F. ANSTEY: HIUMORIS The lizst Load. By F. Anstey. (Methuen.
5s.) SOME composers of tone-poems were fond of concluding them with an envoi, a rapid coda into which all the themes found their way for a n-oment or so. This unexpected. and very welcome little book by F. Anstey (Mr. Thomas Anstey Guthrie) is an envoi. Here, among these collected sketches and stories, we might find all the Anstey themes. Here, for example, are dialogues, conversations at the Cinema, before the Hudson Memorial, and so forth. As we read these things, the years roll away. We are back in the 'nineties, when the dialogue was just as much in favour as it is now out of favour. Punch, the St. James's Gazette, the Pall 31a11 Budget, Mr. Jerome's To-day, and we know not how many more periodicals filled their columns with conversations In the Park," "At the Music Hall," and so on. Of these dialogue writers, "F. Anstey" was, deservedly, the most popular, and it was he who made the form. His best known collection is that in Voces Populi, a book that can still be enjoyed and doubly enjoyed, although it is reprinted humorous journalism and more than thirty years have passed since it was written. How many con- temporary contributions to Punch will keep for more than thirty years and lose little or nothing of their flavour is not easy to decide, but it is certain that a humorous journalist wfth the lasting power of an Anstey is something of a phenomenon. But, indeed, these dialogues were better than journalism. They are funny, but their humour has an edge to it, a sardonic flavour. There was a much later collection of Anstey dialogues that took its title from that of the first in the volume, Salted Almonds. (It described, as we will remember, how a somewhat pompous and opinionated gentle- man took in to dinner a sweet, wide-eyed young girl who demanded his opinion on all manner of questions and listened to his discourse with wonder and respect. He noticed, how- ever, that at certain moments in the talk she laid aside a salted.ahnond. It turned out afterwards that she and another sweet young thing seated at the other side of the table regu- larly played a game together when they dined out. This game consisted of making their partners mefition certain unusual words, the score being marked by the salted almonds.) All his dialogues might have borne this title, for they are all salted almonds, humour with a little acid flavouring, too easy-going to be considered . strictly as satire, but nevertheless never entirely removed from the satirical.
There are, too, in this volume one or two stories on fantas- tically humorous themes (there is one dealing with a mandrake named Ferdie), a kind of story that Anstey made entirely his own. Humour that depends on a touch of the marvellous is clearly not of the highest type ; there is more than a hint of the mechanical in it ; but within the limitations of the kind no one has ever excelled, nor even come near, the author of Vice Versa, The Talking Horse, The Brass Bottle, and the rest. He used his magic sparingly, and once grant him a wave or so of the necromancer's wand, all the rest follows, proceeding strictly out of character and situation. The humour of these things does not depend solely on fantastic comic invention, though that is there, but has real force and bite, the best of it showing real imagination and a capital knowledge of human nature. The most famous of them all is, of course, the first of them, Vice Versa, written when its author was a young barrister of twenty-six. This "Lesson to Fathers" even called forth an enthusiastic notice in the ferocious Saturday Review of the early 'eighties (it was published in 1882), and was, of course, an immense success. Every ounce of comedy, from real satire to broad farce, is wrung out of the situation of the schoolboy turned middle-aged merchant and the middle-aged merchant turned schoolboy. Even yet this colossal early success over- shadows some of the later things, which seem to us equally amusing in their own way. The horse that turned conversa- tionalist and bitterly criticized its new owner, particularly at awkward moments ; the young architect who released the Genic fromhis bottle and found the gratitude of a supernatural being from the Orient somewhat embarrassing ; the misadven- tures of that guest from Blankley's ; these are all very diverting inventions. The wilder the story that has to be told, the more restrained the story-telling should be, and Anstey, unlike his imitators, has always realized this important fact. There is about all his best things a certain dryness and neatness of
touch, at Once lending conviction and being very droll, that other writers who have taken to the fantastic humorous have never achieved, and that sometimes suggest the legal gentleman who was long ago swallowed up in the author.
In addition to the dialogues and the .fantastic humorous stories, there is in this new collection at least one serious story. The sight of it should remind us—and here there is some excuse for the necessity of having to be reminded at all—that Mr. Anstey Guthrie has not always tried to make us laugh. He has written one or two serious novels, very different indeed from the chronicles of his malicious idols and comic Baboos. He followed up Vice Versa, with a rather grim story called The Giant's Robe. It speaks well for him that he should have changed his key at all, for so many men find themselves tied down to the manner of their first great success. But this young man of twenty-seven had a serious novel in him and took the oppor- tunity of bringing it out. The theme of the story is one that other writers have tried to handle, that of a man taking the credit for a dead author's work, but we never remember reading anything on this theme worked out so forcefully and remorse- lessly as it is in The Giant's Robe. It might be tried with advantage on a new generation of novel readers.
It would seem a mistake to begin too magnificently, for colossal early successes are difficult things to live up to, and turn almost any career into an apparent decline and fall. Un- doubtedly "F. Anstey " suffered from his almost explosive beginning. That cannot be helped, but what can be helped is the comparative neglect (critically, of course) that soon falls to the lot of our humorous writers. Most people who make it their business to express their appreciation of good authors seem to shun the humorists as they would the plague. And the others, the thousands who laugh and admire, are either inarticulate or imagine that a friendly word from them does not mean anything. If critics were less pompous and more genuine in their desire to register their admiration of good writing wherever it is to be found, our humorists, some of them indefatigable and scrupulous artists in their own quiet way, would not have to wait so long for a friendly word to break that silence which is, as one of the most distinguished once wrote to me, "the usual portion of the humorous writer." The Last Load is a somewhat melancholy title for such a bright little book, but whether it carries the actual last load or not, it is at least good to realize that its author, who first made our fathers laugh forty-three years ago, is still in harness.
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