“Mr Firbank has an extraordinary knack of writing dialogue, and his entirely odious people move and breathe and are completely real. Perhaps some day Mr Firbank will give us a comedy that is not all satire; when he does it might prove an exceedingly brilliant acting play.”
“Possibly someone familiar with the English colony at Florence would regard it as a _roman à clef_.”
“He is a portent ... a black sheep among white ones....”
“A continuous sparkle of crisp dialogue.”
“Mr Firbank’s endeavours to be wicked are almost pathetic.... Young men with side-whiskers and maids in Assyrian jumpers are raving about Mr Firbank’s audacities....”
“The short story here published reveals a delicate descriptive power, a fine perception of the value of colour, and that restraint which is indispensable to the making of a good short story.”
“Mr Firbank always had a sense of style and a feeling for the mannered beauty of arranged words.... In _Santal_ the passion for beautiful writing is still evident, but it is used with greater simplicity to achieve an effect such as a more reticent Pierre Loti might manage.... Mr Firbank has emotion rather than passion, and his East is viewed through a slight haze of sentiment; but it is a real country, and has its own spiritual excitements.”
“Mr Firbank has acquired a reputation as a stylist which this work will enhance. Within its brief compass there is all the glamour, the colour, the heat, the smells, the vileness, the beauty, and the fervour of Islam. It is the sort of thing that Loti does on a grander scale, and, like Loti, Mr Firbank is an adept at the creation of atmosphere. He is guilty of a few affectations perhaps, but these are like precious flaws in a wondrous Turkish carpet--they are lost in the beauty of the design as a whole.”
“Mr Ronald Firbank has always had his own manner, and a very modish one. In _Santal_ the elegance, almost dandyism, of his style has given just a faint hint of flippancy to a tale in itself very dignified, and full of an unexpected warmth and delicacy of feeling. It is a _nouvelle_--who could call a thing of such distinction a long short story?--with the vivid richly-coloured background of the East.... Something there is, too, of irony and detachment, as though the Mr Firbank of _Valmouth_ and of _The Princess Zoubaroff_ were secretly smiling a little cynically at his unexpected tumble into sentiment.”