ABSTRACT
It is more than forty years since the author first read P. G. Wodehouse in The Captain, a boy’s magazine. In those days his humour was not the all-pervasive element it has since become. Unlike Psmith, Mike was vulnerable, and one of the later stories in which he appears shows him cut off from cricket by the necessity to earn a living as a bank clerk, a situation which no doubt reflected Wodehouse’s occasional despondency in the first years after leaving school. The summer lightning of Wodehouse’s humour was especially grateful to all whose eminence made them feel exposed when lightning of the other kind was playing about their heads. As always when a popular idol falls, the outcry against Wodehouse was fiercest among those who had been drawn to him less by his genius than by what, in changed conditions, they now recognized as his defect.
