FICTION.
IN BRIEF AUTHORITY.*
THE re-entry of Mr. Anstey on the stage of fiction with a full-length novel is a welcome event, for he belongs to the tribe of benevolent entertainers, and has never shown any disposition to enter the camp of the strenuous modern realists who hold it the prime function of the novelist, in schoolboy phrase, to make us "feel beastly "—i.e., not bestial, but thoroughly uncomfortable. It is not that Mr. Anstey is incapable of being serious. On the contrary, there is plenty of sound sense and shrewd observation in his gayest fantasias, and these qualities are not wanting in his latest venture. As on so many previous occasions, from Vice Versa onwards, Mr. Anetey employs a device or formula which is akin to that once defined, a propos of Gulliver, if we remember aright, as "the logical conduct of an absurd proposition." But Mr. Anstey's method is peculiarly his own. It rests on the principle of transformation by magic, whereby the characters of the story are suddenly endowed with superhuman powers, or subjected to some form of enchantment or Metamorphosis. This, again, is not a new principle in fiction ; but Mr. Anstey has made it his own by applying it, to ultra-normal, commonplace, and mediocre people. Their psychology is not altered by their altered environment ; it remains substantially the same. Mr. and Mrs. WibberleyStimpson, though suddenly and miraculously elevated to the throne of illiirchenland, retain the qualities which distinguished them as prosperous dwellers in Suburbia. Their readjustment to their new condition e is ,only superficial. In all essentials they remain incorrigibly insular, self-satisfied, prosaic, unromantic. Mr. Wibborley-Stimpson was stodgy before, and stodgy he continues. His wife was a snob and "thruster," and her elevation only accentuates these unlovely ,attributes. So, too, with their children. Clarence does not cease from bounding, or Edna from her crude efforts after self-expression on the lines of Nietzsche. And Ruby, the youngest of the family, retains the naturalness and simplicity which distinguish her from all the rest. But this is not all. The novel is a feat of double impersonation, since it not only exhibits the attitude of the WibberleyStimpsons towards Fairyland, but, conversely, the impression created on fairy godmothers, princes, gnomes, and ogres by the Wibberley-Stimpsons. Thus, to take two examples, the new King, bolding conscientious scruples against the employment of Chinese labour in South Africa, finds himself obliged to take active measures for the removal of the yellow Gnomes from the mines of Meirchenland, to the great dislocation of society. Even more disastrous are the effects of Edna's cult of the Nietzschean superman on the eccentric Prince, who only needed her encouragement to unmask himself in his true colours as a full-blown Ogre. And this after she had accepted him as a suitor in preference to the eligible and entirely desirable regulation Fairy Prince I The numerous passages of aims between the Fairy Godmother, who was a grande dame, and the new Queen, who was not, ending invariably in the defeat of the latter, are carried out with great spirit and truth to type. Clarence is in some ways improved by his new surroundings, but the only member of the family who really fits into them is Ruby, and that is partly because she was an unsophisticated child, but largely because of the excellent training she bad received from her governess, .Miss Daphne Heritage, to whom the role of heroine is allotted, and who fully justifies her selection. We most not say who Daphne really was, but it may be enough to inform the reader that the talisman, on the strength of which Mrs. Wibberley-Stimpson was identified as the rightful heir to the throne of lifiirchenlancl, really belonged to Daphne, and had been sold by her to her employer to pay a debt of honour. With this clue to the anoilment we take leave of an original and highly diverting entertainment. Three-fourths of it were written, as Mr. Anstey tells us in a few graceful lines of introduction, in happy ante-bellum days. But, as he goes on to explain, "as the central idea of the story happens to be inseparably connected with certain characters and incidents of German origin," he has left them unaltered, "partly because it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to substitute any others, but mainly because I cannot bring myself to believe that the nursery friends of our youth could ever be regarded as enemies." We are not warring with the brothers Grimm, and there are no Reventiows or Bernhardis in Marchenland.
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