Talk:Comedies of Courtship

Reviews

 * The Nation June 11, 1896:Mr. Anthony Hope's novels may be roughly classified as of the Zenda and the non-Zenda. We have either romance, quasi-history, or drawing-room problems worked out by sparkling talk. 'Comedies of Courtship' naturally belongs to the latter category, and abounds in the comicalities of errant affections. A few of the stories, indeed, strike a fuller note than that of comedy, and one or two stage themselves into farce so readily as to be, like all unstaged farce, rather solemn reading.


 * The Bookman, May 1896: Mr. Anthony Hope is original, and original with a light-handed grace not too often found in English writers of fiction. His Comedies of Courtship remind one of pretty dances. The step of the dancers is light and firm, the figures graceful and lively. The whole leaves a sense of harmony and completeness. As in a dance, too, the people are real, the movements artificial. The plots of these tales can scarcely be taken quite seriously. But the young men and women in whom Mr. Hope delights, and makes us delight, talk and behave in the most natural manner. Through these comedies there runs a spice of smiling mischief—it is not even a distant cousin to cynicism—which unites the reader and author in bonds of pleasant fraternity. It is a skilful thing to place behind his smiling groups, as Mr. Hope sometimes does, a background of slightly but well-defined tragedy—a ghastly or pathetic bygone incident of family history, against which plays the modern scene. Tennis parties, afternoon tea; the bright girls with the ready tongues, and the men who answer deliberately but so much to the point also, are haunted—pleasantly haunted—by the shadow of the past. Between the whiffs of the cigarettes you see the plaintive eyes of a Lady Agatha of a former age looking down on her descendants from a portrait on the wall; and you suspect that by some imaginative laws of heredity she guides the freakish plot. Merimée was a great master of this art of threading a tragic underplot with the every-day realism of a modern tale which Mr. Hope also uses. The Frenchman had the stronger grasp, without doubt. He could wind in a streak of the supernatural, making it run unobtrusively but surely on amid the modern incidents, till at last it laid a hand of horror upon you. Yet his art was to make the terror elude you as you sought to grasp it. In Lokis, in the Venus d'Ile, Madame Lucrezia, you may stop at any moment and say: "But this moonshine is incredible;" and the author can gravely reply, "Of course it is"—and the tale flows on quite smoothly without it. But while admitting the superior power of Merimée, it is only proper to add that Anthony Hope, in his graceful and brilliant tales, never finds it necessary to have recourse to disagreeable combinations and situations without which human emotion, for the last thirty years, has seemed to be non-existent to even the best of the French writers of fiction. The quarrels, reconciliations, the whimsicalities, the veerings and changes of sentiment which make the raison d'ê'tre of the Comedies of Courtship, are those of right-minded, wellbred people, whose sentiments in every case do them honour. No circumstances ever make Mr. Hope's young men anything but nice fellows and gentlemen; even when their manners and bearing—always as natural as they are excellent—are severely tried. "It is not very easy," says Mr. Hope, speaking of Willie Prime, "to assert social position when one has nothing on and only one's head out of water, but Willie did it." As to the plots, one must not cavil at the sentimental inconsistencies of the "Curate of Pottons" or those of Mary and John, Dora and Charlie, in the "Wheel of Love," nor at the reconciling bomb which reassorted the wavering couples. We must remember these are only the figures of the dance, the changing of partners, the little confusion of the "grand round." At the end they are all in place again, and move gracefully and with laughter—in which we join heartily—off the stage.


 * The Outlook 21 March, 1896: this book will provide a satisfactory hour's reading. Anthony Hope's Comedies of Courtship includes "The Wheel of Love" and a few other society tales, not intended to be very probable or to be taken seriously, but serving as a medium for witty talk and to set off amusing situations in the limitlessly possible complications of love-making. Those who have read the "Dolly Dialogues" will know what to expect. There is no sign that Mr. Hawkins's powers of invention and quiet satire are failing him.