favourite companions were the Reginalds and Clovises of this world, because they, at least, could never grow up and worship at the shrine of routine.

“Saki" was not only a child-lover, he was a child himself, with all the imagination, the irresponsibility and the harsh cruelty of children fully developed in him there is nothing sweet or mellow or restful in his genius he surprises us just as "O. Henry surprises us by turning a complete somersault in his last sentences after astonishing us with all manner of gymnastic capers in each paragraph before. It reminds one of music-hall acrobats who, after taking our breath away several times during their "turn," make their adieux by performing some incredible antic that leaves us too shattered even to applaud.

Such is the humour of "Saki," which never descends to caricature like so much of Dickens, is never aimless like that of W. W. Jacobs, is often bitter like his masters, Pope, Dryden, Swift, and (at times) Wilde, always verbally brilliant, polished, and cold: his exaggerations are all marked with a restraint which, of course, makes them all the more grotesque and mirthprovoking his accents are as precise as those of the most prim governess or the most literal Scotsman :

"There is a goat in my bedroom,' observed the bishop.

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Really,' I said, 'another survivor? I thought all the other goats are done for.'

“This particular goat is done for,' he said, 'it is being devoured by a leopard at the present moment. That is why I left the room : some animals resent being watched while they are eating.'

It is here that he differs from Stephen Leacock, his transatlantic counterpart both are prolific in verbal felicities, but Leacock is far less subtle: where

"Saki" is giving full play to a wonderfully developed imagination, Leacock is confined by the bounds of his terrestial fancy; where "Saki " soars into the highest regions of the truly comic, Leacock is content with the slow, earth-borne car of Parody; the barbs of irony which "Saki" employed were aimed at foolish humanity straying pitiably from paths where they might be happy, while Leacock's sarcastic darts are levelled at a particular failing of foolish "cranks.” Leacock has intermittent flashes of great brilliance, but his intellect is that of a highly talented professor;

Saki," like "O. Henry," rises quite frequently beyond cleverness into that inexplicable, rarefied atmosphere where only the genius can survive. Like "O. Henry," and only too many other geniuses, he escaped recognition in his lifetime: "Saki" had only an eclectic public but the passion of the devoted few always keeps the reputation of great men burning until the time comes for posterity to acknowledge the master, and there is no doubt whatever that the time will come when "Saki " will be given his niche among the great humourists.

T

IX

WOMEN

HERE is no subject so constantly in man's thoughts as some member of the opposite

sex. Wherever two or three men are collected together gossiping, in the end some generalisation about women will set them off: this is not to say that Englishmen, as a race, talk so incessantly about them as Frenchmen do: nor do I suggest that men give the same amount of time to talking about women as women do about men: it is rather in his thoughts that women take precedence with a man. He is able to concentrate on his work or his games when occasion demands, but in his leisure moments, at the theatre, in church, in the train, in the streets, at fashionable restaurants, he likes to delight his eyes with the sight of pretty women: in books he gluts himself with vicarious love-making, he wallows in sentimental affection for fictitious heroines. If he is unmarried he is always more or less in love: if he is married he is either preposterously in love with his own wife or some one else. All this in spite of the fact that most women make men miserable, that men despise them as a sex, that as companions their own sex is in nearly every way superior. All bachelors suspect their married friends because they unite invariably in urging them to do as they have done: whereas no successful barrister, journalist, or prince of commerce ever yet did anything but try to put off all his acquaintances from taking up the profession in which he has made good.

Women are in so many cases a fascinating mystery or a horrible enigma that it is with a sense of having discovered the sesame to their nature that we pick up a betrayal of the sex by one of their number.1

Women, published by Martin Secker, by an anonymous author, is one of the most provocative books I have ever read. True or not, it is good that man, sentimental man, should learn what one woman thinks of her sex. First there is her attitude to the war, commonly designated as splendid." There is no question in the author's mind that the women liked the war: it immediately gratified their instinctive hunger for emotion: "not Lord Kitchener, but the women of England, made the new armies. "It was the women who sent the men out to fight by cajolery, bullying, ridicule . . . the woman pacifist has yet to be born. Having sent the man to fight, the women found that England was theirs. War became glorious fun it was an excuse for wearing uniforms and acquiring power: it gave birth to a sex-hatred which may now be permanent. Owing to her lack of imagination, the average woman is unable to have anything more than a shallow sympathy with suffering, principally physical suffering. Just as they dote on physical strength and fear intellectual ability, so do they understand, to a certain degree, wounds of the body without being able to realise the more poisonous and lasting wounds of the mind. The emotional excitements which every woman must have, have led to an amazing moral laxity during the last five years. They are much more completely and continuously sensual than men, living as they do in a marvelling delirium of the senses: life has become

1 I am only, of course, guessing when I attribute the authorship of Women to a woman.

a precarious business at best: we are all fatalists : consequently, we have snatched at happiness and secured, in too many cases, misery: this is the outcome of the 'splendid' behaviour of women.' So much for the thesis of Part I.

:

In Part II we are told something of the characteristics of women. There is the love of physical strength mentioned above, the faculty of imitativeness .. and the passion of cruelty at all costs a girl will conform to the prevailing fashion, however unsuited she may be in the principal affair of their lives, the business of love, they are past masters: they sedulously cultivate the myth that all women are mysterious in order to cover the nakedness of their souls and to render themselves more attractive: that is why a woman instinctively dreads a man with brains: he may, at any moment, probe the veil and mortally wound her legendary self, "the offspring of vanity out of vacuum.' Just as the dominant interest in all novels written by women is sex so is sex the obsession of all women. Novel-writing is the outcome of repressed sexual emotions.

The

Part III is devoted to the question of "Why Men Love Women." Leaving out of account all the minor stages in love-making, it is interesting to read that "affairs" with unmarried women subside more normally than those with married women. married woman, having endured a disappointment, having had distaste aroused, and having had developed within her a desire for revenge upon the cause of her disappointment, becomes more quickly reckless. She counts the cost less: she knows as nobody else can do the sweets of stolen intercourse. Men like something stable. They wish to feel that love and company await them through life. The happily