SIR HUGH CLIFFORD
By Richard Le Gallienne
THOUGH these powerful and beautiful stories have already reached a wide audience, they deserve a wider, and readers to whom they are still unknown are missing an imaginative pleasure such as can be found in no other writers of my acquaintance except Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Joseph Conrad, with whom, because of his subject-matter, it is natural to class Sir Hugh Clifford; as I see James Huneker has done before me. So far as treatment is concerned, however, Sir Hugh Clifford owes nothing to those writers. His method is his own and his experience, out of which his stories, as he tells us, have sprung, is perhaps even more his own in theirs. For, with the one exception of "The Ghoul"—as Sir Hugh Clifford tells us in his own preface, itself a thrilling document—these stories are veritable stuff of his own life as a British Government official. He has seen these happenings with his own eyes, and known the actors in them. To have done that. when little more than a boy, is a romance in itself, one of those romantic opportunities which more than once have repaid the servants of the far-flung" British Empire for the hazards
