development in meaning. In his bibliography he points out the need for further 4 "Saki: Some Problems and a Bibliography," English Fiction in Transition; V (September 1962), 6-26. 5 "Theme and Rationale m the Short Stories of Saki," Vanderbilt University, 1953, pp. 86-91. serious criticism of Saki (p. 6). J. W. Lambert's excellent introduction to the Bodley Head Saki is an indispensable source of information about' 6 Hector Hugh Munro, as man- and as writer. It includes biographical details from all available sources as well as a chronological critical survey of Saki's work. Modestly, Lambert suggests that no one has criticized Saki in depth (pp. 61-62). He concludes by expressing the hope that Saki's work may be spared close critical scrutiny and be permitted to exist simply as a source of delight. 7 Both in his thesis, "Saki and His Stories," and m a more readily accessible published article, "Salute to an 8 N.C.O.," Peter Bilton demonstrates his awareness of devel opment in Saki's work. Noting an apparent change in the general tone of the stories from lightly humorous to bitterly ironic, he concerns himself with the possible implications of such a change for an understanding of Hector Munro's life; in so focusing his attention on the man, he unfortunately neglects development in method. r ^(London, 1963), pp. 7-62. 7 . University of Oslo, Norway, 1953, p. 44. ^English Studies, XLIII (December 1966), 440. 5 Perceptive as Bilton's reading of Saki has been, he has failed to pursue his own insights adequately into the work itself. The published article is quite brief, and the thesis attempts to bring together a great deal of informa tion about the transition period'in English literature, .'jy.ltti* ■ some significant fact's about Hector Munro1 s life, and a few general observations about Saki's methods; in neither the article nor the thesis does Bilton really develop in detail any one of his thoughtful observations about the development of Saki's fiction. Valuable as the contributions of Drake and Lambert may be, and suggestive as some of Bilton's observations are for this study,_no work of criticism to date-has traced the development of method and meaning in Saki's 9 fiction. This dissertation should therefore make a useful contribution to the body of scholarship about Saki. 9 George J. Spears, in The Satire of Saki; A Study of the Satiric Art of Hector H. Munro (New York, 1963), attempts a general estimate of Saki's fiction, but he offers less of an original nature than do some of the shorter critical articles. His lack of focus and his careless doc umentation make the book for the most part unreliable. 6 The Rise of the Russian Empire Munro1s first book was not fiction, but history. It was the written report of a young man's close study of a barbaric and then medieval society,- Russia from its earliest times to the moment when Peter the Great stepped forward to bring it into the modern world. In this history Munro reported what seemed most significant to him about the human race as it existed in one large portion of the world. His cynical tone reflected his conclusions about the facts he reported. Because Hector Munro the historian was to become Saki the fiction writer within two years, there is reason to examine what the historian found significant in human life and how he expressed his attitudes toward the subject in this first book, The Rise of the Russian Empire (London, 1900). It begins with a poetic description of the somberly brooding primitive forests of Russia, with a connoisseur's careful listing of the kinds of wild animals that prowl them and a romantic's awareness of the pagan forest deities (pp. 3-6). Then come three hundred pages of stories of ruthlessly triumphant warriors, of fiendish cruelties, and of mass deaths, sometimes with werewolves and ghouls in the background. The following excerpts represent the 7 somewhat Gothic tone of the hook: Naturally he [the Prince of Polotzk] achieves the reputation of having more than human powers; rumour has it that he traversed the road from Kiev to Tmoutorakan in a single night, and the unholy wight could in Kiev hear the clock of the Sofia church at Polotzk striking the hours. The suddenness with which he would appear before the gates of some distant town gave rise, no doubt, to the belief that he assumed the form of a wolf on these occasions. (p. 55) In distant corners of Europe men shuddered at the tales that were told of these fearsome sons of the desert; in marvel-loving Constantinople it was gravely averred that they had the heads of dogs and fed upon human flesh, and the dread of their coming kept the fishermen of Sweden and Friesland from attending the herring-market on the English coast, thereby demoralising prices. (p. 95) When the invaders withdrew, bearing with them all that was worth removing, it was a silent city that they left behind them— a city peopled by 24,000 corpses, meet gathering ground for wehr-wolf, ghoul, and vampire, a wild Walpurgis Nacht for the Yaga-Babas of Slavonic lore. {p. 132) Grim and dreary, mean and monstrous as the Moskovy of this period seems, with its Aleksandrovskie sloboda, its gibbets, axes, impalements, and boiling cauldrons, its man-devouring hounds and blood-splashed bear-dens, its Kromiesniki and dumb driven population, its gutters running red and carp growing bloated on human flesh, and above all, everywhere, those glittering crosses; yet not in Eastern Europe alone could "such things be." (p. 251) Following the last passage, Munro goes on to explain that this segment of human life is much like human life elsewhere at the time. Perhaps childhood experiences under the supervision of a strict aunt have taught him to view life as a brutal existence; perhaps the contemporary doctrine of "survival of the fittest" has contributed something; but his straightforward conclusions recorded in the Russian history confirm Graham Greene's opinion that Saki had a "less kindly mind than" Oscar Wilde'and suggest strongly that Munro1s mind had developed this harshness before the fiction under the pen-name "Saki" appeared. It should not surprise us later that Saki's short stories often treat death as a relatively minor incident, sometimes the subject of humor. He shows this casual, humorous treatment of death in the following passages from the history: The Chronicles of Russian history at this period were wholly in the hands of the monks who wrote them around the deeds of the princes or of the luminaries of the Church; hence little can be gleaned from them of the social life and condition of the people, who existed therein solely for the purposes of supplying raw material for a massacre or a pestilence. (p. 79) Under these circumstances the severities and loose morals of Elena Glinski might well be overlooked by her subjects. Her greatest offence was yet to come. She died. (p. 197) For seven days lasted Oblenski's regency, and then himself and his sister were seized and thrown into prison, where the fashionable death-by-starvation awaited them. (p. 197) ^"Introduction," The Best of Saki (New York, 1961), p. ix. 9 The gravest political fault that must be laid to Ivan's account is that his cruelties were occasionally stupid. (P* 213) Chronicles and historical accounts were still largely in ecclesiastical hands, and scant justice would be done to the memory of a man who had married six or seven wives. The Church might forgive his hates, but never his loves. (p. 249) These examples anticipate Saki's fiction in both attitude and technique; he injects the humor by such a subtly econ omical method as substituting a single word ("fashionable11) for a more conventional choice ("conventional") or by a concluding "punch" line or phrase: "She died." The "double-take" of the reader after concluding such a passage is much like the reaction of the reader to one of the following passages from The Short Stories of Saki: There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady. ("Reginald on House-Parties," p. 20) Amabel commenced operations by asking her unsus pecting pupil to tea in the vicarage garden; she believed in the healthy influence of natural surround ings, never having been in Sicily, where things are different. ("Reginald's Choir Treat," p. 16) Munro's insertion of ironic comment gives his history a personal tone. That is, one is conscious of a narrator behind the facts, a narrator with definite conclusions about the human race, a narrator willing occasionally .to treat the great, the important, and the horrible with an ironic smile. Such a narrator may be an interesting com panion for the reader of fiction, but not every historian would appreciate the apparent lack of objectivity. One reviewer, for instance, Archibald Coolidge, criticized what he called "the badness of pages of lurid rhetoric mixed with ineffective sarcasms, not infrequently in bad taste."^ He complained: "Nothing is ever natural, it is all lurid or grotesque or both." He noted that Munro had made the mistake of regarding Russian life as abnormal and strange, and he disapproved further of Munro's occasional ridicule of Christian clergy. In pointing out what he considers to be Munro1s faults as an historian, Coolidge records details of interest to the student of Saki's fiction. Even as an historian, Munro revealed an interest in the grotesque, the strange, the abnormal, and the lurid, and even in such a scholarly work he practiced certain techniques of the humorist. Coolidge's review was one of the least favorable of those published about Munro's first book, but Munro himself was not sufficiently pleased with his .work to 11 . . . . "Reviews of Books," American Historical Review. VII (October 1901), 13 9. 1--- 11 attempt any further writing of history. Nevertheless, his extended exercise in scholarship had enabled him to examine with detachment one portion of human life. The examination enabled him to form general conclusions about the cruelty of human beings toward one another, and he was ready to approach life in his fiction with an experienced reporter's comparative lack of sentimentality. The possible effect of Munro's study of Russian history may be seen in the difference in tone between two somewhat similar stories: "The Image of the Lost Soul," written in 1891, though published posthumously in The Toys of Peace; and "The Saint and the Goblin," published in Reginald in Russia in 1910. Both stories are about talking, thinking statues and their relations with tiny animals near them. In the first, the statue of the lost soul dies heartbroken when a little bird it has known —dies; in the second, the statue of the saint learns from the goblin to be selfish and lets its vanity outweigh its original kindly feelings for starving church mice. In the years between the composition of the first of these stories and the publication of the second, Munro has chosen to present a different face to the world; in the first story he presents the sentimental view of Oscar Wilde, 12 whose somewhat earlier story "The Happy Prince" is re markably like Munro1s "Image" in its characters, situation, and conclusion. But as Ethel Munro, Hector's sister, points out in her biography of the author, he never again shows the sentimental side of his nature that appears in "The 12 Image of the Lost Soul." The reason for the change may well lie in Munro1s adult experiences, including his study of an entire human society, The Rise of the Russian Empire. Saki's Plays Saki1s three published one-act plays deserve little attention in this paper. "The Baker's Dozen," published with stories and sketches in Reginald in Russia, has some witty lines, but the basic situation is insignificant, and the plot depends for its resolution on the improbable circumstance that a father has forgotten how many children he has. "Karl-Ludwig's Window" and "The Death-Trap," published with the full-length play "The Watched Pot" in The Novels and Plays of Saki, do not even have wit. The characters evidence Munro1s romanticism, suggesting the 12 "Biography of Saki," in The Short Stories of Saki, pp. 714-715. Although it is only thirty-six thousand words in length, this brief account contains almost all of the. material we have on Hector H. Munro's life. types found in Anthony Hope1s Prisoner of Zenda or Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Sire de Maletroit's Door." The stories demonstrate Saki's interest in the involvement of a traditional hero in a test of heroism, with a standard code of noble conduct as his guide. The two plays end unhappily for the heroes, but the reader is supposed to feel relief that they have met the test. Such a concern for tradition, honor, heroic action, and romance is to underlie much of Saki's fiction, particularly in his con trasts of the Tory past with the middle-class present. The plays themselves are unimportant, but their themes are consistent, in their view of life, with those of Saki's stories. "The Watched Pot," on the other hand, furnishes an excellent subject for comparison of the verbal wit of Saki with that of Oscar Wilde, for the similarity is clear., Ethel Munro reports that in 1893 her brother had written 13 from Burma in praise of Wilde's "A Woman of No Importance." Even without this confirmation, however, the careful reader of Saki could scarcely fail to see the resemblance to Wilde. In an excellent introduction to Saki's plays, J. C. Squire 13 "Biography," p. 662. 14 says much about the relationship between the two authors when he writes: "Saki" had all Wilde's cleverness at the substitution of a word in a stock saying or the inversion of a familiar proverb, and was an adept at contradicting our favourite cliches of word or thought, or, strangely adapting them to unsuitable contexts. Yet though many of his sentences might be mistaken for Wilde's none of his pages could be attributed to another man. They are all pervaded by a personal manner and attitude.^ Squire is apparently in disagreement with Elizabeth Drew when he calls attention to the overall flavor given Saki's wit by "a personal manner and attitude." Miss Drew says: Saki is the most impersonal of artists. His private emotions and enthusiasms, meditations or thoughts, have no place in the world of his art. Saki is not Hector Munro, any more than Elia is Charles L a m b . ^-5 Her concluding sentence makes the point that needs to be made, although we might restate it in a somewhat different way: Saki is a mask that Hector Munro successfully adopts for his fiction, a mask that conceals some portions of the life and feelings of Hector Munro while presenting a deliberately designed manner and attitude that controls each page, story, or novel. It is a personal manner and 14 "Introduction," The Square Egg (London, 1926), p. xv. 15 "Saki," Atlantic Monthly, CLXVI (July 1940), 96. 15 attitude because Saki, the mask, is very much a person, a person with an urbanity that few if any human beings have as a natural manifestation of their personalities. This Saki mask, which I shall call the narrative figure in discussing Saki’s fiction, does, as Squire says, distinguish Saki’s work from Wilde's in the total effect. Wilde is certainly different in this respect, for here that artifi ciality Roditi notes in Wilde becomes important. Wilde does not have a consistent controlling narrative voice in his fiction, which helps explain the fact that his verbal wit has no necessary relation to the structure and tone of . 16 . his work. This is not true of Saki generally, and it is an important difference between the two, even more important than Wilde's sentimentalism, his melodramatic effects, and his mixture of Puritanism and paganism; in all of these he differs essentially from Saki. Nevertheless, the 17 following lines from "The Watched Pot" suggest Wilde: Oh, dear, yes. I make it a rule to like my relations. I remember only their good qualities and forget their birthdays. (p. 365) 16Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde (Norfolk, Conn., 1947), pp. 131-134. 17 . __ Page rfumbers refer to The Novels and Plays of Saki. Although Charles Maude helped Saki get the play ready for the stage, he gave Saki full credit for the wit (p. 363). One can afford to be neglected by one's own husband; it's when other people's husbands- neglect one that one begins to talk of matrimonial disillusion. (p. 426) Ancestors will happen in the best-intentioned families. (p. 439) The reverse of the logical in the second quotation, the twisted logic of "forget their birthdays" in the first, and the adaptation of an old aphorism by the substitution of "Ancestors" for "Accidents" in the third illustrate Squire's description of the verbal wit of Saki and Wilde. These examples also remind us of the lines presented earlier from The Rise of the Russian Empire? Saki sometimes practiced the techniques of Wilde even in his history. In Wilde's "A Woman of No Importance," the play Saki praised in the letter to his sister previously mentioned, the following 18 lines are similar to those above from "The Watched Pot": It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, now-a-days, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true. (p. 324) I am told that, now-a-days, all the married men live - like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men. (p. 331) Nothing succeeds like excess. (p. 350) Elmer Davis said of "The Watched Pot": 18 Oscar Wilde, The Works of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1927). 17 Neither Wilde nor Shaw ever packed so many good lines into three acts; and they are lines that not only go off, but that have durability. Davis appears to be excessive in his praise of the good lines in Saki's drama. Apart from the question of verbal wit, neither Saki nor his collaborator Charles Maude has succeeded in giving "The Watched Pot" the dramatic effectiveness of a play by Wilde or Shaw. Saki's one-act plays are not so good as the minor drama of Stephen Phillips, for example, and "The Watched Pot" has never succeeded on the stage. It is the only one of Saki's plays that has much interest for us, and that is mainly because it shows his delight in the kind of verbal wit that fills the pages of Reginald. "The Watched Pot" also shows clearly the resemblance between Saki's verbal wit and that of Wilde in his dramas. This resemblance is not so apparent in the fiction of the two writers because Saki's narrator figure establishes a tone, an atmosphere, and a world quite different from those of Wilde's novel and stories. Even in "The Watched Pot," the principal characters are like those of Saki’s stories: a domineering aunt, a 19 "Brilliant Writing," Saturday Review of Literature. V (April 6, 1929), 854. 18 Reginald-like dandy, a politician or two, a clumsy young woman, and one or two aggressive yound ladies; such char acters in association with each other almost automatically give the play Saki's special manner. Although the tech niques of verbal wit are often like those used by Wilde, one may agree with Squire that no page of Saki could be mistaken for one by Wilde, whether in fiction or drama. The Westminster Alice Munro's only published book between The Rise of the Russian Empire and the first collection of Saki stories, Reginald, was The Westminster Alice, in 1902. It is less than fifty pages in length in the one-volume edition of Saki's novels and plays, and the twenty-four illustrations by F. Carruthers Gould, in the manner of Tenniel, fill approximately one fourth of the total space. The political satire of the book is dated, the characters borrowed, the action slight, and the verbal wit below Saki's later standard; it is not a major piece of literature in any sense. Yet The Westminster Alice is probably the most important single factor in the development of those char acteristics that are to distinguish Saki's fiction. It is important primarily because in his imitation of Lewis 19 Carroll Saki is able to experiment with a form through which he can later present his criticism of society. The Westminster Alice is not marked by originality, but it provides direction for the development of original charac ters and situations. Xn the Lewis Carroll originals, which Munro must have studied carefully in order to produce a marketable parody, Munro encountered a number of conditions and techniques that in different form appear in the Saki fiction? some of these techniques do not first appear in The Westminster Alice. The original Alice of Carroll is that kind of satire 20 which Northrop Frye chooses to call an anatomy. A strong flavor of such anatomists as Carroll and Swift attaches itself to most of Saki's fiction. Lewis Carroll's Alice is a character from whom we do not expect the same things we expect of characters in standard fiction; Alice may exist permanently as an undeveloped character, as something of a stereotype of Victorian innocence, but readers do not care. Similarly, we do not make the same demands of Reginald and Clovis that we do of the protagonist 20 The Anatomy of Criticism (New York, 1957), pp. 310-312. 20 of a typical short story by Kipling or Stevenson. Saki's world, like Carroll's world and Swift's world, is being anatomized, and all we require is a suitable window through which we may view the process. The window is Alice or Gulliver or Reginald. Obviously, then, the step from Alice to Reginald is not a big one? it is necessary only for Saki to create his own window through which his readers may view the world. That his Reginald is a particularly interesting window is a mark of Saki's powers of original ity, but the origin is obviously in Lewis Carroll's Alice. We may enumerate quickly some of the other aspects of Carroll's classic that may be found in Saki's fiction: Lewis Carroll's world is one in which characters and events are either in reverse or "turveywise," as Munro calls, them 21 in The Westminster Alice. Animals talk, dress, and act like people, for instance, suggesting the animal analogy that is an undercurrent of much of Saki's fiction. Adult leaders may wear the costumes appropriate to their positions in society and may demand the respect due those positions, but their actions are irrational, impulsive, emotional, ^indecisive, irresponsible— childish, in other words, 21 Novels and Plays of Saki, p. 301. particularly in contrast to the sensible questioning child Alice. Saki carries the contrast a step further sometimes,, making the actions of conventional adults less sensible than those of an erratic Reginald7 Saki does not say that Reginald is wise, but says that society in general is even less capable of wisdom. Alice illustrates her superior sense at the end of each book, Alice's Adventures in 22 Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (p. 289), by becoming physically superior to the creatures she has formerly treated as adult leaders. Her physical superiority follows immediately upon her recognition that the adults are childish and ridiculous and upon her action to upset them physically. For the Saki reader, Clovis, Vera, Conradin, Nicholas, and even Bertie and Reginald grow in size in a sense after each has successfully outwitted conventional society in a face-to-face encounter of some sort, and Saki1s protagonists attack more frequently than Lewis Carroll's Alice does. Carroll, however, furnishes Saki with some examples of each of his three basic types of short fiction: the juvenile observing and passing 22 Lewis Carroll, The Lewis Carroll Book (New York, 1931), p. 110. 22 judgment on conventional society, the adults in conventional society acting out plots in more or less mock-heroic style to ludicrous conclusions, and the juvenile protagonist attaching and temporarily upsetting conventional society. Each of these three types will be treated, in order, in a chapter to itself, in the three chapters that follow this one. In Saki's own development of Lewis Carroll's original in The Westminster Alice, he emphasizes those techniques that most appropriately suit his purpose of political satire. Alice is there, along with many of the characters from Lewis Carroll, but the characters that receive most attention are kings, queens, knights, duchesses, and other persons of rank. Each of them has the appearance of a leader and the actions of a child or worse. The Arch bishop of Canterbury, as a duchess, is unable to control the leaders of the church; the cabinet ministers are unable to make decisions because of their fear of the ballot box power and because of general ineptitude; Humpty Dumpty is the infantile image of a foolish general. Alice generally observes, asks questions, and passes a mild judgment in each case. In the background is the Cheshire Cat, an enigmatic symbol of one who recognizes the weaknesses of the society but is himself outside the society. As Alice herself concludes, the leaders of the times are the reverse of what one would expect them to be. Hector M u n r O j the hero-worshiping Tory, has an answer, but he offers the reader the opportunity to form his own answers. Having revealed his attitudes toward the human race in The Rise of the Russian Empire and having experimented in satiric form in The Westminster Alice, Hector Munro was ready to take on the mask of Saki and use the popularity of his Alice sketches to create the sketches and stories that were to overshadow his career as a political journal ist. His first step was to create Reginald, a character resembling the Wildean dandy of the nineties but less confident than Lord Henry Wooton (of The Picture of Dorian Gray) that he could lead others to follow his pattern of existence. . Giving this protagonist the verbal wit Munro had observed in Wilde, the author was prepared to make his criticism of conventional society entertaining. Eighty per cent of the Reginald collection of 1904' would consist of monologues and dialogues involving Reginald and his demonstrations of wit. Twenty-six such sketches, from early to late collections of Saki, will be discussed in the next chapter. Chapter Three will deal with theme and 24 situation in twenty-eight stories that involve central actions by members of the conventional society? these stories represent the second stage in Saki's development. Chapter Four will consider the basic, characteristic plot in Saki's fiction, the encounter between a juvenile or romantic protagonist like Reginald and the conventional society he criticizes;, there are eighty of these typical stories. The remaining chapters will discuss Saki's two novels and his total development as a writer of fiction. CHAPTER XI SKETCHES: SOCIETY OBSERVED — Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. William Wordsworth^ Twenty-six of Saki's collected short fiction pieces 2 are more properly termed sketches than short stories. These monologues, dialogues, and essays are basically with out plot, although illustrative anecdotes are sometimes used to develop a theme. Typically one of these sketches ^""The World Is Too Much with Us, 1 1 Works of Wordsworth, p. 349. 2 Sone pieces could be classified as either sketches or short stories. These borderline choices are rare, however, and the totals assigned to the various categories in this dissertation should be fairly reliable. In general, those pieces in which the plot is important are classified as short stories; those in which one or more characters are presented briefly in conversation, usually on a single topic, are called sketches. 25 26 presents a juvenile protagonist in the act of anatomizing the conventional society about him; the protagonist of the sketches uses verbal wit to attack that society, much as the protagonist of a Saki short story may use practical jokes and misleading statements to upset the conventional world. In the sketch as in the short story, the back ground presence of a narrator figure is important to the total effect of the piece. Saki begins his career as a fiction writer by developing the sketch and its basic ele ments: narrator figure, juvenile protagonist, conventional society, and verbal wit. The sketch is not far from the political satires in The Westminster Alice in its rough outlines, and the characteristic Saki short story involves only the development of a plot. In the sketch, then, is the key to Saki's fiction. In Reginald, the first collection under the pen name "Saki," twelve of the fifteen pieces are sketches. "Reginald," "Reginald's Choir Treat," and "Reginald's Christmas Revel" are early examples of the characteristic Saki short story, with the juvenile protagonist attacking and temporarily upsetting a portion of conventional society. The remaining twelve pieces are essentially either mono logues or dialogues with Reginald as the central speaker. To most of the readers of Saki at this time, 1904, Saki is primarily a writer of sketches. In the second collection* Reginald in Russia, pub lished in book form in 1910* only the title piece* "Reginald in Russia*" and "The Sex That Doesn't Shop" are sketches. The short stories in this group generally reflect experi mentation with various kinds of plot situation* but mainly with plots that involve only the conventional members of society. Clovis has yet to make his appearance* and Reginald is abandoned after the opening piece. In "The Sex That Doesn’t Shop," the protagonist is the narrator figure* identified as "I." Only one of the twenty-eight pieces in The Chronicles of Clovis, 1911* is a sketch; "The Recessional" is a dialogue between Clovis and his friend Bertie Van Tahn. In the last collection published before Munro's death* Beasts and Super-Beasts, two more sketches appear* "The Feast of Nemesis" and "'Down Pens* 1" both of them dialogues. After the first collection* then* Saki turns from the sketch to the short story* and even in those few sketches that do appear in the later volumes he uses the dialogue rather than the essay-like monologue. To J. W. Lambert* the pieces in The Chronicles of Clovis and Beasts and 3 Super-Beasts represent the mature Saki. To John Gore, on the other hand, the early sketches in Reginald are Saki's 4 best work. It is obvious that the two critics are talking about two different Sakis, for the early Saki is a writer of sketches, and the later Saki is a short story writer. Lambert appears to be on more solid ground than Gore, if the judgment of Saki's best work depends on that which is original in it. In his development of his-characteristic short story form, Saki uses the sketches as a foundation, but trims away some of the irresponsible foolishness, the decadence, of Reginald and relies less heavily on verbal wit as the core of his work. The verbal wit and the decadence of the early protagonist are most easily traced to originals in Wilde and in the early Beerbohm, and the later short stories belong more surely to Saki alone. Yet even the fact that two such critics can choose between early and later Saki collections indicates that his fiction changed during those years and tends to reveal the essen tial mistake of those, like Gore himself and like Drake, 3 The Bodley Head Saki, pp^ 40-41. 4 "Saki," m English Wits, ed. Leonard Russell (London, 1940), p. 309. who sometimes treat Saki's work as though all of it were much the same. Four of the thirty-three pieces in the major post humous collection. The Toys of Peace, 1919, are sketches: ■V "The Mappined Life," "Morlvera," "The Purple of the Balkan m Kings," and "The Cupboard of the Yesterdays." The first two, however, could easily be classified as short stories except that they represent identifiable variations on the form of the early sketches; and the last two seem rather carelessly written, perhaps because of the pressure of time and work after Munro went to war in 1914. A lack of time for the writing of short stories probably explains the fact that five of the eight pieces in The Square Egg are sketches; this 1924 volume is apparently the result of a gathering of leftovers to fill out the volume contain ing Ethel Munro's short biography. Had Saki been alive to supervise publication, he would probably have left some of them unpublished, along with his many newspaper articles on politics. The five sketches in the last collection include three nonfiction essays by Saki, "Birds on the Western Front," "The Achievement of the Cat," and "The Old Town of Pskoff," and two fictional sketches, "Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business" and "The Comments of Moung Ka." The sketches involve three character elements: the narrator figure, the juvenile protagonist, and the members of the conventional society. In most of the monologues, of course, the narrator figure is very much out of sight, although the structure of the monologue (the title, "Reginald on Tariffs," and a parenthetical "said Reginald" in the first line, for example) suggests the presence of this figure. In a few cases, the narrator figure himself is the protagonist: in the three essays in the final volume, in "The Sex That Doesn't Shop," and in "The Purple of the Balkan Kings." Otherwise, the three character elements are more or less discernibly present. Because the creation of these three character elements is the most important achievement in this first stage of Saki1s de velopment as a fiction writer, this chapter will discuss each of them in order before exploring other aspects of the technique of the sketch in- a characteristic sketch, "Reginald at the Theatre." In order to see all of the three character elements in relationship to one another, however, we shall examine first the title piece of the first Saki collection, Reginald. Although "Reginald" is a short story rather than a sketch, it shows the 31 relationships between the three character elements more completely and clearly than any sketch does. "Reginald" In "Reginald" we meet the narrator figure as "I" in the first line. In no other story or sketch do we observe so directly the narrator figure's attitude toward his protagonist. The story begins with the statement: "I did 5 it— I should have known better." He explains that he has made the mistake of persuading Reginald to go to a garden- party against his will. After telling the story of the catastrophe at the party, in which Reginald destroys the general decorum and the narrator figure's relationship with the hostess, the narrator concludes by telling Reginald that he will never take him to another garden-party. Reginald shows his complete lack of repentance by making an irrelevant remark about his tie. Between the opening and the conclusion we learn that the narrator has brought Reginald to the party in order to please the hostess, Mrs. McKillop, and so obtain from her a female Persian * > kitten as wife for Wumples, the narrator's Persian pet. 5 Short Stories of Saki. p. 1. 32 About two thirds of the way through the story, the narrator underlines the turning point of the plot by explaining that Wumples is sure to remain celibate for life; this explana tion may also apply to Reginald, for his conduct is likely to insure him of permanent bachelorhood as well. Regi nald's celibate state is a mark of his position outside conventional society. Saki uses the animals in this story to suggest clues to the reader about the nature and situa tion of some of the human characters in the piece. Here the suggestion is obscure, but in some later stories the relationship between background animal figures and the central human characters is sharp. Beyond the suggestion of celibacy for Reginald, however, is the implication that the narrator figure is an indulgent person, one capable of fondness for both Persian kittens and such amusing strays as Reginald, the outsider. But t-..o narrator is not willing to be an outsider himself, for he states that he will increase his subscription to the pet charity of the Archdeacon's wife in order to regain her social favor. The narrator, then, is an individual whose imagination can be captured by the romantically adventurous spirit of a Reginald, but whose realistic nature tells him that he himself must conform to the more annoying requirements of 33 convention. He is a link between the adventurer and the conventional. The narrator figure also performs a function outside the limits of the story, however. He not only links the juvenile protagonist with the conventional society around him, but he links both of these with the reader himself. That is to say, he supplies for the reader a means of identification within the story; Reginald is so extreme in his views that the reader cannot quite identify with him, and the conventional characters are so obviously dull and unattractive that the reader would not wish to identify with them. The narrator figure is much the sort of person the reader might imagine himself to be, amusedly indulgent, yet a part of society; consequently, the narrator figure fills an important need. After identifying with the narrator figure, the reader is ready to judge Reginald in a more kindly fashion than he might observe if Reginald were to tell the story in the first person; given this indulgence toward Reginald, the reader is likely to accept the narrator's criticism of conventional society. The narrator need not represent Hector Munro; instead he is a mask through which the Saki stories and sketches are pre sented. For artistic purposes, however, he is both 34 ;successful and essential. Once his personality is estab lished in the background of the first story in the first collection, only an occasional suggestion is necessary in later stories to maintain the desired effect. We might add that the use of "I" is unusual in Saki's tales; here it is obviously intended to establish the presence of a definite personality in the background. In the conversational tone of the story, signaled by the dash dividing the opening sentence, Saki suggests a tale told orally in a clublike setting. This effect in the early Saki sketches has been praised by critics like 6 . . . . John Gore and xs xmportant xn provxdxng an appropriate setting for tales about such an eccentric character as Reginald. Reginald himself in this story has certain charac teristics that are to be found in later juvenile protagon ists like Clovis, Bertie, and Vera. He is resistant to the forces of conformity and resistant in an aggressive manner. Instead of sulking when required to attend the party, Reginald goes to the party with the design of destroying it. He succeeds. For every demand society 6 , "Saki," xn English Wits, p. 310. 35 makes of him, he gets something of his own back. Yet although he is independent, Reginald is not adult; the narrator figure treats him like a spoiled child, promising him chocolate creams for going. To the narrator, Reginald is an irresponsible youth whose only concerns are self- centered and hedonistic; yet his self-interest gives him a strength that is- superior to any quality in the conven tional characters. Ridiculous in his exaggerated interest in stylish clothing, epicurean food, and fine liqueurs, he is admirable in his equally extreme determination to annoy bores, Puritans, prudes, prigs, and serious-minded young women. The other characters in the story are types rather than individuals, true to the tradition of the anatomy. The garden-party background itself is typical of Saki, one of his conventional situations for the presentation of such conventional types as the worried hostess, Mrs. McKillop, concerned about keeping her guests occupied with convention al patterns of activity and at peace with each other. The guests at the party are representative of the character types in Saki's other sketches and stories; the boring retired Colonel Mendoza, the Puritanical Archdeacon's wife, the militant Mrs. Rampage, and the mawkish Mawkby girl. 36 They are dull, commonplace, frightened, and defensive; yet by some strange process of history they are now in charge of the world. Reginald is foolish and ridiculous, but in contrast to these conventional types he has enough admir able qualities to win the reader's sympathy. When Reginald teaches the Temperance leader's son to mix drinks, he has the support of the reader though not of the mother. The role of the narrator figure in convincing the reader that Reginald is superior to the others demands just the right posture, voice, and attitude; Saki succeeds in his stories and sketches generally to the degree that he maintains this control in the narrator figure. Saki The narrator figure deserves a name, and the name is obviously "Saki." This became Munro's pen-name after he achieved popularity with The Westminster Alice, and it is the only indication we have of the name of the narrator figure, who is simply "X" in "Reginald" and some later sketches and referred to as "The Other" in four of the Reginald dialogues. Since names like "Mrs. Rampage" and "Miss Mawkby" have already demonstrated Munro1s care in choosing names for his other characters, we may logically examine the probable meanings of the pen-name "Saki." Ethel Munro states that "Hector chose the name 'Saki' from 7 the cup-bearer in the 'Rubaiyat' of Omar Khayyam." She explains that he "loved Persian poetry and Eastern stories" and quotes the last two stanzas of the fifth version of Fitzgerald's translation to make the point. J. W. Lambert wonders at Munro's choice of the name of a cupbearer, however, and notes that The Rev. A. Aitken Crawshaw, husband of Saki's niece, offers an alternative explanation: that it is a con tracted version of Sakya Muni, one of the names of the Buddha, "the enlightened."® The two explanations of the name are not really so differ ent, however, if one examines the forty-sixth quatrain of the same version of Fitzgerald: And fear not lest Existence closing your Account, and mine, should know the like no more; The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour'd Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour. The cupbearer described in this quatrain has the God-like quality of the omniscient narrator, one who introduces readers to all sorts of human bubbles. The detached 7 "Biography," p. 695. 8 The Bodley Head Saki, pp. 28-29. 38 ; attitude of this implied narrator fits the omniscient figure who hovers outside the novels of later years, with their ironic sadness. As Fitzgerald-Khayyam indicated, the sub stance the cupbearer carries may have some importance. We may safely conclude that this omniscient, detached charac- 9 _ „ ter represents at least one side of the Saki mask. Although no critic has mentioned the fact, saki is also the name of a type of South American monkey. In view of Munro1s known interest in wild animals of all sorts, we might offer the additional possibility that he knew of this meaning for the word and privately enjoyed the expanded associations that were possible. Saki the narrator could well be at one and the same time a divinely omniscient figure and a mischievous beast playing games with human toys; in the second case he would be close to the lighter side of his juvenile protagonists. A general meaning of "Saki" is established in the reader's mind by continued association with the stories and sketches themselves, how ever; each succeeding use of the pen-name increases its 9 Elizabeth Drew calls Munro "impersonal" and "Saki" simply a mask, in her article "Saki," Atlantic Monthly, CIiXVI (July 1940), 96-97, though Graham Greene calls the pen-name meaningless in The Best of Saki. p. vii. 39 allusive quality and, as with the repeated juvenile pro tagonist types, enriches the reader's enjoyment of each new story through the memory of earlier stories. Saki appears as "The Other" in four of the Reginald sketches: "Reginald on the Academy," "Reginald's Peace Poem," "Reginald's Drama," and "The Innocence of Reginald." As such, Saki is very much the straight man in a comedy routine, throwing cues to the clown; because of Reginald's extreme statements, the two sometimes suggest the ventrilo quist and his saucy dummy, Saki becoming then a pleasant sort of mediator between this outrageous outsider and the conventional reader. These dialogues, however, have faint suggestions of more literary traditions than the stage comedy act. The contemporary Sherlock Holmes, a different kind of outsider, needed the more conventional mind of Dr. Watson as a mediator between his intellectual fireworks and the standard mental patterns of the readers. In a situation at once more distant and more immediately comparable, the romantic Don Quixote needed an earthy Sancho Panza to relate him to the practical world of his readers. Saki as The Other has few lines, and most of them are intended simply to draw Reginald out and to establish a fairly sympathetic atmosphere for Reginald's hyperbole; 40 occasionally, though, the sympathetic interaction between the two is so harmonious that The Other essays an aphorism or two. For instance, in "Reginald on the Academy," it is The Other who produces that memorable remark, "To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.For the most part, however, The Other is an effective straight man for Reginald's wit. He is clearly more sympathetic with Reginald than is the Duchess Irene, who is often both the audience for and the object of Reginald's criticism. He has almost the same relationship to Reginald in their dialogues that Mrs. Thackenbury has to her nephew Clovis in "The Feast of Nemesis"; the aunt is obviously caught up in the spirit of the moment, however, and catches Clovis's mood because of Clovis's control of the situation; The Other, however, is generally the responsible person indulging his own romantic side by en couraging Reginald to show off. The use of various kinds of pairings in the dialogues creates not only the interest produced by variety, but a manifold means of communicating to the reader the juvenile protagonist's criticism of the world. The use of The Other as interrogator provides a 10 Short Stories of Saki, p. 9. favorable atmosphere for the reception of Reginald's criticism; in addition, this occasional appearance of the narrator, Saki, as a character in the sketches is like the passing of a host among guests at a party: his momentary presence leaves behind a controlling impulse for pleasure when he is not in view. The narrator figure frequently retreats from sight in the sketches, leaving Reginald or Clovis alone on the stage. Saki uses the parenthetic " (said Reginald) 1 1 or a slight variation of it in such monologues as "Reginald on Worries," "Reginald on Besetting Sins," and "Reginald on Tariffs." Xn these sketches the absence of The Other or some more or less responsible character like the Duchess is felt in the rambling nature of the monologue; yet the rambling from topic to topic by free association of ideas is quite in character for Reginald on his own, and the sketch may be just as entertaining in its own way as is one of the controlled dialogues. Even in these monologues, however, the presence of the narrator figure somewhere in the background is sensed, the parentheses in the first line providing the suggestion of another presence. Saki becomes "I" in "The Sex That Doesn't Shop" and offers to the impractical shopping habits of women the 42 same amused indulgence he shows for Reginald in "Reginald.1 1 The women are as ridiculous as Reginald in their own way, hut they are a part of the social pattern; whereas Reginald is outside standard patterns. Saki's humorously critical attitude toward the silly ways of Reginald and women shoppers is in contrast to his hitter view of what he con siders to he the real evils of life. In "The Purple of the Balkan Kings, " published posthumously, Saki does not enter the narrative as a character or as "I, " hut he editorializes so freely that his role as narrator is important in the story. Purporting to he a short story, "The Purple of the Balkan Kings" is really a portrait of an Austrian "financier and diplomat," a portrait painted by a most unsympathetic artist. In this sketch the narra tor calls the Austrian one of the "Caesars of Mammon" and speaks of his worship of "power and force and money- 11 mastery." His world is a "pompous, imposing, dictating world," one of "big purses and big threats." The narrator is obviously delighted that Luitpold Wolkenstein, the Austrian financier, one of the masters of contemporary merchant society, is humiliated by the news of the success 13~Short Stories, pp. 592-594. 43 >of heroic Balkan soldiers in their battles against the Establishment. The tone of the story is quite unlike the tone of the Reginald sketches; yet the narrator is the same Saki as before; he is indulgent with children, roman tics, and foolish women, but he is aggressively hostile toward the monstrous mediocrities who have made Mammon the ruling spirit of society. Xn three essays in the posthumous The Square Egg. Saki speaks directly on topics that are important to an understanding of his attitudes toward human relationships and conduct. "Birds on the Western Front" describes the effects of battle conditions on bird and animal life. His frequent comparisons in this essay of human life and the lives of the lower animals reveal a point of view that is characteristically Saki. In his fiction, animals are often in the background of the stories, lending support to the principal themes and to character descriptions; we have seen something of this in "Reginald." Xn this essay, human beings are the background characters, and comparisons are ■equally subtle, sometimes being indicated by verbs like "mobilized": "Rats and mice have mobilized and swarmed ! 44 12 into the fighting line." He describes a battle between crows and hawks, with a human aerial combat in the upper background. He himself is an intruder in bird society as he throws himself to the ground in battle and confronts a brood of young larks. The essay sticks to its subject; it is about birds and animals, not human beings; but in it Saki uses human beings as a sort of shocking contrast to his principal subject. In his fiction the reverse is often true. "The Old Town of Pskoff' uses the same technique in one instance; a human swimmer takes a "trout1s-eye-view" of the town; but this essay is more significant as it reveals-his love for the past and for these parts of the world where modern commercialism has not destroyed romance. He calls it a town "which probably gives as accurate a picture as can be obtained of a mediaeval Russian burgh, untouched by Mongol influence, and only slightly affected 13 by Byzantine-imported culture." In this town he finds the costumes of the people gay and charming, the shops quaint, the peasants stalwart, and the business life pleas ant. The essay is worth remembering when one comes to 12 Short Stories, p. 613. 13 Short Stories, p. 627. 45 Saki's short stories that are most critical of modern life. Pskoff is one of his romantic standards by which most of modern life fails. Saki's essay on "The Achievement of the Cat" is one of his most intriguing statements of belief. It is about 'cats, but it is also about the qualities of heroism and endurance that modern man must develop if he is to resist the evils of conformity and of conventional patterns of existence. The cat, Saki explains, has made the most suc cessful adaptation to the modern world of any domestic animal. It has been able to obtain acceptance at the fireside of its former enemy, man, now dominant in the world; yet, unlike other domestic animals, it retains its independence. It can roam at night in civilized communities as it once did in the jungle, still free, still fierce and carnivorous, then return to the comforts of the household when it is ready to do so. The essay ends on a note that is at once pessimistic about the chance of success for heroes in the modern world and defiant in his praise of hopeless heroism: And when its shifts and clever managings have not suf ficed to stave off inexorable fate, when its enemies have proved too strong or too many for its defensive powers, it dies fighting to the last, quivering with 46 ; the choking rage of mastered resistance, and voicing in its death-yell that agony of bitter remonstrance which human animals, too, have flung at the powers that may be; the last protest against a destiny that might have made them happy— and has not.-*-^- This essay appears in the last volume of posthumous selec tions, but the respect Saki expresses for the cat is the end of a thread that begins as early as The Westminster Alice. Saki, like Lewis Carroll, makes the Cheshire Cat a creature that can come and go as it pleases and that seems to know the answers to some of Alice's questions about the society she observes. Cats appear in many of Saki's stories, taking important subordinate roles in "Reginald," "The Reticence of Lady Anne," "The Penance," and "The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat." In the last three, the cats are in some respects superior to the human protagonists. In "Tobermory" the cat becomes the protagon ist. In "Mrs. Packletide's Tiger" the contrast between an aging tiger and an aunt-figure, one of the powers of con ventional society, is an effective comment on which of the two, man or tiger, is the "super-beast." Saki’s mythology of the cat, as revealed in "The Achievement of the Cat," may owe a good deal to Kipling. 14 Short Stories, p. 626. 47 Just after completing The Westminster Alice, Saki attempted a parody of Kipling's Just So Stories. The parody was unsuccessful, so it did not reach hook form, but it must have brought Saki into close acquaintance with Kipling’s book. In that book, the final story is called "The Cat 15 That Walked by Himself." Like Saki's essay on “The Achievement of the Cat," this story first probes the dark ness of a time when animals were wild and hostile to man. Kipling tells of the coming together of Woman and Man and the establishment of domestic patterns; then he describes how Woman tames the horse and the dog and attempts to tame the cat. The cat outwits Woman and gains the privileges of the household while retaining his right to walk alone. It adapts successfully to the new pattern of life, yet remains free. This is almost precisely the myth that Saki presents in his essay, and it defines much of the goal Saki sets for his juvenile protagonists. The Juvenile Protagonist Saki the narrator retreats farther into the background after the Reginald protagonist is abandoned. Clovis, like 15 Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories (Garden City, New York, 1912), pp. 197-223. the cat, can stand alone; he is more attractive than Reginald because he is less silly and more in control of situations. In "The Feast of Nemesis," for instance, we find Clovis actually bringing his aunt around to his own point of view. This is hardly what one would expect of a Reginald, for Reginald's mischief rather regularly results in his temporary exclusion from society or in a similar punishment. Only occasionally, as in "The Peace Offering, 1 1 does Clovis so conduct himself as to be faced with inevi table reprisal by persons he must depend on for his com-__^ forts; but Reginald misses meals and other delights as a result of his pranks in "Reginald," "Reginald's Christmas Revel," "Reginald's Rubaiyat," "Reginald's Choir Treat," and others. Clovis is superior to Reginald in control; the conclusions of "The Match-Maker" and "The Stampeding of Lady Bastable" tell us of Clovis's ability to conduct his attacks on convention in such a way as to be in a favorable situation at the end of the episode. Clovis is much closer than Reginald to the ideal hero established in "The Achievement of the Cat." The protagonists of the novels will be discussed later, but they, too, are much different from Reginald. Reginald is obviously an experimental character who is important in the development of Saki's later protagonists but not a completely satisfactory pro tagonist himself. He is good enough in sketches in which the emphasis is on verbal wit, but too erratic and unsym pathetic to be the hero of the characteristic Saki short story. Clovis, however,' bwes much to Reginald, and Reg inald himself owes something to other authors. J. W. Lambert perceptively refers to Reginald as 16 "a kindergarten Lord Henry Wotton." It would be difficult to ignore the resemblance between Reginald and some of Wilde’s characters, particularly in view of their common indulgence in aphorisms. Their views are frequently very much alike: “To have reached thirty," said Reginald, “is to have failed in life.1 1 Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself. Reginald frequently criticizes duchesses and other noble women who do not look the part; Wilde says of Lord Henry's wife, "She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded j i The Bodley Head Saki. p. 30. j Short Stories, p. 10. | 18 Dorian Gray speaking, Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 124. ; 19 • :m being untidy." The dandies in both Wilde and Saki are contemptuous of popular taste in art and music and regard luxuries as necessary to life. Both sets of dandies are self-centered, and both choose to make their own rules of conduct. The resemblances are many. Yet Reginald is completely different from Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray : in his effect on the reader. The dandies of Wilde's novel had a different kind of arrogance from the childish impud ence of Reginald. Lord Henry appears to be confident that his philosophy can become that of all in his world who are really important. Neither he nor Dorian is particularly humorous. Reginald, however, is never completely serious. Wilde's Lord Henry seems to violate decorum when he is i witty, for he is presented seriously in a tale of terror; Reginald's wit seems to be the natural product of his personality, for Saki presents him with the amused tone of an adult introducing a precocious youngster to other adults.: Death in The Picture of Dorian Gray is a subject for melo dramatic narrative; in the Reginald Sketches, death is an unimportant incident, often the subject of humor: Although j i ■ the resemblances between Wilde's Lord Henry and Saki's I i ^Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 136. Reginald are identifiable, they are not really important; for Saki's world is one in which a mere dandy cannot be taken, seriously, even if the dandy is sometimes less ridiculous than the conventional world about him. Wilde is not the only writer to have introduced dandies to the literary world. Critics have identified so many possible influences on Saki's protagonists that they cancel each other out. Saki is not a John Oliver Hobbes or an Anthony Hope, for their characters, situations, and verbal wit are only superficially like Saki's. He is not a Max Beerbohm, for Zuleika Dobson is the product of an author whose attitude is one of pure joy. Though he re sembles all of these authors superficially, Saki owes more to Lewis Carroll than to any of them, and his juvenile protagonist develops from Alice rather than from Lord Henry Wotton. Clovis and the protagonists of the novels are guided by a fairly well-defined philosophy of life; this, too, appears in the Reginald sketches in tentative, experimental ; form. In "Reginald at the Theatre," the Duchess points toward a probable influence on Saki's philosophy when she ; says: "Oh,-you're simply exasperating. You've been reading f Nietzsche till you haven't got any sense of moral proportion 20 :left." Young men in London were reading Nietzsche in the early years of this century, according to Holbrook 21 Jackson. Reginald, however, is not the manly man or the warrior that Nietzsche praises. He suggests Nietzsche mainly in his egotism, his nonmoral attitudes, certainly beyond good and evil, and his rejection of conventional attitudes. Nietzsche's philosophy is often so close to the Toryism Saki reflects in The Westminster Alice that it would be difficult to separate the two in Saki's work. But Nietzsche might well be one of the sources of Saki's view of life. Another possible influence on Saki is the Sir Roger De Coverley sketches. The titles of the Reginald sketches and those of the Sir Roger pieces suggest a pos sible attempt by Saki to ironically suggest the earlier series. Sir Roger and Reginald are contrasting characters, ; however, and Saki's point in any such suggestion would be that society has descended a long way from the solid values of Sir Roger's Toryism. Perhaps the possible influence of Sir Roger on Saki's thought is best seen in a comparison ,of the pictures of Sir Roger's life in the country and the 20 . Short Stories, p. 13. 21 The Eighteen Nineties (New York, 1927), pp. 128-130. idealized portrait of Lady Greymarten at Torywood in When 22 William Came. The similarities are in total effect rather than in details, but they exist. Saki's philosophy develops from a number of sources, some of which we can only guess, but among them are his probable reading of Nietzsche, his interest in Tory traditions, his study of Wilde and the other writers of the decadent school, his critical evaluation of Russian history, his fondness for things medieval. Oriental, and romantic, and his observation of contemporary society. His philosophy becomes more important to his fiction as he moves from the relatively lighthearted Reginald sketches to the more serious actions of Clovis, Comus, and the principals of When William Came. The names of Saki's protagonists often suggest the heroes they should be. According to Webster1s Seventh Collegiate Dictionary, "Reginald" is a Teutonic name mean ing "strong ruler"; "Clovis" is the name of a Frankish king; "Albert" (Bertie) is Teutonic and means "illustrious through nobility"; "Nicholas" is the name of a Russian Czar i as well as of the juvenile protagonist in "The Lumber-Room"; "Conradin" is a diminutive of "Conrad," which means "bold 22 Novels and Plays of Saki, p. 244. 54 ; counsel." Conradin appears in "Sredni-Vashtar." All of these suggest nobility and strength and aid the contrast between the ideal hero and the kind available today. Vera, one of the more accomplished liars in fiction, has a name that suggests truth. Like her male associates in Saki's list of juvenile protagonists, however, her name is ambiguous. Her lies are real enough, but in contrast to the hypocrisies of the society about her, they are true. Most of the young men protagonists appear at first to be contradictions of their heroic names; yet they have a greater potential for heroic action, being individuals, than do the standard representatives of conventional so ciety. Saki's names- furnish an opportunity for him to turn : life around until the reader sees it from various points of view and thereby discovers that the first view is not always the most nearly accurate. His juvenile protagonists are best seen in contrast to conventional society. Conventional Society The standard types in "Reginald" are representative of conventional society as it appears in the rest of Saki's ■ fiction: the bore, the graceless young woman, the militant ‘ female, the Puritan, the unimaginative hostess. In an 55 I j occasional instance an important character in Saki can he j all of these persons at once. Amabel in "Reginald's Choir ! Treat" is one such example, combining in a single individual enough of the objectionable qualities in conventional soci- ; ety to inspire Reginald to use extreme methods of rebellion ; against society. In most stories, though, Saki's targets of attack are more specialized. In Saki's fiction, the titled woman who has descended to the level of the dominant middle class in her standards of taste and conduct is often used to represent conventional society. The Princess in "Reginald in Russia" is such a person, a woman whose taste-in furniture," dogs, and Socialism reveals her ignorance: "He classified the Prin cess with that distinct type of woman that looks as if it i habitually went out to feed hens in the rain" (Short j Stories, p. 45). The Duchess Irene exhibits similar traits; she is vaguely liberal but devoutly capitalistic, | and she cannot be trusted to choose a wine (p. 22) . Her intellectual performance in "Reginald at the Theatre" is ! typical of her group. Reginald observes of Lady Beauwhistle: i i i and of the type in general that they might learn grace and j I dignity by studying the conduct of Persian cats (p. 19). i ! Reginald sometimes turns his criticism into guidance for ! the Duchess, but he is too frivolous to be a teacher. Clovis3 however, frequently teaches his companions something, of the graces of life; his chronicles are often parables to illustrate social lessons, as in "The Chaplet," "The Story of St. Vespaluus, " and "The Way to the Dairy." The lessons are unconventional, but titled persons who have surrendered their noble prerogative of establishing high standards of taste require unconventional promptings. A number of types occur in Saki repeatedly: indecisive government leaders, suffragettes, union members, pompous Germans, rich Jews, domineering aunts, wealthy American and Continental boors, and artists who lower their standards for popular approval. Saki is firmly British, and his chief objection to wealthy Germans, Jews, Americans, Greeks, and the rest is that they have corrupted traditional British aristocratic taste. Suffragettes are unwomanly women who have abandoned their traditional place in society,; like the union workers who have no loyalty for their em ployers. The principal villains, however, are those aristocrats who fail to lead; because of them, suffragettes and labor agitators can succeed in their disruptive actions.' Saki's conventional types are exaggerated, it is true; collectively they present a distorted picture of the world; but Saki creates his own world, not a real world, 57 •and he does so in order to furnish recognizably evil giants for his juvenile Don Quixotes to attack. Whether real or not, Saki's world is consistent within itself, and it is hear enough to truth to make his point. The Technique of the Sketches In the Reginald sketches, the emphasis is on verbal wit and the comic natures of the characters themselves. The verbal wit is much the same as that of Saki's dramas, a wit of syllepsis, substitution, suprise, and puns. Much of it depends on the shock of treating serious matters lightly and inconsequential affairs seriously. As Holbrook Jackson has pointed out, however, this kind of verbal wit was practiced by many of the writers of the nineties and 23 after. Saki's originality depends largely on how he matches surprise and inversion in word and phrase with surprise and inversion in character and situation. As Jackson points out, this verbal wit is a "dandyism of the intellect"; the dandy, therefore, is the verbal wit become character. So long as Saki treats the dandy as an object of ridicule, the harmony between verbal humor and the rest 23 The Eighteen Nineties, p. 111. 58 of the sketch is easy to discover. But in the early sketches Saki develops the wit of surprise, inversion, substitution, and paradox in other characters as well. A juvenile protagonist with an heroic name like Reginald quite obviously provides surprise when he turns out to be the sort of fop Sir Roger De Coverley claimed had corrupted his age (Spectator No. 6). In the role of hero Reginald is clearly a substitution for something stronger. But most of the conventional characters are also substitutions for something better, for what they ought to be. A Duchess who cannot enter a room gracefully is like a pun; she resembles the appropriate term in some respects, but the fact and nature of her essential difference from it makes her ridiculous. For- "womanly women," society substitutes suffragettes and socialists; for government leaders, democ racy substitutes sycophantic seekers after votes; for the faithful servants of Coverley Hall, labor unions substitute arrogant and disloyal strikers. So Saki views the world. As characters accept roles in society that are the inverse of their proper places, so each plot situation is filled with substitution, inversion, and surprise. Values, too, have been turned "turveywise." Money is all; honor is its servant. The popular and the mediocre in art, music. literature, and the delicacies of gracious living have supplanted the truly fine and rare. In Saki, the techniques of verbal wit are extended to character, plot, setting, and even imagery; as we have seen, Saki's animals are not merely superior to Saki's conventional characters in single traits like ferocity and speed: they are superior as total crea tures. In "Mrs. Packletide' s Tiger," the beast is noble and the supposed conqueror of the beast is basically false to her human nature. In "The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat, " Jocantha is afraid of life, but her cat gets what he wants. The comparison between beast and human being is generally favorable to the beast, a consistent inversion expressed through what sometimes seem to be casual uses of imagery. For those who are most entertained by the obvious humor of the verbal wit and of the ridiculous dandy, Reg inald, Saki's later stories are less interesting than the early pieces. Reginald's monologues, moving from one eccentric topic to another in apparently erratic fashion, are full of surprise,- shock, and inversion; the speaker is himself the object of much of the ridicule. In "The Sex That Doesn't Shop," a later sketch, the narrator figure speaks, and the ridicule is focused on women shoppers, a • part of conventional society. The laughs are still there, hut most of them come from the actions of the standard products of society, not from the outsiders. In the final Clovis monologue, ’ ’ Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Busi ness, " Clovis is not the subject of ridicule, nor are his words; verbal wit and the wit that ridicules the dandy have been replaced by a serious ironic comment on the masters of conventional society, the businessmen. Although Saki has altered his techniques in the twelve-year span between "Reginald on Worries" and "Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business," the method is not completely different. In the last example as in the first, the subjects of humor are ridiculous because they are substitutes for the ideal; the depth of difference between the ideal and the actual is nowhere more remarkable than in the last example, where the masters of the world, those who set the pattern for others, have lived lives that are completely without meaning, com pletely failures. The humor is grim because the persons at the center of the pattern are seen to be ridiculous, not just the eccentric outsiders. "Clovis- on the Alleged Romance of Business" is not so entertaining a sketch as any of the Reginald pieces, however. Saki's shift in emphasis from a ridiculous protagonist to one capable of action made his new sketches duller than the earlier ones; it was logical for him to leave the sketch behind, for the most part, as he abandoned Reginald. Yet at their best the Reginald sketches were much more than mere entertainment. They frequently made a serious comment on society, and in some cases they presented unified criticisms of single aspects of conventional life and thought. We can demonstrate this best and sum up the potential of the Saki sketch by a detailed analysis of one of his dialogues, "Reginald at the Theatre." "Reginald at the Theatre" The title of the essay names the principal character and the setting of the. dialogue. Only indirectly does it refer to the topic of conversation, society's codes. .The two characters are engaged in a conversation while a play by Stephen Phillips, Paolo and Francesca, is in progress before them. "Reginald at the Theatre" contrasts with "Sir Roger at the Play" (Spectator No. 335), for in Addi son's sketch Sir Roger focuses his attention and his remarks on the play itself; in Saki's sketch, Reginald and the Duchess ignore the play except when the Lord of Rimini is too noisy for them to talk. Reginald and the Duchess , 62 are themselves performing; the reverse of the logical is true in the basic situation. The characters of the Duchess and Reginald are quite unlike each other. The Duchess, though possessing a noble title, is in her attitudes toward life the epitome of middle-class social leadership, and Reginald is an outsider. The Duchess accepts with little question what she vaguely understands to be the conventional code of her time. Reginald questions all, and his questions help the Duchess see the flaws in that code. Neither character is described in this essay, so we do not know their ages or personal details about their families or friends. We know only that one is a duchess and the other her companion whom she refers to in one case as "child." She views Reginald with dis trust, and he feels some disapproval for her: Reginald considered that the Duchess had much to learn; in particular, not to hurry out of the Carlton as though afraid of losing one's last bus. A woman, he said, who is careless of disappearances is capable of leaving town before Goodwood, and dying at the wrong moment of an un fashionable disease. (Short Stories, p. 11) This passage contains the best of the verbal wit in the sketch: substitution of "disappearances" for the expected "appearances" and the use of surprise in the word "unfash ionable" associated with death. The single word flash of 63 ;wit is characteristic of Reginald, particularly in his treatment of serious matters in a light fashion. 'The pas sage does not, however, offer precise facts about the two characters. Elsewhere, Saki ridicules unnecessary des cription; in describing the working habits of a commercial novelist named Mark, he writes: He had described at some length, for the benefit of those who could not imagine it, what a rectory garden looks like in July; he was now engaged in describing at greater length the feelings of—a young girl, daugh ter of a long line of rectors and archdeacons, when she discovers for the first time that the postman is attractive. (Short Stories, p. 529) Saki follows his own advice, assuming that the reader can develop his own image of the Duchess and Reginald and their exact position at the theatre. H. E. Bates calls this sort of economy one of the marks of the modern short story 24 writer. In this respect, at least, Saki is modern. The Duchess introduces the subject in the opening paragraph, remarking about the universal nature of stand ards of right and wrong. She speaks of their having “well- : defined limits," but she does so "vaguely," suggesting that : she has not really determined what those limits are. Her 24 The Modern Short Story (London, 1943), p. 23. vagueness gives Reginald an opening; his reference to situation ethics (in different terms) brings the conversa tion to a stop as they look at each other with distrust. She supposes that Reginald has lower concepts of humanity than her own and mentions the evolutionary concept of man's descent from the ape. Reginald, however, says that man generally has not made the descent. She supposes he is irreligious. He^replies: Oh, by no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other. (p. 11) "Theatre" in the title now seems to apply to the topic; for Reginald is saying that "religion" today is a matter of convenient pretense. The Duchess is contemptuous, but her use of religion is also suggestive of playing church: She was one of those people who regard the Church of England with patronizing affection, as if it were some thing that had grown up in their kitchen garden. At this point the confrontation of the two, the out sider and the conformist, has discovered the fact that the outsider is not deeply religious. This may shock, but it is not particularly surprising. Next, however, we discover that the Duchess is not particularly religious, even though j . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - - - - - - 6 5 : she does not know her position herself. Because she repre sents the solid part of society, we are shocked. Reginald's mild reversal of the normal is insignificant by comparison to the Duchess's unconscious revelation that the normal is really not "normal." Interrupted once by the noises of the play, they discuss other codes and standards. Reginald does not really believe in brotherhood and says as much; the Duchess does not believe in it either, but Reginald must point this out to her. Her philanthropy does not bring her into sympathy with the poor; and, as Saki points out, the system of competition means that giving to one requires taking away from another, so where is philanthropy, after all? She concludes that he has been reading Nietzsche too much and believes in no rules of conduct. He explains that his rules; of conduct depend on his own comfort, a Nietzschean concept,; and makes a witty remark about the necessity of behaving well to commoners, since one of them may be a king. By Nietzschean standards, such a levelling would be bad; Reginald indicates that it is the condition of modern man. The middle-class values of the Duchess, already examined, have prepared the reader for the reference to the king, so this remark, even though it appears to be irrelevant at 1 firstj sums up the situation of the Duchess and the rest of society. The conversation concludes with Reginald's statement that nowadays the wealthy man can buy all of the other honors. Buried in the sketch are a number of allusions,, each with its power to provide additional meaning and all of them contributing to the unity of the total sketch. One is from Kipling's "Recessional, " which suggests to the reader all of the codes of the British Establishment. The next allusion is identifiable as a reference to the "young ravens" in Psalm 147. The next is more interesting: For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffen sive, grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden. (p. 13) The allusion is to Hebrews 12:2, "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." Both pieces of advice are based on self— ; interest; one may be rewarded if he does this. Reginald's ironic comment reminds us, however, that his statement is honestly based on the principle of looking out for his own comfort; the New Testament advice, suggestive of the > i Duchess's recent remarks on philanthropy, is just as selfish in motive, but hides the motive behind the supposed ! Christian motive of charity. The essay on codes, religious and otherwise,, hypo critical and otherwise, concludes with Reginald's statement that he has read in a sacred book of a man who asked for wealth and then received all other honor. The "sacred book”; is Debrett (the peerage list) . One is expected, however, to think of the famous "lilies of the field" passage in the sixth chapter of Matthew, which begins with the warning that one "cannot serve God and Mammon" and concludes with the advice that we seek first "the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." Two sacred books are involved, Debrett arid the Bible. The first, Saki is saying, governs society. Two gods are involved, Mammon and Jehovah; the first actually controls society. The Duchess is a faithful worshipper of Mammon, but she believes that she is faithful to her kitchen garden • Church of England and that Reginald is the unbeliever. ; Reginald is not moral, but beyond good and evil in his own way; neither is the Duchess moral, but she fancies herself to be. In "Reginald at the Carlton," the same Duchess, we I are told, is "sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence towards dividends" (p. 22). The church is something in her kitchen garden, but dividends, the tokens ;of Mammon, receive her reverence. Saki leaves no doubt about the nature of the society he dissects. In a single essay of two and a half pages, "Reginald at the Theatre," he shows how he can reverse over and over again the way in ‘ which the reader must see this world ruled by Mammon. He turns people and ideas on a spit until the reader can see them from every angle. After such a turning, the Duchess seems much the inferior of her parasite companion, Reginald. This sketch illustrates the possibilities of serious statement underneath an exterior of wit; but these possi bilities were largely abandoned after the first collection of Saki's fiction. He found the plotted short story more useful for his purposes. After 1904, most of his pieces are forms of the short story. The sketch represents an :important stage in his development as a fiction writer, in i i that it enabled him to develop character types he would use later and to introduce most of the themes and many of the j techniques he would present in his future stories. CHAPTER XIX STORIES WITHOUT HEROES: SOCIETY IN ACTION ----- The world is too much with us; late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours ; We have given our hearts away, a sordid booni 1 . William Wordsworth .1 i » Twenty-eight of Saki's short stories are basically accounts of actions that take place entirely within conven tional society; they are stories without heroes and without ;heroism. In these stories, Saki presents most of his themes, most of his criticisms of conventional society. Sometimes he is humorous in tone, sometimes ironical, some times simply bleak. Clovis appears in the background of a number of these stories, either as an observer or as a teller of the story; but neither Clovis nor any other juve nile protagonist is a principal actor in any of them. Such 1 "The World Is Too Much with Us, " Works of Wordsworth, p. 349. ‘ stories belong to Saki's second stage of development. Having left Reginald and the sketch behind for the moment, ! t Saki experimented with styles more characteristic of other writers, even while he continued to work toward his char acteristic confrontation of juvenile protagonist and conven- V tional society. His most clearly imitative short stories appear in Reginald in Russia, published six years after its ; predecessor, Reginald. A few heroless stories are included ; in each of the succeeding collections except the final one, I The Square Egg. After Reginald in Russia, however, even the stories without heroes generally bear the distinctive ! marks of Saki, although the later stories of this type sometimes break new paths for the author, too. Reginald in Russia is a collection of fifteen pieces; one is a play; two are sketches; six are early versions of the characteristic Saki plot; and the following six are stories without heroes: "The Reticence of Lady Anne, 1 1 "The ! i Lost Sanjak, 1 1 "The Blood-Feud of Toad Water," "Judkin of the Parcels," "The Saint and the Goblin," and "The Bag." i J All but the last are somewhat derivative, although all of ; 1 them are consistent in theme with the rest of Saki. Seven j i of the twenty-eight pieces in The Chronicles of Clovis | belong in this chapter: "Mrs. Packletide's Tiger," "The ; ” „ 7i I : i backgrounds" "The Quest," "The Hounds of Fate," "A Matter 'of Sentiments" "The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope," and "The Remoulding of Groby Lington." In five of these, Clovis; appears in the background, more or less as an interpreter of their meaning. He appears less frequently in those that ; follow. Beasts and Super-Beasts includes nine without heroes: "The Cobweb," "The Unkindest Blow," "Cousin Teresa," "The Yarkand Manner, " "The Byzantine Omelette, M "A Holiday Task," "The Stalled Ox, 1 1 "The Name-Day," and "The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat." In The Toys of Peace are the following six: "Louise, " "Tea, " "A Bread and Butter Miss," "Forewarned, " "The Seven Cream Jugs, " and "The Oversight." Saki’s Criticism of Society These stories present Saki's major statements about j I conventional society. They do so mainly by describing sit-j uations that require but do not have individuals capable of decisive, imaginative action. Most of them contrast ! ;existing conditions with an implied ideal. Sometimes they i i describe the leaders of conventional society exerting mas- = i sive effort to confront insignificant problems? at other times, they present insignificant people incapable of action; r " “ ' 72 ; i ;in the presence of genuine difficulties. In each case, I the reader is generally aware of the contrast between what he reads and an unstated but comparable story of traditional / heroes. In a sense, most of these stories are miniature mock-epics. As such, they follow the Saki tradition of deriving humor from the light treatment of important affairs and the solemn treatment of unimportant matters. In addition, they involve substitution and surprise; the substitution of mediocrity for heroism and the surprise that must result when those in positions of leadership are incapable of leading. Some of the lighter stories are simply tales of fumbling and inefficiency. In "The Quest" and "Louise," for instance, supposedly responsible adults misplace their i ! children, mainly because they are unable to differentiate between what is important and what is not. In "A Matter of Sentiment" and "A Bread and Butter Miss," groups of adults waste' a good deal of time in trying to predict winners in horse races, and fail to do so. In "The Over- j sight" and "The Byzantine Omelette, " hostesses find it I impossible to overcome elementary problems in handling I . people, elementary by traditional standards in such things, ! i at least. A somewhat similar problem is the cause of ! Iconfusion in "The Seven Cream Jugs." These stories are basically light entertainment; yet all of them point up the inability of modern social leaders to deal effectively with simple problems. The reader who is aware of the traditional importance of poise and grace in social situa tions must see something more than simple humor in such stories of ineptitude. Ineptitude in the leaders of business and government is revealed in "The Yarkand Manner" and "The Unkindest Blow." In the first of these, a foolish situation causes an office boy to replace the editorial staff of a major newspaper; he does a better job than the editors have done. In the second, the government repeatedly demonstrates its inability to control strikes until finally a Duke and Duchess invent a strike that is so improbable that all strikes and all ineffective governments are made to seem ridiculous. Both of these stories are instances of hyperbole, but both make a serious point about conventional society. Even the traditionally noble pursuit of hunting has degenerated, Saki tells us; for when the leaders of society are themselves mediocrities, they are incapable of main taining any part of the heroic tradition. In "The Bag," the Master of the Pexdale Hounds is a Major Pallaby, who is "a victim of circumstances, over which he had no control and of his temper, over which he had very little" (Short Stories, p. 83). Faced with a ridiculously simple problem, the Major demonstrates his ineptitude by immediately re signing the Mastership. In "Mrs. Packletide's Tiger," a ‘ middle-^class woman who is a leader of sorts in a society dominated by the middle-class ludicrously tries to imitate the practices of the aristocratic leaders of other times. She goes on a tiger hunt. Such a leader, however, is no match for a real tiger. The tiger she brings home is so old that it dies of heart failure rather than of her bullet The animal would have been, in its prime, superior to the human being. In "The Remoulding of Groby Lington," beast superiority is so complete that the human protagonist takes on successively the characteristics of each of his pets. Regardless of the degree of humor and entertainment value in his stories without heroes, Saki repeatedly makes the serious point that man in modern society is without grace, without courage, and without nobility. The absence of heroes, to Saki, is tragic. Early Experiments ; Like the Reginald sketches, Saki's stories without heroes sometimes suggest the influence of other writers of the time. Suggestions of such influence are especially strong in some of the stories in Reginald in Russia. This collection includes.the last of the Reginald sketches, the title piece, and comes before the appearance of Clovis, Saki's later form of the juvenile protagonist. Consequently it is logical to suppose that it represents a time of ex periment. Just as Saki has previously reflected the influence of Wilde and others, it is logical to suppose that here, too, he has found some inspiration in other writers. We do not have available complete records of his 3 reading, but we may conclude from many allusions in his stories that he has read many of the better writers of his time and of the preceding generation. Allusions in his i stories to other writers exist largely to establish the characters and atmosphere of the stories, of course; so we | could hardly suppose that the omission of a writer's name h [ means that the writer has been of no interest to Saki. On j i the contrary, we may suppose that if Saki alludes to George j Meredith in "Reginald on House-Parties," he may be familiar j with the more popular Thomas Hardy, Meredith's friend and |contemporary. References to such current favorites as Kipling and Conan Doyle may lead-"us-to believe that he is familiar with 0. Henry, then popular abroad as well as in the United States. Scattered allusions to Longfellow, Shaw, Yeats, Poe, Fitzgerald, and various literary maga zines of the day indicate familiarity with a variety of authors, and his parodies of poems in "Reginald's Peace Poem," "Reginald's Rubaiyat," and "The Recessional" prepare : us for both parody and imitation in his short stories. Traces of the style and subject matter of other authors i appear most clearly in Reginald in Russia; but, as Frederick Beaty has pointed out, they may be evident in later stories : as well.^ In Chapter I we have pointed out the similarity between Saki's 1891 story "The Image of the Lost Soul" and i Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince." "The Saint and the ' Goblin" is so much a cynical restatement of "The Image of the Lost Soul" that we can reasonably speculate that it is ■ the end product of an exercise in first imitating Wilde and : 2 In "Mrs. Packletide and Tartarin, " Nineteenth j Century Fiction, VII (December 1952), 219-220, Beaty admits Saki's originality, but claims that this story is much like ; Alphonse Daudet’s "Tartarin de Tarascon." ithen using the imitation as the hase for a short story written from the ironic point of view Saki adopts in his maturity. In four other stories in Reginald in Russia Saki shows evidence of experimenting outside his usual ■boundaries: "The Reticence of Lady Anne," "The Lost Sanjak," "The Blood-Feud of Toad Water," and "Judkin of : the Parcels." Christopher Morley has called attention to Saki's able use of the surprise ending in such stories as "The Reticence of Lady Anne" and has called him equal to 0. Henry 3 in this respect. He adds* however, that the background and characters in Saki are as English as 0. Henry's are .American. The surprise ending in this story does suggest ! 4 the skill of 0. Henry. Only in the last line do we dis cover that Lady Anne has been dead during the entire story, ; while her husband, Egbert, has been conducting and losing | a quarrel with her. Yet we are prepared for the surprise by clues in the first paragraph: 3 ' ' Short Stories of Sakie, p. vi. 4 . . Maupassant might well have influenced Saki m tech nique, but 0. Henry's current popularity might have made j him a more immediate model for experiment. 78 ; i i ( Her pose in the arm-chair by the tea-table was rather elaborately rigid; in the gloom of a December afternoon Egbert's pince-nez did not materially help him to dis cern the expression of her face. (Short Stories, p. 48) The clues would be too revealing if it were not for the added words that shift our attention; "in the arm-chair by the tea-table" focuses our attention on the furniture rather than on the pose, and the emphasis on Egbert's pince-nez turns attention from her face. Saki repeatedly during the rest of the story states that she is silent, and once he causes Egbert to conclude that she is unwell. The thought of death does not occur to the reader, however, ; for Saki's narrative shifts continually to the life in the j room: the cat, the bullfinch, and Egbert's own movements, i :He also uses verbs in such a way as to imply that Lady Anne is capable of controlling her responses: "Lady Anne j maintained her defensive barrier of silence." "Lady Anne showed no sign of being impressed." Without ever saying \ ! E that she is alive, Saki leads the reader to this conclusion;; it . ; yet he does so in such a way that a rereading of the story reveals the strong possibility that Lady Anne is dead, even I •as she is presented on the first page. The surprise ending j is thoroughly anticipated, even though it is never given ! i away before the final line. 79 ! • i Yet "The Reticence of Lady Anne" is not an 0. Henry story. Quite apart from the Englishness of the characters and background, Saki places his individual stamp on the piece. He does so mainly through his use of animals as subtle contrasts to the human beings in the story. Both the Persian cat, Don Tarquinio, and the bullfinch are superior to Egbert and Lady Anne, in a sense. The bullfinch, for example, has been taught by a previous owner to sing an ; air from Iphiqenie en Tauride, somewhat above the standards : of taste of the human characters in the story; for Egbert and Lady Anne favor The Yeomen of the Guard in music and in ■ art paintings that explicitly tell sentimental stories. The cat's name reflects the superior imagination of the household page-boy, for Egbert and Anne would have called him "Fluff." Saki gives the story his own sort of twist as he causes Don Tarquinio to make an unfavorable mental j * i comment about Egbert at the end of the story, even as the | cat moves Tarquin-like to seize the bullfinch. When Saki makes the cat capable of "carrying out a long-formed theory ; ;of action with the precision of mature deliberation," he contrasts the animal with the Egbert who has just lost an i argument to a dead wife. Saki makes Egbert's plea that he is "only human" an admission that he is less than the beast, for Saki explains: He■insisted on the point, as if there had been unfounded suggestions that he was built on Satyr lines, ; with goat continuations where the human left off. (p. 50); Egbert fears his wife and steps out of his way to avoid disturbing the cat on the carpet. He is obviously of i secondary importance in the family, for his wife is always referred to as Lady Anne while he is simply Egbert, without title. At the end of the story he is compared to "a ne glected butcher-boy” in his hopeless docility. Yet, ridiculous as he is, he represents the aristocracy of the | modern world; both he and Lady Anne have, like Queen 5 Victoria (or so historians tell us), middle-class standards: of taste, but even they must explain their simple story paintings to their friends, so the rest of society is of even "duller intelligence." Saki contrasts the trappings of nobility in Lady Anne's title and in the household and I •servants to the present mediocrity; his idealized past is ; always nearby to serve as a shocking comparison with the present. i ^John D. Cooke and Lionel Stevenson describe Victoria’s1 bourgeois habits in English Literature of the Victorian Period (New York, 1949), pp. 43-48. | ■ The story is true to Saki in theme as well as in its use of animal-human contrasts to present the theme. Its surprise ending is an early example of a technique that Saki is to make as much a part of his own repertoire as it is of 0. Henry's. But this kind of story is not as good as are the better examples of the characteristic Saki plot which we shall examine in Chapter IV. It has no characters ; with whom the readers can identify; the cat is not developed, as a character until the end and therefore cannot provide the unity of the juvenile protagonist who begins and ends a ; story at the center of the stage. With the focus on Egbert,; the story manages to be dull at times in spite of the i imaginative use of suspense and irony. No one could care j much about either Egbert or Lady Anne. This, of course, is i ■ i a part of Saki's theme; people like this are already dead i in life, and as a consequence physical death becomes merely ! i an incident, a suitable subject for humor. But stories ' | about a dull society are inclined to be dull themselves; in j j 'Saki's characteristic plot, the reader will have a hero of ; f sorts in whom life exists and with whom the reader can j ■ I triumph over dullness. j f t ( "The Lost Sanjak" also suggests 0. Henry in its ending,; I but the subject matter of crime and its unravelling reminds j 82 | j the reader that the story belongs to the era of Conan Doyle ; and the Sherlock Holmes stories. Saki's callous treatment of death is closer to Ambrose Bierce than to Doyle, however;; the surprise ending is particularly horrifying because it reveals the fact that the chaplain has permitted the prisoner to be executed even though he strongly suspects that the man is innocent. Such a chaplain, keeping to his routine rather than taking the trouble to prevent a terrible mistake, is very much a part of the conventional society of i Saki's stories. This is a society in which*things happen, not one in which heroic individuals are in control of j affairs. More than 0. Henry or Doyle or Bierce, the story is characteristic of Saki. Little touches in the opening lines create the feeling ■ of horror and inevitability. The Chaplain enters the cell ] "for the last time." When the prisoner wishes to tell his i . ! * • . * ; story, the Chaplain with thoughtless cruelty tells him to i hurry and glances at his watch, making the prisoner shiver ; as he does. Then horror is mixed with a grim humor by the introduction of an incongruous idea; the prisoner says that I i ihe is there because he has not been a specialist in anything; From this point on, the story has almost a cheerful air, ; produced mainly by the formally conversational tone of the ■ 83 1 i j ;prisoner's narrative. He explains quite matter-of-factly that he must have been mistaken about the lady's love for him, and the Chaplain murmurs agreement; when he arrives at the story of his final capture, he explains the details of a silly national contest awarding a prize to the best bloodhound, a contest that turns a life and death issue into a game, one that pays no heed to the problems of individual human beings. Most ridiculous of all, though, is the fact that the prisoner's "moderately good" education 1 is superficially no better than a "cheap modern education," : and as a consequence the prisoner cannot be shown to be superior to the Salvation Army captain he is mistaken for. This fact and the fact that the prisoner is so much a face in the crowd that his acquaintances cannot identify him provide the circumstances that bring his conviction. j The story presents again Saki's theme that individuals i cannot exist in modern society. It also presents the ironic: ' I I mixture of the horrible and the routine that is to be a mark of Saki's fiction henceforth. Like "The Reticence of Lady Anne," the story would be more interesting with a protag- ; onist who is outside the limits of conventional society, but then it would be a quite different story. ; i i The subtitle of "The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water" is I ■ "A West-Country Epic." The story is a mock-epic that parodies the style of Thomas Hardy. The central conflict j is a feud between two families stemming from the presence of one family's chickens in the other family's garden; Munro's sister tells us that the characters and the conflict g are from life. Hardy's style is suggested at once; twice on the first page, "Pate" appears, appropriately capital ized; "the Great Human Family" and "the Great Mother" call attention to themselves in the first two pages; the scene is a "lonely upland spot" that is "thrust away in the benighted hinterland of a scattered market district," where : two families share "a common isolation from the outer world." Silly as are the circumstances of the dispute, they are described in language as pretentious as that of the quotations above; the Genesis story of Cain and Abel is alluded to in heavy tones. Nature intrudes in purple pas- ; sages like the following: | i j The chaffinches clinked in the apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and the waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, but between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate, permeating and permanent. (Short Stories, p. 62) i i 6 "Biography," p. 658. The years roll away; "some of the actors in this wayside ; drama have passed into the Unknown1 '; and then, breaking i from the tritely pompous to the surprisingly frivolous in the same pompous style, we learn that "other onions have arisen, have flourished, have gone their way, and the offending hen has long since expiated her misdeeds." Saki's; West Country is like Hardy's Wessex, except that Hardy takes; his ordinary farmers seriously, and Saki regards an epic written about faces in the crowd as being necessarily, ridiculous. He parodies Hardy's style, but also ridicules Hardy's subjects and themes. Though he obviously imitates in order to ridicule, Saki presents his own theme about the ! pettiness of life today; his theme is a serious one and in contrast to the Hardy theme that the life of the average peasant is important. It is the romantic altered by ; cynicism making fun of the Naturalist soaked in romanticism.; It represents the most obvious fictional parody in Saki and j ; ' f ' i has little to do with the style of Saki's later work; only ; "The Hounds of Pate," "The Cobweb," and perhaps one or two other stories have much of Hardy in them, and they are ; i outside the mainstream of Saki. The parody of Hardy does r i give Saki an opportunity to experiment in the observation and recording of a phase of life he seldom notices in his ; 85 istories. "Judkin of the Parcels" also suggests Hardy, but it is not a parody. In fact, its basic failure as a story ; comes from the apparent imposition of serious statement and style on a nucleus that must surely have been intended for parody. Judkin is not Saki's sort of protagonist, except as a specimen of a potentially heroic type gone wrong. Judkin is the sort of character Hardy might have chosen for a story, though? and the basic situation of an observer wondering about Judkin1s past suggests Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives* Tale, particularly Bennett1s preface to the 1912 edition, which, however, is two years after the pub lication of Reginald in Russia. The brief account of ; Judkin could almost fit into any of Hardy's later novels except for Saki's judgment of the man. Saki wonders that anyone who has once known adventure could now, under the influence of a domineering wife, retire to dull routine. Then he questions his own faith in adventure, however: Has Judkin of the Parcels found something in the lees of life that I have missed in going to and fro over many waters? Is there more wisdom in his perverseness than in the madness of the wise? The dear gods know. (p. 67) But this self-doubt is not the conclusion of the story. ■ 87 ^Instead, the story questions the values of the Naturalists like Hardy; but it does so in serious rather than humorous ; ; fashion. As it presents the author's self-doubts and as it ' avoids the humorous, the story is unusual for Saki; he does ; not take precisely this path again. The figure of Judkin the domesticated adventurer does suggest one character in a : Saki story of the future; that character is Tom Keriway, the former adventurer whom Elaine encounters by accident in his place of retirement in The Unbearable Bassinqton (Novels and Plays. pp. 66-73). That encounter is important - in the development of Saki1s best novel, and it raises the ] same questions that Saki raises in "Judkin of the Parcels." There is sufficient internal evidence to convince us ! ' I that Saki is experimenting further, with regard to styles j i and subject matters, in some of the stories without heroes I I in Reginald in Russia. We can recognize these stories to be i experimental because they are different in some respects fran the majority of Saki's stories, and because they resemble the work of other writers. We might reverse the reasoning, i however, and assert that what we may regard as the charac- | s ( teristic Saki story is also in the experimental stage at i i this point. The fact that it later becomes the standard i I form for Saki obscures for us at this point its experimental state; its development belongs, in any case, to the next chapter. One story of this type should be pointed out here,! however; that is "The Soul of Laploshka." This story of a miserly spendthrift whose ghost comes back to haunt the narrator over a debt of two francs reminds the reader of Gogol's short novel The Overcoat.' In theme, however, it is sufficiently different from Gogol's model to make it clear that whatever Saki might have gained from reading Gogol is certainly revised and made original in this story. Accord- ! ing to Ethel Munro, the characters in "The Soul of Lap loshka" and "Judkin of the Parcels" are, like the characters’ in "The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water," drawn from life ("Biog raphy, " p. 694). The fact that Saki begins in these three j , stories with characters he had given to him by direct i observation may explain why these stories seem different j ■ t from the rest of his work. i 3 The Missing Hero j The absence of a hero is the governing characteristic of the stories discussed in this chapter. The vacuum is ; sometimes filled in part by Fate; at other times an anti- hero both impotent and uninteresting occupies the space in . the story that Saki believes a hero should fill. Without |a hero, a story nevertheless moves toward a conclusion of some sort, a conclusion that usually demonstrates the need for a traditional hero. In "The Hounds of Fate, 1 1 Martin Stoner is a man down on his luck who seems suddenly to have a reversal of for tune simply because of the coincidence of his resemblance to Tom Prike. When Martin wanders up to a strange farm house, it turns out to be the home of Prike, who has been away for some time. Martin is mistaken for Tom, and he seems to be in control of his life once again. Then the same Fate that has given him a new life takes all life away from him in a new ironic twist; Martin is killed by a man who is the enemy of Tom Prike. What has come to Martin without reference to his merit leaves him with as little reason. The story illustrates Saki's view of society, that men are no longer masters of their lives, but ' are simply things to which life happens. The reader can ‘ hardly feel grief at the death of a thing like Martin Stoner. Things happen to people in “The Cobweb," also. j In that story a young husband meets unexpected, accidental death, and his young wife sees her life change for the \ worse with the suddenness of Fate. The man and his wife- j are a part of a new generation that does not honor the past | or care about tradition. Another character in the story triumphs in a sense, for an old serving woman who belongs to the past traditions of the farm survives what has seemed to be a warning of her death and remains on the farm after the young man dies and his wife leaves. Like "The Hounds of Fate, " this story includes references to superstitious warnings of death, in this case from the actions of the poultry and the old dog- and it suggests^that there is something in nature that is much more important than any of the commonplace human beings of this generation. "The Name-Day" and "A Holiday Task" tell stories of men who are ridiculously unheroic. For the very weak man, a simple problem can be defeating, as these stories show. The two stories carry antiheroism to extremes, but they do reveal the need for heroes through the contrast between what happens and what the reader must believe could have happened had a strong, decisive man been the protagonist. "Tea" for a moment suggests that its protagonist will escape the dull society of which he is a part; then Saki shows how difficult it is to break the pattern. James Cushat-Prinkly resists the efforts of women to marry him off until he reaches thirty-four. Then he falls into a cleverer trap than the others he has seen. Having learned 91 j to identify the habits of the conventional domineering young woman, he imagines that by marrying poor, hardworking,' unconventional Rhoda he will find excitement and interest in life. He marries her, only to be disappointed? as soon as she has enough money to be like the other young women he has known, she adopts their patterns of life. He is trapped after all in a world controlled by women. "Cousin Teresa" is one of Saki's most pointed state ments of the central irony of modern existence, for in this story a traditional sort of hero is ignored while his half- ! brother, the denial of the heroic tradition, is honored. Basset Harrowcluff, at thirty-one, has led an adult \ i existence conforming to the Tory code of honor and loyalty. ; As a British government official in a remote corner of the Empire, he has demonstrated exceptional ability as a leader ? and diplomat, and now his father, Colonel Harrowcluff, ! expects Basset to appear in the next Honours list. Lucas j Harrowcluff, the forty-year-old half-brother of Basset, is I a loud, vain, useless fellow whom Saki describes as Jewish in appearance, hence, to Saki, a representative of the foreign element that now infects Britain. The Colonel does ; not expect anyone to take Lucas's "silly little ideas ; seriously," but Lucas writes a nonsensical refrain for r ' ” 92 imusic halls and becomes so popular that the government awards him a knighthood for literature in the Honours list. The government officials responsible have not even noticed Basset’s existence. Although the story seems improbable, one has only to think of the Beatles and their appearance in such a list to recognize the prophetic truth in the story. In Saki's time, the irrational popularity of the "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay" refrain gives plausibility to the story. The apotheosis of Lucas foreshadows the lionization of popular singers in When William Came, Saki's bitter novel about what he pre dicts will be the inevitable result of further development of society's loss of traditional values. The words of the refrain suggest again the dominance of woman in the world: Cousin Teresa takes out Caesar, Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi. As the song is performed on the music-hall stage, a woman moves across the stage with four dogs in tow; that the dogs represent men may not be demonstrable, but Basset Harrow cluff is the half-brother who loses in the story, and Lucas s represents the effeminate society that rejects him. \ (Basset, of course, is the name of a breed of dog.) Saki‘s stories without heroes represent only a minor Iportion of his total product: they are outnumbered three i i to one by those with the characteristic Saki plot of the i juvenile protagonist attacking society. Yet the stories ! without heroes illustrate some of the reasons for the suc cess of the typical Saki stories, principally the roles of the hero as a source of entertainment and as a character with whom the reader can identify. In most cases, Saki1s stories that involve only conventional characters are less interesting than those that introduce juvenile protagonists ; ! as inciting forces. But Saki consistently presents his ser-‘ ious criticism of society in these stories without heroes, j i and they create in the reader a need for some sort of pro tagonist who provides an adventurous spirit to admire. Such ! a person Saki presents in his characteristic short stories, j i ; A Note on Imagery j Imagery and allusion appear in varying quantities ; i in Saki’s stories. Because his stories are very short, he ! j tends to use only that which fits the need of the moment i best and to omit whatever techniques do not make a useful I ! contribution in a particular situation. When he does turn i I to allusion, for instance, he uses it effectively, as we i have seen in the Biblical allusions buried in "Reginald at j « 94 j i { ;the Theatre." Similarly he uses imagery in patterns calculated to produce the maximum supportive effect for F : i his theme; this we shall examine in "The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat." Allusions, however, often have the purpose of estab lishing backgrounds for characters and plots. In "Reginald on House-Parties," for instance, we are told of a girl who reads Meredith because Saki wishes to establish the kind ; of person whcT is to be found at house-parties, not because Meredith's work is to provide supplementary meanings for j the sketch. Figures of speech must also be judged in two ways, for their supportive and suggestive effects and as they reveal the speech patterns of a portion of society; in the latter case, we should note that conventional pat- | terns of people might be expected to be accompanied by \ \ cliches. Since many of Reginald's witticisms involve | the substitution of a new word for a conventional part j of a trite expression, it is obvious that the people | who are part of the pattern of society will use trite j language without change. It may be added that, particu- \ i larly in those Saki sketches that are obviously meant to \ \ * v ' have a spoken quality, the presence of cliches may make j this quality more natural. It would be difficult to permit j 'the Duchess Irene to speak in brilliantly witty dialogue; ; for instance; and lead the reader to conclude that she is a rather dull woman; no more aristocratic than a middle- class brewer's wife, in spite of her title. At times it may even be necessary to describe her in trite language in order to achieve the desired effect. Admittedly, all of this may be obvious to most readers. Nevertheless, the point should be made that Saki uses subordinate language effects for different purposes, and it would be unfair to judge his ability to use imagery and allusion on the basis of a story in which he feels other techniques are more essential. Philip Stevick has explored the Freudian significance iof the imagery in four stories in Saki's 1914 collection, Beasts and Super-Beastsi "The She-Wolf," "The Boar Pig," 7 "The Treasure Ship," and "The Lumber Room." He suggests that other stories in the same collection deserve such attention. Choosing this collection and date because the first English edition of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams had appeared in 1913, Stevick finds much possible 7 "Saki's Beasts," English Literature in Transition, IX (September 1966), 33-37. evidence of Freudian implications in secret rooms, closed gardens, threatening beasts, phallic symbols, and images of swelling, expanding, and so forth woven into what seem to be patterns of meanings. Stevick does not press the case at length, and his conclusions speculate more about bio graphical details in Munro1s life than about the intended meanings of the stories, but his suggestions are suffi ciently well documented to make the consideration of Saki's stories in the light of Freud a legitimate pursuit. Stevick's concern about the date of the English translation ; of Freud is irrelevant, however, for Saki was fluent in German when he did his research for The Rise of the Russian i Empire, according to Lambert (Bodley Head Saki, p. 23). We ; might readily test even Saki's early fiction for Freudian symbolism, if we chose. "The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat" is the most clearly concerned of all of Saki's stories ; with sexual desire. It is a part of the 1914 Beasts and Super-Beasts collection and merits examination if we accept j , Stevick's thesis. j i 3 In "The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat," Jocantha is a young woman comfortably married to Gregory. Aware of . her reasons for being happy, she nevertheless realizes that Attab, her male cat, enjoys the comforts of the same ; 97 ; home that makes her happy hut has one additional advantage. He can go out in the afternoon and kill a sparrow, then return to the fireside. Enviously, she goes out looking for adventure, imagines herself in assignations with a r handsome young man she observes at a table near her in a tea shop, is unable to attract his attention, and goes home discontented. The cat returns also, but he has killed his sparrow. The story is another of Saki's tales about protagonists who are either too unimaginative or too re pressed to find the adventure they need to be happy. On the surface it says little about sex; Jocantha limits her imagined associations with the boy to conversation over ; Sunday tea with her husband present. Her disappointment ■at the conclusion of the story, however, suggests much more i I than conversation as her object. A note of irony appears when the young man becomes so absorbed in reading about j i adventure in India that he does not notice the adventure waiting for him at the next table. ; The five-page story is full of words suggesting sensuality and plbasure. Although the pleasure is not ! ■precisely defined, variations of "pleasure" and "pleasant" I occur ten times. The repetition of these and similar words i i establishes a subliminal effect of sensuality. Jocanthals ‘ apartment receives much more direct description than Saki usually provides, and the description takes in those details that speak of luxury, softness, and comfort. Much of the narrative is suggestive of more than the superficial meaning: Gregory had managed to get home for a hurried lunch and a smoke afterwards in the little snuggery; the lunch had "been a good one, and there was just time to do justice to the coffee and cigarettes. Both were excellent in their way, and Gregory was, in his way, an excellent husband. Jocantha rather suspected her self of making him a very charming wife, and more than suspected herself of having a first-rate dressmaker. (Short Stories, p. 428) The word "snuggery" suggests bachelors’ dens, bar parlors, and hideaways on the surface, but it also may suggest the ; female sex organ. Gregory and Jocantha are able to enjoy the lunch and "do justice to the coffee and cigarettes," ! :but Gregory's hurry may imply that Jocantha is left wishing ! i \ for a sexual experience. "In his way," Gregory is "an ; ) excellent husband," but Jocantha may wish variety, another I way. The word "suspected,"repeated, establishes an air of secrecy about Jocantha“s thoughts, and her reference to : i her dressmaker immediately following her description of j herself as "a very charming wife" may suggest that her mind ! is on the sexual attractiveness of her body. In any case, i 99 j jher attention turns to Attab, the cat; she notices that: "He lies there, purring and dreaming, shifting his limbs now and then in an ecstasy of cushioned comfort. He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety." From her own body, she shifts to an inspection of the male cat's body, "shifting" in "ecstasy." Her mind plays with the sensual images of softness and luxury. Attab becomes generalized when Gregory says that "it is just as well that the Attabs of the community should have the idea of how to pass an amusing afternoon." Jo cantha has already joined the Attabs in her mind as Gregory goes "into the outer world, " withdrawing metaphor ically from her sexual embrace. Jocantha reminds him that they are going to the Haymarket that evening, a place the name of which suggests commercial sex if one wishes to force the interpretation. Introspectively, then, Jocantha examines her life, particularly the snuggery, "which contrived somehow to be cozy and dainty and expensive all at once," suitable terms to describe the sexual organ of an expensive young wife. j "The porcelain was rare and beautiful" may refer to her j i l skin, and other objects in the snuggery suggest sensuality. ; Then she reflects: i 100 It was a room in which one might have suitably enter tained an ambassador or an archbishop, but it was also a room in which one could cut out pictures for a scrap book without feeling that one was scandalizing the deities of the place with one's litter. '"Entertaining" a male other than her husband could con ceivably scandalize the deities, but those deities would not be shocked if she became pregnant by her husband and developed a litter that would mean pictures for the family scrapbook. Jocantha is in a "mood of simmering satisfac tion" and is "one of the most contented women in Chelsea." Then she contrasts her life with the "pleasureless" lives of shop girls who go home to "chill, dreary bedrooms." She decides first to buy two tickets for a play and give them to two shop girls. She next reasons that giving one ticket to one girl might give the girl a chance to find a friend (sex unspecified) at the theatre. Having bought one ticket for the "Yellow Peacock" ("yellow" having been an erotic color in the nineties and "peacock" suggesting the exotic and sensually beautiful), she goes to a tea shop and decides to give the ticket to a working girl at the ;next table. Before she has acted, a very good-looking young man enters and sits by the working girl, with whom he is I . " 101 i i I i"obviously on terms of friendly intimacy.1 1 Jocantha immediately begins to think of the relative poverty of'the boy1s life, after deciding that he is much better looking than any of the young men she knows and only a few years younger than herself. She is quite sure that he has not "seen the ‘Yellow Peacock,1 " perhaps now referring to all of the sophisticated sexual adventure she can offer him. Her mind projects itself past the giving of the one ticket to the boy to later meetings with him. She suspects that her philanthropy may "prove far more entertaining than she had originally anticipated." She believes this, evidently, ; because the boy knows how to brush his hair and wear a tie. She admires him, and as his companion leaves, she thinks more and more of his "beautifully brushed hair," a quality that might suggest to her the male cat in the snuggery, a j cat now out killing his sparrow. But the boy begins read- j i ing a book of adventure, so she must catch his attention in order to offer him the ticket. She has "a large and well-filled sugar basin" on her own table, but she finds that she can find a pretext for borrowing his sugar basin ; if she makes the menu "stand on end" and hide her own basin.; This is a complicated pattern of terms, but "stand on end" ; :is obviously a sexual image, and a sugar basin can 102 i conceivably represent a female's sex organ; hers is well- filled by her husband, but if she conceals this fact she i ; | can try to persuade the boy to provide sugar for her table. ; She tries to attract his attention by talking to the wait ress about "alleged defects in an altogether blameless muffin" (possibly gossip) and by- making "loud and plaintive inquiries about the tube service to some impossibly remote 8 suburb." But Jocantha never brings the boy’s tube service to the remote suburb of her life, for the boy is engrossed in the adventures in his book. When she comes home, she finds her house dull, and she believes Gregory will be uninteresting and "the play would be stupid after dinner." Sexual play with Gregory i will have lost its satisfaction. But Attab has killed his sparrow and has "a great peace radiating from every curve ] of his body." The implied contrast between the adventurous { :cat and the girl who is unable to seize her adventure is a unifying element that makes the story clearly one of sexual ; desire. "Killing" is associated with sexual triumph, and i i 8 "Tube service" may not be intended as a reference to the male sexual function, but, like some of the other images1 mentioned, it could involve Freudian implications, particu- ; larly in an early experiment in the use of such patterns of I ; image r y._____________ _ _________ j 103 I i ; I ithe sparrow is a suitable victim for such a killing by a < male, since "bird" is associated with women as sexual , I j objects. The summary above does not include all of the possi bilities in the story, and some of those named in the sum mary are not so sharply Freudian as are others. Yet there is sufficient evidence that Saki has used Freudian imagery to support his basic theme; he has used it in a pattern as skillfully developed as the pattern of Biblical allusions described in the interpretation of "Reginald at the Theatre, " in Chapter II. The story again illustrates Saki1s view of a world ;too much dominated by aggressive women. In this case, the j • ! imale object of Jocantha's desire fails to accept the "thraldom" she offers him, partly because she herself is f i unable to give up anything in order to obtain his services. ; | He remains free of her domination. Saki's sketches and stories often show relatively wealthy women with parasitical i i young men as their subjects. Comus, in The Unbearable Bassington, has the opportunity to obtain financial security! if he marries Elaine. He does not and is forced to give j i up the luxuries and the social life he loves. In "The i Philanthropist and the Happy Cat," another poor young man , ^retains his freedom by ignoring the overtures of a woman who is willing to buy him. Like Comus, however, he may ■suffer or die, the price of independence in a society turned- upside down. But the young man is not the protagonist of the story. Jocantha is that, and she is a part of the conventional society that Saki shows in all of these stories to be in need of salvation. CHAPTER XV SAKI'S CHARACTERISTIC PLOT: THE ATTACK These moralists could act and comprehend: They knew how genuine glory was put on; Taught us how rightfully a nation shone In splendour: what strength was, that would not bend But in magnanimous meekness. William Wordsworth'1 ' All of the pieces in The Short Stories of Saki except the sketches discussed in Chapter II, the stories without heroes discussed in Chapter III, the one-act play "The Baker's Dozen," and, of course, Ethel Munro's "Biography of Saki" have the characteristic Saki plot. In each of the ; eighty stories of this type, a juvenile protagonist attacks j conventional society and wins a temporary triumph. In this chapter we shall examine the basic character istics of the characteristic Saki plot, particularly as they ^"Great Men Have Been Among Us, " Works of Wordsworth, ; p. 287. ! 106 j : E appear in twenty-four of the eighty stories of this type. The twenty-four include eighteen that appear in both the Bodley Head Saki and The Best of Saki, two recent selec tions. They also include the three stories of this type in Reginald and the three in The Square Egg; neither of these collections is represented in the eighteen stories of this type chosen by J. W. Lambert and Graham Greene for the official publishers' selections just mentioned. The twenty-four stories we shall consider representative of the characteristic Saki plot are the following:. "Reginald," "Reginald's Choir Treat," and "Reginald’s Christmas Revel," | from Reginald; "Gabriel-Ernest," "Cross Currents," and "The ; Mouse," from Reginald in Russia? "Tobermory," "The Unrest- ; ! Cure," "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham," "Sredni Vashtar," and "The Easter Egg," from The Chronicles of Clovis; "The She-Wolf, " "The Boar-Pig," "The Brogue," "The Open Window," "The Schartz-Metterklume Method," "The Seventh Pullet," "The Story-Teller," "A Defensive Diamond," "The i Lumber-Room," from Beasts and Super-Beasts; "Quaxl Seed," from The Toys of Peace; and "The Square Egg," "The Gala Programme, " and "The Infernal Parliament," from The Square | Egg. These twenty-four represent the principal variations | i in the characteristic Saki plot as well as the major stages j 107 ] ] in its development. The fact that fourteen of the eighteen j selected by both Greene and Lambert appear in the collec tions of the middle years, The Chronicles of Clovis and , Beasts and Super-Beasts, suggests that these two collections represent the maturity of the Saki short story. In these collections, the characteristic Saki plot is dominant. The Juvenile Protagonists "Juvenile" does not always mean young in its appli cation to Saki's protagonists; some of them, like Lady Carlotta of "The Schartz-Metterklume Method," are middle- aged or older. Some, even, are animals, like the title j subjects of "The Brogue" and "The Mouse." All of them have j . i ; ■ . i an adventurous quality that separates them from their I ! conventional associates; most of them are highly fanciful; j and most of them could be called romantics. They are I individuals in revolt against conformity patterns and are j i consequently outsiders in spirit. j i Reginald is the first such protagonist. Saki tells j I ! little about him directly, but we learn that he is unreli- \ t 1 able, self-centered, impulsive, vengeful, frivolous, ; iconoclastic, impertinent, unconventional, and mischievous, j i He is young, probably under twenty-three {Short Stories. j ■ 108 i ip. 4), and is apparently dependent on others for the good things of life he so much enjoys. Unlike Clovis, Reginald works alone, planning and carrying out his pranks without consulting others for advice or help. Although he tempor arily upsets the order of the society he attacks, he does not win supporters and he faces punishment at the end of the story, like a child who has done something wrong. The following lines from the concluding paragraphs of the three stories of this type in Reginald indicate that some thing unpleasant awaits him: "Never, never again, will I take you to a garden party." ("Reginald") t Reginald's family never forgave him. They had no sense of humour. ("Reginald's Choir Treat") I hate travelling on Boxing Day, but one must oc casionally do things that one dislikes. ("Reginald's Christmas Revel") Reginald's pranks are successful, but they do not threaten society for long; after the prank is over, he is once again in a position of dependence on the society he has attacked. As Graham Greene points out, the victims of Saki's juvenile protagonists suffer only a "temporary humiliation" before they have their own way again (Best of Saki, p. x). Janet Overmyer says much the same thing: 109 j ! I , | The heroes are not those who win, for no one can win, but those who persist until they gain some small suc cess before the greater power intervenes. It is the attempt that exalts.^ j Reginald is the first and possibly the most hopeless of Saki's juvenile protagonists, all of whom are "hopeless heroes," hopeless because they cannot win in the long run. In Reginald in Russia, Saki leaves Reginald to ex periment in other directions. A sixteen-year-old boy who ; is a werewolf is the protagonist of "Gabriel-Ernest." The Wilderness exercises its force on an ordinary man in "Cross ; Currents," and an anonymous mouse upsets the conventional in "The Mouse." These three protagonists are not quite in the direct line of development from Reginald to Clovis | to Comus, but they all represent that external force of j l Nature that threatens to upset human society at any time? j i something of this force is inside the Reginalds, Veras, j Conradins, and Clovises. Nevertheless, these three stories j are not typical of the characteristic Saki short story. Most often the juvenile protagonist is human. The cat in j "Tobermory," for instance, is human in its ability to talk | and superhuman in its courage. The other stories in The | \ i 2 ^ "Turn Down an Empty Glass," Texas Quarterly. VII | ; (Autumn 1964), 175 .____ j j ~~ 110 I - Chronicles of Clovis have human protagonists, and one of them is the next major development in protagonist after Reginald, ■ Clovis Sangrail. Clovis is a combination of the youthful mischief of 1 Reginald and the self-discipline of a traditional hero. His: first name suggests a Frankish king, but also hints at the cloven hoofs of Pan, relating him to Gabriel-Ernest and to the Pan of "The Music on the Hill" and to the pagan cere monies Reginald teaches the choir'boys in "Reginald's Choir Treat." His last name clearly marks him for heroism, but the combination of the Holy Grail and Pan constitutes one of Saki’s characteristic ironies. Clovis is the most effective of the juvenile protagonists in Saki's short stories. In "The Match-Maker,his first appearance as an active protagonist, he arranges a new marriage for his mother and yet avoids the possible unpleasantness for him self that the marriage might bring; he controls the situa- i tion. In a number of sketches, as we have shown in Chapter II, Clovis proves himself able to maintain produc tive relationships with his patrons while teaching them his i unconventional kind of wisdom. In "Shock Tactics" and "The I She-Wolf," he cooperates successfully with other individuals! j to strike back at bores and tyrants. In "The Unrest-Cure," ! i in : <he carefully plans and executes a complex attack on dreariness with the kind of control that Reginald could not have exercised. Only in "The Peace Offering." does the conclusion of the story suggest that Clovis has threatened his personal security. Clovis is almost a hero with a \ future, a young man capable of becoming a leader in the traditional sense. Yet Clovis is also hopeless. Mediocrity and convention regain their power over society soon after Clovis has con cluded his attacks. Clovis may change one bad habit of one woman in "Shock Tactics," for instance, but he does not .alter the entire society or even the entire woman. Leonard ; Bilsiter will continue to be a bore, although Clovis has ; |arranged for his temporary discomfiture in "The She-Wolf." ! Clovis1s ultimate hopelessness is implied in his continuing | state of dependency, on his mother or on friends. He is I a parasite, even though, like the cat, he can leave the I I : I fireside for a sparrow hunt then return in peace. But I someone else provides the fireside, someone in control of things. j Although Clovis is the most consistently successful j of Saki's juvenile protagonists and represents a necessary j preparation for Comus Bassington, Saki's younger j iprotagonists are important forms of the Saki protagonist type. Vera Durmot, at fifteen and sixteen, is the oldest of the children and closest to Clovis in both age and sophistication; her best appearance is in "The Open Window. In this story she is a niece who "entertains" a visitor in , such a way that his weak nervous system is strained to the limit and he runs away, leaving the aunt mystified and ready to accept Vera's second major lie of the story. Vera I has the apparent innocence of a child, but the actual cor ruption of a Reginald or a Clovis, for lies are her specialty. This combination of innocence and corruption makes possible the reversal of the expected that is so much ; a key to Saki's technique. The same combination is present j in Matilda Cuvering, thirteen-year-old protagonist of "The Boar-Pig." Nicholas of "The Lumber-Room" and Conradin of "Sredni-Vashtar" are both about ten and are both less i ready to lie and play pranks from sheer love of mischief; j I both of them turn to the attack because of the tyrannous pressures that make their lives miserable. Hyacinth of "Hyacinth" is another interesting child protagonist, but his; malice is harder to believe than is that of Conradin, for example; in addition. Hyacinth is offstage for most of the I story and consequently fails to focus reader interest on ; himself as a personality. Other children appear as protagonists, but these are the best. Because of the popularity of "The Open Window," "The Lumber-Room," and "Sredni-Vashtar" today, casual readers of Saki are likely to regard young children as his most characteristic pro tagonists. This is not the case, however, for Clovis and Reginald appear in far more of his stories and sketches than do young children. In a few stories, Saki uses a caricature of a tradi tional hero, usually in a setting in the distant past. These heroes turn up as obvious contrasts to the leaders of today, sometimes with modern problems to face. In "The Gala Programme," for example, Saki invents a Roman emperor and presents him with"a threatened demonstration by suf fragettes. He simply throws them to the lions, showing the decisiveness and strength of a true leader, as Saki sees it. In "Hermann the Irascible— A Story of the Great Weep," Saki sets the action in modern times, with suffra gettes again, but provides a traditional hero by the operations of a Plague that brings an obscure member of a distant branch of the Royal Family to the throne of England. Hermann's solution is less bloody than the Roman emperor's, but equally decisive and effective. Hermann and the 114 jemperor are exceptions among Sabi’s protagonists, however; most of them are hopeless of bringing permanent change to the world. Eight of the twenty-four stories on the list have adult romantics as protagonists. Some of these eight protagonists are natural adventurers, like Lady Carlotta of "The Schartz-Metterklume Method" and Treddleford of "A Defensive Diamond." A few are men who have broken with their past habits of conformity and have taught themselves to be adventurous or imaginative. Lester Slaggby in "The Easter Egg" is a coward who gains sufficient courage to die bravely in an act of heroism. Arlington Stringham is a dull soul who learns to joke, beginning on a small scale and finally shocking his dull wife into committing suicide because of his change. Clovis remains_the most successful of Saki's juvenile protagonists and the closest to offering the reader hope of permanent change in society. Modes of Attack Saki's juvenile protagonists attack by one of several imethods: the childish prank, the lie, the sophisticated prank based on a carefully-developed lie, the use of physical violence. The protagonists themselves may ! sometimes use animals or other human characters to help them in their pranks and in their physical violence. Al though no definite pattern of development from one sort of attack to another exists, some form of lie is at the base of most of the attacks in Saki's later stories of this type,: and pranks are common in the earlier stories. Reginald, for instance, indulges in pranks. In "Reginald," his basic method is to outrage the party guests ! by ignoring the proprieties of conversation. He interrupts | a bore with an impudent remark, speaks favorably of liquor to the son of a temperance leader, and shocks prudes with vulgarity and pedants with frivolity. His method is spontaneous, daring, and effective; but he is a lone wolf, I consulting no one and achieving success without evidence of detailed planning. In "Reginald's Choir Treat," he plans1 and carries out an extended prank, turning a choir picnic | into a Bacchanalian festival; however, except for a few whistles he brings no equipment for the prank, relying on spontaneous inspiration to provide a goat and pagan costumes; i and chants. In "Reginald's Christmas Revel," he plays a j ■ ! single prank in vengeance against the other members of a dull party; although he destroys the Christmas party in a single night, his action is apparently the result of sudden j ! 116 f iinspiration, not of long-range planning. Because Reginald lacks the strategic touch and is incapable of leading others, he is able only to make brief patrols against the enemy; he could never wage a successful war against the massive power of conventional society. Clovis Sangrail has the qualities of self-discipline, imagination, and planning ability that make his pranks more sophisticated than Reginald's, and more nearly capable of bringing about permanent changes in society. In "The Unrest-Cure," for instance, his mind works like that of a corps commander. He identifies the problem, plans all ;details in advance, appears on the scene prepared to act with precision on a definite time-table, and moves a group i of adults around with the self-assurance of a general, or of a funeral director. In "The She-Wolf," Clovis works with other adults in order to accomplish the trick; and the reader feels in this story that Clovis has the power to influence others. In "Shock Tactics," Clovis focuses his efforts on a specific problem, corrects it, and leaves Bertie and Ella somewhat better off than before; in this story he even shows something resembling sympathy. Clovis develops out of Reginald, it is true; but Clovis is consid erably closer to being a traditional hero than Reginald ; - - Yu ] ; i ;could ever be. C-lovis has enough sympathetic qualities to enable the reader to laugh at the conventional society rather than at Clovis, most of the time at least. He is amusing, but one is prepared to take his actions seriously. ; With such a protagonist, Saki has both lost and gained. He has lost the nonsense quality of the humor in the Reginald sketches, for the reader concentrates on the cen tral plot rather than on the casual humor of spontaneous pranks and sallies; but he has gained effectiveness in the presentation of his themes, for the targets are clear, and Clovis is not himself a prime target for laughter. t The lie is more common than any other form of attack except the prank. Like Clovis's carefully-designed practi- : cal jokes, the imaginative lie has an intellectual superior-; ity over the childish pranks of Reginald. Yet the imagina- ! c tive lie is a method that can be ujed by children as well ! as adults, by individuals acting alone rather than in 1 concert with others. Such lies are generally involved with j ; ' ' j pranks, but they may stand alone as methods of attack. Vera; • i : ! Durmot, for instance, tells two lies in "The Open Window," one to the neurotic visitor and the other to her aunt after ! i I he leaves suddenly; without any sort of physical action, j s r Vera attacks and defeats one of Saki's favorite targets, ; 118 i :an adult male who is weak. The lie is sometimes a poeti cally just form of vengeance on adults who lie to children. In both “The Boar-Pig" and "The Lumber-Room," it is fitting that the juvenile protagonists attack adults with lies, for these very adults have considered it proper to lie to the children. In "Tobermory," a variation of this sort of vengeance appears; the talking cat tells the truth, to and about adults who by mutual consent conceal from each other their feelings and activities. Saki uses lies from his earliest to his latest pieces, and his apparent enjoyment of wild tales never seems to flag. "The Square Egg," for example, contains one of his best lies; and both "The Gala Programme" and "The Infernal Parliament," the other examples of the characteristic Saki plot in the final posthumous volume, are constructed around extremely wild conceptions, suffragettes in ancient Rome and a Parliament in Hell. The wild tale is basic to Saki. The lie as a form of attack in the characteristic Saki plot appears most frequently in one of Saki's best collections, Beasts and Super-Beasts, with such stories as the following: "The Hen," "The Open Window," "The Lull," "The Romancers," "The Seventh Pullet," "Dusk," "The Quince Tree," "The Story-Teller," "A Defensive Diamond," "The Lumber-Room, " jand "Fur." The fact that so many of the stories in one of Saki's best collections use the lie as the basic mode of i ■ ? : attack indicates its importance for Saki. The lie is a form- of attack that demands something of the reader's own imag ination and intelligence and that gives much in return. In the mouth of Vera Durmot, an imaginative lie is much superior to one of Reginald's impertinences as a form of amusement. It has subtlety, finesse, and a shared con spiracy between reader and protagonist. Like Clovis's well-planned pranks, the lie is a superior form of J i i amusement. Because a lie confronts the reader with the question of what truth actually is, it is also a more serious method of expression than is one of Reginald's pranks. It is fitting, then, that in the later and better ! stories, Saki uses the imaginative lie and the strategic prank as his principal methods of attack. Violence by | * itself appears seldom in Saki, and then most often to j eliminate very grave offenders like Mrs. De Ropp in "Sredni j Vashtar," the suffragettes in "The Gala Programme," and the epitome of all ineptitude in "The Sheep." The early | "Gabriel-Ernest" is, like a number of other stories in ; I Reginald in Russia, an experiment in a new direction; it j i lacks wholeness as a story, for there is no justification 120 [ i ! 1 i I for the extreme violence it contains-. Although the story ; i does reveal the magnitude of the stupidity and blindness of which members of conventional society are capable, it has more shock value than point. Saki's later stories generally have purposes for the attacks the protagonists— ; make; the purposes are consistent with Saki's criticism of society. Although Saki uses all of his standard modes of attack from the early volumes through the final ones, he tends to use them with more precision, purpose, and intel ligence in the characteristic plots of The Chronicles of Clovis and after. Saki's Targets I The targets of concentrated attack in the character- j istic Saki plots are simply those types in modern conven- j i tional society who represent society's failure to equal . ■ ] the standards of an idealized past: weak men, domineering I I women, inept leaders, materialistic employees and employers,; .and aristocrats with mediocre taste and intellect. Many j of the targets are those tyrannical aunts and guardians that have become identified with Saki in such popular | stories as "The Lumber-Room" and "Sredni Vashtar." These i j 121 ; ■ j iaunts and their equivalents are representative of something I more general, however; they are forms of the “unwomanly woman" of Nietzsche; they are individual examples of the 3 i type of militant female seen in the group as suffragettes.. The weak men of "The Open Window" and "The She-Wolf" represent another Nietzschean evil, the "unmanly man." Such! imen appear in groups as members of governments that give in : to suffragettes and anarchists. Mediocrity and conformity are forces and conditions that are opposed to the individ- 4 ualistic, creative ideals of Nietzsche. Saki uses them as his target in almost every story. If one examines the | targets Nietzsche attacks in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he j i finds about the same types that Saki attacks in his ! characteristic plots. If, like the aunts, the targets j sometimes seem to come out of Saki's personal experience, j ] they nevertheless fit the general types on Nietzsche's list.; J We should recognize the fact, however, that Saki could have | developed the same list of targets simply by contrasting j i i j ■ ■ j The Modern Library edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's j Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York, [no date]) describes the j : male-female problem in pages 176-178, but also in many other passages. One must assume a certain degree of familiarity with this book on the part of the reader. 4 Nietzsche, pp. 76-79. I 122 | what he observed in his own society with the romantic past ! i • as he imagined it in his Tory mind. Hypocrites are the targets in "Tobermory" and "The i Schartz-Metterklume Method." Bores become targets in "A Defensive Diamond" and "Reginald's Christmas Revel." Weak men are ridiculed in "The Mouse" and other stories; in "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham," such a man reforms and fortunately destroys his wife by the shock of his self- i assertion, mild though it may seem to be. In "Quail Seed," ; an imaginative artist illustrates the difference between I his creative mind and the commonplace mind of the business- j i iman. This story also reveals the dearth of adventure in the life of the average woman and the degree of attraction such adventure has for her. "The Easter Egg" is a gory j statement of the bloodier side of Nietzsche, the side that j j recommends violent death in battle to prove one’s manliness.! i "The Square Egg, 1 1 on the other hand, represents in part j i Saki's own disillusionment with modern warfare; it first j presents the mud and dreariness of trench wars, then the ! j attractiveness to the soldier of even so quiet an amusement j as a tall story. j The targets of Saki's attacks are those who have ! ! wasted their powers of living, who have given their hearts ! i ’ ”' " " '123”] away in exchange for security. Sometimes they need to be t spurred into renewed life after slipping into meaningless routine; at other times they are without the possibility of salvation and are destroyed. These targets are most dangerous and in need of destruction when they threaten the lives of others, especially children. Saki distributes his punishment with an eye for justice; usually the punish- : ment fits the severity of the crime. Protagonist and Narrator In this dissertation, the assumption is made that Saki's best short stories appear in The Chronicles of Clovis: (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (collected in book form ; ! in 1914). Since the writing of these stories is generally either prior to or concurrent with the writing of his novels; i (The Unbearable Bassington in 1912 and When William Came in ; 1913), the further assumption is made that the novels \ represent the concluding steps in Saki's development as a ' j fiction writer. By the time the novels appear, he has developed his sketch, his story without a hero, and his | . ! : ! characteristic story and has used each type in a number of ] examples that are as good as any that will appear in his j posthumous volumes. In theory, then, we would not need j \to examine the stories of the final volumes more than we already have. Some of them, however, indicate the results of haste in writing that must have been caused by Saki's army service, from 1914 until his death. This haste, and perhaps a growing desire to state his themes directly and in serious fashion, is reflected in a visible change in the use of reliable commentary by the narrator figure as opposed to indirection in earlier short stories. The change is not completely consistent, since Saki must have spent more time and care on some stories than on others. We may notice the change, though, in three examples: "The Unrest-Cure," "The Sheep," and "The Square Egg." The first of these is from The Chronicles of Clovis, written before the novels; the other two are from his posthumous collections. "The Unrest-Cure" is one of the best of the character istic Saki stories. Although both Greene and Lambert include it in their selections, it is not likely to appear in school anthologies because of its open anti-Semitism. It is humorous anti-Semitism, but all anti-Semitism has been made obscene by the processes of history and Hitler. We may smile at Samuel Johnson's hostility toward the Scottish people, but Saki's similar attitude toward the • ......' - - - - -“-j ! ; Jews is in bad taste because of a tragic modern period that has set the Jews apart from the Scottish and all other ; peoples. Except for this anti-Semitic aspect of the story, 'however, "The Unrest-Cure" is an effective piece of enter tainment and a good example of the characteristic Saki plot.r Saki's most nearly complete juvenile protagonist of the short stories, Clovis, levels a highly-imaginative attack upon a fundamental symptom of the weakness of modern society; he attacks the timid victim of compulsive adherence: to conventional routine. Because J. P. Huddle of Slow- borough is simply a typical representative of middle-aged mediocrity,‘ not a tyrannical individual like Mrs. De Ropp of "Sredni Vashtar," this story is fundamentally humorous, and nothing particularly harmful happens to Huddle. His disease is serious, though, and the attack on conformity and dullness is not a light one. Although Huddle and his household provide the reader with laughs, that household will not forget Clovis's visit. The tone is light enough to permit an easy use of verbal wit. Huddle remarks to a friend on a train, "We j ! don11 feel - that we want a change of thrush at our time of ' ! i life" (Short Stories, p. 141). Huddle's sister hears that ! i • | the Bishop will visit them unexpectedly: j | 126 j ; i It was not her day for having a headache, but she felt that the circumstances excused her, and retired to her room to have as much headache as was possible before the Bishop's arrival. (p. 143) When the housemaid hears that her fiance has been killed and; prepares to scream, Huddle asks her to be quiet because her ; mistress has a headache. Because of the headache, Clovis reports that the Bishop will not have anyone shot near the house: Any killing that is necessary on the premises will be done with cold steel. The Bishop does not see why a man should not be a gentleman as well as a Christian. (p. 146) ; Both the narrator figure and the characters in the story, ' i then, produce an undertone of humor in their use of verbal wit. With such a basic tone, the story obviously will not j end tragically. The basic humor is that of situation, though. Clovis j has invented the improbable story that the local Bishop j will use Huddle's house as a center from which he will con- j i duct an operation to kill all Jews in the community, twenty-; :six in all. Because Clovis has planned the prank so well j and so convincingly acts the part of the Bishop's secretary,; Huddle believes him. Telegrams arriving and local Jewish ! i j gentlemen appearing in response to mysterious telegrams makej | 127 | |the show a convincing one. The story builds to a climax ! with the false announcement that a man has been hilled; then it ends quickly with Clovis's smooth escape. He leaves! the household and its guests to a night of fear and perhaps : r a lesson learned. The narrator figure is present in the story, but his presence is subtly indicated. The opening paragraph describing Huddle has a casual style that suggests oral presentation. The use of parentheses around a brief summary of Huddle's conversation suggests voice parentheses used by ’ a story-teller. A cliche a few paragraphs later suggests ;an oral telling, "Clovis became galvanized into alert j attention." The next sentence begins with the casual "After! all, ” again suggesting an oral presentation. Like the ^Reginald sketches, then, the story exhibits a narrator !figure, a character in the story who tells the story aloud ; ) and inserts enough of his own personality to give the piece j ! the urbane flavor of his presence. Yet he is in the back ground; most of the story is in the dialogue of the i characters, not in narrative summary, and Saki dramatizes j the theme and keeps editorializing by the narrator at a ! minimum. j i In "The Sheep," however, the narrator figure offers ! ! 128 | i i Hong paragraphs of commentary on the dangers of sheep-like human beings to society. Published in the posthumous The Toys of Peace, the story has no time for verbal wit and little space for humor of situation. Rupert, the aristo crat of traditional faith, sees his daughter about to marry : the Sheep and produce a generation of little sheep to inherit Rupert's estate. Rupert is seriously concerned about the prospect, but he feels that he can do nothing. The Sheep is not a vicious person, just a bungler, an in competent who can neither play cards nor hunt nor conduct himself discreetly in a political contest. After the Sheep ; in ignorance shoots a rare honey buzzard, Rupert admonishes j him quietly, but the narrator tells us that Rupert1s eyes show hatred for a moment. Poetic justice takes place; the Sheep drowns by his own foolishness and by the intervention j of a dog that prevents his rescue. Kathleen, Rupert's | i daughter, marries Malcolm Athling (whose name tells the j i complete story of his true nobility). j Saki has a serious purpose in "The Sheep," but he fails: ; to achieve it subtly. His name symbolism is too obvious, j and his editorial comments by the narrator figure are too j frequent. The outcome is too contrived for this story to j be first-rate Saki, and it suffers in every respect by ; ^comparison to "The Unrest-Cure." Evidently the pressure of time and the desire to state his "message" directly have rendered the story mediocre. The best piece in his last posthumous collection, the title piece, "The Square Egg," is in some respects a better ; literary work than "The Sheep"; but it is even farther from : the structure of the characteristic Saki plot. "The Square ; Egg" is really an essay, subtitled in parentheses: "A Badger's-Eye View of the War Mud in the Trenches." It ■skillfully compares man and animals and the men of modern warfare with the soldiers of Barbarossa and Frederick the Great. Then it drifts to a description of a meeting of the narrator with a man simply called "Tavern Acquaintance.": :This acquaintance is one of Saki's great imaginative liars, a creative confidence man. "Saki" and "Tavern Acquaintance": suggest Omar, and all of them suggest escape from the war | . I and its mud. This contrast between the mud of war and the ' t pleasures of romance gives the total piece a kind of unity, ; ;but it does not quite come off either as an essay or as a j characteristic Saki story. Once again, Saki is trying to j say something serious and uses the narrator figure too j ■ ■! directly in saying it. The short story is sacrificed to j i ithe essay; yet the essay seems interrupted by the story. ! 130 ! I i 1 It is- not really a further development in fiction technique;; instead it represents a movement away from fiction and i toward the straight essay. It is less well-organized than "The Sheepj" and "The Sheep" is apparently inferior to Saki's pre-war stories. i Saki1s characteristic plot is not really a formula, for it has a potential for very great variety, in protagonist, ; in attack, and in target. It may be either humorous or I bitter, but generally examples of this form tend to be hu morous in the early collections and bitter or simply ironic ; in the later collections. The characteristic Saki plot is | a long stride away from The Westminster Alice, and it shows j the creative activity involved in moving from the Reginald sketches to the Clovis classics. In Reginald, Saki is I evidently under the influence of Carroll and Wilde and j others; in The Chronicles of Clovis. Saki has his own pro- j tagonist and his own basic plot. Most of the Saki stories that appear in anthologies today are of the characteristic type, and our critical judgment of Saki should probably use j ithe characteristic Saki plot as the standard for his fic- ! i tion. At its best, it permits him to criticize society j i | effectively and indirectly while entertaining the reader | with original protagonists in highly imaginative attacks on 131 i mediocrities who deserve to be attacked. The plot expresses most of the meaning. Any expansion of the theme may be indicated through animal-human comparisons, through the implied contrasts with the ideal of the subtle mock-heroic story, and through the surprise and reversal expressed in both the verbal wit and the characterization of the story. In these stories, Saki has the reader's sympathy on the side: of his protagonist, even though the protagonist may be isolated from society; and the reader laughs at the ridicu- i lous spectacle that he himself makes as he takes part in a conventional routine that renders the average man a machine. The characteristic Saki plot has greater interest ; than his stories without heroes have, and it expresses theme more adequately than do the sketches. At its best, it belongs with other classics of literature; but-only in one or two dozen stories can Saki be said to combine all ingredients of the characteristic plot for a completely ; successful result. The characteristic Saki plot also serves as the j starting point for Saki's novels. j CHAPTER V SOCIETY KILLS A PAGAN Small cause there is for that fond wish of ours Long to continue in this world; a world That keeps not faith, nor yet can point a hope To good, whereof itself is destitute. 1 William Wordsworth Although H. E. Bates tells us that the short story "cannot tolerate a weight of words or a weight of moral 2 teaching, 1 1 we have seen Saki accomplish his "moral teach ing" in his short stories, often without a weight of words. Prom his short stories and sketches published prior to his first novel, we can put together a large and detailed statement of Saki's criticisms of life and his implied recommendations for reform, principally a call for new heroes. It should not have shocked his readers in 1912, 1 "Epitaphs," Works of Wordsworth. p. 389. 2 The Modern Short Story, p. 37. 133 I then, to find that The Unbearable Bassington was a very serious novel. Yet Hugh Walpole recalls that critics and typical readers alike were hoth shocked and puzzled; they . 3 were surprised to find their entertainer so serious. The Saki they recalled was still present, in the characters and the verbal wit? but the meaning of the book was a ser ious one and the conclusion tragic. Yet Saki presented almost entirely themes he had presented in earlier pieces of fiction. In "The Hounds of Fate" and "The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water, 1 1 for instance, he had referred to "Fate" as an unpredictable force that arbitrarily deals both good and bad to human beings. This Fate has given Francesca Eassington, in her judgment, a brother who helps her and a son who is a disappointment i(Novels and Plays, pp. 11-15), her judgments reflecting her inverted view of life. In "Reginald's Choir-Treat" and "The Music on the Hill," Saki had indicated his interest in Pan and the pagan mysteries of the forest; in each case, .he had contrasted the adventure and zest of a life that could contemplate such mysteries with the relative dullness 3 "Introduction, " Reginald and Reginald in Russia (New York, 1921), p. ix. 134 j of a life that could not. In "The Soul of Laploskha" and "Filboid Studge," Saki had pointed toward material interests; as the principal motivation for the actions of the average man; in "The Background" and "Reginald on the Academy" and other sketches, Saki had ridiculed the way in which society treats persons who have genuine imaginative powers; and in "Judkin of the Parcels" and "The Unrest-Cure," he had shown contempt for the way in which the average man settles for mediocrity and routine instead of seeking adventure and the world of the imagination. In The Unbearable Bassington j an imaginative juvenile protagonist attacks a materialistic, I dull, tasteless, greedy society and meets defeat, after he has first disturbed the calm a few times. This protagonist ; is a pagan spirit bringing mirth and adventure to human beings who are too much the prisoners of conformity to : ' ! accept what he brings. They are the ultimate extensions of the Puritan middle-class doctrines of hard work and free ; enterprise; they have lost the art of enjoying life, and r ■they permit themselves to be controlled by the property they' i own. Their materialism is the only residue of Christianity,; for, as the cynical Lady Caroline points out, "The Christian! Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve" (p. 108). j i Their choice is not between Christianity and Paganism, but | : 135 j between dull materialism and the pagan adventure that Comus i offers to them. The novel is constructed around three stories, really? enveloping the other two is the story of Francesca? within that is the story of Comus's struggle with society? and within that is Elaine's personal tragedy. The Comus story is most important, but its meaning is revealed through the other two. Francesca Bassington The novel begins and ends with Francesca and her brother, Henry Greech, in conversation .in her drawing room. This drawing room, Saki tells us, is her soul (p. 1*1) . It is filled with treasures she has given her life to collect ing and protecting? the most important is a huge painting ! !of a battle scene by Van der Meulen, brought with her as a j part of her dowry. Her excessive loyalty to her treasures makes Francesca an excellent representative of her mater- ! ialistic society. She is in her early forties, a widow for j more than ten years, no longer beautiful or loved. She has one son, Comus, who is a disappointment to her, and a brother, Henry, who is dull, unimaginative, and unintelli—- \ gent, but helpful in financial matters. Her brother also I ; ~ 136 I i t ! j !is representative of society, for he is a Member of Parlia- ; Iment and no more dull than many of his fellow members. At the beginning of the story, Francesca and Henry think alike ; in most things. Francesca’s soul is in danger. The drawing room and the house must go to Emmeline Chetrof, now seventeen, when Emmeline marries. When it does, Francesca will be unable to provide another suitable setting for her treasures. She and Henry decide that Comus must be used to save her soul_ (the drawing room). Francesca and Henry plot the ways in which Comus may be used; as he disappoints them in one way, they plot again. They are willing to marry him off to one :of the wealthy young women, including Emmeline Chetrof, to send him off to one of the colonies as secretary to a government official, or even to send him off to Africa to an isolated outpost where he expects to die. They are will ing to use Comus in any way so long as Francesca need not j sell any of her treasures. Comus dies in Africa. j In the final chapter of the novel, Francesca realizes | her missed opportunities with her son, the affection they might have had for each other, and the superiority of human j love over material possessions. She even thinks of Comus's 1 137 ! \ j death as a crucifixion (p. 139), recalls his references to his African clothing as "grave-clothes for his burying : alive, " and faces alone "the bleak thrall of black unending Winter, a Winter in which things died and knew no re awakening" (p. 142). Then, while Henry tells her the news that her Van der Meulen is only a copy after all, she sits in stricken grief, wishing Henry's voice would stop {p. 143). It is the end of her story. Although Francesca * s story seems at first reading to be a tragedy, it is only superficially so. True, she has lost her son; and in the world she knows, crucified would-be' saviours do not rise up again. She is alone. On the other j hand, she has for the first time come to see the relative \ importance of human communication and love and the insig nificance of property. She has lost the supposed value of I • j the Van der Meulen, the chief among the treasures that have i heretofore represented her soul; but she has gained another I kind of soul in her capacity to grieve for another human ; being. In a sense, Comus1s crucifixion has been for the j sins of society, represented by his mother and those like \ her; his death has saved her from the sin of materialism \ and has given her a new life as a fully human being. Whether pagan or otherwise, Comus has entered the world and | jhas, by his death, brought love. He now lives for his mother more fully than he had ever lived while he was I : ' i 'literally alive. So we may view the Francesca plot as triumph, not tragedy. Such a conclusion requires us to ignore the super-! ficial details of the concluding paragraphs, however, and to speculate rather optimistically about what will happen to Francesca after the novel's present ending. It is certainly not a cheerful conclusion, and Comus has died in miserable loneliness; but the change in Francesca offers f some hope that Comus1s death has not been entirely wasted j on the world. The conclusion may truly be said to raise more questions than it answers and to raise them because the author wishes the reader to consider them. The am biguity of the ending is not a flaw in the novel. " J ■ - i j | The Francesca plot does reveal one major flaw in i Saki's skill as a novelist, however. This flaw is present \ i I in other aspects of the novel as well, but nowhere more I i seriously than in the Francesca story. In both the opening j and closing chapters of the novel, Saki tells the reader j too much; he explicitly states what sort of person Fran- j | cesca is, what her character is like, what her attitude is j • ! S toward her son, what she thinks of her treasures, and so ; ; * 139' 1 i ! j I forth. Indirection is too frequently sacrificed for the quicker way of the omniscient narrator summarizing all we i i need to know about the character. Saki deprives the reader of the opportunity of forming his own conclusions after watching a dramatized situation. The first~T:ive pages tell 'what would require several times the space to dramatize, it is true? but one feels that the first five pages should be dramatized in part. In the final chapter, too, Saki's style of narration errs on the side of directness. A part of the fault is in the omniscient point of view itself. i This point of view tempts the writer to "cheat" and tell more than he should by direct statement. Part of the problem arises from Saki's attempt to present an entire j ] 'society under attack within the space of about fifty thou sand words. To accomplish so much in so little space, Saki summarizes more than he should. A final reason for j [ Saki's failure to dramatize sufficiently is his old reliance on the narrator figure to serve as both a dramatized char- :acter in the story and as a reliable source of information f for the reader. The narrator figure is obviously present j in the many personal comments on the characters and their j problems, sounding very much like the asides of an acquaint-; ance as he tells one a story. But a narrator figure who j ■could occupy a definite position on stage in a very brief story can easily be forgotten between his appearances in a fifty-thousand-word novel. That is the case with The Unbearable Bassington. In most of the novel we have drama tized events that tell what they have to tell through indirection; but now and again, as in the first and last- chapter with Francesca and in a number of passages with Elaine, the narrator figure steps on stage to tell the reader what might have been dramatized by a more skillful novelist. Then, too, the fact that a more or less identi fiable character, the narrator figure, is permitted to enter ■the minds of severaj. persons, as if he were an impersonal : omniscient narrator, is somewhat confusing. Saki does not always handle the problem of distance properly, and this adds to the* confusion about point of view in general. If we were inside Francesca's mind in the first and last chapter, we would have to learn to judge her without the j help of the narrator's direct comment; but we would know \ Francesca as a human being, at least. With Elaine in the garden scene (pp. 46-50), we also need to be inside her I mind; hearing about it at second hand leaves the reader j too distant from the character. A major problem in the society Saki describes is the inability of characters to j I 141 i j I i I communicate with one another. As Saki has told the story, he has also made it difficult for the characters to com- ! ! municate with the reader as believable people. Perhaps ■ the result is useful in the presentation of a society in which the human beings do not live as human beings but as machines operating within fixed patterns of action; yet the handling of point of view and editorial comment by the ; narrator is a problem Saki has not solved adequately in this novel. It is a problem, incidentally, that would seldom arise in Saki's short fiction, simply because such \ short stories and sketches may use the narrator figure in j a more restricted role without difficulty and the short pieces need not explore the minds of more than one or two i characters. The need for more indirect presentation is, i of course, subject to debate. Saki says much in this j relatively short novel, and the greater length required I for additional dramatization might have brought its own I i disadvantages. Nevertheless, The Unbearable Bassington j demonstrates an incomplete mastery of the novel form on the . j I \ .part of the author. j I In spite of the problems Saki has failed to solve, i i I the narrator figure serves an important purpose in the j | novel. He is the writer of the gospel of Comus according j I to Saki? as a gospel writer he unifies the entire book, selecting the incidents from Comus's life that we need to know about, interpreting their moral significance, and generally ordering events and sayings to suit his own sense of their total meaning. Seen in this way, the narrator figure becomes important as a unifying element for the various plots of the novel, and his direct interpretation of the significance of events is even partly excusable. Nevertheless, the novel centers around the figure of Comus, and he furnishes unity through his effect on the other principal figures in the story. Elaine de Frey Just as Francesca is a representative of the mater ialism of society and has long ago lost her ability to love, so Elaine is a younger representative of this society, con ditioned by family training to treat as sacred those rules that protect property from danger. At Lady Caroline's dinner party, Francesca observes the girl she hopes Comus will marry: She was pretty in a restrained nut-brown fashion, and had a look of grave reflective calm that probably masked a speculative unsettled temperament. Her pose, if one wished to be critical, was just a little too elaborately careless. She wore some excellently set rubies with 143 | that indefinable air of having more at home that is so difficult to improvise. Francesca was distinctly pleased with her survey. (p. 36) Francesca can identify with a girl who wears rubies with confidence; although their financial positions are quite different, Francesca and Elaine share certain attitudes about material possessions. Francesca wants Elaine's money for her son and, in part, for herself. A rising young political dandy named Courtenay Youghal also wants Elaine's money, however. He tells an old acquaintance, Molly McQuade, that he is falling in love with a young woman who will make him an excellent political > hostess and will provide financial security for his politi- ; cal campaigning. He "imagines" he is "rather" in love with ( her and that, although she may not be in love with him, she is a girl who will "let judgment influence her a lot" (p. 44). When he tells Molly that he would be an excellent j husband for such a girl, Molly tells him that he is still in love only with himself and that his intended is likely to be miserable, as any woman who married him would be. i Since Molly has known him for years, the reader may be sure | i that Courtenay is not likely to be quite the fine catch | i j Elaine may think him. ! Courtenay's statement that Elaine would let "judgment" j influence her decision is prophetic. Elaine's mind, we i discover later, is "a sort of appeal court before whose i secret sittings were examined and judged the motives and actions” of everyone she meets or reads about {pp. 48-49). Elaine has learned from governesses and relatives that "wealth is a great responsibility," and this knowledge has caused her to judge the motives of other people with so much care. Elaine feels the obligation to get a good buy in whatever dealings she has. This awareness of her duty and her care in judging each situation are parts of her Puritan system of virtue. It is this system that Comus will, threaten. While Elaine's mind is rendering preliminary judgments ; : ^ on Courtenay and Comus, the three of them are seated on a lawn in an atmosphere referred to more than once as heaven- i ! ly. In contrast to the court of her mind is the carefree state around Elaine and her suitors: i The warm sunlit garden grew suddenly into a heaven j that held the secret of eternal happiness. Youth and comeliness would always walk here, under the low-boughed I mulberry trees, as unchanging as the leaden otter that j for ever preyed on the leaden salmon on the edge of the j old fountain, and somehow the lovers would always wear j the aspect of herself and the boy who was talking to the ] four white swans by the water steps. (p. 52) ! i Elaine is young and capable at times of joy and love and j ; 145 | ;life, but she is also a careful judge of facts, and at the end of the scene the facts are not completely favorable for i Comus. One unpleasant fact she must face is that Comus has been careless with her property. He takes the only bread- and-butter dish to the lake to feed four swans. These are swans that Elaine has imagined to be the "souls of unhappy boys" who have been forced to enter the clergy; at times, Elaine can feel~~romantically sorry for such souls, but at other times she must be a judge. She must judge Comus, for ; he announces happily that he will keep the silver bread-and- butter dish as a souvenir. i ! At this moment Elaine thinks of her cousin Suzette, a girl who is more completely a part of middle-class so- i ■ciety in tastes and interests than Elaine is herself. j Suzette, in such a situation as this, "would have gone into I a flood of tears at the loss of her bread-and-butter" alone;' the silver dish is much more serious. Elaine could smile indulgently at the thought of Suzette's tears over bread and butter; but the dish is enough to make Elaine angry. | Suzette and Elaine are of the same family. Comus assumes i i that if one is wealthy such things as bread-and-butter dishes! ■ ' I are not important; but when Elaine shows her anger, he, too, i becomes greedy and insists on keeping the dish (p. 53). Until this moment, Comus has been playful and innocent of greed. Elaine (Eve) sins first, by making property impor tant ; after she does, Comus (Adam) eats of the apple of greed and lust, too. Elaine's mental picture of boy and girl walking in the garden (of Eden) changes; she is no longer sure that the boy in the picture is Comus. In effect, Elaine's greed,; followed by Comus's response, has driven Adam and Eve from the garden; a death of sorts awaits each of them in the . future. But the final break takes place later. When Fran cesca attends Lady Caroline's bridge party soon after the ! i scene on the lawn, she hears the society gossip predict that Courtenay will marry Elaine. The gossip's name is : George St. Michael, and his role of the Arch-angel Michael predicting the future of Adam and Eve is subtly underlined \ once or twice. Still Elaine has not decided yet. On a I trip to a party on horseback, Elaine symbolically turns out j ] of the road to avoid a series of vans containing the animals! i of a travelling wild-beast show. Her horse, much like j I herself in temperament, is afraid of wild beasts, just as she is fearful of the uncertainty of life with Comus. j ^Turning into a farmyard lane, she meets Tom Keriway, once a j much-puhlicized figure of adventure and romance, but now retired to a little farm. He has always represented to her the sort of happiness one should find in the unconventional life. When she discovers that he is not .happy, now that he is finished with his travels and adventure, she is less interested than before in the adventurous life Comus might offer. Soon after, Elaine and Comus sit together in chairs in the park, and Elaine's judging mind reviews Comus's faults, including the taking of the silver dish: There had been small unrepaid loans which Elaine would not have grudged in themselves, though the application for them brought a certain qualm of distaste; with the perversity which seemed inseparable from his doings, Comus had always flung away a portion of his borrowings in some ostentatious piece of glaring and utterly profitless extravagance, which outraged all the canons of her upbringing without bringing him an atom of i understandable satisfaction. (p. 77) I In contrast to these reflections, Elaine compares Comus favorably to Egbert, the fiance of her cousin Suzette; the two are seated within sight of Elaine, and Suzette and Egbert are obviously not finding life and conversation ex citing. Comus has some good qualities after all. j Then Comus makes the final mistake. After discussing 148 ; his money problems, he borrows two pounds from Elaine. She j loses all hope for such an irresponsible person and within a few hours proposes to Courtenay, reminding herself that he is also superior to Suzette's Egbert. Comus does not learn of Elaine's decision until, while viewing a portrait -of his mother at an exhibition of paintings, he decides to 'make a serious attempt to win Elaine, partly in order to help his mother. It is too late. When he hears the news, he writes Elaine that he will give her and Courtenay the silver dish for their wedding present: "I shall love to think of you and Courtenay eating bread-and-butter out of it for the rest of your lives" (p. 96). Although Elaine has triumphed over Suzette by marrying a more attractive man than Egbert, she finds on ; her honeymoon that Courtenay is "one of Nature's bachelors" j i and not particularly interested in sexual activity. His I sexual passivity is only one unpleasant fact. At a costume i ball, she discovers that he regards the world of costumes ; and masks as the real world and has no interest in anyone .' I but himself. Two of her aunts are in Vienna while she and j ! I Courtenay are there on their honeymoon, and they recognize i i the fact, as they see it, that her marriage has prevented j | what would have been a very great mistake, marrying Comus; ' 149 :on the other hand, they regard Courtenay as almost as unfortunate a choice. Elaine is apparently doomed to a living death, whereas Comus will eventually be forced to go out to Africa and die alone there; death for each has come as a result of the sin of greed in the garden, a sin that has separated them. The Adam and Eve interpretation is speculative, but it has some justification in that a few years before the writing of Bassington Saki had written a fragment of a story about Adam and Eve. Reported by Ethel Munro in the “Biography" (pp. 691-693), the fragment has Eve resisting the pleas of both the serpent and the archangel; Eve is simply an unimaginative Puritan girl who could not possibly j t break a rule. Ethel Munro explains that: ! i Hector had a special detestation for this type of character, stubborn, placid, unimaginative, like the awful, good child in “The Story-Teller," who is from ; life, though we never knew her as a child. (p. 693) j Saki's Adam and Eve story is a reversal of the first one, ; in a sense, for Elaine is obeying her Puritan rules of con- : r duct in being greedy. Yet Saki is pointing out that Purit- j anism has come full circle until what has once been a virtue1 i 1 i is now a sin, the sin of lust for property. Saki uses i j reversal once more to point an unexpected truth about j society. The more obvious allusion to Milton in Elaine's story is, of course, to the masque "Comus." Here, too, Saki is reversing the situation of the characters. Elaine, like the Lady in Milton, represents the Puritan Christian vir tues, but they are not so much chastity and temperance as they are.prudence and judgment in the management of material possessions. In each case, Comus represents the figure of a god of revelry and mirth. Puritan Milton regards Comus1s temptation as evil, while pagan Saki treats Comus as the way to salvation for a Puritan society gone wrong. j Elaine has been "brought up on the methodical lines of ■ l [ Victorian Christianity" (p. 67), the outgrowth of Milton's ; i Puritanism. She resists the temptation of Comus and thus | retains her chastity more completely than she wishes to; j Courtenay is no threat to the chaste. Elaine misses her chance for salvation from Puritanism. \ Comus Bassington ! Comus receives his pagan name from his father, who j i i dies soon afterward. Saki explains that Francesca, the | i mother, feels that Fate has been harsh with her in giving j ;her such a son instead of a dull, reliable, hardworking ! offspring. Comus lives up to his name: 151 The boy was one of those untamable young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe themselves through nursery and preparatory and public-school days with the utmost allowance of storm and dust and dislocation and the least possible amount of collar-work, and come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes that has reduced every one else concerned to tears or Cassandra-like forebodings. (p. 15) Although such boys may either become as dull as others and live commonplace lives or achieve greatness and the praise of the public, that is not the usual case: But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave school and turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too civilized and too crowded and too empty to have any place for them. And they are very many. (p. 16) This will be Comus1s tragedy. He will be unable to settle down to dullness, and he will just miss the chance for Igreatness. This chance is suggested to his mind after he has examined the portrait of his mother at the exhibition and has resolved to try to make something of himself. He thinks Elaine may still be his: With the influence of Elaine's money behind him, he promised himself that he would find some occupation that would remove from himself the reproach of being a waster and idler. There were lots of careers, he told himself, that were open to a man with solid fi nancial backing and good connexions. (p. 87) With the opportunity that Comus has already surrendered to •Courtenay Youghal at this point, Comus might have been one ■of those rare romantics to win the applause of the public by great, heroic deeds. But Courtenay has Elaine, and Comus: i is left with his tragedy. No possibility remains for him but the lonely assignment in Africa, where he will die. Elaine has not been his only opportunity, however. Francesca and her brother Henry have planned other ways for Comus to obtain money to help Francesca keep her position. First, the two have tried to bring off a marriage between Comus and Emmeline Chetrof, to whom Francesca's | house will revert on her marriage. Comus does not cooper- ] ate, is deliberately cruel to Emmeline's younger brother ' in school, and loses the chance. j Next, Comus has the opportunity to become a secretary j to the dull Sir Julian Jull, newly-appointed governor of a- j i West Indian territory. When Comus hears that Francesca and ■ ! r Henry have this in mind for him, he signs a scathingly ; satiric attack on Sir Julian and has it published, closing j that door permanently. j j At any time, of course, Henry Greech might have done j something more direct in aid of his nephew, but Comus1s | | personality is such that Henry wishes him at a distance. j 153 I 1 ! |Elaine offers the only solution short of West Africa. When I Comus makes the fatal mistake of borrowing two pounds from Elaine and sending her on the rebound to Courtenay, his l action is a part of a long series of attacks on conventional society. He has succeeded in temporary victories over materialism and conformity. His cruelty to Lancelot Chetrof has really been his way of rebelling against Francesca's attempt to use Comus as a vehicle to obtain a permanent lease on her house. The caning he gives Lancelot is unjust : and severe, but he is striking back at an adult society that would deprive him of freedom. He strikes at the dull- ; ness of this society when he writes his name at the end of ■the satire (composed by his friend Courtenay) on Sir Julian ; Jull. In each case, he enjoys a victory that reveals his hopelessness as a hero, for his victory brings him even j . . . i greater trouble than before. Even in his encounter with i Elaine, he achieves a victory. Courtenay plans a careful j i campaign for Elaine that will win her money while concealing; from her his materialistic purpose (pp. 52-55); he succeeds | so well that Elaine proposes to him (p. 81). But Comus j keeps his freedom and his soul; knowing quite well that I i Elaine is too much concerned about money, he borrows the two pounds from her anyhow. He annoys her sense of ; 154 j responsibility so much that he loses her completely, but he has made some sort of point about the unimportance of money. Certainly she is later to regret her decision to marry Courtenay; Comus has helped teach her a lesson, but this victory means that West Africa is inevitable for him. Comus dares to suggest to Francesca that they might sell something, the Van der Meulen, for instance; but she does not weahen. Her property will remain with her in life (p. 105). Francesca has already summed up Comus1s problem and his future: i "Comus, 1 1 she said quietly and wearily, "you are | an exact reversal of the legend of Pandora's Box. You have all the charm and advantages that a boy could want to help him on in the world, and behind it all there is j the fatal damning gift of utter hopelessness." "I thinh," said Comus, "that is the best description that any one has ever given of me." {p. 103) In his last scene, in Africa, he reflects that if he were I to have another chance he would throw that away, too. "Fatej j played with him with loaded dice; he would lose always" j (p. 137). Comus is the hopeless hero, capable of brief victories over mediocrity and conformity, but doomed ulti- i imately to be defeated by the mass of that mediocrity and its; t ; ) pressures. ■ "Fate" is roughly equivalent in the quotation above 155 } f I \to "Nature" in the passage below. A teacher at Comus's school has just suggested that another teacher might be able to tame Comus: "Heaven forbid that I should try," replied the housemaster. "But why?" asked the reformer. "Because Nature hates any interference with her own arrangements, and if you start in to tame the obviously untamable you are taking a fearful responsibility on yourself." "Nonsense? boys are Nature's raw material."■ "Millions of boys are. There are just a few, and Bassington is one of them, who are Nature's highly finished product when they are in the schoolboy stage, and we, who are supposed to be moulding raw material, are quite helpless when we come in contact with them." (pp. 21-22) i Such boys never grow up, he goes on; but he does not mean to suggest Peter Pan. These are boys who want real adven tures, real wolves and pirates, not toys. The world can never tame then;, for they can never accept the routine and i the dullness that other men adjust to. On the other hand, ; there are so few of them that they can never really change the rest of the world. If they are lucky and have a chance | to combine their potential heroism with the time for heroism the world may applaud them? otherwise they are doomed to ■ i isolation from the world and consequent failure. j Like Tom Keriway, Comus is not happy in isolation. j I It is not that he is like the ordinary members of his j ! 156 ; ^society, but that he is one of the few who really know how to appreciate life in society. Life is an adventure for him, but he needs others to help him make it so. Courtenay is the Harlequin who mistakes a costume ball for real adventure; Comus would be able to find the genuinely adven turous experience that Elaine has missed in marrying Courtenay. Comus’s gift is a gift for living creatively and enjoying what others pass over without recognizing as good. But like Tom Keriway he is forced to live in isola tion, and he dies. In his death he has persuaded Francesca ; that the values of her society are not good enough, and he has left with Elaine a memory of the promise of real ad- j venture; he has won temporary triumphs along the way and has left some permanent influence on the life of Francesca, f at least; but society has debated Comus, since he is only a hopeless hero after all. Minor Characters j Saki1s minor characters help to fill out the mural of conventional society and, in some cases, serve to present j reinforcements and expansions of basic themes through j i i parallel problems and relationships. Of the minor charac- j ters in the novel, only Courtenay Youghal is important j i 157 j 1 : ! enough to have a life of his own? and that life is essen tially as a contrast to Comus in Elaine's story. We have i : already seen his impotence, his shallowness, and his ; underlying confusion about his own values. Together with Sir Julian Jull and Henry Greech, however, Courtenay presents a picture of the government that controls the society that defeats Comus. The govern ment is as ridiculous as the rest of the society. Sir Julian and Henry have had the occasion to pool their talents: in drafting a resolution that is ruled out of order (p. 28).! i | Their inferiority as legislators is equalled only by the ; dullness of their conversation. But although Courtenay's speeches are showy enough to attract public notice, his j ; i own work in Parliament is not particularly glamorous. When i i ;Elaine remarks that he does not have to argue about bread- ] : ' ' and-butter dishes, his reply is disillusioning: ! i I i "Chiefly about bread-and-butter," said Youghal; j "our great preoccupation is other people 1s bread-and- I butter. They earn or produce the material, but we busy ourselves with making rules how it shall be cut up, and the size of the slices, and how much butter ; shall go on how much bread. That is what is called j legislation. If we could only make rules as to how | the bread-and-butter should be digested we should be happy." (p. 53) j i After this description of his work, Courtenay leaves Elaine j to go "forth to battle or the semblance of battle" (p. 54). It is not the traditional battle of adventurous knights, Saki is reminding the reader; but it is the only adventure left for those who are a part of society. One can almost hear the Pagan Comus murmuring to the Puritan Elaine of the merchant society, "Man does not live by bread-and-butter alone." But Comus fails to communicate his message of salvation in time to rescue her. In fact, Courtenay's battles over bread-and-butter please Elaine; As a young woman with the responsibility of guarding her wealth, she has learned to sit in judgment on Parliament and its activities. She knows that Courtenay iis both a good debater and a faithful worker on committees (p. 54). Francesca, too, is aware of governmental affairs. She goes to the defense of Sir Edward Roan, the Foreign Secretary, as she plays cards with Lady Caroline Benaresque (pp. 60-61). Lady Caroline has her own opinion of Sir I Edward: "He reminds one so of a circus elephant— infinitely more intelligent than the people who direct him, but quite content to go on putting his foot down ortaking it up as may be required, quite unconcerned whether he steps on a meringue or a hornet's nest in the process of going where he's expected to go." (p. 61), Lady Caroline is quoting Courtenay Youghal on Sir Edward, we discover; but Lady Caroline, like Francesca and Elaine, is actively interested in the government. The interest is not the admiration of the Medieval lady watching her knight in the tournament; instead, it is the judgment of the expert. Women are, after all, in control of this society, of their husbands, of their fortunes, of social events, and : even of the government. When legislation concerns the dining table, it is natural that women should supervise. Saki is making once again the point that women are not womanly and men not manly in these days of suffragettes. :The background conversations at bridge parties and the like j } serve the purpose of providing a detailed impression of the j basic nature of the society. Such things as legislative prospects do not really belong in the leisure.conversations j of women, if they are womanly. But to the degree that the j men are unheroic, the women become masculine; there are no i j heroes in this society, but if there were, they would have \ difficulty in finding womanly heroines. j t . ' . I The satire on leaders xn The Westminster Alice is j ! \ suggested both in the portraits of M.P.'s and in those of j i i church leaders. Canon Besomley is one of the representative', j i of the latter group; he defers to the opinions of the j women in whose company he spends much of his time. As Lady i Caroline says, he is "the sort of popular pulpiteer who spanks the vices of his age and lunches with them after wards" (p. 59). The Canon enjoys Lady Caroline's remark that the "Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve" (p. 108), and he describes a fellow clergyman as one who "spends his life explaining from his pulpit that ; the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been necessary to invent it." No heroism is left in government leaders, and no religion is ; left in church leaders. Both are subject to the dictates of women. ; Lady Veula Croot appears frequently at parties with a look of sadness that marks her isolation and the isolation’ of other individuals, particularly those like Lady Veula I and Comus, creatures isolated by their superiority to the j average member of the society. According to Lady Caroline, | | Lady Veula is "a woman whose dresses are made in Paris and j whose marriage has been made in heaven" (p. 74). Lady j i i Veula should be happy, but she is not, in spite of her own { • k f beauty, "a devoted husband, some blond teachable children," j i and the "commercial solidity and enterprising political j i nonentity" of her husband's family (p. 74). In a society j 161 | Ithat prizes wealth, she is wealthy and disappointed with ! her life. She is sad and is aware of others who are sad, like Comus before he leaves for Africa. She notices the phantom black dog that foretells his death? only she and Comus have seen it, but only she has really tried to com municate with him. The rest of those at his farewell dinner party show as little concern for Comus as his own mother does. Lady Veula, however, sighs as she leaves, "What a tragedy life is 11 1 Like Elaine, she has found the approved values of her time disappointing; like Comus, but in a different way, she is isolated from others, and her life is ; a tragedy. Isolation and inability to communicate are charac teristics of the people in this novel. Francesca and Comus : : j - communicate with each other so little that Comus becomes ! i aware of his mother's softer side only when he examines her ; portrait at the exhibition; the picture suggests what ■personal contact does not, that his mother might have a soul. Portraits and paintings also raise identity problems ! :of another sort.: Elaine suggests to those she meets a j ■portrait by da Vinci in the Louvre, not her own human self j i f {p. 129). She reflects: "Evidently the impression she i \ made on people was solely one of externals." At the moment j |of this reflection she is talking with a young Russian she has just met at a costume hall. Her costume disturbs her : further, for it is her husband's suggestion, the costume of 3 aear v ■ an obscure figure in history about whom she knows nothing. Yet her husband has told her that he wanted to marry Elaine j only because she was like his ideal of that obscure woman in history (Marjolaine de Montfort). Even to her husband, then, she is someone other than her real self (p. 127). On the other hand, she can scarcely recognize her husband i in his role as Harlequin at the costume party; he is so different from the debater she has married. In this society in which mother and son, husband and wife, and frequent companions do not know each other, Comus is the most isolated of all by nature. When he dies [ alone in Africa, he is in the midst of a people with whom he can never identify; yet his situation is different only in degree from his isolation in England. Only Lady Veula j has for a moment recognized his feelings; others have | ignored him while going on with their meaningless conver- j i sations at dinner. The novel is full of parties, for that ; i I matter, and at those parties the guest's chatter to each j | other about superficial matters while inwardly absorbed in personal problems their companions know nothing about. ! When Comus dies and the telegram arrives in London, his mother sits silent with her unbearable grief while her ! brother Henry babbles on about paintings; the novel ends in this scene of isolation. • i David Daiches has written that a common characteristic | of many modern novels is the world in which individuals are i so "imprisoned by their own private and unique conscious- ; ness" that they cannot achieve love. He says that in these ; novels "loneliness is the great reality, love the great necessity." The problem is bringing the two together.^ ! f Saki suggests in The Unbearable Bassington that the two cannot be brought together. The novel obviously fits the Daiches description of the modern novel in its themes, if J t not always in its techniques. Saki's minor characters reinforce meanings in the j ‘ i j stories of the major characters. Lady Veula, for instance, j has already experienced disappointment similar to Elaine's, j so we are prepared for the conclusion of Elaine's story. ! f Suzette and Egbert, in their dreariness of prospect, should i ■ f serve to warn Elaine of possible future unhappiness; she j ; . i has compared herself and Courtenay with'them* but she has j i 4 i The Hovel and the Modern Word (Chicago, I960), p. 10. | 164 missed the real similarity. The names of the minor charac ters, as well as their voices in the background and their movements to and fro, help to complete details of the picture of the society against which Comus does hopeless battle. Ada Spelvexit, Merla Blathlington, Serena Golackly, Lulu Braminguard, Henry Greech, and Julian Jull suggest by their names the dreary mediocrity of the society. Mervyn Quentock, Courtenay Youghal, and Poltimore Vardon suggest the. pretentious and artificial. Both dreariness and-pre tentiousness are a part of the society; both are revealed subtly through the names of the characters. General Francesca Saki unifies his story in part through an underlying pattern of animal imagery. Most of the characters are at one time or another identified with animals. Francesca, however, is set apart from the other characters by images of toughness and hardness and particularly by military images. She is portrayed with the verbs and modifiers of a general more frequently than with those that would suit a lady. The conditions that have made her drawing room her soul have created a masculine Francesca. Only in the final chapter of the novel does she become a woman. 1 6 5 ! i j In the opening paragraph of the novel, Saki speaks of Francesca as "regaling herself" with her brother on "tea and small cress sandwiches"; the verb "regale, 1 1 even in its participial form, does not suggest the dainty lady of romance, but rather two companions on equal terms of strength, sex, and worldly experience. Although such a distinction may be almost too slight to note, a number of word choices in the following paragraphs indicate the same kind of discrimination on the part of the writer. Saki says that no one would call Francesca "sweet," then refers to her "enemies" and "friends." The daintiest ladies have friends, and some of them enemies, but these terms divide the world in a masculine way, the way in which a business executive or a military commander might divide it. Then, j in the sentences concluding with the statement that Fran- t cesca1s drawing-room'is her soul, other masculine and military terms are applied to Francesca: "if pressed in : an unguarded moment, " "the one had stamped the impress of j i its character on the other." In the final sentence on the j first page (p. 11), Saki introduces further military langu- age: "With the advantages put at her disposal she might j ! i have been expected to command a more than average share of feminine happiness." Only in the last two words does i |Saki suggest that she is feminine and seeks such a soft thing as "happiness." Francesca is a commander who dis- [ :poses of things. The comparison continues through passing i terms suggesting hardness ("rock-garden of their souls," "stony griefs") and toughness ("dragging," "cheated") to the following: The battle had more than once gone against her, but she had somehow always contrived to save her baggage train, and her complacent gaze could roam over object after object that represented the spoils of victory or the salvage of honourable defeat. (p. 12) The nature of her trophies (bronzes, battle scenes, and ! some feminine articles) and the way she has obtained them (betting, winning at cards, and receiving one from a dead j admirer) show Francesca to be masculine in her aggressive i ‘ f approach to life, with only a remnant of femininity, now j ■ ' I ■partly buried. She is a woman operating with assurance in a man's role in life, evidently obtaining her triumphs ] from her competition with men. The Van der Meulen painting j I of a battle scene is indicative, too, of the modern role ; of man: : There was a pleasing serenity about the great pompous battle scene with its solemn courtly warriors bestrid- | ing their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely in earnest, and yet somehow conveying j the impression that their campaigns were but vast seri- ] ous picnics arranged in the grand manner. (p. 13)____ j 167 : ■ i I i The male warriors belong to the past and have been rendered | docile enough to be picnickers, as Francesca has preserved them on her wall. Just as Elaine judges men and their actions as a general might, Francesca can look to the paint ing captive on her wall and judge the warriors who are prisoners within its frame. A page later Francesca looks to a problem in the future, when she must lose the house, and plans to use Comus as a bridge over chaos; he is a bridge she is build ing, so one supposes that she is now an army engineer. A moment later, Francesca thinks of her brother and Eliza IBarnet, a female reformer, as together "in other arenas of life and struggle," where "the fiercest competition and rivalry" is found (p. 16). This brother, who competes on i a level with women, dislikes big game hunting and most j : j games; he is less masculine than his sister, although he represents the legislators who supposedly run the country, j i ' In Chapter III, Francesca's next scene, she "steers" j her way through a crowd, haying no man to manage for her (p. 25). Then she demonstrates "Spartan stoicism" and j • i "pushes" her way through another crowd, "fortified by a j : ■. - 1 sense of well-earned victory" (pp. 28-29) . The next day I ! her breakfast is "only just beginning to mobilize on the j 168 ] [breakfast-table, 1 1 Saki says, when she learns of a defeat. ] Then follow these military references: ; j Francesca, forgetting the golden rule of strategy which enjoins a careful choosing of ground and opportunity be fore entering on hostilities . . . (p. 30) If Saki departs for even a moment from his hard, tough, masculine, military imagery applied to Francesca, the depar-i ture is not noticeable. The reader can understand the reasons for the "wall of ice" between this tough creature and her son (p. 32). Although one may sympathize with Francesca for having been forced to be a manager and a strategist, one may not deny the fact that she is too mas culine to fit either Saki's or Nietzsche's ideal of woman. After the failure of the Emmeline Chetrof and Julian I Jull campaigns, both managed by Francesca and sabotaged by j i | Comus, Comus himself begins the siege of Elaine; Francesca i I does not control this attempt, although she is a concerned observer. The military terms begin to attach themselves ; i to Comus, then, although he is hardly aware of the fact j that he is doing battle. Francesca thinks of the advantages! i Comus brings "into the field" against Courtenay, but also ' t of the many Courtenay can assemble (p. 40). Comus sports ; • t and plays in his courting, while Courtenay is a strategist j ■ i Jfrom the first (p. 54). Just before his mistake, Comus is I described: Comus, marching carelessly through unknown country to effect what seemed already an assured victory, made the mistake of disregarding the existence of an unbeaten army on his flank. (p. 77) Two pages later Comus has foolishly borrowed two pounds, then attempted to give Elaine time to cool her anger before he returns. Saki says: "His tactics would have been excellent if he had' not forgotten that unbeaten army on his flank" (p. 79). She finds Courtenay at once and proposes the same day. Elaine becomes aggressive and military when ; she takes matters into her own hands and proposes to Courtenay, for soon afterward she arms herself and wins a j victory over Suzette (pp. 91-93). Comus1s brief military ; excursion ends as he shows his mother "a look of defeat" (p. 97). Thereupon, Francesca becomes masculine again in an aggressive way as she watches the castles she has built ] i crumble before their "architect" (p. 100). Almost giving j way to sympathy for Comus for a moment, she recovers her- j self, draws back from her softer feelings, and the two of ' i 1 them face "themselves again as antagonists on a well- j disputed field" (p. 103). Comus will leave for West Africa j | soon. Francesca orders and organizes a farewell dinner j 170 | ] ! for Comusj but her military campaign is over. She sorrows more for a broken liqueur glass than for her departing son^ ; j ;and the two separate without communicating affection for ;each other. Only in the final chapter does she permit herself to become soft, womanly, and loving, even though the love is for the dead. Saki1s undercurrent of military terms, combined with architectural imagery and subtle suggestions of toughness and hardness, furnishes a strong supplement for the direct - descriptions of Francesca and her actions. She is a female ; representative of a society in which women manage affairs, j sit in judgment, and organize, plan, and supervise. The world is upside down, and no one can be happy in it, for i i no one plays the role that tradition has intended him to | - | play, according to Saki and Nietzsche. Francesca and Elaine are both, in their own ways, representative of the same i j social problem the reader finds in "The Reticence of Lady j Anne" and less sharply in many of Saki's shorter pieces. j j Aggressive women propose to impotent men like Courtenay and : I are unable to help males like Comus achieve their mature I ■ ! i roles in life. For both male and female, it is a tragedy. S 171 | j i ■ i An Animal World j As Francesca, before the Elaine campaign, contemplates : the prospects of her twice-defeated son, defeated by his ■ own willful choice, she thinks of the Darwinian nature of the universe: In an animal world, and a fiercely competitive animal world at that, something more was needed than the decor ative abandon of the field lily, and it was just that something more which Comus seemed unable or unwilling to provide on his own account. (p. 32) This competition between animals for survival has helped make the widowed Francesca a field commander and strategist.; The animal imagery exists frequently in the novel, some times indicating the relative importance of characters {starlings, sheep, etc.), but regularly reminding the reader that this society is one of creatures lacking certain human | characteristics such as souls. j 1 Early in the novel Lancelot Chetrof describes Comus I to his sister Emmeline as "the Limit as Beasts go" (p. 24) . j f i This wildness in Comus, distinguishing him from the other ■ human animals, causes Elaine to shy from him as her mare \ | shies from the travelling wild-beast show outside Tom | s Keriway's farm. To Lancelot Chetrof and another student, \ \ E Comus is like a tiger (p. 23), but when Francesca thinks : ~ “ " • 1 7 2 j of the competitive world Comus must face, she thinks of him j as a field lily. As we have suggested, the tiger element in him is produced only at his own wish; he needs the right sort of help from his mother to develop it. At Serena Golackly's, Francesca is aware of nonenti ties in the background as "starling-voice dullards" (p. 25).! She thinks of them as mediocrities which should have been "prevented" (p. 26) and again identifies them as "starling voiced chatterers" before she leaves the party. One of the types at such parties is Merla Blathlington, who is called "one of those human flies that buzz" (p. 55); she and; Francesca "pop in and out of shops like rabbits" (p. 56); human cats watch human mice, spread nets for birds, and so forth. St. Michael is "bird-like" (p. 63), perhaps sug- ; I gesting that as an angel he is unimportant. Ordinary people- j are referred to as "herds" (p. 90) and as being like both ; j sheep and starlings at the same time (p. 109). In Africa, j f the ordinary human beings are ants (p. 132) and flies (p. 134). Tom Keriway, too, has seen "the busy ant-stream j i of men and merchandise" near the Black Sea, and he compares j the farm poultry with Medieval humanity in its class j i • E structure (p. 70). By such imagery, Saki conveys quickly | to the reader the impression of undetermined numbers of unimportant persons furnishing a background for somewhat more important people whom he describes in detail. Comus i ■ ■ t : may be a tiger, but most people are ants, sheep, starlings, ; and the like, moving along in ant-like, herd-like patterns of conformity. Elaine hears Tom Keriway describe himself as a "tame crippled crane" that is tame"because it is lame (p. 73) . The effect is sad, but not so pathetic as Elaine's final conclusion about herself, after she has seen her marriage to Courtenay as a tragedy. A young Russian tells Elaine that the English are "splendid animals" (p. 129). As she ' f considers herself as an animal, she decides on something lower, "Perhaps I am a vegetable." Elaine's story ends on this note; Francesca hears the news of Comus1s death and ‘ r becomes "a wounded animal" (p. 140). I | ©f the other uses of animal comparisons, the best is j .. ' | the emphasized similarity between horse and rider. This i i prepares the reader for Courtenay's impotence, for instance.! I Courtenay rides a gelding named Anne de Joyeuse, a prize- j i i winning, good-looking horse, but a gelding. Saki concludes:! i j j But his strongest claims to distinction were his good i looks and his high opinion of himself. Youghal evident ly believed in thorough accord between horse and rider. i (p. 73) I ! - - - - l i |Saki does not say, but clearly implies, that the rider is ' also a gelding. Two pages later Saki speaks of Ernest ; i Klopstock and his horse as "the ungainly bay cob and his ' appropriately matched rider" (p. 75), just in case any reader has failed to note that horses and riders explain each other. Just before the description of Youghal and his ; horse, Saki describes Elaine on horseback. She rides a "fast light-stepping little mare" that has "the nerve- flutter of an imaginative animal" (p. 67). As we have noted' previously, this mare shies from wild beasts, just as Elaine1 finally rejects Comus as too dangerous for her. When Saki j describes the mare's moods, he is also telling the reader | about Elaine's thoughts and wishes: ; ■! The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the paddock, with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had not thrust out the image j of her own comfortable well-foddered loose box. (p. 72) j i j This description concludes Elaine's visit with Tom Keriway. ! , \ i Elaine, too, is eager to turn back to security after an ;experiment with romance. i In Saki’s fiction, one should always be aware of his I j references to animal life. Much of the time, these refer- V i ences tell a good deal about the human characters in the \ i story. In The Unbearable Bassington, the animal imagery j ;is largely of a reinforcing nature, but it is significant. Verbal Wit In this novel Saki has presented once again descrip tions of a society of mediocrities contrasted with a tra dition of heroism and, on the other side, compared with animals, pointing out the absence of human beings of heroic stature. Supplementing direct descriptions and figurative I comparisons are examples of the inversions and substitutions in phrasing that make up the wit of the Reginald sketches. Such inversions and substitutions remind the reader of a society that substitutes bad for good, weakness for j -'strength, and conformist mediocrity for individual superior- J . ity. He uses syllepsis;,— for instance: . . . whose clothes Comus had described as having been j made in Southwark rather than in anger. (p. 78) j . . . the island might possibly be visited by a member j of the Royal Family, or at the least by an earthquake. j (p. 28) ! ! He reverses a natural assumption: r | i I . . . Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering dimly as she went what people found so unsupportable in the j affliction of deafness. (p. 26) ] | He reverses cliches: j i t . . . this is going to hurt you much more than it will ! i hurt me. (p. 24) ! i He substitutes a surprising word in a commonplace j series: I do so envy journalists who can write about plagues and strikes and Anarchist plots, and other pleasing things. (p. 37) He applies a familiar expression to a new situation (in a retort by Lady Caroline during a card game): "If you had followed the excellent lyrical advice given to the Maid of Athens and returned my heart we ; should have made two more tricks and gone game. 1 1 (p. 62) j He uses puns, illogical statements that make sense, and; most of the kinds of word-play to be found in the Reginald sketches. In The Unbearable Bassinqton, verbal wit is used f ) with discrimination, however. The narrator figure's wit is \ generally restricted to ironic comments that do not disturb \ I the basically sad tone of the novel. The following example,! for instance, is humorous, but the humor fades ultimately ' into bitterness: Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment j to describe her soul, would probably have described her I drawing-room. (p. 11) j s > Comus himself is capable of verbal wit, but Saki does not j j show him in the act very often; Comus's final scenes are ] 'so sad that too much levity associated directly with him in the earlier pages would create an incongruity. Lady 'Caroline, however, is sufficiently apart from the central plots to be able to appear frequently in the company of verbal wit of her own making. Her thrusts are sometimes impatiently critical, sometimes more good-humored, but seldom tolerant of the stupidity of her society. There is so little around her to arouse sympathy that one is sur prised when she shows pity for Francesca (p. 141) . Without the preceding examples of ironic, caustic wit, her pity would be less surprising and would fail to achieve the necessary emphasis on the sincerity and depth of Francesa's grief. ' Saki uses verba! wit as of old, but-he uses it. always with.a careful eye to its total place in the characteriza tion, tone,., and meaning of the novel. A Final Note The Unbearable Bassington is Saki's better novel and his single attempt to develop the characteristic Saki plot on the novel scale. As a novel, it fails in at least two ways. The narrator figure summarizes directly much that should be presented indirectly through dramatization. The jcharacters are for the most part types, not individual , . j human beings. Francesca and Elaine, for instance, are 1 i excellent as representatives of women in the society Saki paints, but not so admirable as portraits of individual human beings we can believe in. These faults, failures in dramatization of theme and in- creation of individual char acters, are important if we judge the book as a novel. But it is not a novel; it is an anatomy of a society, an exam ination of the types of people and their motives and actions' ; j a criticism of the standards by which modern men and women live. If one thinks of the narrator figure as an anatomist i : describing a society systematically, beginning and ending I with Francesca's story and including Comus's story and Elaine's story within this outer framework, then the book ; shows structural unity and an overall logic of construction [ : I :that excuses what one might criticize in an ordinary novel. I As an anatomy of a society, then, the book is more j than three individual stories; it is the story of an entire j ; I world under attack by a potential saviour. Comus, the pagan saviour, attacks and finally dies in failure; he has j not changed the world, but he may have converted at least | one person with whom he has been in contact, Francesca. In j ' ^ i the long run, however, he is hopeless, for the world is j 179 j ;beyond salvation. This is the. .characteristic Sabi plot developed at full length. We have seen much that is good in the novel. Sabi's patterns of imagery, his choice of names, his contrast of group gatherings with lonely souls, and his subtle allusions: to Milton and his Puritan themes in reverse collectively produce a maximum of meaning in a minimal'number of pages. One might criticize the boob as lacbing in human interest, but such a criticism would be merely a recognition of Sabi's: success in protraying a society that is inhuman; such a society is a failure, and the sort of failure that must deny the possibility of human interest. As mere entertainment, this boob cannot ranb with Sabi's best short fiction. As a serious statement about life, it is successful. CHAPTER VI A NOVEL WITHOUT A HERO In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.— In everything we are sprung Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold. William Wordsworth'1 * As we have seen in Chapter III, Saki's short stories without heroes are generally less successful as fiction than' ;his stories constructed around the characteristic Saki plot i of juvenile antagonist attacking conventional society. For I : j much the same reasons, When William Came is less successful j than The Unbearable Bassington. Its interest, unity, and j impact are faulty because no central hopeless hero catches ! "It Is Not to Be Thought Of, 1 1 Works of Wordsworth. p. 288. (By coincidence, Lord Charnwood quoted two lines of! this poem in his introduction to the novel in Novels and j Plays of Saki. p. 150). 180 181 j land keeps the reader 1s interest from the beginning to the ; end. As an anatomy of a society gone wrong, it is complete ; and effective. The central metaphor of an occupation by : ■ mediocrities, quite apart from any literal prophecy, is an ingenious method of communicating the urgency and despera tion of man's predicament. The book is generally more adequately dramatized than is The Unbearable Bassinqton. And it includes some of the verbal wit and many of the character types of earlier Saki fiction. Yet in The Unbear able Bassinqton the reader becomes concerned about what happens to two or three individuals, whereas in When William1 Came no major character really deserves the reader's concern. It is an anatomy about and of a society, modern British society of 1913, but it is not quite about people, ; : largely because Saki's view of this society is that there are no people left. Their absence makes his point, but, | j like the heroless short stories, tends to leave the reader ! less than excited. When William Came does not pretend to be the story of 3 iMurrey Yeovil or his wife Cicely or any other individual j character. The subtitle of the novel indicates its pur- j ' j pose: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns. The j j novel itself reveals Saki's attitude toward Prussian manners! j 182 j I r l ! I land taste; previously in his fiction he has loosely grouped ] Germans, Jews, and Americans as examples of the vulgarian leaders of the international mercantile society, so the Saki reader is prepared for the bitterness of Saki's con- ' - ■ j tempt for Prussians in this novel. The conditions of the i [ novel, occupation of Britain by conquering German forces, | make the control of British society by vulgarians a neces sity, and this creates in the reader a sense of desperation ■ that no other device could have accomplished so success fully. Saki satirizes the same manners and attitudes as before, but the felt need to remedy the situation is now | an urgent one. He presents the same dowdy leaders of i society as before, but now they lead as a matter of politi- j i cal privilege; there is no alternative. Thus, in a j London society under the control of invaders, approximately ! the same conditions exist as those Saki has described in I his short stories of unoccupied Britain. As he suggests, I it may not be too late to change this now; but eventually I j : I such leaders and manners will take root and gain the right : : ' . 1 I : to control British society, as surely as if they had been j forced upon Britain from without. Now it is not too late j -,i to take action; when the reader finishes the novel, he J knows that the Prussians have not really come and that there! 183 is still time to prevent their coming, both literally in a war and metaphorically in the contamination of tradition- > i ;al British standards of taste and conduct. Saki's method ; is clever and should be effective; but the average reader s is likely to take the story literally and treat it as simply a warning against weakness in national defense j effort. The fact of World War X soon after is likely to cause the reader of today to miss the metaphoric meaning. Nevertheless, Saki says most of the things he has said before, and this time with an extremely urgent note. j An extension of the same method is used to make ! r j military service seem to be a desirable privilege rather than a burden. An ordinary person might be inclined to I i accept low standards in taste and manners because it is > ■; ' j •! troublesome to adjust oneself to anything better. Simi- ■.] ' I ' j larly, a citizen may attempt to avoid military service j I simply because it is more comfortable to live at home than j i in barracks. Saki presents a situation in which the { British citizen can never have the opportunity for military j i service, just as he can never have social leaders who have j high standards; the method is dramatically effective. When j t i the occupying Germans rule that British citizens will not I i I be eligible for service, then even the young clergymen are i ; - 184 | indignant. One of 'them, at least, in a day when Pacifism was preached from many pulpits, speaks out to Murrey Yeovil ; of the advantages of military training and discipline in eliminating potential delinquency (p. 230). If one believes' in the tradition of chivalry, as Saki does, this novel is ■useful propaganda for the faith. Two characters almost give unity to the novel, Murrey and Cicely Yeovil. Cicely is representative of those British aristocrats who adjust quickly to the conditions of occupation society, and she appears in most of the chap- j ters in which her husband does not appear as well as in i i some in which he is present. He is the focus of the narra- | tive in so much of the novel that one might almost assume that he is the protagonist. Yet two chapters (Six and ! .Sixteen) shift completely from Cicely and Murrey, and j ! Murrey becomes neither admirable nor interesting in any j way at the end of the novel; it is truly a novel about ' i London under the Hohenzollerns, about a defeated society, j . ! not about the hopes and despairs of any individual. Saki's ; :shifting focus produces the effect of unrelated sketches i of a society from different angles and at different times, | j 1 and that may be his intention. If so. Murrey and Cicely ! serve to give the novel its beginning and ending points j 185 | j |in time as well as focal points in most of the chapters of S the novel. They need not be protagonists if the novel is really an anatomy of a society instead of a story of ! individual experience. Nevertheless, the novel is less interesting without hero or heroine than it might be with j one or both; in addition, the unity of the work is so hazily fixed in space and time that its total effect is weaker ; than the dramatic central metaphor of an occupied society would lead one to expect. The relative absence of a narrator figure causes a further problem in unity. There is a moralizing, solemn ; personage in the background offering a commentary on the j characters and their actions; but this personage is so ! ■ i serious in tone and purpose that the reader finds it hard ! | to identify him with the Saki of past fictional experiences This solemn tone is particularly noticeable in the opening ! chapters, describing Murrey's return to the shock of - ! occupied London; here the grimness of the situation makes j I j it impossible to recognize in the narrator figure the same — I ] ;person one finds in the background in the Reginald sketches \ s : and the later Saki short stories. Various characters in j j :the novel sometimes display the verbal wit of other Saki | stories, but the narrator figure himself is generally too j I ’ 186 ; solemn for verbal wit. He reminds one of the Mark Twain ■of the later years, particularly the author of Joan of Arc, a humorist who takes his subject so seriously that the reader expecting humor is disappointed and the writer is ■unsure of his method in creating a new tone. Like Mark Twain, Saki has been accustomed to placing a good-natured narrator figure just offstage to introduce the entertainers to the audience; in When William Came, the narrator figure has exchanged his tweed jacket for tails and his smile for a fixed look of sternness. Occasionally the ironic humor of the narrator figure of other Saki stories may show for a moment, as in the opening description of Cicely and in the description of Joan Mardle at the beginning of Chapter Five; but Saki is serious, and his attitude affects the personality of the narrator figure. Because that person ality is different from the one readers have encountered in earlier Saki pieces, it is as though there were no nar rator figure at all, just an impersonal, formal, objective writer. The humorless third person narrator simply does :not become a character in the novel, and neither a narrator figure nor a protagonist furnishes identifiable unity for the novel. A Society Gone Wrong Murrey Yeovil has been hunting in the Russian forests, : has spent weeks in a fight with a dangerous fever, and has finally come home to an England taken over in a brief engagement by an invading German forcer the war has been easily won by the Germans because England has been unpre pared. Murrey's wife. Cicely, has adjusted quickly to the ' i new state of affairs and is planning to become one of the leaders of the new London society. Cicely correctly j . anticipates that Murrey will be slower to adjust to the new regime; but she is confident that he will make the ad- ! f justment eventually, for in the past the two have managed ! to adjust their principles to permit each to find pleasure ■ ■ ! in his own way. Murrey has left Cicely frequently for hunting expeditions, and she has kept good-looking young j t men around her without interference from Murrey. Occasion- : I ally Murrey and Cicely have shared their leisure oh the j golf links, where Murrey is later to say the German victory | i ; has been won (Novels and Plays of Saki. p. 199). In the 1 i present age, Cicely says, "sensible people know thoroughly ; ' ! well what they want, and are determined to get what they j want" (p. 156). Cicely expects Murrey to be sensible about I 188 | f | the new state of affairs, eventually, but she has a mutual friend, Doctor Holham, explain to Murrey what has happened. I ; * I ;The Doctor explains that the people had been unwilling to sacrifice in order to be prepared to defend themselves; no government could have survived at the polls if it had demanded the enormous sacrifices that would have been necessary (pp. 170-171). Because of a softness in all classes, high and low, the war was lost; now there is no chance to recover freedom. The British monarch is in India | and still rules many of the dominions, but the British Isles are a German province. With the British Royal Family elsewhere and many of ! I the former leaders of London society removed to the 'dominions or to their country estates, a new set of social j • i :leaders has taken over. Cicely is one of the members of | this set, but the most'important leaders are Baron and Lady j ! Shalem, wealthy and destined for higher titles; the Baron | ! and his wife have previously been ignored by the older j • • i noble families, but they have achieved social prominence j now by collaborating wholeheartedly with the Germans. ; 1 German imports like the Grafin von Tolb share the social \ leadership. American dowagers, third-rate women writers, j Hamburg Jews, Prussian officers, music-hall performers, ! ! 189 i ’ j land effeminate men appear frequently at the major social ; j events. With slight differences in identification and ; : i : I presented in a more serious manner, these types are simply the vulgar, middle-class, materialistic sort who have dom inated conventional society in Saki's earlier fiction. In When William Came, their vulgarity and their lack of taste have simply been exaggerated somewhat further. Cicely's | ambition to be a leader in-the group can be satisfied simply by proper obeisance to the German royal visitors. She complies discreetly, avoiding offense to her husband ■ until he shall have learned, like herself, to accept an accomplished fact. ' j In such a society, the social events are what the ; i reader of The Unbearable Bassinqton and the short stories i might expect, extreme extensions of the tasteless and vulgarj events of earlier Saki fiction. Amateurs like Gorla Mustel-j ford, a member of an old and distinguished family, perform j i ! ridiculous "suggestion dances" for the Prussian officers } i 1 and the rest. Popular singers like Tony Luton succeed on j , the basis of good looks rather than good voices. The lead- j ers of society take particular pleasure in such exhibitions j i as a group of wolves riding tricycles and dressed in clown j costumes. When Murrey sees the wolves, he is shocked, for 190 ; a s a hunter he has always thought of wolves as representing the untamed spirit of freedom and savagery (p. 209). The comparison of the wolves and people like Murrey is ohvious. In such a society, there seems little hope for a future restoration of national pride. The Action The novel is primarily a picture of life in occupied Britain. The action is negligible, principally because the main characters do not take the only action worth taking: resistance to the German occupation. Cicely moves from one gigolo to another in the ten-month course of the novel; in addition, she provides the temptations of country hunts and the like that lull her husband into acceptance of their status. Meanwhile, she maintains her place in the new society, near the Baron and Lady Shalem, who become the Earl and Countess of Bailquist in the final chapter as a reward for subservience to Germany. For most of the char acters the novel simply tells the story of their continuing compliance with the orders of the new regime. Only with Murrey and a few minor characters is there evidence of possible change. Tony Luton, an entertainer, breaks away and joins the Canadian Marines; one hears of other dim 191 i i * ; \ r I figures in the background who have gone to the dominions; : but Murrey is the only important person in the novel to show. j signs of a strong desire to take action. When Murrey comes home, Cicely knows that he will object to a party she is giving soon for Gorla Mustelford and a mixed group of British and German leaders of London society. Instead of canceling the party to avoid offending j Murrey, Cicely simply decides to hold it in a restaurant instead of at home. Their marriage is such that this ; j action prevents any further trouble, for each has always gone his own way. Murrey's basic inadequacy for any heroic j : i action is already with him at the start of the novel; for i where a man does not control his wife, he is incapable of \ ! controlling anything of significance. This is Saki's | familiar theme again; women should be womanly, and men ! j ■ t should be manly. To Cicely, men are instruments of plea- ; I sure, to be used as needed. As she turns Ronnie Storre over . i to others, she replaces him with another good-looking young j boy, Larry Meadowfield. Murrey is somewhat more important i than these two boys, but Murrey can also be controlled. Cicely is a better strategist than Murrey. j 1 J Cicely waits patiently until Murrey is ready to adjust j I ■ to the new society; meanwhile, she offers temptations that ! imahe adjustment a pleasant alternative to resistance. Once : he has accepted the idea of her supper party for Gorla and the Germans, he is ready for further managing, Cicely decides. She tells him that he should leave London and avoid the unpleasant associations of the new society, that he might fish in Norway in the summer and hunt in Wessex in the winter. Just as "out of sight, out of mind" has prevented his criticism of her party, it may cause him to forget all that has happened as well. So she reasons, and eventually she is proved correct. After Gorla's debut as a dancer, with all the attend ant display of the vulgarity and boorishness of this j j society, Murrey departs for Torywood, there to see a ; i Mustelford woman of an earlier generation than Gorla. ■ Before he goes, he hears the news that the British will no j longer be permitted to serve in the military forces, a fate j j he recognizes as degrading. On the way to Torywood, he ! « f shares a train compartment with a Hungarian who offers his I own explanation of the fall of Britain or any other once- ;proud country. Such a fall begins, he says, with a loss j ' ! of mystery and wonder in the Christian faith. Then the j j country's leaders are bored with what is left of Christian j i i I ■practice, but "not virile enough to become real Pagans" ! : (p. 237) . They exchange their nationalistic spirit for a i socialistic faith in international brotherhood? then some one stronger takes advantage of their weakness. Murrey j is resentful of the Hungarian's criticism of the British, but he agrees that his countrymen have become soft. A loud-mouthed English fisherman then gets on the train and talks confidently of the eventual rescue of Britain by the i forces overseas, in the dominions. Murrey is not opti- ■ mistic and says that they themselves must act. He is critical of men who merely talk and are incapable of doing anything. At Torywood, Lady Greymarten tells him to be a ; fighter, to take a job as a commercial traveller and be free to move around the country as a counter agent, stirring • I ■up the patriotic spirit of the people. On his way back to ! ! London, however, he thinks of his present short supply of .mental and physical energy? the comforts of the English \ j country life attract him, and he thinks fondly of the ! coming hunting season. At the end of the trip, he already | knows that he will give in to the easy way, will turn to j • • • ! 'the hunt, and will abandon plans to act for his country. ] i ! He is like the loud-mouthed fisherman he has criticized for j | talk without action. j 194 When Ronnie Storre gives his afternoon performance on the piano, Murrey is there with Cicely's crowd. After the performance, Murrey without premeditation injects into a conversation a loud recitation of a patriotic poem describing the sort of unheroic times they now know. Tony Luton, the successful entertainer who has pulled himself up from the bottom by his own hard work, suddenly is inspired by the poem and made indignant at what they are all not doing. Saki explains: Life had been for Tony a hard school, in which right and wrong, high endeavor and good resolve, were un taught subjects? but there was a sterling something in him, just that something that helped poor street- scavenged men to die brave-fronted deaths in the trenches of Salamanca, that fired a handful of appren tice boys to shut the gates of Derry and stare un flinchingly at grim leaguer and starvation. (p. 254) This patriotic spirit, suddenly aroused, is in contrast to the spirit that should have been present in all of those who had been brought up with a knowledge of "right and wrong, high endeavor and good resolve." But these people, like Murrey, have also been brought up to appreciate com fort and pleasure. Murrey has decided to choose comfort, not sacrifice. Tony Luton, on the other hand, gives up his success as a London entertainer and goes off to Canada. Eventually, the hunting season comes, and Murrey by | 195 ! accident meets the German Lt. von Gabelroth, a former guest of Cicely in London, takes him home for a drink, and at last surrenders his convictions for comfort. He has accepted Cicely's philosophy of life (p. 276). At the end of the novel. Murrey is present to watch the Boy Scouts march in salute to the German Emperor. When they fail to appear, he realizes that he has given up too soon, that there is still hope for the future; but he has given up. His inaction is the principal action of the novel; it is significant because he represents all that should be best in British aristocratic preparation for heroism. As he fails, so Britain fails. Murrey's inaction is logical and essential to the theme, but it helps create an effect-of looseness in the novel's structure. - With neither an active protagonist nor a noticeable narrator figure, the novel gives the impres sion of a series of sketches, not a unified pattern of incidents. As an anatomy of a society in which vulgarity ,and hedonism have replaced taste and self-discipline, it is complete and vivid; but it would be more effective in its total impact if it had an active hero, even a hopeless hero. Its principal fault is that it is a novel without a hero. ; 196 | ‘ ! ' " Imagery and Allusion When William Came contains much animal imagery* i s ■although it is less systematic in its patterns than is The : Unbearable Bassinqton. Nevertheless* Saki makes some of his sharpest points by comparing human beings to animal life. Tony Luton* the popular singer who acts heroically in the end, is described in the first chapter as "a merry-eyed dancing faun* whom Fate had surrounded with streets instead of woods" (p. 158). As Saki reveals in "The Music on the Hill*" the faun is an admirable creature* j combining the best of the adventurous human being and the animal.. This faun is "virile enough" to be a real pagan i (p. 237) and therefore capable of heroism. Less compli- ; ] mentary are the comparisons of Joan Mardle to a hedgehog ! (p. 183)* with a voice like the laugh of a woodpecker j I (p. 216)* of Cicely to a goosegirl herding a society of j i i geese (p. 252)* and of the Grafin to a "wide-awake dormouse"; > I (p. 207) . Gorla Mustelford is like a wagtail pursuing j ! insects when she dances (p. 212). Most of these comparisons! i help to identify the character and the role of the human ] ■ i being in the novel. i Lady Greymarten's name does not necessarily suggest j j the strength and ferocity one might expect of the last i r” ~ ..... “ " 197 j ; representative of an ancient fighting tradition; but a marten is superior to a dormouse (the Grafin) in its fur, i i and it is the dormouse that has succeeded the Greymarten as a leader of society. Lady Greymarten's house becomes 2 important in its comparison to a watch-dog in the follow ing passage: Torywood was not a stately, reposeful-looking house; it lay amid the sleepy landscape like a couched watched- dog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes. Built somewhere about the last years of Dutch William’s reign, it had i been a centre, ever since, for the political life of the countryside; a storm centre of discontent or a rallying ground for the well affected,, as the circumstances of the day might entail. (p. 242) j It represents the Tory tradition of service, just as Lady j ' . • ! Greymarten does: "She had laboured on behalf of the poor and the ill-equipped, had fought for her idea of the Right, j I ;and above all, for the safety and sanity of her Fatherland" j j (p. 243). All of the features of Torywood, which Saki j i describes with loving care, stand for tradition, service, j | patriotism, and pride. Lady Greymarten recognizes the I : \ differences in animals and human beings when she explains i that she has let the falcon go free, knowing that "the otherj 2 I The context of the quotation indicates that "watch- j dog" is an appropriate interpretation for "watched-dog." j i ■ ; 198 I j ► | ibirds may be reconciled to their comfortable quarters and 1 abundant food and absence of dangers," but not the falcon (p. 245). She explains this to Murrey shortly before challenging him to fight; on his way home he realizes that he is not a falcon, for he loves comfort. The allusions in the novel are sometimes of more than incidental usefulness. The title of the first chapter, "The Singing-Bird and the Barometer," begins the novel on an ironic note, telling the reader what is basically wrong with the society in the novel. Cicely is singing happily enough, but not because her love is coming to her that day; I Murrey is not her love by any normal definition of the :word; they are just friends, as man and wife who live apart ' most of the time. Cicely herself is not the sort who would ; i ■ ' ! sit waiting in her nest for her mate to come to her, in any j I t i case. Nesting and mating are far removed from her nature. | t ! The knowledge that Murrey is coming home does not make it j t the "birthday of her life, 1 1 for she can see all sorts of j difficulties likely to interrupt her routine now that Murreyj | is coming back. She and Murrey do not have a romantic re- j lationship; on the contrary, they have carried realism as far as it can go. She is practical in everything, and regards the coming storms as simply another problem to be : circumvented if possible. The word "barometer" applies ] not only to the "domestic barometer" that predicts storms, though; it also suggests that Cicely herself is. a barometer,: changing with the changing governments. Most important of the allusions in the novel, however, : is Cicely's identification in the last chapter of a piece of music as Danse Macabre, by Saint-Saens (p. 283).. She . makes this identification just after she has reviewed the facts of Murrey's quiet acceptance of the new life and the Teutonic companions he has found in his hunting. He, who has previously demonstrated some possibility of life, has . j settled down to the dance of death that has already afflict-; ed the rest of the society. In his first observations of ; t the society upon his return from Russia, Murrey says that ; its gaiety is "rather like merry-making with a dead body I i I lying in the house" (p. 173). This may be recalled by the ! . ] reader at Ronnie's performance, when Cicely mentions Saint- f I t Saens in passing (p. 250), but it should be recalled with r the explicit reference to the death dance in the final chapter. Cicely may be aware of the .nature of the dance, j I but she chooses it rather than life. Murrey Yeovil joins j I the dance without intent, simply by failing to act. The j J i death in life is essentially the same kind of condition j iSaki has presented in many of his earlier stories, partic ularly those without heroes. Themes and Propaganda The themes of the novel are familiar to the readers of Saki's sketches and stories and to the reader of The Unbearable Bassinqton. The metaphor of the German occupa tion gives propaganda force to what has previously been the [ subject of humor or of more subtle comment. A few depar tures from earlier statements occur, however, notably in i the picture of a young clergyman who represents the best 1 . i spirit of the society and in the discarding of the Reginald : . i type as a possible hero. I Although Paganism is still Saki's preference (p. 237), \ I quite Nietzschean, he pays tribute to the old Christian • f faith in England, too, treating it much as he treats the other old values. The young clergyman represents the po- I tential virility of the old faith: | i ! f • I i "I have learned one thing in life, 1 1 continued the | young man, "and that is that peace is not for this | world. Peace is what God gives us when He takes us j into his rest. Beat your sword into a ploughshare if | ' you like, but beat your enemy into smithereens first." j (p. 231) | j ; i This clergyman has just recommended military service as a i 201 j ^natural outlet for potential juvenile delinquents- In , presenting the "right" attitudes in this man, Saki is ! i telling the reader that all of the old faiths, including ; both religion and nationalism, should be cultivated. Because (according to this novel) the soft, the weak, and the impotent must be discarded, the Reginalds must go. Chapter Seventeen, "The Event of the Season," shows Cornelian Valpy and an acquaintance discussing a costume ball; both of them are clearly Reginald types, and neither ! they nor the subject of their comments comes off well. It J is not the time for softness or even for this kind of j selfishness, but a time for heroic action for one’s country.; Ronnie Storre, like Reginald and all of the little Regi— ; nalds, is fond of asparagus, but it is not a time for j asparagus-fanciers. Ronnie wears a Tyrolean hat, but comes I s no closer to boar-hunting (p. 256); he is like the wolves ] who are admired because they can ride tricycles or like ! the song-writer in "Cousin Teresa," who is honored for j mere entertainment while his brother's faithful service to ' ■ I the country goes unnoticed. Percival Plarsey, whom Murrey I despises, is representative of those who have taken over j i society; effeminate and catty, this decorator of houses I stands for the level to which Murrey descends when he gives j !up the fight. Like Percival, Murrey has accepted the j subordinate role in a society that is controlled by women. ' - ' i It is the only role left for a man who refuses to fight. ;By portraying the dandies as worthless and rather stupid, Saki shows how grimly serious he has become in this novel. The novel is unashamed propaganda. Because it is, its literary quality is less than that of The Unbearable ; Bassington; nevertheless, both novels present the same 1 i themes. Just as Saki's stories without heroes are generally less interesting than those with characteristic Saki plots, j ; J When William Came is inferior to- The Unbearable Bassington j i ;iri interest. But it still attracts and holds the reader's ; i interest to a considerable and noteworthy degree; and it ; i is forceful, however, as a bitterly thorough examination i of a society that has gone wrong by its own choice. 1 CHAPTER VII THE DEVELOPMENT OP METHOD AND MEANING IN SAKI1S FICTION England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, ' Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Ohi raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. William Wordsworth^ t r There is a clear line of development in both the method j and the meaning of Saki1s fiction. His meaning is fairly consistent from Reginald through the posthumous stories and j I sketches, but he states it more directly and more seriously | in his later work than in his first sketches. He is most ! serious in When William Came, but even the shorter pieces after that time (1913) reflect his sense of urgency. The j ■^''London, 1802," Works of Wordsworth, p. 287. | 204 r bhanges in methods are much more radical than those in his meaning; and each broad change is noticeably an outgrowth pf what he has already accomplished. Of course, having led his readers to expect certain kinds .of stories through his earlier work, Saki does not completely reject past methods as he moves in new directions. On the contrary, there is variety of new and past methods in even his last collections of short fiction. Interestingly, his second novel is less advanced in method, for the most part, than his first. But in general his work from about 1902 to 1914 shows a def inite movement from one pattern to another until he develops completely the characteristic Saki plot and its attendant v_ techniques. The Methods; Especially the Fully-Developed Method Before he chose the pen-name "Saki,“ Hector Hugh Munro had moved well on the way toward the creation of the atti tudes, the characters^and the characteristic plot that were to distinguish his best short stories and the best qualities of his novels. I "The Image of the Lost Soul, " written when Munro was twenty-one, shows only a touch or two of the cynicism that was to be a mark of Saki's style. Basically, the story has ; 1 - i ! romantic sentimentality like that of Oscar Wilde's earlier "The Happy Prince." Its very nearness to Wilde, however, ishows Munro's interest in Wilde's various forms of romantic ! rebellion against Victorian mediocrity. Both the rebellious; spirit and the romantic faith in something better than everyday reality are essential qualities of Saki's mature meaning; and, in their effects upon his characters and situations, they are qualities of his fully-developed method as well. In itself, "The Image of the Lost Soul" is not important; it does prepare the reader for an under lying romanticism in future stories, however. j In 1900, nine years later, Hector Munro's The Rise of ! j the Russian Empire shows the result of much careful obser- j • i • [ vation of a large segment of human society over a number ; : I of centuries. The result is the development of a narrator ! figure who is cynical, witty, and detached from the facts he describes, whether grotesquely horrible or ironically j ridiculous. This narrator figure seems less-detached at- times, when he tells of exhibitions of superhuman daring :and strength or myths of werewolves and ghouls or simply ! •the details of forest and animal life in Russia. In the j | main, however, he accepts a hundred bloody deaths or a i single foolish human action with the calm of a good reporter! This early detached attitude toward the horrors and the silliness of human society is to appear in the narrator 'figure in the Saki stories and novels, particularly in the best of these. Even in Munro's Russian history, the atti tude is manifested by deliberately ironic phrasing in the description of events that are the reverse of the expected, events in.jwhich a fool is frequently substituted in a role demanding a hero. Saki's verbal wit is being developed years before the first Reginald sketch. Given a submerged romantic who shows a cynical surface \ i in a detached, ironic treatment of human society, the reader \ should be prepared for the Hector Munro of The Westminster ; > Alice. Like Lewis Carroll, his model, Munro exaggerates ■ human weaknesses and then makes them seem still more ridic- ; i ulous by implying a comparison between his caricatures and [ an ideal group of romantic heroes and monarchs. The nar- I t j rator figure, with his detachment and equanimity, is still in the background. The society described is now the con- ; > temporary British aristocracy, disguised in the armor and | i ■ i royal robes and pretensions of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, i Some of the characters are animals; others act in ways that j | are subhuman, or even inferior to the animals. Both the ; comparison with animals of all sorts and the contrast with j ;the heroic ideal are always present. In addition, Saki has added a juvenile protagonist, an Alice who observes this ridiculous human society, asks questions about it, and sug gests or states disapproval of it. She does not act; the purpose of the sketches is to present the society, not to 'attack it. Presenting it is in itself a sort of attack, but it is a passive method at most. The characters and situations are borrowed from Lewis Carroll, along with most of the method. The narrator figure, the cynical attitude, and the appeal to a romantic ideal or to animals to reveal the extent of human foolishness— these aspects of the little book will be found again later, in Munro1s Saki fiction. But he has yet to create his own juvenile pro tagonist and to perfect the techniques of verbal wit used later. Except for three attempts at plotted short stories, the first Saki collection (Reginald) is made up of sketches. All fifteen of the sketches and stories in this collection are about a juvenile protagonist name Reginald, a creature bearing some resemblance to the dandies of Wilde, Hope, Beerbohm, and others, but in total Saki's own creation. Reginald is too self-centered to be able to win a body of followers to assist in his occasional attacks on society, ; -— 208 ; : ’ i . | and he is too scatterbrained to plan extended or complicated' ; i attacks. Mainly, Reginald is an observer of society, one who attacks in the relatively passive way of the witty remark; but his remarks have the nature of the female's gossip, not the frontal attack of the male hero. Only in the three stories in which Reginald acts . ("Reginald," "Reginald's Choir Treat," "Reginald's Christmas Revel") does' he get past this behind-the-back sort of verbal attack. His wit and the narrator figure's wit and the occasional wit of one of the other characters in the Reginald sketches ‘ are all constructed on the principles of paradox, substi- i tution, and reversal of the expected, techniques common enough in the literature of the Nineties. In Saki's I [ sketches and stories, however, these techniques are used i both to point out and to complement in their form the very \ i i facts of paradox, reversal of the expected, and substitution; j for the ideal that the observers see in human society. It \ is paradoxical that the weaker sex"is the stronger sex in ] 3 contemporary society, but this reversal of the expected i I. is the case, as Saki sees it. Substituting for the rightful] male leaders of society are duchesses, bishops' wives, and { ' I female novelists. Reginald himself is the reversal of the j I expected, for as a male he should lead; instead, he is in ! a condition of parasitic dependency on women like the Duchess Irene, a type of the Victorian "middle-class nohil- : | ; ity, " also a close relation to the domineering aunt of some ; of Saki's most popular later stories. Both Reginald and the narrator figure see the contrast between what is and what should he, but in the Reginald sketches neither one does much more than observe and offer the mild attack of f verbal wit. Because Reginald is himself ridiculous, the I narrator figure is important as a bridge between Reginald and the reader; the Saki mask acts much like a ventriloquist interrogating his dummy, and Reginald is as shocking.and ■as unrealistic as a dummy. Many of the sketches are mono- ' logues, and all of them emphasize the oral element. This j element has its own importance in the total effect of the ! ■ j sketches on the reader. All of the voices are distinctly i i British of the house-party class. Collectively, they es- j tablish a certain reader expectancy of social tone that j • - i needs to be fulfilled in subsequent Saki stories for com- j plete success. “When Saki on rare occasions switches away | 1 | ■ from this British quality marked by upper-middle-class j accents, as in "Morlvera," the effect is simply "not Saki." I Just as Mark Twain creates a certain expectancy in his j readers that must be fulfilled by American colloquial iaccents if his writing is to be fully satisfactory, Saki j creates in his readers a demand for British upper-middle- class accents. In his best stories, he complies with this ; demand, a demand established in the Reginald sketches. From the first Saki collection, then, Saki brings with him a recognizable narrator figure, British upper-middle-class accents, a picture of a society dominated by women and incompetents, a facility in verbal wit, and a ridiculous juvenile protagonist incapable of sustained attack on society. He has most of the elements of the characteristic . i plot that is to come, but later the juvenile protagonist j must be able to stand alone, without the apparent support of the narrative figure, and he must be able to act. In Reginald in Russia, Saki presents the results of experimentation toward what will be his characteristic plot.; i He abandons Reginald as a protagonist and turns away from j the sketch except as an occasional practice. Suggesting j \ sometimes the styles of other short story writers, he experiments in short stories without heroes, that is, stor- j ies in which all of the characters are representative of ! I ithe dull, mediocre, conventional society of the times. In : . ■ -I .4 these stories he makes his criticism of society sharp I : ' ' t enough, but generally the pieces need a more or less | isympathetic central character to give them interest. He develops the technique of the surprise ending, using it effectively in "The Reticence of Lady Anne," for instance. ; In the-same story, he continues to contrast his characters j with the romantic ideal and with animals, often with j ludicrous effects, by intent. He continues also to search for a better juvenile protagonist than Reginald, using animals ("The Mouse"), the call of the wild ("Cross Cur rents 1 1 ), and Pagan creatures ("Gabriel-Ernest") as protag onists attacking conventional society, but never quite j successfully. The characteristic Saki plot does not occur until Saki finds Clovis, the model of a hopeless hero. In The Chronicles of Clovis and Beasts and Super- j ■ I Beasts, Saki presents his best stories. Some of the pieces j in his two posthumous volumes are to be especially worth i i reading, but none will surpass those published before his I i ! death. In-his characteristic plot, Saki presents a sympa- \ thetic but highly individual juvenile protagonist attacking ! conventional society in an imaginative manner. The protag onist may be an older romantic or an adolescent girl or a 1 ten-year-old boy; it may even be an admirably ferocious ani-j i j mal; but it is sympathetic as Reginald never quite was. ? ! Clovis, the most successful repeated protagonist, is capable ofj 'controlled and sustained action sometimes involving the | cooperation of those sympathetic to his cause; though he, ‘ t too, is. dependent on the women who control society, he can, j like a cat, venture out on his own to kill a sparrow, then return safely to the fireside. He is almost a hero, about as close as a man can come to the hero of tradition in a ; time when the rules have changed to encourage conformity to mediocre taste and to discourage individual creativity and imagination. Although he is a hopeless hero, hopeless of permanent success, he can win a brief skirmish against ■ his enemy, mediocrity, and for a moment turn a portion of j society right side up again. He most often engages in i pranks that require mediocre persons to face the risks of ! ; i . i leadership and heroism; their failure is the subject of much humor, for it involves a reversal of the expected: a j juvenile triumphs against entrenched power that is ineffec- j ! tive because of disuse. Younger protagonists like Vera j employ the lie as a method of attack, an appropriate method j 1 i against a society in which the truth is the opposite of j ■what should exist and where consequently a lie has its own i kind of truth. The truth, too, in such a false society, i I ! may be a form of attack. Whatever the case, the method j j of attack is itself a supplementary comment on the society ; i 213 j ithat is a reversal of what should he. When a young child : is substituted for the traditional knight of romance, he shows, more vividly than the strong hero might show, just how weak and ridiculous society has become, since even a child, with imagination, can win a temporary victory over the dragon of mediocrity. The dragons the modern hero must ; face are within the society, not outside it as they once were. This fact becomes clearest finally in When William Came, for in that novel the dragons have officially occupied Britain and have legally taken over the country. The metaphor of occupation by an outside force is Saki's ex- I treme presentation of the desperate state of human society I in his time. Its irony is recognized only if one sees that j j Saki has been saying all the time that the British have themselves placed mediocrity in control, by laziness and ! by default. The novels, however, represent a further development ■ of Saki's technique. They use expanded patterns of imagery,! i particularly patterns comparing human beings with animals. j i Such techniques as this and the use of buried allusions j j have been employed in Saki's fiction from Reginald onward. i In the novels, however, they are used more extensively and j i i imaginatively than in even the best of the short stories. i 214 i ' ! 1 I : i iThe Unbearable Bassington is more carefully patterned in j its imagery than is When William Came. The second novel generally has less unity of imagery than the first; When William Came is a novel without a hero, and consequently ■ : * i without the unifying focus of The Unbearable Bassington. It is in The Unbearable Bassington that Saki1s technique is i developed beyond the limits he has reached in his short stories; When William Came is little more than a series of ; sketches and is remarkable only for the sense of urgency created by the central metaphor of an occupied Britain. On ! i the other hand, The Unbearable Bassington has a degree of unity in the successful interlocking of three plots, the ! basic one involving a juvenile protagonist, Comus,J in his ! hopeless attack on the materialism and conventionality of j ■ ■ | his society. Whereas When William Came is a failure with j some .valuable parts, The Unbearable Bassington is a success j | with some deficiencies. Its principal problem is its ‘ ! ' ! overuse of narrative interpretation as a substitute for , dramatization and indirection. This fault is in part the : ' i j ■result of attempting to present too much in a relatively | i 1 ! short space; in part, it is simply Saki's failure to regard j j direct statement as a fault. But Bassincrton. whatever its I good qualities, reminds us that Saki's principal achievement! : 215 ■ ? i ; , . I ’ is in the short story, specifically the short story with the characteristic Saki plot. The only development in method after the novels is the rather hesitant use of Freudian imagery in a number of the stories in Beasts and Super-Beasts, perhaps best illus- ] trated in "The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat," but present in others. The Meaning's Saki1s themes grow out of an early affinity for Wilde, i a cynical view of human existence, a Tory political outlook,; a touch of Nietzsche, and an underlying romantic faith in j the importance of heroes. It is obvious that these sources • • j are not mutually exclusive and that Saki's total statement • is not attributable to a single source. Although he is \ ! ( consistent in his view of society and of its need for reform,; i i there are some changes in his themes during the ten or j i l twelve years of his principal work in fiction. i In the Reginald sketches, Saki is relatively hopeful j about the world and about its potential for improvement. He| i is so hopeful that he can afford to ridicule Reginald, the i ! protagonist, as well as the society Reginald criticizes. I I Reginald and his friends are relatively unproductive members; of a society that places great stock in productiveness? by Saki's standards, they are at least as valuable for society t i as the dull drones who merely produce. Reginald is a connoisseur of food, clothing, and manners in a sociefey- that has no sense of taste or style. Reginald is irrespon sible in money matters in a society that regards financial responsibility as the only important kind of responsibility. If forced to choose, Saki would rate Reginald as superior to the leaders of conventional society. Yet Reginald is silly, and his silliness makes conventional society seem ! even more pathetic, for he is superior to it. But the tone j of the Reginald pieces is humorous, and in them Saki does not seem disturbed about the future. In his stories without heroes, Saki concentrates on j the vices of mediocrity, since he presents only the cohven- j tional members of society. Such concentration makes the i problem seem more serious than in Reginald. In a number of j - i these stories, even, the life of the typical character is j : j so mechanical and unimaginative that it is no different I :from death; "The Reticence of Lady Anne" makes this point, | and the casual treatment of death as merely an incident is S I to be repeated in later stories. In When William Came, the j novel without a hero, _the dance of death becomes a major | I 217 i ; 1 ■ i ! statement about a society that has been taken over by | persons of mediocre ability and taste. In his characteristic stories, Saki suggests that for the young or the imaginative it is still possible to break away from conformity patterns and make an occasional brief success, even though it is hopeless to think of bringing about a permanent change in society. In The Unbearable Bassington, the novel with the characteristic Saki plot, the final hopelessness of the imaginative hero is evident, although the novel suggests that one or two members of i society have been brought to see the truth before the hero j fails m his attack on the system as a whole. ; i Behind all of Saki's criticisms of society is an ideal I i of an aristocratic human race proud of its old traditions j . and governed by decisive, courageous heroes of nobility, a I nobility approximately equivalent to the best found in i j King Arthur's court. Saki presents a picture of society that is not realistic, but true within Saki's terms; he begins with the premise that there are no heroes and that ‘ 1 ! the world is inverted from the ideal. The society he pre- | sents fits this description. In the early sketches, he shows this picture of society to the reader with a laugh. j In his later work, however, with the threat of World War I j \ x n the air, he becomes serious and regards the need for j reform as urgent. This sense of urgency is responsible for ; j I whatever development occurs in his themes. In When William ; Came, his most urgent statement, he rejects the dandy, as ; not only useless but reprehensible in a time that calls for i real heroes; and he calls even for a revived faith in Christianity, in an effort to propagandize for all of the old British loyalties. • Saki is most modern in his themes. Even in their specific details he is not so dated as one might conclude j at first reading. The suffragettes are no longer with us, \ ; | but labor unions and other units of power continue to ! i threaten governments with demonstrations. Contemporary j conservatives are likely to see the solution to such prob- j j lems as resulting from the use of much the same methods j ! which Saki indicated: decisive, authoritarian action by | i i aristocratic rulers. War and peace are still with us, and j ! I Saki would find his view still represented as one of the j answers to a basic question. Most of all, the conflict i i i between conformity pressures and the impulse to individual- j ! I I ism is still present. Saki's preference for the young j I i rather than the middle-aged muddlers of affairs is as modern! as the latest Broadway play or campus protest. His Tory | ‘ answer may seem old-fashioned, but the path from one extreme! I to another is not long, and the true believer on one side i i _ . . J has much in common with his opposite. Although not greatly ! original in technique, Saki has modernity in his themes. His modernity may in part be due to his use of Nietzsche as one source of his ideas, for, as Robert Brustein has pointed out, Nietzsche preaches many of the doctrines that 2 have been dramatized by our most modern writers. But Saki's ideas do not come from a single source, and to a large extent they come from his observation of British society in the early years of this century, not from second-! hand information. In the early years of our century Saki i j successfully and vividly presented through fiction many f of the criticisms of human society that are still considered I new. In so doing, he earned his place among modern writers,| | as distinct from writers of nineteenth century fiction who i j happen to have lived in this.century. ■ j ( A Brief Estimate 1 In a dozen or so stories, Saki has developed his j i classic plot with sufficient success to offer superb j i - f i 2 ' “The Theatre of Revolt (Boston, 1962), pp.. 9-14. | 220 ! i i ! i 'entertainment while making a significant statement about j human society, in his day and in ours. In these stories at least, Saki has stood the test of more than fifty years, ; and in most of them he does not sound dated. Saki is not a superior novelist, although each of his two novels has some interest for the reader who has found Saki's short stories significant in theme. "His reputation will stand on such stories as the following: "Tobermory, 1 1 "Sredni- ! Vashtar, 1 1 "The Open Window, " "The Schartz-Metterklume Method, " "The Lumber-Room, 1 1 and "Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped." All of these have appeared in recent anthologies of literature for high school and college' | ■ study. It would be easy enough to add a dozen short ; i stories and sketches that both entertain and inform success-j I | fully. A reader of some patience would find fifty or sixty j | of Saki's stories and his first novel well worth reading. j \ The total of Saki's best work, then, is somewhere between ; forty and four hundred pages of fiction. His characteristic^ plot incorporates protagonists, a society, and methods of j [ I attack that in combination are original; but his original ity is not the originality of a James Joyce or an Ernest i Hemingway, each of whom has contributed at least four j I hundred pages of fiction so different, and successfully so, j |that his reputation could stand on those four hundred pages J : I Saki does not belong with these men. j To place Saki, we need to compare him with a writer who is much different on the surface, Mark Twain. Once having accepted the fact that Saki's good work is consid erably less in bulk than the total of Mark Twain's best, we can see two major resemblances in the men. Each of them ; has created one or more forms (sometimes including himself as narrator figure) of a juvenile or romantic protagonist : observing and criticizing the society of his own country | ( i i and contrasting it to an ideal form of the same society. ■ ;Mark Twain's protagonists are distinctly American, at his i best, and Saki's are definitely British. Twain's ideal j ■ I society is a pure form of American democracy, against which j i he contrasts all of the evils he sees about him. Saki's | ideal society is, on the other hand, a Tory aristocracy, i and he measures the mediocrity of his own time against this I 1 I standard. Underneath these superficial differences, then, j the two men are much alike. And the two belong to that j rare group of writers who have contributed genuine, original! > i : humorous concepts to the history of literature. Saki, we may say, is a British Mark Twain, but one who has produced a smaller body of first-rate work. He is not one of the j 222 giants of British literature, but he deserves a place of respect in the history of modern British fiction. He is a better entertainer than many of his technical superiors, and he makes a more significant and more modern statement about the human condition than do most of the good enter tainers. Saki has survived in more than his own stories, how ever. One may readily detect his influence in both P. G. Wodehouse, the entertainer, and Evelyn Waugh, the satirist. • It is not unlikely that his work will continue to influence writers in future generations. 1 B IB L I O G R A PH Y ! f t I I 223 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, Herbert Vaughan, ed. The Sir Roger de Coverlev Papers. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1904. Baring, Maurice. Introduction, The Unbearable Bassington by Hector H. Munro. New York: The Viking Press, Inc. 1926. Bates, H. E. The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1943. "Beasts and Super-Beasts," Spectator. CXIII (July 11, 1914) 60-61. Beaty, Frederick. "Mrs. Packletide and Tartarin," Nine teenth Century Fiction. VII (December 1952), 219-220. Bilton, Peter. "Saki and His Stories." Unpublished thesis University of Oslo, 1959. Bilton, Peter. "Salute to an N.C.O., " English Studies, XLVII (December 1966), 439-442. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961. Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962. Carens, James F. The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh. Seattle University of Washington Press, 1966. Carroll, Lewis. [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.] The Lewis Carroll Book. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1939. Charnwood, Lord. Introduction, When William Came, by Hector! H. Munro. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1926. Chesterton, Gilbert K. Introduction, The Toys of Peace, by i Hector H. Munro. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1926. ! J Cooke, John D., and Lionel Stevenson. English Literature of the Victorian Period. New York: Appleton-Century- : Crofts, 1949. j Coolidge, Archibald C. Rev. of Munro's The Rise of the Russian Empire, in American Historical Review. VII (October 1901), 13 8-140. Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modern World, rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Davidson, Edward. "An English Wit, 1 1 Saturday Review of Literature (New York), IV (October 1, 1927), 147. I Davis, Elmer. "Brilliant Writing," Saturday Review of Literature (New York), V (April 6, 1929), 854. Drake, Robert. "Saki's Ironic Stories," Texas Studies in j Language and Literature. V (AutumiT 1963) , 374-388. Drake, Robert. "Saki: Some Problems and a Bibliography," j English Fiction in Transition. V (September 1962), 6-26. Drake, Robert. "The Sauce for the Asparagus," The Saturday i Book, ed. John Hadfield, No. 20. London: Hutchinson, j 1960, pp. 61-73. | Drake,' Robert. "Theme and Rationale in the Short Stories | of Saki." Unpublished thesis. Vanderbilt University, ] 1953. j Drew, Elizabeth. "Saki," Atlantic Monthly. CLXVI (July 1940), 96-98. j Elton, Lord. "Munro, Hector Hugh," Dictionary of National i Biography. 1912-1921, ed. H. W. C. Davis and J. R. H. “I Weaver. London: Oxford University Press, 1921, p. ' 397. ' I Enck, John J.., Elizabeth T. Forter, and Alvin Whitley, eds. The Comic in Theory and Practice. New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1960. Fitzgerald, Edward. Works of Edward Fitzgerald. 2 vols. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1887. Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. ‘ New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1967. — Gore, John. " '.Saki, ’" English Wits, ed. Leonard Russell. London: Hutchinson, 1940, pp. 309-326. Greene, Graham. Introduction, The Best of Saki. by Hector H. Munro. New York: Viking Compass Books, 1961. Hobbes, John Oliver [Mrs. Pearl Richards Craigie]. The Ambassador. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, Publishers, 1898. Hobbes, John Oliver. The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895. Hope, Anthony [Anthony Hope Hawkins]. The Dolly Dialogues and Comedies of Courtship. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902. Hudson, Derek. "A Little Master," Spectator. CLXXXVIII (May 30, 1952), 720, 722. Inglis, Brian. "The Lumber Room, 1 1 Spectator. CXCVII (De- — cember 21, 1956), 907. Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen Nineties. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927. Kennedy, J. M. English Literature: 1880-1905. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, Publishers, 1913. Lambert, J. W ., ed. The Bodley Head Saki. London: The Bodley Head, 1963. Lambert, J. W. "Jungle Boy in the Drawing-Room, 1 1 Listener. LV (February 9, 1956), 211-212. j 227 i i ' I jLeGallienne, Richard. The Romantic '90‘s. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and.Company, 192 5. ■ Longaker, Mark, and Edwin C. Bolles. "Saki," Contemporary | English Literature. - New York: Appleton-Century- | Crofts, 1953, pp. 216-219. Lunt, W. E. History of England, 3rd ed. New York: Harper j and Brothers, 1945. ! ■Mais, S. P. C. “The Humour of Saki," Books and Their I Writers. London: Grant Richards, 1920, pp. 311-330. Milne, A. A. Introduction, The Chronicles of Clovis, by Hector H. Munro. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1926. Morley, Christopher. Introduction, The Short Stories of j Saki. by Hector H. Munro. New York: The Viking Press,1 Inc., 1930. i Munro, Ethel M. "Biography of Saki, 1 1 in The Sguare Egg, by I Hector H. Munro. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., | 1926. | i I i Munro, Hector Hugh. The Novels and Plays of Saki. Complete! in one volume. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., \ 1945. I i | Munro, Hector Hugh. The Short Stories of Saki. New York: j Modern Library, 1958. j i • Nevinson, H. W. Introduction, Beasts and Super-Beasts, by j Hector H. Munro. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., | 1926. j Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. | Thomas Common. New York: Modern Library [n.d.]. Overmyer, Janet. "Turn Down an Empty Glass," Texas Quarter-! ly, VII (Autumn 1964), 171-175. j t t Pearson, Hesketh. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. New j York: Harper and Brothers, 1946. | 228 j j \ I i Peltzie, Bernard E. "Teaching Meaning Through Structure in j the Short Story," English Journal, LV (September 1966),! 703-709, 719. I i Porterfield, Alexander. "Saki," London Mercury, XII (Augustj 1925), 385-394. - Pritchett, V. S. "The Performing Lynx," New Statesman and Nation, n. s. LIII (January 5, 1957), 18-19. Redfern, 'James. Review 6 f "The Watched Pot," Spectator, CLXXI (August 27, 1943), 194. Reynolds, Rothay. "Hector Hugh Munro," in The Toys of Peace, by Hector H. Munro. London: John Lane, 1919, pp. ix-xxiv. j "The Rise of the Russian Empire," Nation, LXXII (March 7, 1901), 201. ! iRoditi, Edouard. Oscar Wilde. Norfolk, Conn.: New Direc- j tions Books, 1947. j ) Russell, Frances Theresa. Satire in the Victorian Novel. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1920. j i "A Serviceable Reference-book of Russian History," Dial j (Chicago), XXIX (November 1, 1900), 310. j : ! . i Spears, George J. The Satire of Saki: A Study of the j Satiric Ant of Hector H. Munro. New York: Exposition j Press, 1963. | ' i I Spender, J. A. "Foreword," The Westminster Alice, by j Hector H. Munro. London: John Lane, 1927, pp. vii- xvi. Squire, J. C. Introduction, The Square Egg, by Hector H. j Munro. London: John Lane, 1926. j ■Stevick, Philip. - "Saki's Beasts," English Literature in Transition. IX (September 1966), 33-37. j ■Thorslev, Peter L., Jr. The Byronic Hero: Types and j Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. . i F Tyndall, William York. Forces in Modern British Literature: ; 1885-1956. New York: Vintage Books, 1956. \ Walpole, Hugh. Preface, Reginald and Reginald in Russia, by Hector H. Munro. London: John Lane, 1926. Wilde, Oscar. The Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1927. Winwar, Frances [Mrs. Frances Grebanier]. Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Cambridge Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.

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Creator Otto, Don Henry (author)

Core Title The Development Of Method And Meaning In The Fiction Of 'Saki' (H. H. Munro)

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Templeman, William D. (committee chair), Durbin, James H., Jr. (committee member), Wilbur, Leslie (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-371505

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