The Sisters Sarcenet (on stage): "You men are deceivers
and awfully sly. Oh, you are!"
Male Portion of Audience (as is expected from them):
"No, we aren't!"
The Sisters S. (archly): "Now you know you are!
You come home with the milk; should your poor wife ask why,
'Pressing business, my pet,' you serenely reply,
When you've really been out on the 'Tiddle-y-hi!'
Yes, you have!"
Male Audience (as before): "No, we've not!"
The Sisters S. (with the air of accusing angels): "Why,
you know you have!"
It is sometimes objected that the root of Mr. Anstey's success lies near the surface, and is nothing but the vividness of his dialogues. It is a great deal more; it lies in the truth of his characters, subtly drawn, but irresistible, and, now and again, tenderly pathetic. Thus may you see the optimist and pessimist, and the link between them, in the following scene in the Mall on Drawing-Room Day:—
Cheery Old Lady (delighted): "I could see all the coachmen's 'ats beautiful. We'll wait and see 'em all come out, John, won't we? They won't be more than a hour and a half in there, I dessay."
A Person with a Florid Vocabulary: "Well, if I'd ha' known all I was goin' to see was a set o' blanky nobs shut up in their blank-dash kerridges, blank my blanky eyes if I'd ha' stirred a blanky foot, s'elp me dash, I wouldn't!"
A Vendor (persuasively): "The kerrect lengwidge of hevery flower that blows—one penny!"
In the composition of his "Voces" and kindred work, it has been the practice of Mr. Anstey to visit the needful spot, where he would try to seize the salient points and the general tone, the speakers and the scene, trusting to luck for a chance incident, feature, or sentence that might provide a subject. Sometimes he would have to go empty away; but as a rule he would find enough to provide the rough material for a sketch. Sometimes, too, he would combine hints and anecdotes received from his acquaintance with his own experience and invention; on rarer occasions he would happen upon an incident which could be worked up into a sketch very much as it actually occurred, though with strict selection and careful elaboration. On the whole it may be taken that the conversations are mostly what might have happened, but that they never were shorthand reproductions of overheard talk; and the incidents are almost invariably invented. Occasionally something in an exhibition or show would suggest a typical comment, or a casual remark might provide an idea for a character; but a good deal is certainly unconscious reminiscence and fragmentary observation, and the residue pure guess-work.
Of the artistic quality of Mr. Anstey's work there can be no question—neither of its humour, nor of its value as a complete reflection of English, and especially of Cockney, life. Old-fashioned people may and do denounce it as newfangled; but does anyone doubt the sort of welcome that would have been accorded to it by Jerrold and Thackeray and Gilbert à Beckett if they had had the good fortune to have an Anstey in their midst half-a-century ago?
R. C. LEHMANN.
(From a Photograph by Elliott and Fry.)
Mr. R. C. Lehmann, grand-nephew of W. H. Wills, one of Punch's early crew, had a good reputation as a Cambridge wit before Mr. Burnand captured him for Punch. In April, 1889, he began to edit "The Granta," the clever "barrel-organ of the Cambridge undergraduates," satirical, brightly humorous, and freshly youthful. On the 14th of the following December there appeared in Punch his first contribution, a dialogue entitled "Among the Amateurs," which has since been reprinted in "The Billsbury Election."