At Moscow I had two little rooms in the Mwilnikov pereulok on the ground floor. I was now a regular correspondent to the Morning Post, and used to send them a letter once a week. Their St. Petersburg correspondent was Harold Monro, who wrote fiction under the pseudonym of “Saki.”
The stories that Monro wrote under the name of “Saki” in the Westminster Gazette and the Morning Post attracted when they came out in these newspapers, and afterwards when they were republished, a considerable amount of attention; but because they were witty, light, and ironical, and sometimes flippant, few people took “Saki” seriously as an artist. I venture to think he was an artist of a high order, and had his stories reached the public from Vienna or Paris, there would have been an artistic boom round his work of a deafening nature.
As it is, people dismissed him as a funny writer. Funny he was, both in his books and in his conversation; irresistibly witty and droll sometimes, sometimes ecstatically silly, so that he made you almost cry for laughter, but he was more than that—he was a thoughtful and powerful satirist, an astonishing observer of human nature, with the power of delineating the pathos and the irony underlying the relations of human beings in everyday life, with exquisite delicacy and a strong sureness of touch. A good example of his wit is his answer when a lady asked him how his book could be got: “Not at an ironmonger’s.” His satire is seen at its strongest in the fantasy, When William Came, in which he describes England under German domination, but the book in which his many gifts and his intuition for human things are mingled in the finest blend is perhaps The Unbearable Bassington, which is a masterpiece of character-drawing, irony, and pathos. And yet in literary circles in London, or at dinner-parties where you would hear people rave over some turgid piece of fiction, that because it was sordid was thought to be profound, and would probably be forgotten in a year’s time, you would never have heard “Saki” mentioned as an artist to be taken seriously.
“No one will buy,” as the seller of gold-fish remarked at the fair—“no one will buy the little gold-fish, for men do not recognise the gifts of Heaven, the magical gifts, when they meet them.”
Nobody sought the suffrages of the literary and artistic circle less than “Saki.” I think he would have been pleased with genuine serious recognition, as every artist would be, but the false réclame and the chatter of coteries bored him to extinction.
In 1914 he showed what he was really made of by enlisting in the army, and he was killed in the war as a corporal after he had several times refused a commission.
I spent Easter in Moscow, and this was one of the most impressive experiences I ever had.
I have spent Easter in various cities—in Rome, Florence, Athens, and Hildesheim—and although in each of these places the feast has its own peculiar aspect, yet by far the most impressive and the most interesting celebration of the Easter festival I have ever witnessed was that of Moscow. This is not to be wondered at, for Easter is the most important feast of the year in Russia, the season of festivity and holiday-making in a greater degree than Christmas or New Year’s Day. Secondly, Easter, which is kept with equal solemnity all over Russia, was especially interesting in Moscow, because Moscow is the stronghold of old traditions and the city of churches. Even more than Cologne, it is
“Die Stadt die viele hundert