A writer like Wodehouse who published over a hundred books cannot have been a Flaubert or a James Joyce, but in his own style and idiom he was a connoisseur of the mot juste, as careful to get the precise nuance of every Bertie Wooster slang phrase—so artfully contrasted with the stately idiom of Jeeves—as Joyce was to catch the precise accent of the various inhabitants of Dublin on that June day in 1904. Wodehouse in translation, like Dickens in translation, must lose some of his appeal. Bertie, Jeeves, Ukridge, Mr. Mulliner and the Oldest Member belong to the English-speaking world as much as Sam Weller and Huckleberry Finn.

[The quotation which illustrates] Wodehouse's political innocence also illustrates (as it was meant to do) his superb command of the English language for his immediate humorous purposes. It is the opening of a story … collected in Lord Emsworth and Others …:

The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying.

'He'll have to let it grow or shave it off,' said the Whisky and Splash. 'He can't go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache or he has not. There can be no middle course.'

Mark Twain himself, in his most solemn, deadpan manner on the professional jester's platform, could not have improved upon that opening. But Wodehouse's concentration on the growth or lack of growth on the Nazi dictator's upper lip was not intended to cover up the tyrannous nature of the Nazi regime, upon whose admirers in England he was to express his scornful opinion only a year or two later. The man who broadcast from Berlin in 1941 that in return for his freedom he was willing to hand over India and reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator was the same man who, in The Code of the Woosters (1938), had made pretty plain his opinion of Roderick Spode, 'founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organisation better known as the Black Shorts.'

Primed by Jeeves on Spode's shameful secret (under the trade name of Eulalie he designs ladies' underclothing), Bertie is emboldened to address him as follows: 'The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People …' The reference to Mosley and his Black Shirts could hardly have been more explicit. (p. 314)

Writers like Dickens, with a fundamentally serious view of the responsibilities of the comic art, can go on from a Pickwick Papers to a Bleak House, but writers with a smaller range and a more limited artistry, like Wodehouse …, would indeed be foolish if, having struck oil, they moved on to unfamiliar ground. The intricacies of Wodehouse's plots are often tiresome, but we don't read him for his stories so much as for his narrative style and his dialogue, both of which recall the early Dickens as well as Huckleberry Finn and Three Men in a Boat. It is nearly always the early Dickens from whom P. G. partly descends. One of the rare exceptions is Ukridge's sponsorship of Battling Billson in Lord Emsworth and Others…. (p. 315)