^ C345tXl 66- 10071
Dark
W* S^ Gilbert , his life and
letters
780.92 G466d 66-10071
Dark
W S* Gilbert his life and
letters
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,,PHPLIC LIBRARY
W. S. GILBERT
SIR WlU I AM SCHWKHK GUBKKT
(This photograph was signed nineteen da>s Ixtforc the chanwttist'h tkutih.)
W. S. GILBERT
HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
BY
SIDNEY DARK
AND
ROWLAND GREY
WITH EIGHT 1'IJJ1>!AGK I'LATKS AND
SOME ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
LONDON: METHUEN & GO. LTD.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
JffttNTED IK GREAT
FOREWORD
MY friend, the late Henry Rowland-Brown, an inti-
mate friend of Sir W. S. Gilbert in the later years
of his life, had intended to write the biography
of the author of the Bab Ballads and the Savoy libretti. The
war and the long serious illness that finally occasioned his
death prevented him from carrying out his intention.
He left behind him certain memoranda, and before his
death, he had related to his sister, Miss Rowland Grey, a
vast amount of Gilbertiana, without which this book
could hardly have been written. Miss Rowland Grey's
knowledge and enthusiasm have made it possible to attempt
the task.
We have had most kindly and gracious help from Lady
Gilbert, and to her and to Miss Nancy Mclntosh we are under
a great debt of obligation, as we are to Mr. Rupert Carte
and to the numerous ladies and gentlemen, mentioned in
the course of the biography, who have lent us letters and have
given us their recollections of Sir William Gilbert at various
times of his life. We are also indebted to the Editors of the
Cornhill Magazine and the Strand Magazine for permission to
use certain letters that have been printed in their columns.
S. D.
Qlf HUJ
6610071
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I GILBERT'S BEGINNING i
II GILBERT AND " FUN " 9
III GILBERT'S PROSE . 36
IV THE FIRST PLAYS 41
V GILBERT AND SULLIVAN 62
VI LATER PLAYS 137
VII GILBERT IN THE THEATRE 152
VIII GILBERT'S FRIENDSHIPS 166
IX THE CROWNING YEARS .193
X GILBERT AS A LAWYER 200
XI GILBERT AT HOME 207
XII GILBERT THE MAN 214
XIII THE LAST DAY AND AFTERWARDS , . . .220
XIV GILBERT THE ARTIST 228
APPENDIX 241
BIBLIOGRAPHY 261
THE GILBERT AND SULLIVAN OPERAS * 265
INDEX 267
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES
FACING
PAGE
Sir William Schwenk Gilbert . . . Frontispiece
(From a photograph by ELLIS & WALLERY)
Gilbert as an Officer in the Gordon Highlanders ... 42
(From a photograph by WINDOW & GROVE)
Gilbert in the Early Sullivan Days 62
(From a photograph by WINDOW & GROVE)
Gilbert's Original Design for the Prince of Monte Carlo's Dress
for " The Grand Duke ".;.... 128
Another of the Dramatist's Costume Drawings for " The Grand
Duke " 134
Gilbert as Harlequin ........ 194
(From a photograph by ELLIOTT & FRY)
Gilbert at Grim's Dyke ....... 208
Sir George Frampton's Medallion on the Victoria Embankment 228
(From a photograph by HUMPHREY JOEL)
IN THE TEXT
PAGES
Gilbert's Illustrations to Fun and the Bab Ballads . . .11-23
A Gilbert Letter 182
Sketches in Court ........ 205
Gilbert's Illustrations to Fun and the Bab Ballads . 241-260
ix
W. S. GILBERT
HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
CHAPTER I
GILBERT'S BEGINNING
WILLIAM SCHWENK GILBERT was born at
17, Southampton Street, Strand, in the house of
his mother's doctor, on November 18, 1836. His
second name, Schwenk, was the surname of his godmother.
He was the only son and one of the four children of William
Gilbert, a naval surgeon, who retired from his profession at
the age of twenty-five on inheriting a moderate fortune.
The Gilberts claimed descent from Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
the Elizabethan navigator who landed at Newfoundland
in 1583 and established the first English colony in North
America. There are certain striking resemblances between
the navigator and the Savoy poet. Their physical pro-
portions were much the same. Both possessed hot tempers
and could " shoot out their arrows with bitter words/' Both
were capable of almost quixotic chivalry; both made mis-
takes leading to cruel mis judgment by exasperated con-
temporaries. It is remarkable, too, that William Schwenk
Gilbert had the sea passion. Both Lord Charles Beresford
and Lord Jellicoe assured him there was not a rope wrong
aboard His Majesty's Ship Pinafore. The Bab Ballads
are salt with sea-brine. Another and a tragic resemblance
Sir Humphrey Gilbert's ship was wrecked off the Azores
and he was drowned. " The general, sitting abaft with a
1 i
2 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
book in his hand, cried out to us in the Hind : ' We are as
near to Heaven by sea as by land/ " The poet dramatist
died in the water too, gallantly attempting, old man as he
was, to rescue his friends in distress. Whether the pretty
conceit of Elizabethan descent is genuine, or, as cavillers
insist, mere fancy, there is certainly an odd similarity between
the two careers.
W. S. Gilbert's father, William Gilbert the elder, was
born in 1804, and though the books he wrote fill nearly two
columns of the British Museum Index, he published nothing
until he was fifty-nine. When his father began to write,
his son was then twenty-seven, and already known as a
promising young author. It is suggested that it was the
son's success that spurred his father to literary activity. " I
think the little success which has attended my humble efforts
certainly influenced my father/' Gilbert told Miss Edith
Brown. " You see, my father never had an exaggerated idea
of my abilities ; he thought that if I could write, anybody
could, and forthwith he began to do so." William Gilbert
the elder suffered from an unfortunate stilted literary style.
He was a man of many prejudices, having a particular aver-
sion to the Roman Church and to the Catholic party in the
Church of England.
The younger Gilbert had a deep and sincere regard for
religion, and for good men and women of all faiths.
In one of his books, Facia Non Verba, William Gilbert the
elder insists that Protestant ladies are far more philan-
thropic than Catholic nuns, for, while the religious habit has
secured recognition, the inconspicuous Protestant has never
been valued at her true worth. In this book there is an
account of an Elizabeth Gilbert, a rich blind woman, who,
moved by compassion for her poorer sisters in misfortune,
dedicated her life to their service in a manner distinctly fore-
shadowing the methods of the late Sir Arthur Pearson,
William Gilbert wrote three-volume novels, which had
quite a good circulation in their day, and which axe full of
GILBERT'S BEGINNING 3
fulminations against intemperance and injustice to rate-
payers. His Memoirs of a Cynic contains one passage that
the author's brilliant son might have written :
" From my earliest childhood the ridiculous has thrust itself into
every action of my life. I have been haunted through my whole
existence by the absurd."
The Memoirs of a Cynic is rather a tiresome book, full of
prejudices and antagonism against things in general. It
contains a notably brusque and very Gilbertian attack on
the fashionable ladies' doctor " who never cures." Two of
William Gilbert's books, The Magic Mirror and King George's
Middy, have special interest from the fact that they were
illustrated by his son. The illustrations have the character-
istics of the drawings made afterwards for the Bab Ballads,
and, with the exception of Rudyard Kipling and his father,
we can think of no other such collaboration between father
and son. Of the two, King George's Middy is the more in-
teresting.
William Gilbert, senior, had the true Gilbertian temper.
The late Mr. William Faux, one of W. H. Smith's managers,
used to relate that when he was a youth he was once left in
charge of one of his firm's country branches. Gilbert stalked
into the shop and asked for all the copies of Clara Levesque,
one of his novels, and, to the horror of the boy, proceeded to
tear them to pieces in a violent rage. Mr. Faux afterwards
learned that the author had discovered that his final proofs
had not been properly corrected.
After their marriage, the elder Gilbert frequently called
on his son and daughter-in-law on Sunday, when the maids
were out. He was asked not to knock at the door, but to
ring the bell, as the knocker could not be heard. But he
persisted ip, knocking, and refused to ring. He would wait
for some time, knocking and knocking, and finally go away,
angry and offended, to be seen no more for weeks.
While he was a small child, W. S. Gilbert travelled with
his parents in Germany and Italy, and when he was two he
4 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
was stolen by brigands at Naples and ransomed for twenty-
five pounds. Two pleasant Italians stopped Gilbert's nurse
and said that the English gentleman had sent them for the
baby, and she handed him over. This incident was obviously
in Gilbert's mind when he wrote The Pirates of Penzance. It
will be remembered that Ruth, the simple-minded nurse-
maid, was told to apprentice Frederick to a pilot, and in
mistake she apprenticed him to a pirate :
"Mistaking my instructions that within my brain did gyrate,
I took and bound this promising boy apprenticed to a pirate.
A sad mistake it was to make and doom him to a vile lot,
I bound him to a pirate you instead of to a pilot/'
Gilbert's pet-name as a child was Bab, and this, of course,
is the origin of the Bab Ballads. He is said to have been a
child of considerable beauty, and Sir David Wilkie asked to
paint his portrait. At seven he was sent to school at Bou-
logne, and at thirteen he was sent to the Great Baling school,
a remarkable scholastic establishment, which numbered
among its pupils at one time or another Charles Knight,
Lord Lawrence and his no less famous brother Sir Henry
Lawrence, Sir Robert Sale, Bishop Selwyn, George Alexander
Macfarren, Thackeray, John Henry Newman, Thomas Huxley
and his brothers, Captain Marryat, Lord Truro, Bishop West-
macott, and Hicks Pasha. Huxley's father and Macfarren's
father were both for a while members of the teaching staff.
It has been impossible to discover any details of Gilbert's
childhood. He was not one of those men who talk much
about their early days, and, as his sole surviving sister has
told us, it was never a family habit to keep any correspon-
dence. He used sometimes to refer to his child affection for
those highly coloured cardboard theatrical characters which
Stevenson also adored, and which are still manufactured by
Mr. Pollock, of Hackney. While he was at Baling he wrote
plays for his schoolfellows to act, but, alas 1 the manuscripts
have either been lost or destroyed. At school, Gilbert was
regarded as a clever but rather lazy boy, and he once told
GILBERTS BEGINNING 5
Rowland-Brown : "I was not a popular boy, I believe."
But he hated being left behind, and by the time he was six-
teen he was head boy of the school, winning various prizes
for verse translation of the classics.
After leaving school he went to King's College, where
Canon Ainger and Walter Besant were among his fellow-
students, and his first published literary work were verses
that appeared in the college magazine. In a fragment of
autobiography published in the Theatre Gilbert says :
" I was educated privately at Great Ealing and at King's College,
intending to finish up at Oxford. But in 1855, when I was nineteen
years old, the Crimean War was at its height, and commissions in the
Royal Artillery were thrown open to competitive examination. So I
gave up all idea of Oxford, took my B.A. degree at the University of
London, and read for the examination for direct commissions, which
was to be held at Christmas, 1856. The limit of age was twenty, and
as at the date of examination I should have been six weeks over that
age, I applied for and obtained from Lord Pamure, the then Secretary
of State for War, a dispensation for this excess, and worked away with
a will. But the war came to a rather abrupt and unexpected end,
and no more officers being required, the examination was indefinitely
postponed. Among the blessings of peace may be reckoned certain
comedies, operas, farces, and extravaganzas which, if the war had lasted
another six weeks, would in all probability never have been written.
I had no taste for a line regiment, so I obtained, by competitive
examination, an assistant clerkship in the Education Department of
the Privy Council Office, in which ill-organized and ill-governed office I
spent four uncomfortable years. Coming unexpectedly into possession
of a capital sum of ^300, I resolved to emancipate myself from the
detestable thraldom of this baleful office ; and on the happiest day of
my life I sent in my resignation. With 100 I paid my call to the
Bar (I had previously entered myself as a student at the Inner Temple),
with another ^100 I obtained access to a conveyancer's chambers, and
with the third 100 I furnished a set of chambers of my own, and began
life afresh as a barrister-at-law."
He joined the Northern Circuit in 1866, and attended the
Old Bailey as well as various assizes and sessions on his
circuit. The law, for which Gilbert had an intense love all
through his life, a love obvious in so much of his writing, did
not offer him an income, and in his first two years at the
Bar he only earned seventy-five pounds. He practised for
6 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
four years, averaging five clients a year. One of these clients
was a Frenchman, and Miss Edith Brown tells an amusing
story of his showing his appreciation of his counsel's powers
by throwing his arms round Gilbert's neck and kissing him
in open court. Gilbert wrote a story round his maiden brief.
It appeared in the Cornhill of December, 1863. It began :
" Late on a certain May morning, as I was sitting at a modest break-
fast in my * residence chambers/ Pump Court, Temple, my attention
was claimed "by a single knock at an outer door, common to the cham-
bers of Felix Polter, and of myself, Horace Penditton, both barristers-
at-law of the Inner Temple.
" The outer door was not the only article common to Polter and
myself. We also shared what Polter (who wrote farces) was pleased
to term a ' property * clerk, who did nothing at all, and a ' practicable '
laundress, who did everything. There existed also a communion of
interest in teacups, razors, gridirons, candlesticks, etc. ; for although
neither of us was particularly well supplied with the necessaries of
domestic life, each happened to possess the very articles in which the
other was deficient. So we got on uncommonly well together, each
regarding his friend in the light of an indispensable other self. We
had both embraced the f higher walk ' of the legal profession, and were
patiently waiting for the legal profession to embrace us."
The first brief was to defend a woman prisoner- and the
defence was not a success.
" No sooner had the learned judge pronounced this sentence than
the poor soul stooped down, and, taking of! a heavy boot, flung it at
my head, as a reward for my eloquence on her behalf ; accompanying
the assault with a torrent of invective against my abilities as a counsel,
and my line of defence. The language in which her oration was couched
was perfectly shocking. The boot missed me, but hit a reporter on the
head, and to this fact I am disposed to attribute the unfavourable
light in which my search for the defence was placed in two or three of
the leading daily papers next morning."
Gilbert explained his failure at the Bar by the fact that he
was " a clumsy and inefficient speaker/' suffering from " an
unconquerable nervousness/' which prevented him from
doing justice to his clients. As a matter of fact, in the latter
years of his life he was a singularly felicitous speaker* During
part of these years of struggle Gilbert lived in a boarding-
house at Pimlico. Among his fellow-boarders was the father
GILBERT'S BEGINNING 7
of C. B. Fry, the famous cricketer, who remembered Gilbert
mainly for his propensity to practical joking. Mr. Percy
White, the novelist, tells us :
" Sometime in the late ' sixties/ before Lewis Fry (then engaged to
my sister) married her, he told me of an extraordinarily amusing fellow
named Gilbert, who was living in the same boarding-house somewhere
in South Belgravia, then known as Pimlico. Gilbert, I remember Fry
said, was in a Highland military regiment. He was also, like Fry, a
clerk in the Civil Service. I cannot remember the nature of the jokes
which Gilbert was reported to play at the expense of the denizens of
the now never to be localized boarding-house. But dramatically to
appear (after dinner) from the folds of the drawing-room curtains and
surprise the ladies, then stalking Hamlet-like across the room dis-
appearing in a tragic silence ' teeming with mystery/ was one of his
pranks. The whole thing is a dim memory. Still, I remember that
Fry was much impressed by his fellow-boarder's powers of really amus-
ing ' ragging/ as it would be called in these degenerate times. Fry
(who had a Civil Service pension) died on the Riviera at the age of
nearly eighty."
The Highland uniform is explained by the fact that after
his determination not to be a professional soldier, Gilbert
served for some years as an officer in the Militia Battalion
of the Gordon Highlanders, and wore the kilt. Dancing the
Highland reel was, by the way, one of his many accomplish-
ments.
Like many other briefless barristers, he turned to his pen
as a means of livelihood. Gilbert himself told the story of
his first literary effort :
" My very first plunge took place in 1857, I think, in connection
with the late Alfred Mellon' s Promenade Concerts. Madame Parepa-
Rosa (at that time Mddle. Parepa), whom I had known from babyhood,
had made a singular success at those concerts with the laughing
song from Manon Lescaut, and she asked me to do a translation of
the song for Alfred Mellon' s play-bill. I did it ; it was duly printed
in the bill. I remember that I went night after night to those con-
certs to enjoy the intense gratification of standing at the elbow of any
promenader who might be reading rny translation, and wondering to
myself what the promenader would say if he knew that the gifted
creature who had written the very words he was reading was at that
moment standing within, a yard of him. The secret satisfaction of
8 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
knowing that I possessed the power to thrill Mm with this information
was enough, and I preserved my incognito.
" The thing was a laughing song, and went like this :
"'An entertaining story,
A fiction amatory,
About a legal star,
Ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! ha !
A legal dignitary
Particularly wary,
A member of the bar,
Ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! '
"And so on. The French original ran thus :
"'Cest 1'histoire amour euse,
Autant que fabuleuse,
D'un aiicien fier-a-bras,
Ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! ha ! ha !
D'un tendre commissaire,
Que Ton disait severe,
Et qui ne 1'etait pas,
Ha ! ha ! ha ! ha 1 ha ! ha ! '
" You see the English is hi strict metrical form, yet exactly repro-
duces the rhythm of the French. I afterwards used the same words
in my * respectful perversion ' of Tennyson's Princess."
Three years afterwards he was a member of the staff of
Fun, and his first play was produced at Christmas, 1866.
On August 6, 1867, Gilbert married Miss Lucy Blois Turner,
the daughter of an Indian officer, at St. Mary Abbot's, Kensing-
ton. Gilbert and his wife had known each other for some
three years before they married. They first lived in a house
in Eldon Road, Kensington, and a little more than a year
afterwards Gilbert bought the lease of 8, Essex Villas, Kensing-
ton, where they remained for about eight years.
CHAPTER II
GILBERT AND FUN
IN the Theatre autobiography Gilbert says :
" In 1861 Fun was started under the editorship of Mr. H. J.
Byron. With much labour I turned out an article three-quarters
of a column long, and sent it to the editor, together with a half-page
drawing on wood. A day or two later the printer of the paper called
upon me with Mr. Byron's compliments, and staggered me with a
request to contribute a column of copy and a half-page drawing every
week for the term of my natural life. I hardly knew how to treat that
offer, for it seemed to me that into that short article I had poured all
I knew. I was empty. I had exhausted myself. I didn't know any
more. However, the printer encouraged me (with Mr. Byron* s com-
pliments) and I said I would try. I did try, and I found to my surprise
that there was a little left, and enough indeed to enable me to con-
tribute some hundreds of columns to the periodical throughout his
editorship, and that of his successor, poor Tom Hood ! "
Fun at its heyday may well have been the formidable
rival of Punch. Of its first editor, H. J. Byron, Gilbert spoke
warmly to his friend of later days, Rowland-Brown, main-
taining that he had been " paid, and paid well for every verse
he ever wrote." He preserved an accountable but uncritical
admiration for the Byron burlesques. Sometimes when he
and Rowland-Brown were alone together at night, he would
recite lengthy extracts to his friend from the reams of this
jingle. It may be that gratitude invested them with sparkle
to the disciple soon so far to surpass his master. Among the
group of writers working for Fun were Hood, Jeff Prouse,
Harry Leigh Brunton, Paul Gray, W, R. Rands, Tom Robert-
son, and Clement Scott. Gilbert's passing note of regret for
" poor Tom Hood " may be rightly held an inadequate index
9
io W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
to their connection. The following advertisement appeared
in Fun of July 26, 1867 :
" Now ready at the FUN Office, ' Robinson Crusoe or the Injun Bride
and the Injured Wife. A burlesque by H. J. Byron, W. S. Gilbert,
T. Hood, H. S. Leigh, Arthur Sketchley, and ' Nicholas/ performed at
the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on Saturday, July 5th. N.B. The
proceeds of the sale will be added to the fund for the benefit of the
widowed mother of the late Paul Gray."
There is no evidence that Gilbert was ever taught drawing,
but he was as frequent a contributor to Fun with his pencil
as with his pen. The question as to the exact date of the
first contribution is difficult to answer, for more reasons than
that he frequently wrote them anonymously without even
the "W.S.G." which for years preceded the more famous signa-
ture of " Bab." Gilbert certainly writes in the Theatre of
the founding of Fun in 1861 as if he had almost immediate
association with it. Yet the tl W.G." occasionally signing
pictures in the first volume was so different a draughtsman
to the "W.S.G." of 1863, to make it improbable they were
identical. Moreover, Gilbert was always tenacious of his
second initial. In the 1863 volume there are several con-
ventionally comic large woodcuts by Gilbert entirely unlike
the jaunty Bab Ballads thumb-nail illustrations. In one of
them there is the familiar gibe at faded or charmless woman-
hood, which reappeared in the operas and for which he was
so often attacked. A " gushing spinster " in a huge crinoline
inquires of a heavy swell at the Crystal Palace, " Oh, Mr.
Jones, don't you adore the antique ? " to be answered, " Oh
ah yes in marble/ 1 In " You were sober, of course ? "
the questioner is a typical common-law barrister of the days
when Gilbert fell in love with law and incongruously hailed
her away from her own dusty purlieus to fairyland. The
drawing, " And you ask me to convict upon such evidence
as this ? " is not lacking in cleverness. In another drawing
two girls are looking at a new bonnet. " Well, I don't think
GILBERT AND FUN n
much of it," says Clara. " They wear nothing else in Paris/'
retorts Edith. The headline is, " Then they ought to be
ashamed of themselves." "The Day after the Ball" and
the drawing in which "little Popper " shows Mrs. P. how Miss
Rose Leclerq played Manfred are neither very distinguished.
This purely imitative work vanished with the advent of the
Perverse Fairy. Judged by artistic tests, the " Bab " folk
may be all wrong. Judged by popular acclaim, they are, in
Gilbert's own words, " as right as right can be." A glance
at any of the countless efforts to copy them proves them
inimitable. The characters in the multitudinous tiny figures,
in those hundreds of heads drawn for the prose or verse of
Fun, not to speak of larger sketches in line, always have a
quaint fascination.
The low rate at which Gilbert appraised his early work is
obvious, for with the exception of the " Babs " and not
all of them nothing has been republished except a mere
handful of the short stories that he wrote in considerable
numbers. Yet to the true Gilbertian, nothing is quite negli-
gible. Fun is indeed the cradle of the operas, and by no
means through the " Babs " alone. The prose sketches are
sown with embryo ideas, often developed later with trium-
phant effect. The Gilbertian spirit tricksey, elusive, magical
speedily begins to haunt these columns. The Puck-like
imp of Topsy-Turvydom plays pranks foreshadowing those
of the libretti. Gilbert did all sorts of work for Fun.
Occasionally he wrote the parliamentary sketches, and once
he attempted political satire in would-be Byronic vein. Scorn
for Napoleon III was an obsession of Fun, and Gilbert was
apparently in hearty agreement with the editorial policy.
He read and loved Victor Hugo, and this literary enthusiasm
doubtless inspired his hatred for " Napoleon the Little."
Gilbert was manifestly in dead earnest when he wrote
The Lie of a Lifetime ; or, The Modern Augustus, and because
it was his only essay in politics, we reproduce part of it
here.
12 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
THE LIE OF A LIFETIME;
or,
Random Readings of Traitorous Traits, Past Passages And Present
Prospects
of
THE MODERN AUGUSTUS.
A Serious Serial in Several Sections.
SECTION THE FIRST,
His inauguration as President on the 2Oth December, 1848,
Silence ! silence everywhere ! a silence vast and deep,
Like the solemn, silent stillness of death's all-subduing sleep,
And the troops with anxious faces stood motionless and dumb ;
Hush'd briefly then (for ever soon) the French Assembly's hum*
*Twas in chill and dull December, and the swift on-coming gloom
Was an omen, then unheeded, of French freedom's hapless doom,
GILBERT AND FUN 13
Were there none among that body, like the Augur Priests of old,
Who could read the coming future and its murderous page unfold ?
None ! or if there were, they spoke not ! all were silent in that room,
And the lamps all feebly struggled with the swift on-coming gloom.
The President rises ; he speaks, words flow
From his lips in sentences solemn and slow ;
Sentences I aye, but no hearers could know
Their result would be terror, and bloodshed, and woe !
He announced the selection,
By ballot election,
Of Louis NAPOLEON, to be then and there
Installed, with due pomp, in the President's chair.
There was anxious confusion ; a passage was clear' d ;
The HOUR had arrived ! and the MAN soon appeared !
With Jewish nose, and narrow brow,
Small snaky eyes whose flashings show
(As molten lava gleams below
The dread abyss with lurid glow,
Before an Etna's mighty throe
Rains death around) the lengths he'd go
To gain an end : he reach' d the tribune, made his bow,
And though by nature subtle, slow,
His energy o'ercame his sloth
As solemnly, and nothing loath,
With LIPS ALONE he took THE OATH,
An oath to serve the nation : keep intact
The French Republic, as a glorious fact ;
The people's rights to reverence and defend,
Alike from foreign foe and traitor friend !
An oath, scarce made 'ere broken ; his next breath
To keep that oath had doom'd himself to death
(To have, 'ere axe his felon neck had press 7 d,
The Badge of Honour torn from off his breast).
A doom more sternly just, more richly earn'd,
Had never been, since ADAM'S sons have learn' d
To be ambitious false to rob and lie
To honour rogues and worship perjury.
He took the oath 1 nor yet with that content,
The innate vileness of the man found vent
In words uncalTd for words so smooth and pure
That e'en his foes fell victims to the lure,
And all believed (save one who had resign* d,
With the calm grandeur of a noble mind
I 4 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
And honest self-control, that mission high)
His bearing was too grand To CLOAK A LIE.
Deluded fools 1 he did but act a part,
Lied with his lips, and scom'd you in his heart.
But hear him i let him speak ! " The tribune's right
Is yours," MARRAST exclaim' d with air polite.
Then from those lips, so recently profaned,
Pour'd forth the protestations of unfeign'd
Attachment to the laws that then obtain 5 d ;
Respect for him, who previously in power
Had kept France glorious to that present hour.
He said his oath should ever guide his will ;
That, as a man of honour, he'd fulfil
His sacred duty would regard as foes
To France, himself, and Liberty, all those
Who strove to change, by lawless word or deed,
That which the great French People had decreed.
He paus'd ; he ceas'd, and then a vast grand shout,
" Long live the great Republic," loud rang out
A roar as when the wind-toss' d waters reach,
And spend their fury vainly on the beach.
So loud, so long the shout, none heard the cry
That burst from thy rent heart, oh Liberty !
(Yet three years thence, the echo shrill and clear
Of that wild wail chill' d ev'ry mortal ear,
'Mid anguish' d groans that marked " the night of fear ! ")
Guiltless of mortal passion's ebb and flow ;
Conscious of wounds, that laid their honour low,
The sullied lilies hung their heads of snow ;
While Gallia's guardian spirit saw with woe
Her once proud Eagle now a carrion crow I
The illustrations, also Gilbert's work, are rather savage cari-
catures. In one of them (see p. 15), referring to the Emperor's
marriage, a preposterous manikin in a toga blesses Napoleon
and Eugenie, an almost unrecognizable pair.
" Beauty and the Beast I jine
In this agreeable Valentine,"
That a second series of The Lie of a Lifetime was demanded
and supplied was assuredly due more to prevailing political
rancour than to literary merit. Never again did Gilbert repeat
the experiment of political satire, and to the end of his days
GILBERT AND FUN 15
he maintained an utter indifference to politics, which he
scarcely ever mentioned in conversation.
His pencil-marks in his own set of Fun show that he was
occasionally dramatic and art critic, before the few illustrated
notices signed " Bab " appeared. There is little acrimony,
and no venom in his criticisms. Praise for the plays of the
Robertson he loved is lavish. His notes of admiration for
many who, like Lady Bancroft and Sir John Hare, were destined
to fame, are full of discernment. Other players are treated
with considerable candour. In view of his later resentment
of what was often unfair and unappreciative criticism, his
own work as a critic has a double interest. Writing in May
1865, under the heading " From Our Stall/' Gilbert says :
" Miss Bateman has made her appearance in a third character,
Bianca, in DEAN MILMAN'S sparkling tragedy, Fazio. With every dis-
16 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
position to deal gently with a very charming young lady, it is impossible
to say that Miss Bateman's appearance in this lively little piece is at
all calculated to advance her professional reputation. It is really time
that the truth were spoken about this young lady ; she is not, and, as
far as we can form an opinion, never will be a great actress. She has
beauty, grace, and dignity and when you have said that you have
said aH Her calmer scenes are cold and unimpassioned, and her
ebullitions of jealousy or anger are simply, the demoniacal ravings of
a female fiend. Even the audience on Monday last began to see this,
for there was no symptom of a ' call ' before the end of the third
act,
" It is only fair to Miss Bateman to state that that dismal actor
Mr. Jordan was playing in the same piece, and it is impossible to say
how much his depressing presence may have told upon the animal
spirits of the audience. The excessively disagreeable part of Aldebella
was played with great care and judgment by Mrs. Billington. When
we say that the piece was put upon the stage as all Adelphi pieces are,
it will be understood that the audience saw more ' flies,' ' grooves,' dead
wall, dirty scenery, and unsatisfactory ' supers ' than they would at
any 'theatre in Whitechapel. We will qualify our condemnation.
Let the playgoer wait outside until the third act approaches its close,
and then let him enter the theatre and witness the scene between
Bianca and that unfortunate silent senator whom she collars, cries
over, and abuses. This gentleman's demeanour under those trying
circumstances is a thing to be remembered. Having seen this, the play-
goer cannot do better than turn into Evans's without delay, or the
curtain win rise on the fourth act.
" A pleasant little drama, by Mr. PALGRAVE SIMPSON, was produced
at the Prince of Wales's Theatre on Wednesday. A Pair Pretender
is based upon the story of the loves of Will Seymour and Lady Arabella
Stuart, and explains how one Susanna Spritt (Miss Marie Wilton)
connived at their escape from the fortress in which the unfortunate
lady was imprisoned. The jealousy excited in the bosom of a certain
soldier, one Gideon Gubbins, by Susanna's constant meetings with
Will Seymour, who, in the disguise of a pedlar and subsequently of a
soldier, is present in the fortress to assist his wife in effecting her escape,
is the exciting cause of the greater portion of the laughter which decided
the success of the piece.
" It is utterly impossible to speak too highly of Miss Marie Wilton's
performance in the part of Susanna. In every class of character under-
taken by this young lady, from Juliet to Pippo, and that a tolerably
extensive range, she is equally charming.
" By the bye, Mr. Leigh Murray is about to take a complimentary
benefit at Drury Lane, This admirable actor has for months past
been confined to his room, and we are sure that it is only necessary
to mention this fact to send crowds of sympathizers into the theatre
on that occasion,"
GILBERT AND FUN 17
Miss Marie Wilton was, of course, afterwards Lady Bancroft.
In 1879, Gilbert wrote a blank-verse version of the Faust
legend, which he evidently regarded as too grave a story for
burlesque, for, fifteen years before, he dealt trenchantly with
a travesty produced at the St. James's Theatre.
" Fancy tlie exquisite story of Faust and Marguerite, in which the
most profound thoughts that can engage the mind of men have been
so grandly interpreted by GOETHE, turned into a travesty for the St.
James's. The public will be quite prepared after this to see underlined
for immediate production, at the same theatre, a burlesque founded
on Paradise Lost. The old legend of Dr. FAUSTUS, who, when he
was quite old enough to know better, sold himself to a nameless
personage that he might have back his youth and go in for reckless
enjoyment of everything, is anybody's property, and has been often
cleverly presented in grotesque fashion before, but MARGUERITE is
too pure and delicate a creation to be reduced to a lodging-house
wench, and only thought good enough to suck sherry cobblers at
Cremorne.
" What had Mrs. CHARLES MATHEWS done that she should be dragged
down to the lowest level of burlesque after having gained deserved
honours in the highest range of comedy ? Why should Mr. CHARLES
MATHEWS be called upon to do penance for any possible transgression
by standing in flaming tights and crimson c fly ' before a respectable
audience as a travestied MEPHISTOPHELES ? Is a hideous skeleton
shaking its bony joints in mid-air a comic view of the end of mortal-
ity ? Is a grim embodiment of death in a crinoline hopping about the
boards in a bal masqut a funny realization of the German legend setting
forth the horrors of a Walpurgis night on the Hartz mountains ? There
is no occasion to pause for a reply.
" If audiences can be found to tolerate these representations out
of respect to those compelled to take part in them, the indignation
of society will find strong expression in other ways. The good taste
which should govern the extravagances of burlesque is here alto-
gether wanting, and the piece should be removed from the bills with
what haste the manager can make.'*
Here already there is a revolt against the fashionable bur-
lesques, which were eventually to be killed by the Savoy operas
to come to life again, alas, rechristened as " musical
comedies " and " revues," generally with no greater humour
or taste. Gilbert could not abide music-hall humour. In
1865, Fun published the following verses from his pen :
2
i8 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
MUSINGS IN A MUSIC-HALL.
BY A YOUNG MAN FROM THE COUNTRY.
When a man sticks his hat at the back of his head,
Tell me, Oh, Editor, why do they roar ?
And then, when he pushes it forward instead,
Why do they scream twice as loud as before ?
When an elderly gentleman rumples his hair,
Why do they all go delirious as well ?
When he uses a handkerchief out of repair,
Why do they, why do they, why do they yell ?
When a vulgar virago is singing her song,
Why must she offer herself as a wife ?
Why give applause about ten minutes long
When a baby of seven imperils its life ?
What does a singer intend to imply
- By "Whack fol the larity, larity, lay" ?
What can he hope to convey to me by
Singing " Rum tiddity, iddity 1 " eh ?
These Fun comments on the drama may be concluded
with an amusing letter on pantomimes published on Feb-
ruary 20, 1864.
ON PANTOMIMIC UNITIES.
To the Editor of Fun.
" From week to week I have entertained a hope that you would
scarify with your powerful pen (can a man scarify with a ppwerful
pen ? I am sure I don't know) a feature of pantomimic business,
which, to a man of my delicate theatrical susceptibilities, seems to
shriek aloud for reform. I allude to the preposterous disregard of
the unities of time and place which appears to obtain in every panto-
mime anybody ever saw. But the pantomime season is drawing to
a close ; circumstances, over which harlequin has no control, have
dimmed the lustre of his spangles ; columbine dances as if she were
paid for it ; clown and pantaloon are beginning to hate the sight of
each other ; and yet the scarifying article has not appeared. So I
have set myself the task of penning this letter to you in order that
editorial attention may be directed to the matters of which I complain.
I say ' editorial attention ' because, in point of fact, you editors are the
people who educate the public taste. The members of the public are
possessed of no critical power whatever. They take what is given
them, but suspend their judgment until they have read that of the
morning papers, and then they speak. As for the managers, they are
GILBERT AND FUN 19
but a medium of introducing the author to the public a species of
theatrical conduit-pipe, too often, alas ! stopped up.
"Sir I am a conscientious theatre-goer, and one who respects a
pantomime rather on account of its indissoluble connection with the
names of RICH, GRIMALDI, and EDMUND KEAN, than because I derive
any pleasure whatever from the performance itself. And the reason
of this is, because the whole comic business, from the transformation
scene (which becomes every year more like a five-shilling valentine)
to ' ALBERT and ALEXANDRA, and May They be Happy ! ' in a red-fire
vapour bath, requires reform.
/ s
1 ' The abuse begins at the beginning. Without the slightest reference
to the time or venue of the introduction, the four pantomime characters
are in all pantomimes respectively dressed in the selfsame costume.
Now this is not as it should be. To preserve some little unity between
the ' introduction ' and the comic business, the costume of the panto-
mime characters, while it sufficiently resembled that they now wear
for purposes of identification, should be modified to suit the require-
ments of the age in which the ' introduction ' is supposed to have
taken place.
" Thus : If the pantomime is founded on the affecting story of
' CORIOLANUS,' CORIOLANUS (who would, of course, be changed into
harlequin) should, in the comic scenes, wear a kind of patchwork toga,
which would sufficiently show that he was a noble Roman, and that
he is a harlequin. In the same way the costume of VIRGILIA (Ms
wife) as columbine, and that of TULLUS AUFIDUS as clown, might be
so modified as to suggest the Roman bride, as well as the columbine,
in the one case, and the Volscian monarch, as well as the clown, in the
other. Of course, the scenes of the comic business should be Roman,
if the introduction is Roman. Great fun might be got out of such
20 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
a scene as the Gulf in the Forum with clown (as MARCUS CURTIUS)
on a hobby-horse, about to leap into the chasm, but contriving, at the
last moment, to pitch pantaloon (who, I am afraid, would, of neces-
sity, be VOLUMNIA, COKIOLANUS'S mother) into it instead.
" Is clown mortal or immortal ? He appears to possess the privilege
of doing whatever he likes to the constituted authorities without fear
of any unpleasant consequences. This is the way in which he usually
treats policemen prior to knocking their heads off, which is murder ;
but nobody ever heard of a clown being hung or even condemned to
death. Also, he possesses (in conjunction with CORIOLANXJS) the
privilege of leaping through brick walls. These attributes would seem
to argue immortality, yet if he puts the hot end of a poker into his
pocket, it burns him. How can you reconcile these discrepancies ?
" Again Is transformation to harlequin a punishment or a reward ?
Of course, I know it is nominally a reward of constancy, but, in point
of fact, a more fearful punishment it would be hard to conceive. From
a # a y young prince, the popular 'sad dog ' of the introduction, he is
changed into a dumb, spangled, fishy thing, calculated to excite no feeling
other than the profoundest contempt. Is he mortal or not ? He may be
cut into pieces and yet be re-united, and apparently be none the worse
for the operation. He may be rammed into a cannon and blown
from it with impunity. But, on the other hand, he is compelled to
seek the ordinary domestic couch at night ; he is in the habit of taking
furnished apartments ; and it is but too evident that he perspires
freely. On the whole, I am disposed to think he must be the Wan-
dering Jew.
" Again What relation does pantaloon bear to clown ? Of course,
I know that, in the original Italian comedy, pantaloon was clown's
master, but in modern pantomime these relations appear to be reversed*
He is now the humble imitator of his more ingenious friend's eccentrici-
ties. He suffers fearful indignities at the hands of clown. When he
GILBERT AND FUN 21
falls he is picked up by clown in the manner shown in the margin. It
is difficult to imagine anything more utterly humiliating than the
being picked up in this manner. He is buffeted, insulted, and bullied
in an insupportable manner, and yet pantaloon and clown are always
together. Are these two bound together by any mysterious tie,
and if by any, by what ? and if not, why not, and how otherwise ?
" Why is the confiding shopman's business invariably transacted
on the pavement ? We don't find Mr. GRAVES, of Pall Mall, striking
bargains with customers outside his shop-door, or engaging party-
coloured shopmen on the mere strength of their own uncorroborated
recommendations .
" One word from you might set this all right."
For some years Gilbert contributed to Fun a number of
paragraphs with large initial letters. Not only because his
first contributions to Fun are likely to be among them do
they arrest the attention, but because they reveal Gilbert
in the guise of Don Quixote. The then less stringent law
of libel made all things possible to one naturally audacious.
When a girl employed by a fashionable milliner died of
starvation and over- work, Gilbert attacked her " murderer "
with burning words of indignation. Case after case did he
castigate. He would describe a scene in court, flagellate
legal delinquents byname, and conclude : " For our own part,
we give the rowdy portion of the Bar warning. Whenever a
case of this kind occurs, we shall present the public with a
full-length portrait of the offending barrister." Nor was
this a vain threat ; at least one merciless instance is extant.
If Gilbert used his tongue as a sword when upon the Bench
in the zenith of his success, he wielded his pen with equal
fearlessness from the first.
The " Comic Physiognomist " began his long, merry course
in Fun on November 7, 1863. The following extracts give
an indication of its character.
" The nose is (or should be) the most prominent feature of the face.
Its local relation to the other facial organs is so generally known that
it is only necessary to state that it springs from the valley below the
brow of the ' man-mountain,' that it pursues an undulating and irregu-
lar course for some two or three inches, and that it finally discharges
22 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
itself into the pocket-handkerchief. As many rivers owe their exist-
ence to the dissolved snow with which their native hills are covered,
it may be as well to state that the human nose is in no way indebted
for its origin to the melting eyes from between which it often rises.
It is furnished with two nostrils and a bridge. The latter is much used
by the eyes when they run over to pay each other a friendly visit.
It is easily amused ' tickled with a straw ' and is sometimes called
the neighs-all organ for obvious reasons. It is an effective wind instru-
ment, its most popular performance being ' Suoni la tvomba intrepida 1 '
preceded by a running arrangement of the ' Light Catarrh.' ''
OF THE VARIOUS ORDERS OF NOSES.
" Goodness knows ! "- Popular Ejaculation.
"Innumerable orders of architecture are employed in the con-
formation of the human nose. The Grecian is, of course, the order
to which most attention is paid, although it is an order which is very
rarely given. Among those most frequently occurring we find ;
"No. i. THE NOSE ARROGANT. This is ac-
curately depicted in the accompanying sketch.
It is the property of the peer of the fashion-
able novel and the wealthy cotton -broker of real
life. It is often found in Parliament: is accus-
tomed to receive deputations and to express
itself, on those occasions, in general terms with-
out committing itself to anything. Although
distantly affable to bodies aggregate, it is
haughtily insolent to individuals.
"No. 2. THE NOSE TANTALIZING. Com-
monly found under demure, round hats at the
seaside, and dancing with the best set of men at
evening parties. It can be saucy without being
fast, epigrammatic without being personal. It
possesses a keen sense of the ridiculous, and is
usually found between a pair of big brown
eyes.
"No. 3, -THE NOSE CONTRADICTORY. This
is a variety which is extremely common among
people of the churchwarden stamp. It is also
found (in a subdued form) at bar messes, and
under the wigs at the C.C.C, It is a subject
which most of us have often been tempted to
touch, as it presents plenty to catch hold of.
Want of space, however, and a relentless editor,
compel us to pass on.
GILBERT AND FUN
" No. 4. THE NOSE DEFIANT. This is a nose
from life. It is the property of our landlady,
and we are sorry to say that she always brings
it in with her when she comes for the weekly
rent. It is too horrible a subject to dwell upon,
so we will not apologize for quitting it rather
abruptly. We told her last week, that if she
didn't take care we would put her in Fun, and
now we've done it, and we don't care.
"No. 5. THE NOSE DISCONTENTED, Common
among middle-aged bachelors of a punctilious
turn of mind. Has rows with club-waiters,
box-keepers at theatres, and all railway porters.
Gets into a cab and orders the driver to take
him as far towards Charing Cross as he can for
a shilling. Is devotedly attached to little
children, and never thinks of swearing at them."
The "C.P." obviously became an im-
mediate favourite, for when a second series
succeeded in May, 1864, it was heralded by a large illus-
tration in the best " Bab " manner. " The Men we Meet "
of 1867, though the sketches are signed " Bab/' are still
announced as by the " C.P." These are nearly all most
amusing, with witty text and humorous drawings. In "The
C.P. in Love," Gilbert came nearest to drawing a pretty girl,
and his justification " HoinononVir " is essentially Gilbertian.
In " The C.P. at a Levee/' a solitary quotation from Dickens
should be noted for rarity, for Gilbert scarcely ever cited the
work of others either in his own or in his letters.
' ' To quote Mr. Dick Swiveller, ' Under such a combination of
staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent.'
" The C.P. did not go to court to kotoo to Princes, although the
kotooing to Princes happened to be one of the incidents of his pro-
gress through St. James's Palace. He went to court in order to set
at rhest rest, that is confound those ' h's ' a question which for
many years had sore perplexed him that is to say, ' Why do people
go to Levees ? ' They cannot all go to see why people go, as the
philosopher did. Of course, he is well aware that there are some
people whose position in society demands that they should show them-
selves at these singular gatherings once a year, or so, but these form but
a small portion of those who attend. They go as a duty, and as a very
tiresome duty, and very bored they all look. What the C.P. wanted
24 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
to know is what Ensign Parker, of the Barbadoes Militia, Cornet Tomp-
kins, of the Afghanistan Irregulars, Brown, the big brewer, Green, the
great grocer, can possibly want over and over again at St. James's ?
The C.P. is bound to admit that his doubts upon these points were
not satisfactorily set at rest. Neither did two collateral questions,
not bearing directly upon Levees, but growing out of them, meet with
satisfactory solutions. What do people want in Yeomanry Regiments ?
And why join the Hon. Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms ? The C.P. does
not refer to the Gentlemen-at-Arms under the new organization, but
to the corps as it was three or four years since. ' Wilkins determining
to be a Gentleman-at-Arms ' is a sketch which the C.P. regrets he has
not space for in this chapter.
" The C.P. has invariably noticed that, with all their faults, Scotch
gentlemen are more accessible to strangers than any other inhabitants
of the British Isles ; so he took the gallant Highlander on his left
into his confidence, and requested him to pilot the philosopher through
the gilded salon that leads to the Throne Room a duty which the
Highland gentleman discharged with so much twangy urbanity, that
the C.P. will say nothing ill-natured about him except that he can-
not possibly imagine what that gentleman could see in a Levee to
induce him to come up all the way from Edinburgh to attend it."
The Bab Battads were not indexed in Fun under the name
they immortalized until 1869, long after the majority had
sparkled in its columns. Not only did Gilbert include a
large number of lyrics from the operas in the collection he
selected personally in 1897, but also a sprinkling of the more
serious verses often published anonymously ia Fun, It
seems, therefore, as if he at least thought the odd familiar
name appropriate to all he wrote in rhyme. In the green-
covered first edition issued by Hotten, Gilbert excuses publica-
tion in book-form with his invariable modesty, on the ground
that " the verses sub-titled ' much sound and little sense '
seem to have won a sort of whimsical popularity/' They are
not, as a rule, he confesses, founded on fact. " I have ventured
to publish the little pictures with them, because while they
are certainly quite as bad as the ballads, I suppose they are
not much worse." The pictures are beyond criticism. They
defy it. Gilbert perpetrated an artistic crime in condemning
probably twenty innocent Bobs to be buried alive, pictures
and all*
GILBERT AND FUN 25
He once told Rowland-Brown how he arrived as his marvel-
lous names, insisting that " they came naturally to the rhythm
of the verse, and that the pictures were never begun before
the ballad was in form." For more than one reason it is
interesting to quote in full the short preface, dated from 24,
The Boltons, Kensington, in 1876:
" The Bab Ballads appeared originally in the columns of Fun when
that periodical was under the editorship of the late Tom Hood. . . .
The period during which they were written extended over some three
or four years ; many, however, were composed hastily, and under the
discomforting necessity of having to turn out a quantity of lively
verse on a certain day in each week. As it seemed to me (and to
others) that the volumes were disfigured by these hastily written im-
postors, I thought it better to withdraw from both volumes such
ballads as seemed to show evidence of carelessness or undue haste. . . .
" It may interest some to know that the first of the series, ' The
Yarn of the Nancy Bell/ was originally offered to Punch, to which I
was at that time an occasional contributor. It was, however, declined
by the then Editor on the ground that it was ' too cannibalistic for
his readers' taste.' "
The Fifty Bab Ballads of 1876 possibly include the best
of them. They came, were seen, and conquered. Of Gilbert
in this his own province it can be said : " There is no one beside
him and no one above him/' The Babs bore fruit the
radiant operas as compact of the art which conceals art.
They are impervious to literary freaks of fashions, safe-
guarded by " the fairy shield " of genius. The marvel they
could be written to order regularly, it might be said mechani-
cally, leaves critics in blank wonder. 1867 may be called
the apogee of the ballads, for a sequence of the best quoted
succeed each other with freshness and vitality, an absolute
originality making them unique. Gilbert's love of the sea
is evident in a number of the best ballads, and Captain Reece
and the other sea ballads have always been favourites with
sailors. In this connection a correspondent of the Strand
Magazine has drawn attention to a " lost " ballad which we
have been unable to trace. He says :
26 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
" It was published, I think, about the same time, or shortly after,
Captain Reece, and, much to the regret of many sailors, it did not
appear again in any of the later editions of the ballads. I do not
remember the title of it. It was a sailor's ballad, and began thus :
" ' To sail the seas is my delight,
To bend a bowline on a bight,
To fish the Crojic yard and haul
On topsail lifts true bliss I call.'
" It ends with :
" ' Hurrah ! till cruel fate forbids,
I'll live midst marlinspikes and fids,
And dissipate all thoughts of gloom
With bobstays and a stuns' 1 boom.
If life with sorrow crowns my cup,
I'll send the mizzen topsail up,
And with a cheer the chafing gear
I'll calmly bid to disappear.'
" This was quite as much a favourite with sailors in my young days
as the Mystic Selvagee, which has survived," writes this correspondent.
" And any verses of the old one which I have been able to repeat to
sailors have always given them much pleasure and amusement/ 1
If the Nancy Bell was the first Bab to be written, Captain
Reece takes pride of place in the first edition.
Gilbert was, as has been said, married in 1867, and one of
his few lapses of memory would seem to have been made
when he told Rowland-Brown that " Prince II Baleine was
done on my way to Folkestone on my honeymoon/' The
" Prince/' however, figures in Fun in 1869, an( l is scarcely
likely to have been held over for two years. It embodies a
favourite Gilbertian theme, and is not included in either of
the volumes. It is printed with others of the lost Babs
in the Appendix.
In May, 1864, Gilbert published a Derby poem, which is
interesting because the chorus is an anticipation of the rhyming
of the " Greenery Yallery, Grosvenor Gallery " song of Patience :
"Trudging along, two dozen strong,
Wearily, drearily, riff-raff,
Swells at them stare, singing the air
Of Saturday's opera, ' Piff-paff '
GILBERT AND FUN
Handful of coin all of them join
Rambling, scrambling, pick up ;
Rowing for more, won't have ' encore,'
Frightening, tightening, stick up'
Posturers two come into view,
Rummer set, summerset throwing ;
Over they turn (don't try and learn),
All that they get for it owing.
f Palery alery, smokery, jokery, rambling,
Scrambling, crash along, dash along
Down to the Derby," etc.
The Three Bohemian Ones is the best of the lost Babs.
IE an embarrassment of riches we may dispense with Sir
Galahad the Goluptious, which came dangerously near to being
a complete failure. But how could Gilbert have had the
cruelty to reject The Three Bohemian Ones ? They are essen-
tially men whom to know is to love, and they are drawn
just as we know they are. We appreciate them as we appre-
ciate Belial Blake or Ferdinando, or " the strange young sorter
28 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
with expressive purple eyes/' Later editions should restore
them to their admirers, and make a thousand new ones.
To quote the sub-title of Utopia and sub-titles are a
Gilbertian weakness the Bab Ballads are " Flowers of Pro-
gress." They heralded the approach of Gilbert the genius
with a flourish of their jolly trumpets. The man in the street
and the man in the study both listened and rejoiced.
In 1898 the Bab Ballads were published in a volume with
a large number of lyrics taken from the Savoy operas, which
had before been issued as " Songs of a Savoyard." The 1898
volume contains a hundred and seventy-five different poems.
Gilbert says in his preface :
" I have always felt that many of the original illustrations to the
Bab Ballads err gravely in the direction of unnecessary extravagance.
This defect I have endeavoured to correct through the medium of the
two hundred new drawings which I have designed for this volume.
I am afraid I cannot claim for them any other recommendation."
The new illustrations were all drawn on a table that still stands
in the window of the billiard-room at Grim/s Dyke. Excel-
lently humorous as most of thetn are, they are on the whole
inferior in quaintness to the original " Bab " illustrations of Fun.
The Bab Ballads have an established position in English
literature. They stand by themselves. There is nothing to
which they can be compared. They are ingenious, musical,
humorous. They show amazing aptitude for finding the right
word. They are Gilbert, and when Gilbert was himself, he was
like no other writer who ever put pen to paper. The Bab
Ballads evidence an apparently inexhaustible invention. To
every subject Gilbert brings some amazing topsy-turvy idea :
" It also was a Jew
Who drove a Putney bus,
For flesh of swine, however fine,
He did not care a cuss."
" The common sin of babyhood objecting to be dressed
If you leave it to accumulate at compound interest,
For anything you know, may represent, if you're alive,
A burglary or murder at the age of thirty-five."
GILBERT AND FUN
29
An interesting question is why the Bab Ballads maintain
a perennial freshness, while humorous poems of the same
period, some of them written by able hands, have become
neglected and almost forgotten. The answer is that the Bab
Ballads are original. Gilbert could, and often did, write
extremely good parodies. To quote one example, when the
chivalrous Ferdinando is dispatched by his lady-love Elvira to
discover the author of " those lovely cracker mottoes," before
she would accept his hand and heart, he naturally approached
the most popular poets of his day before he undertook arduous
journeys to " Patagonia, China, and Norway/' Of his treat-
ment by eminent poets Ferdinando reports :
" Henry Wadsworth only smiled and said he had not had the honour,
And Alfred too disclaimed the words which told so much upon her."
Ferdinando flourished in the days of Martin Tupper, whose
Proverbial Philosophy, it may be remembered, was highly
praised by Queen Victoria and her Consort. When Ferdinando
called on his Elvira, they " talked of love and Tupper/' Natur-
ally, therefore, inquiry was made of Martin Tupper as to
whether he was the author of the cracker mottoes.
" Mr. Martin Tupper sent the following reply to me :
" ' A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit.'
Which I think must have been clever, for I didn't understand it."
This parody is really delicious and apposite. There is
another reference to Tupper in Sir Barnaby Bampton Boo :
" Now Nelly's the prettier, p'raps, of my gals,
But, oh ! she's a wayward chit ;
She dresses herself in her showy fal-lals,
And doesn't read Tupper a bit !
O Tupper, philosopher true,
How do you happen to do ?
A publisher looks with respect on your books,
For they do sell, philosopher true ! "
Generally, however, Gilbert preferred using his creative
faculty for origination rather than for humorous imitation a
wise course, when one remembers that all the world knows
the Bab Ballads, while such a book as Bon Gaultier Ballads,
30 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
written by Aytoun, the author of Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,
and Theodore Martin, which rapidly went through fourteen
editions and was illustrated by Leech and Doyle, is now
entirely forgotten. The parodists parodied writers who are
themselves no longer read, and died with them. The author
of the Bab Ballads exploited his own personality, and is among
the immortals. Another best seller of the seventies was
Cholmondeley Pennell's Puck on Pegasus, which contained a
series of illustrations by Millais, Leech, Tenniel, Doyle, Phiz,
and Noel Paton. The parodies are stilted and ineffective,
not to be compared with the work of more modern writers,
and are now properly forgotten. But even the sound intrinsic
literary merit of Calverley has not saved him from partial
eclipse, and, with all his merits, many of the Fly-leaves are
withered. The mellifluous parodies of Jean Ingelow are
damp squibs in a generation that reads Jean no longer. The
sheer cleverness of The Cock and the Bull seems rather sense-
less caricature in an age that has learned to appreciate Brown-
ing without exaggerated enthusiasm. The fact is that parody
is necessarily ephemeral. At its best it reflects the critical
mood of a day. It is interesting in this connection to recall
that Gilbert disliked both Browning and Meredith, and that
he parodied neither. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll are in
Gilbert's jocund company, but the writings of neither has the
claim of the Bab Ballads to literary immortality. The Old
Lady of Smyrna and the incomparable Jabberwock himself
do not possess the qualities of Captain Reece and the Bumboat
Woman, and the lover of Annie Protheroe, for Gilbert's crea-
tions were the first figures outlined for future genre pictures
the Savoy operas full of movement and warm with
colour. It would be difficult to exaggerate one's gratitude
to Lear and Lewis Carroll, but their achievements are minia-
ture compared with those of the English Aristophanes,
It would be absurd to endeavour to decide which is the
best of the Bab Ballads. If the test be the greatest number
of well-worn quotations, the laurel would probably fall to
GILBERT AND FUN 31
Etiquette, which, was first published in the Graphic. Who
does not know the lines :
" Down went the owners greedy men whom hope of gain allured.
O, dry the starting tear, for they were heavily insured 1
" The oysters at Ms feet impatiently he shoved,
For turtle and his mother were the only things he loved.
" He longed to lay him down upon the shelly bed and stuff :
He had often eaten oysters, but had never had enough."
Ellen M' Jones Aberdeen is an example of Gilbert's extra-
ordinary aptitude in nomenclature. His explanation that
irresistibly comic names always came with the metre, does
not explain the variety. Balzac, it will be remembered,
tramped miles before he saw the name Z. Marcas over a mean
shop, and was transfixed by its suitability for his special
purpose. Dickens's inspiration in nomenclature often failed
him, as witness his Hawkes and Verisophts and Mutanheds,
and Forster tells how laborious a business was the baptism of
Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield. Gilbert had no
such difficulty. The names " just came/' and when they
had come, he used them with masterly skill. Few versifiers
would find Macpherson Clonglocketty Angus M'Clan, the
patronymic of the bagpipe-player who produced an air from
his instrument, a convenient opening for a quatrain ; but
Gilbert contrived it. Patterson Corbay Torbay is the very
ideal name for the kilted Sassenach who " could not assume
an affection for pipes."
" One morning the fidgetty Sassenach swore
He'd stand it no longer he drew his claymore,
And (this was, I think, extremely bad taste),
Divided Clonglocketty close to the waist."
If the best Bab Ballad is the best illustrated, many will be
inclined to quote Gentle Alice Brown, as seen in the Fifty
before her coiffure was modernized. Her lover, a " young
sorter/' in his Elizabethan garb, is in all respects worthy of
32 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
her. She dons an even larger chignon when making her
terrible confession to a rather Protestant-looking Father Paul :
" A pleasant-looking gentleman, with pretty purple eyes,
I've noticed at my window, as I've sat a-catching flies ;
He passes by it every day as certain as can be
I blush to say I've winked at him, and he has winked at me ! "
Lest the reader should be shocked, the last avowal was origin-
ally printed in tiny type. If sheer originality be accepted
as the hall-mark of supremacy, then Prince Agib is possibly
the foremost achievement of the Bab Ballads. Its metre is
captivating, and its particular charm is the unsolved mystery
of the plot. In this poem the unmusical Gilbert makes happy
use of a musical term, jokingly mixed up with medical jargon :
" They played him a sonata let me see I
' Medulla oblowgata ' key of G.
Then they began to sing
That extremely lovely thing,
' Sch&vzando 1 ma non troppo> ppp" "
The deft use of the most unexpected words is carried to its
apogee in the third verse :
" Strike the concertina's melancholy string !
Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything I
Let the piano's martial blast
Rouse the echoes of the past,
For of Agib, Prince of Tartary, I sing !
" Of Agib, who, amid Tartaric scenes,
Wrote a lot of ballet music in his teens :
His gentle spirit rolls
In the melody of souls
Which is pretty, but I don't know what it means.
" Of Agib, who could readily, at sight,
Strum a march upon the loud Theodolite.
He would diligently play
On the Zoetrope all day,
And blow the gay Pantechnicon all night."
Eleven of the fifty Bab Ballads are concerned with Church-
men or Church matters that is, if Father Paul, the confessor
of Gentle Alice Brown, be included.
GILBERT AND FUN 33
The others are : The Rival Curates, Sir Maoklin, The Phan-
tom Curate, The Fairy Curate, The Bishop of Rum-Ti-Foo,
The Bishop of Rum-Ti-Foo Again, The Reverend Simon Magus,
Lost Mr. Blake, The Bishop and the 'Busman, and The Reverend
Micah Sowls. We have suggested that Gilbert showed that
he shared his father's dislike of what used to be called " ritual-
ism " in Lost Mr. Blake, who, it may be remembered, " mocked
at dalmatics/' But lest it should be thought that he was
numbered with the persecutors of the Anglo-Catholics, it
should be remembered that he added :
" He used to say that he would no more think of interfering with
his priest's robes than with his church or Ms steeple,"
The rejected Bobs include more than one dealing with the
question of Sunday observance, and it need hardly be said
that Gilbert had no sort of sympathy with the harsh dictates
of Victorian Sabbatarianism. Nine of the fifty Bab Ballads
deal with the Navy. All without exception rank high. They
are : Captain Reece, The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, The Bum-
boat Woman's Story, The Captain and the Mermaid, The Mar-
tinet, The King of Canoodle-Dum, The Sailor Boy to his Lass,
Etiquette, and The Mystic Selvagee. In this last Gilbert used
his considerable nautical knowledge with amusing ingenuity :
" Upon your spars I see you've clapped
Peak-halliard blocks, all iron-capped ;
I would not christen that a crime,
But 'twas not done in Rodney's time.
It looks half-witted !
Upon your maintop-stay, I see,
You always clap a selvagee ;
Your stays, I see, are equalized
No vessel, such as Rodney prized,
Would be thus fitted.
" And Rodney, honoured sir, would grin
To see you turning deadeyes in,
Not up, as in the ancient way,
But downwards, like a cutter's stay**
You didn't oughter |
34 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
Besides, in seizing shrouds on board,
Breast backstays you have quite ignored ;
Great Rodney kept unto the last
Breast backstays on topgallant mast
They make it taughter."
Despite Gilbert's military ambition and service, the mili-
tary Bobs are fewer than the naval. The two best are Thomas
Winterbottom Hance, with whom " no swordsman ever could
compare/' and the irresistible Hongree and Mahry, a humorous
travesty of transpontine melodrama, which begins :
" The sun was setting in its wonted west,
When Hongree, Sub-Lieutenant of Chassoores,
Met Mahry Daubigny, the Village Rose,
Under the Wizard's Oak old trysting-place
Of those who loved in rosy Aquitaine.
" They thought themselves unwatched, but they were not,
For Hongree, Sub-Lieutenant of Chassoores,
Found in Lieutenant-Colonel Jooles Dubosc
A rival, envious and unscrupulous,
Who thought it not foul scorn to dog his steps,
And listen, unperceived, to all that passed
Between the simple little Village Rose
And Hongree, Sub-Lieutenant of Chassoores."
The best of the legal Babs is unquestionably Baines Carew,
Gentleman, the genial attorney :
" Whene'er he heard a tale of woe
From client A or client B,
His grief would overcome him so,
He'd scarce have strength to take his fee."
To a Little Maid and The Troubadour are concerned with
female prisoners, and in the second there is an inimitable
comic warder. Emily, John, James, and I tells a tale of
condign punishment for crossing the course on Derby Day. It
is a most musical Bab.
The stage Babs are Only a Dancing Girl, with its pretty
touch of genuine feeling, At the Pantomime, and The Pantomime
Super to His Mask, a rather grim poem. The Haughty Actor
is perhaps more legal than theatrical, but in it Gilbert expresses
GILBERT AND FUN 35
his contempt for the egregious vanity that is often the cha-
racteristic of lesser players.
Anything like a detailed analysis of the Bab Ballads would
be merely ridiculous, and they may be left with the conclu-
sion that, with all their other qualities, they are English in
idea and construction, untranslated into any other tongue,
and absolutely untranslatable.
CHAPTER III
GILBERT'S PROSE
IN addition to his contributions to Fun, Gilbert, at the
beginning of his literary career, contributed articles and
stories to the Cornhill, London Society, Tinsley's Magazine,
and Temple Bar. He also acted for some time as the London
correspondent of a Russian newspaper called the Invalide
Russe, and wrote dramatic criticisms for the Illustrated Times.
The collection of what he himself regarded as his best
short stories was published in volume form in 1869, an d reissued
a few months before his death. It contains nineteen stories
and sketches, and the volume is called Foggerty's Fairy, from
the first story in the collection. In the preface Gilbert says
that none of the tales except Comedy and Tragedy was written
with the idea of subsequent dramatization ; but three others,
Foggerty's Fairy itself, Creatures of Impulse, and The Wicked
World, were afterwards turned into plays, and the Elixir of
Love is the basis of the plot of The Sorcerer.
There is a very evident Dickens influence in Gilbert's short
stories, and Gilbert, as a short story writer, has the same
affection for fairies and humorous supernaturalism as he has
in his verse and his libretti. Foggerty's Fairy is an excellent
story, which possibly may have supplied Mr. Hackettwith the
germ of the idea which he developed so cleverly in Ms farce,
Ambrose Afiplejohn's Adventure. Foggerty was a confectioner
in the Borough Road, and a fairy off the top of a twelfth
cake told him that he had only to eat one of the cake's orna-
ments to obliterate any deed from his. past life and to become
GILBERT'S PROSE 37
somebody entirely different. He took the fairy at her word,
and at once found himself the captain of a pirate ship, to
change again, in circumstances of great peril, into a wealthy
and unscrupulous financier. When the financier was in the
dock (the familiar end of so many financial careers), again
the twelfth-cake ornament came to Foggerty's assistance, and
he returned to the place from whence he came and was once
more Foggerty of the Borough Road.
An Elixir of Love is another fantastic and amusing story.
Johnnie Pounce is sentimental, and might well have been
written by Dickens himself. In it there is something of the
Dickens faculty for vivid description in a phrase. For example :
" Then there was Joe Round, Mrs. Joe Round, and Miss Joe Round,
and Miss Joe Round's young man, in a pink fluffy face and blue stock
with gold flies. Joe Round was deputy usher in the Central Criminal
Court. He was a big full- voiced man with a red face, black curly hair,
and a self-assertive manner. He had a way with him which seemed
to say : * I am Joe Round. Take me as you find me or let me go, but
don't find fault.' Mrs. Joe Round was a beautiful specimen of faded
gentility. She was an Old Bailey attorney's daughter, and a taste for
exciting trials had led her in early youth to the C.C.C., where she saw
Joe Round, fell in love with his big voice, and married him."
The volume of stories contains a sketch which Gilbert calls
Actors, Authors, and Audiences, in which he supposes that
the author of an unsuccessful play is tried by a jury of the
audience. He is charged with "having written and caused
to be produced an original stage play which has not come
up to the expectations of the audience/' and in the evidence
Gilbert, with rather bitter wit, summarizes the points of
view of managers and actors points of view that probably
remain much the same to-day as they were sixty years ago.
Cross-examined by tfie author, the manager says :
" I did not read your play before accepting it, because I do not
profess to be a judge of a play in manuscript. I accepted it because
a French play on which I had counted proved a failure. I ha4 nothing
ready to put in its place. I was at my wits* end. I have been there
before. I soon get there. I have had no special training for the posi-
tion of manager. I am not aware that any special training is requisite.
38 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
It is a very easy profession to master. If you make a success, you
pocket the profits ; if you fail, you close your theatre abruptly, and a
benefit performance is organized on your behalf. Then you begin
again."
Here is an extract from the evidence of the leading lady :
" I regard your play as highly creditable to you in a literary sense,
but it is wholly undramatic. It is undoubtedly a thoughtful composi-
tion. In point of fact, it is too thoughtful. It is a fact that the stage-
manager suppressed several small characters. It is true that two
minor parts were fused with mine to make it worthy of my reputation.
I did not charge extra for rolling the three parts into one. I did it
entirely in the author's interest. I do not remember your objecting
to the mutilation of your play. It is not a circumstance that would
be likely to dwell in my mind. I have never been hissed in my life.
The parts I have played have frequently been hissed. No one has ever
hissed me."
The low comedian says :
" I did my best with the part. I bought a remarkably clever
mechanical wig (laughter) for it (laughter) but it was useless.
(Roars of laughter.) In my zeal in behalf of the Prisoner I introduced
much practical ' business ' into the part that was not set down for
me. (Laughter.) I did not charge extra for introducing practical
business ; I introduced it solely in the Prisoner's interest. No doubt
the Prisoner remonstrated, but I knew what an audience likes much
better than he does. (Laughter.) The part was soundly hissed
even the introduced scene with the guinea-pig and the hair-oil." (Roars
of laughter.)
The singing chambermaid is also called :
" The part I played was that of a simple-minded young governess
in a country rectory, who is secretly in love with the Home Secretary.
I did not see why such a character should not sing and dance in the
intervals between her pathetic scenes. She might be supposed to
do so in order to cheer her spirits. I do not consider ' Father's pants
will soon fit brother ' an inappropriate song for such a character.
There is nothing immoral in it. I see no reason why a broken-hearted
governess should not endeavour to raise her spirits by dancing an
occasional ' breakdown.' I would not dance one in every scene, because
that would not be true to nature. I see no objection to her dancing
one now and then. A governess would probably have to teach her
pupils to dance, and she would naturally practise occasionally to keep
her hand in. No, I do not mean her foot I mean what I say, her hand,
I wore short petticoats because the audience expected it of me. I see
GILBERT'S PROSE 39
no reason why a governess in a country vicarage should not wear short
petticoats if she has good legs."
There is evidently a world of bitter experience behind the
writing of Actors, Authors, and Audiences.
In a paper also included in the volume, called Unappreciated
Shakespeare, Gilbert develops a favourite thesis of his, that
the English people do not read Shakespeare, and that if they
go to performances of Shakespearean plays, it is because they
feel at a disadvantage in knowing nothing whatever about
the plots. He says :
" The truth is that Shakespeare is not light reading. But an abso-
lute ignorance of the works of Shakespeare is most properly held to be
disgraceful, and so when it conies to pass that a play of Shakespeare
is adequately presented, people rush to see it in order to familiarize
themselves, in the readiest and easiest and most agreeable way, with
works with which it is considered and most rightly that all English-
men should be familiar."
Knowing so little, they do not realize the common mutilation
of the play as it is performed :
" But who cares ? Who resents these atrocious liberties ? / do
and the reader does, but who else ? A few, perhaps, but how many ?
Who calls out from the pit to the ' star ' who deliberately cuts out the
last two acts of Henry VIII because he has no part in it ' You
insufferably vain and sacrilegious impostor, how dare you lay your
mutilating hand upon the immortal works of a genius whom we revere
as we revere our religion ? Restore the fourth and fifth acts of this
great play ! Perform them at once, or up go your benches ! ' / am
in the habit of publicly addressing the star-tragedian in these words,
and so is the reader ; but who else does so ? No one else probably
because it is not generally known that the two acts have been sup-
pressed. As for the c star/ in all probability he has never read those
acts. Why should he ? There is no Wolsey in them.
" In truth and it is a lamentable truth the popular knowledge
of Shakespeare is almost entirely derived from performances of muti-
lated versions of Ms plays. Of those plays in their entirety, and of
the plays that are seldom or never performed, the mass of Englishmen
know little or nothing."
Gilbert permitted no actor to add or to take away from his
own plays, and he demanded for Shakespeare what he secured
for himself.
The dramatized version of The Wicked World was produced
40 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
at the Haymarket, with the Kendals in the cast, and afterwards
supplied Gilbert with the idea of the libretto of Fallen Fairies,
the opera for which Mr. Edward German composed the music.
Among the stories not included in the volume is one of a
series of six tales arranged on the Dickens plan and published
in 1866. The tales are called The Five 'Alls. Tom Hood
wrote the introduction, W. J. Prowse wrote The King's Story,
Clement Scott The Parson's Story, T. W. Robertson The Soldier's
Story, T. Archer The Farmer's Story, and Gilbert The Lawyer's
Story. It is rather a stilted essay in sentimentalism, with the
Crimean War as a background no better and no worse than
the other contributions to the series. Like most writers for
the stage, Gilbert had an obvious tendency to be rhetorical
when writing narrative fiction, and his rhetoric, anyhow in
this one instance, is definitely theatrical. Here is a charac-
teristic extract :
" Captain Brereton, you are an uncompromising liar. You have
taken advantage of my presence here to undermine Miss Bessemer' s
affection for me. You left the Crimea in possession of my fullest
confidence. You were intimately acquainted with my engagement
to Miss Bessemer, and in my blind confidence I was happy in the belief
that your presence in her society would keep the recollection of me
more fully before her. And you have availed yourself of your intimacy
with my mother, with her, and with me, to substitute yourself in my
place. You may possibly think this behaviour consistent with your
character as a gentleman. In my opinion it is that of an unmitigated
scoundrel."
The fact, of course, was and this will become more evident
as Gilbert's later work is considered that no literary artist
was ever less a realist than he. Fairyland was his home, and
in his short stories, as in his 'plays, he is happiest and most
successful in the fantastic land of make-believe. It is obvious
that it is infinitely more difficult to make the fantastic con-
vincing in a play than in a story. Gilbert was triumphant
in the more difficult task, and in the easier he was sufficiently
successful in Foggerty's Fairy to make one believe that, had
the theatre not called him as its own, he would have won
a considerable reputation as a story-writer.
i
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST PLAYS
N the fragment of autobiography printed in the Theatre
-Gilbert has himself told the story of his beginning as a
dramatist :
" Of the many good and staunch, friends I made on my introduc-
tion into journalism, one of the best and staunchest was poor Tom
Robertson, and it is entirely to him that I owe my introduction to
stage-work. He had been asked by Miss Herbert, the then lessee of
St. James's Theatre, if he knew anyone who could write a Christmas
piece in a fortnight. Robertson, who had often expressed to me his
belief that I should succeed as a writer for the stage, advised Miss
Herbert to entrust me with the work, and the introduction resulted
in my first piece, a burlesque on UElisir $ Amove, called Dulcamara ;
or, The Little Duck and the Great Quack. The piece, written in ten
days and rehearsed in a week, met with more success than it deserved,
owing, mainly, to the late Mr. Frank Matthews' excellent impersona-
tion of the title-role. In the hurry of production there had been no
time to discuss terms, but after it had been successfully launched, Mr.
Emden (Miss Herbert's acting manager) asked me how much I wanted
for the piece. I modestly hoped that, as the piece was a success,
30 would not be considered an excessive price for the London right.
Mr. Emden looked rather surprised, and, as I thought, disappointed.
However, he wrote a cheque, asked for a receipt, and, when he had got
it, said : ' Now take a bit of advice from an old stager who knows
what he is talking about : never sell so good a piece as this for ^30
again.' And I never have.
" My first piece gave me no sort of anxiety. I had nothing in the
matter of dramatic reputation to lose, and I entered my box on the
first night of Dulcamara with a cceur leger. It never entered my head
that the piece would fail, and I even had the audacity to pre-invite
a dozen friends to supper after the performance. The piece succeeded
(as it happened), and the supper-party finished the evening appro-
41
42 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
priately enough, but I have since learnt something about the risks in-
separable from every ' first night/ and I would as soon invite friends
to supper after a forthcoming amputation at the hip-joint.
" Once fairly afloat on the dramatic stream, I managed to keep
my head above-water. Dulcamara was followed by a burlesque on
La Figlia del Reggimento, called La Vivandidre, which was produced
at what was then the Queen's Theatre, in Long Acre, and excellently
played by Mr. J. L. Toole, Mr. Lionel Brough, Miss Hodson, Miss M.
Simpson, Miss Everard (the original Little Buttercup of H.M.S. Pina-
fore), and Miss Fanny Addison. The Vivandiere ran for 120 nights,
and was followed at the Royalty Theatre by the Merry Zingara, a
burlesque on the Bohemian Girl, in which Miss M. Oliver, Miss
Charlotte Saunders, and Mr. F. Dewar appeared. This also ran
120 nights, but it suffered from comparison with Mr. F. C. Burnand's
Black-Eyed Susan, which it immediately followed, and which had
achieved the most remarkable success recorded in the annals of
burlesque.
" Then came the opening of the Gaiety Theatre, for which occasion
I wrote Robert the Devil, a burlesque on the opera of that name, and
in which Miss Farren appeared. This was followed by my first comedy,
An Old Score, which, however, made no great mark. But there was a
circumstance connected with its production which may serve as a
hint to unacted authors. As soon as I had written the piece, I had it
set up in type a proceeding that cost me exactly five guineas. I
sent a copy of it to Mr. Hollingshead, and within one hour of receiving
it he had read and accepted it. He subsequently informed me that
he read it at once Because it was printed. Verb, sap"
The two first pages of the published version of Dulcamara
are sufficient indication of its character.
A NEW AND ORIGINAL EXTRAVAGANZA
entitled
DULCAMARA ;
or, the
LITTLE DUCK AND THE GREAT QUACK.
First Produced at the
THEATRE ROYAL, ST. JAMES'S,
December 29, 1866.
By
W. S. GILBERT, ESQ.
GILBERT AS AN OFFICER IN THE GORDON HIGHLANDERS
THE FIRST PLAYS 43
DULCAMARA ;
or,
THE LITTLE DUCK AND THE GREAT QUACK.
DRAMATIS PERSONS.
NEMORINO (a Neapolitan peasant, of whom
you will hear more presently) . . . Miss Ellen McDonnell
BELCORE (a Sergeant of Infantry, who is " cut
out " for a good soldier by nature and
by Nemorino) Mr. F. Charles
DR. DULCAMARA Mr. Frank Matthews
BEPPO (his Jack-pudding a mystery, whose
real nature is concealed by a mysterious
Pike-crust) Mr. Stoyle
TOMASO (a Notary, keeping company with
Gianetta ; '* Tomaso and Tomaso, and
Tomaso, creeps with his pretty pay-
sanne " Shakespeare) Mr. Gaston Murray
ADINE (the little Duck, who, it is hoped, will
nevertheless be found to be very long in
the bill). . Miss Carlotta Addison
GIANETTA (the pretty paysanne, to whom
Tomaso pays an overwhelming amount
of attention) Miss Eleanor Bufton
C^TERINA (an exquisite villager). . . . Miss Marion
MARIA (another) Miss Guiness
Soldiers, Male and Female Peasants, Fisher Girls, etc.
SCENE i. EXTERIOR OF ADINA'S FARM.
Arrival of Belcore and his warriors.
SCENE 2. INTERIOR OF NEMORINO' s HOUSE,
SCENE 3. A VILLAGE MARKET PLACE.
Dance of Soldiers and Peasants, and arrival of Dr. Dulcamara.
The Mystery ! The Love Philtre i
SCENE 4. INTERIOR OF AD IN A' s FARM,
Preparations for the marriage of ALL the village girls.
SCENE 5, THE VILLAGE GREEN.
The Potion Works Discomfiture of Belcore Astounding Solution
of a Remarkable Mystery, and Triumph of Agricultural Innocence,
typified by
A GRAND ALLEGORICAL TABLEAU OF LOVE'S DEVICES 1
THE MUSIC ARRANGED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF
MR. VAN HAMME.
44 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
H. J. Byron, who was responsible for Gilbert's introduction
to the columns of Fun, was the author of many successful
farces, including Our Boys, and of innumerable burlesques,
the principal characteristics of which were a long series of
appalling puns. It was inevitable that, in writing burlesque,
Gilbert should in some measure have followed the Byron
model, though, as has been shown in one of his dramatic criti-
cisms that we have quoted, his sense of fitness was jarred
by its extravagant tastelessness. Dulcamara and Robert the
Devil, with which the Gaiety Theatre was opened by John
Hollingshead in 1868, are much like the ordinary burlesques
of the time. The 1866 number of Wane's Christmas Annual,
edited by Tom Hood, contains a burlesque by Gilbert of
Ruy Bias. He described it as a preposterous piece of - non-
sense for private reproduction, and as it has never been printed,
except in this long-forgotten annual, we quote from it as an
example of Gilbert's early burlesques. It is written in rhymed
couplets, with a pun almost in every line.
In the List of dramatis persona, the major-domo, Don Sallust,
the master of Ruy Bias, is described as " a man with a good
deal to look after, and who made yer at home, oh, when you
came to stay with his master."
Don Sallust has been banished on account of an intrigue
with one of the Queen's maids, and in revenge he disguises
Ruy Bias as his cousin, Don Cesar de Bazan, and helps him
to make love to the Queen herself. The Queen is lonely and
unhappy :
QUEEN. Unhappy Queen unhappy maiden, I !
In vain to get a wink of sleep I try ;
But wander, dressing-gowny and night-cappy,
I seldom get a nap I'm so un-nappy 1
Oh, gentle sleep apostrophized as sich
By some late monarch I forget by which
Oh, how I nightly long for that blest time
When, bathed in sleep, I need not talk in rhyme,
Or be prepared to sing about my cares
In parodies of all the well-known airs 1
THE FIRST PLAYS 45
SONG. Q0EEN.
Air *' A~hunting we will go."
The king announces every morn,
In summer or in snow,
To me, his faithful wife forlorn,
That a -hunting he will go !
What kind of pleasure can he find
In tearing through his parks,
In search of game of various kind,
Confining his remarks
To " Hey ! ho ! Chevy 1
Hark forward ! Hark forward I Tantivy," etc.
If this goes on much longer, why
I'm sure that I shall die.
If he'd confine his hunting to
The usual time of year,
I'd not complain but all in vain,
The season's over here.
How can he care to spend the day
With huntsmen and with hounds,
Expressing all he wants to say,
In such unmeaning sounds
As " Hey 1 ho ! Chevy !
Hark forward ! Hark forward ! Tantivy," etc.
If this goes on much longer, why
I'm sure that I shall die.
In the third scene of the burlesque, Don Diego, one of the
court noblemen, proposes to his fellows a plan for filling their
pockets :
" In Queen Maria's kitchen, pounds, I find,
Are lost in perquisites of every kind ;
The servants' kitchen stuff, alone, I'm told
Is worth a hundred thousand pounds in gold.
The fees that tradesmen to the butler pay
Amount to several hundred pounds a day.
The Christmas boxes, too ! They give, I hear,
A box upon the opening of each year !
The butler vanishes so does the tea
Best seconds disappear, and, like the bee,
They get them money aH the day from flours,
These seconds, gentle sirs, may be weE 'ours.
46 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
(During these lines, Ruy has been expressing, in panto-
mime, the profoundest disgust of Don Diego's proposal.)
Stop all the servants' perquisites, the pests !
Cram all their wastes into our private chests !
Reduce their rations and cut down their wages,
Butlers and footmen, chambermaids and pages !
This is what I propose with all submission."
In the end, Ruy Bias and Don Sallust fight a duel. Sallust
is killed and Ruy Bias is left happily with the Queen. The
finale has something of Gilbert's characteristic deftness of
rhyming, and might, indeed, have been used in one of the
later libretti :
QUEEN. Oh ! all is settled, and is just as jolly as can be.
Ruy. An easy independence I perceptibly foresee ;
I killed the fellow, dearest girl, and we shall soon be one,
QUEEN. I thought you would, 'cause in a play it's usually done !
(Air changes to " Diamants de la Couronne")
RUY (to audience).
List, I implore, one moment more
To me, before you seek the door :
You'd best ignore deceitful lore
But that, I'm sure, you knew before !
QUEEN. But as for me, I'm going to be
Restored to he, as you may see :
Why should I be melancholee
Or pipe my 'ee, I do not see I
(Don Sallust springs up and joins the chorus.)
SALLUST. And let me say a word, I pray,
Before the play is o'er to-day.
All men, they say, become the prey
Of habits they in youth obey.
The moral's trite, when I was quite
A little wight I learnt to bite,
And in the fight you saw to-night
He killed me quite >and serve rne right !
Chorus :
But as for she, she's going to be
Restored to he, as you may see 1
Why she should be melancholee,
Or pipe her 'ee, we do not see.
THE FIRST PLAYS 47
In writing burlesque, as in writing sentimental comedy,
Gilbert was doing work that other men could do. It was only
when his work was something that no one else dared attempt
that his genius was evident. In everything else he was dis-
tinguished above his fellows, but it must be remembered
that the English theatre in the sixties and seventies of last
century was for the most part the home of sheer banality.
Then Gilbert was a giant among pigmies. When he wrote
the Savoy libretti, he was a giant among giants.
But Gilbert did succeed in giving humour and distinction
to Victorian burlesque. In La Vivandi&re, produced in 1868
at the old Queen's Theatre in Long Acre, with Toole, Lionel
Brough, and Henrietta Hodson in the cast, he began to find
himself in the theatre as he had already found himself in
Fun, and to exploit the distinctive whimsical humour of the
Bab Ballads and the Savoy operas. In one scene he pillories
the bad manners of English tourists. Lord Margate is talking
to his companions at the Grands Mulets on Mont Blanc :
LORD MARGATE. " You all remember when we left the shore
Of Rule Britannia, we in concert swore
We'd do our best on reaching these localities
To show our undisputed nationalities,
To show contempt in everything that we did :
Tell me, my comrades, how we have succeeded ? "
MARQUIS OF CRANBOURNE ALLEY. I've sworn at all who've hindered
my researches.
LORD PENTONVILLE. I've worn my hat in all the foreign churches.
LORD PECKHAM. On all their buildings I've passed verbal strictures
And poked my walking-stick through all their pictures.
I only carry it about for that use.
MARQUIS OF CRANBOURNE ALLEY. I've decorated all their public
statues.
LORD PENTONVILLE. When Frenchmen have conversed with me or
you,
We've always turned the talk to Waterloo.
48 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
LORD MARGATE, I've half a dozen Frenchmen tried to teach
That I'm twelve times as brave and strong as each,
And showed that this corollary must follow,
One Englishman can thrash twelve Frenchmen hollow,
In fact, my friends, wherever we have placed ourselves,
I may say we have thoroughly disgraced ourselves.
Both as man and artist, Gilbert was typically and absolutely
English, but he never tired of laughing at the jingo patriotism
which is based on folly and bad manners. The gibe in La
VivandUre is repeated in H.M.S. Pinafore in the well-known
lines :
" He is an Englishman !
For he himself has said it,
And it's greatly to his credit,
That he is an Englishman !
That he is an Englishman 1
" For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Itali-an ;
Or perhaps Itali-an !
" But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman ! J>
It is repeated again in The Darned Mounseer*
" I shipped, d'ye see, in a Revenue sloop,
And of! Cape Finisterre,
A merchantman we see,
A Frenchman, going free,
So we made for the bold Mounseer,
D'ye see ?
We made for the bold Mounseer 1
"But she proved to be a Frigate and she up with her ports,
And fires with a thirty-two I
It come uncommon near,
But we answered with a cheer,
Which paralysed the Parley-voo,
D'ye see ?
Which paralysed ,tbe Parley-voo I
THE FIRST PLAYS 49
" Then our Captain he up and he says, says he,
' That chap we need not fear
We can take her, if we like,
She is sartin for to strike,
For she's only a darned Mounseer,
D'ye see ?
She's only a darned Mounseer ! '
" But to fight a French fal-lal it's like hittin' of a gal-
It's a lubberly thing for to do,
For we, with all our faults,
Why, we're sturdy British salts,
While she's but a Parley-voo,
Dy'e see ?
A miserable Parley-voo !
"So we up with our helm, and we scuds before the breeze,
As we gives a compassionating cheer ;
Froggee answers with a shout
As he sees us go about,
Which was grateful of the poor Mounseer,
D'ye see ?
Which was grateful of the poor Mounseer !
" And I'll wager in their joy they kissed each other's cheek,
(Which is what them furriners do,)
And then they blessed their lucky stars
We were hardy British tars
Who had pity on a poor Parley-voo,
D'ye see ?
Who had pity on a poor Parley-voo 1 "
Gilbert was often the victim as well as the inventor of para-
dox, and there is something delightfully comic in the fact
that this song, obviously intended as a gibe at the futile " one
jolly Englishman can lick all three " boastings, was regarded
by certain French critics as a gross insult to their nation,
and years after it was written the supposed insult prevented
a Gilbert and Sullivan production in Paris. In this connection
one may note the jokes at expansive patriotism in Utopia
Limited, where the idea of La Vivandibre reappears again.
Between 1869 and 1872 Gilbert wrote a great many sketches
for the famous German Reed entertainments at the Gallery
4
50 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
of Illustration in Regent Street. The music of these sketches
was composed by Frederick Clay, who in 1871 introduced
Gilbert to SuUivan. As an example of Gilbert's constant
habit of re-using plots and ideas, it may be mentioned that
one of these comediettas, which was first played in 1869, was
expanded into Ruddigore years afterwards. Arthur Cecil,
Corney Grain, Leonora Braham, and Fanny Holland all made
their stage debuts in the plays that Gilbert wrote for the
German Reed entertainments.
To return to the autobiography, Gilbert says :
ff I had for some time determined to try the experiment of a blank-
verse burlesque in which a picturesque story should be told in a strain
of mock-heroic seriousness ; and through the enterprise of the late
Mrs. Listen (then manageress of the Olympic) I was afforded an oppor-
tunity of doing so. The story of Mr. Tennyson's Princess supplied the
subject-matter of the parody, and I endeavoured so to treat it as to
absolve myself from a charge of wilful irreverence. The piece was
produced with signal success, owing in no small degree to the admir-
able earnestness with which Miss M. Reinhardt invested the character
of the heroine. Her address to the ' girl graduates ' remains in my
mind as a rare example of faultless declamation. It was unfortunately
necessary to cast three ladies for the parts of the three principal youths,
and the fact that three ladies were dressed as gentlemen disguised as
ladies, imparted an epicene character to their proceedings which
rather interfered with the interest of the story. The success of the
piece, however, was unquestionable, and it led to a somewhat more
ambitious flight in the same direction.
" Immediately after the production of The Princess, I was corn-
missioned by the late Mr. Buckstone to write a blank- verse fairy
comedy on the story of Le Palais de la Verite, a subject which had been
suggested to me by Mr. Palgrave Simpson. The piece was produced
at the Haymarket Theatre with an admirable cast, which included
Mr. Buckstone, Mr. Everill, Mrs. Kendal, Miss Caroline Hill, and Miss
Fanny Gwynne, and it ran about 150 nights. A day or two before the
production of the piece, I was surprised to receive a packet containing
twenty-four dress-circle seats, twenty-four upper-box seats, twenty-four
pit seats, and twenty-four gallery seats, for the first night. On inquiry,
I discovered that by immemorial Haymarket pustom these ninety-
six seats were the author's nightly perquisites during the entire run
of a three-act play. I assured Mr. Buckstone that I had no desire to
press my right to this privilege, which seems to be a survival of the
old days when authors were paid in part by tickets of admission. I
believe that the Haymarket was the only theatre in which the custom
THE FIRST PLAYS 51
existed. Under Mr. Buckstone's conservative management, very old
fashions lingered on long after they had been abolished at other theatres.
I can remember the time (about thirty-eight years since, I think)
when it was still lighted by wax candles. The manager of the Hay-
market, in Court dress, and carrying two wax candles, ushered Royalty
into its box long after other managers had left this function to their
deputy, and the old practice of announcing that a new play * would
be repeated every night until further notice ' survived until the very
close of Mr. Buckstone's management.
" Pygmalion and Galatea followed The Palace of Truth, and achieved
a remarkable success, owing mainly to Mrs. Kendal's admirable im-
personation of Galatea. Mr. Buckstone, Mr. Howe, Miss Caroline
Hill, and Mrs. Chippendale were the other noteworthy members of
the cast. This was followed by The Wicked World, a fairy comedy in
three acts, and Chanty, a modern comedy in four acts, which achieved
but an indifferent success in London, although it was played with much
credit in the country, under Mr. Wilson Barrett's management."
The Princess was produced on January 8, 1870 ; The Palace
of Truth on November 19, 1870 ; Pygmalion and Galatea on
December 9, 1871 ; The Wicked World on January 4, 1873.
Pygmalion and Galatea has, of course, often been revived,
notably by Miss Mary Anderson in 1884 and in 1888, and as
a contrast to the 30 which he received for his first play, it
is interesting to note that Gilbert received some 40,000 in
fees for Pygmalion and Galatea.
The quality of the dialogue in The Princess may be esti-
mated by the following lines :
" For, adder-like, his sting lay in his tongue !
His bitter insolence still rankles here,
Although a score of years have come and gone !
His outer man, gnarled, knotted as it was,
Seemed to his cruel and cynical within,
Hyperion to a Saturday Review ! "
There is a definite suggestion of the Gilbert of the Savoy
operas in one of the incidental songs :
" Load her with frippery,
Glovery, slippery,
Cleverly planned, not going too far !
Marabout feather,
Gossamer airy,
Fastened together,
Give to your fairy."
52 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
The plot of The Palace of Truth is familiar. It finishes
with a series of rhymed couplets :
PALMIS. You've learnt to doubt the love that those profess,
Who by such love gain temporal success.
(Looking angrily at CHRYSAL.)
ZORAM. That surly misanthropes, with venom tainted,
ARISTA us. Are often not as black as they are painted !
AZEMA, To doubt all maids who of their virtue boast :
That they're the worst who moralize the most !
(Looking at MIRZA.)
MIRZA. That blushes, though they're most becoming, yet
Proclaim, too oft, the commonplace coquette !
(Looking at AZEMA.)
I can declare, with pardonable pride,
I never blush !
AZEMA. You couldn't ii you tried !
PHILAMIR. Under the influence that lately reigned
Within these walls I breathed my love unfeigned ;
Now that the power no longer reigns above,
I ratify the accents of my love.
Forgive me, Zeloide, my life, my bride !
ZELOIDE (very demurely). I love you, Philamir be satisfied I
Pygmalion and Galatea is a romantic comedy in blank
verse. Its stage-craft is admirable, and it is easy to under-
stand the attraction that the part of Galatea has had for
beautiful actresses.
Perhaps the most felicitous lines are those in which Galatea
describes her gradual awakening to life :
" I was a cold dull stone ! I recollect
That by some means I knew that I was stone :
That was the first dull gleam of consciousness ;
I became conscious of a chilly self,
A cold immovable identity,
I knew that I was stone, and knew no more !
Then, by an imperceptible advance,
Came the dim evidence of outer things,
Seen darkly and imperfectly yet seen
The walls surrounding me, and I, alone,
That pedestal that curtain then a voice
That called on Galatea ! At that word,
THE FIRST PLAYS 53
Which seemed to shake my marble to the core,
That which was dim before, came evident,
Sounds, that had hummed around me, indistinct,
Vague, meaningless seemed to resolve themselves
Into a language I could understand ;
I felt my frame pervaded by a glow
That seemed to thaw my marble into flesh :
Its cold hard substance throbbed with active life,
My limbs grew supple, and I moved I lived I
Lived in the ecstasy of new-born life !
Lived in the love of him that fashioned me !
Lived in a thousand tangled thoughts of hope."
On January 25, 1871, the Court Theatre in Sloane Square
was opened by Miss Marie Lytton with a comedy by Gilbert
called Randall's Thumb. This was followed by his Creatures
of Impulse on April 15, 1871 ; by a dramatization of Great
Expectations on May 28, 1871 ; by On Guard on October 28,
1871 ; and by The Wedding March on November 15, 1873.
Writing of his version of Great Expectations, Gilbert said :
" It afforded, however, a curious example of the manner in which
the Censorship of those days dealt with plays submitted to it for licence.
It seems that it was the custom of the then Licencer of Plays to look
through the MS, of a new piece, and strike out all irreverent words,
substituting for them words of an inoffensive character. In Great
Expectations, Magwitch, the returned convict, had to say to Pip : ' Here
you are, in chambers fit for a Lord. 5 The MS. was returned to the
theatre with the word ' Lord J struck out, and ' Heaven ' substituted,
in pencil ! "
In the spring of 1873, Miss Lytton produced The Happy
Land, a burlesque version of Gilbert's Wicked World, which
Gilbert himself sketched out and Gilbert a Beckett completed.
On January 3, 1874, Charity was produced at the Haymarket
Theatre, the cast including Mr. and Mrs. Kendal. Gilbert
took immense pains with this comedy. The one notebook
that he left behind him contains scenes of the play written,
rewritten, and transposed with evident determination to attack
a social problem impressively and, in a manner, to compel
respectful attention. Charity is a problem play, the story
of a woman who redeemed the mistake of her life by a career
54 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
of self-sacrifice. It says something for Gilbert's courage that
he should have attacked the hard judgments of conventional
Victorian morality, even though his play finishes with a con-
ventional sentimental ending. Times have changed, but it
was certainly true in the respectable England of the seventies
that there was one sin, and one sin only, " for which on earth
there is no atonement/' Gilbert preaches in Charity, deliber-
ately preaches, for the jester, with whom all the world still
laughs, was moved to the depth of his soul by cruelty either
in individuals or institutions, and yearned, almost pathetically,
to use his art to destroy the thing that he hated.
Sweethearts, a sentimental comedy in two acts, was produced
at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in 1874, the principal cha-
racter being played by Mrs. Bancroft. It was followed at
the same theatre by Tom Cobb. Broken Hearts was produced
at the Court Theatre on December 17, 1875, the cast including
Mr. and Mrs. Kendal. Years after, Gilbert told Miss Anderson
there was " more of me " in Broken Hearts than anywhere
else, a confession that the humorist, whose wit was often so
brilliantly hard, was at heart a sentimentalist. Broken Hearts
is a fanciful fairy-story, set on an island where four broken-
hearted maidens live together guarded by a deformed dwarf :
" We maidens all (save one) have dearly loved
And those we loved have died. We, broken hearts,
Knit by the sympathy of kindred woe,
Have sought this isle far from the ken of man ;
And having loved, and having lost our loves,
Stand pledged to love no living thing again."
The man, young and handsome, arrives on the island and
two of the maidens, two sisters, fall in love with him. The
elder is strong and resolute, the younger weak and ailing,
and after a rivalry in unselfishness, the younger sister dies.
Broken Hearts was very near to Gilbert's heart, and he
resented the failure to appreciate it. F. C. Burnand, who was
undoubtedly jealous of Gilbert, wrote to Clement Scott :
" Pm off to see Gilbert's ' Broken Parts/ " Scott foolishly
THE FIRST PLAYS 55
repeated the remark, and Gilbert wrote Mm the following letter :
" Burnand's attempt at wit is silly and coarse, and your
attempt to bring it into prominence is in the worst possible
taste. I am not by any means a thin-skinned man, but in
this case I feel bound to take exception to your treatment
of me and of my serious work/'
Dan'l Druce was produced at the Haymarket Theatre on
September n, 1876 ; and Engaged at the same theatre on
October 3, 1877, Miss Marion Terry playing the leading part.
Engaged is a humorous farce with a definite suggestion of
the " topsy-turvydom " of the Gilbert of the Bab Ballads and
the operas, and it has a proper place in the story of Gilbert's
considerable achievements. It was produced in the same year
as The Sorcerer. The first act takes place in a Scottish cottage,
near Gretna, and it opens with the courting of Maggie Mac-
farlane by Angus Macalister. Angus explains to his future
mother-in-law :
" I'm a fairly prosperous man. What wi* farmin' a bit land and
giUieing odd times, and a bit o' poachin' now and again ; and what
wi* my illicit whusky still and throwin' trains off the line, that the
poor distracted passengers may come to my cot, I've mair ways than
one of making an honest living and I'll work them a' nicht and day
for my bonnie Meg 1 "
A train is wrecked, the distracted passengers arrive, and the
fun begins, the dramatist burlesquing romantic drama with
a gusto that Mr. Shaw might well envy. The dialogue is
excellent. For example :
MINNIE. Mr. Belvawny, I don't know what we should have done
without you. What with your sweet songs, your amusing riddles,
and your clever conjuring tricks, the weary days of waiting have
passed like a delightful dream.
Miss TREHERENE. It is impossible to be dull in the society of one
who can charm the soul with plaintive ballads one moment and
the next roll a rabbit and a guinea-pig into one.
The conclusion is pure Gilbertian, The heroine speaks:
" Belvawny, I love you with an intensity of devotion that I firmly
believe will last while I live. But dear Cheviot is my husband now ;
56 W. S. GILBERT: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
he lias a claim upon me which it would be impossible nay, criminal
to resist. Farewell, Belvawny ; Minnie may yet be yours. Cheviot
my husband my own love if the devotion of a lifetime can atone
for the misery of the last few days, it is yours, with every wifely
sentiment of pride, gratitude, admiration, and love."
Gretchen, a blank-verse version of the Faust story with
MepMstopheles left out, was produced at the Olympic Theatre
on March 24, 1879. It was not a success, and Gilbert once
said: "I called it Gretchen, the public called it rot" The
play is not without dignity. The following lines are part of
Gretchen j s last speech :
" Ah me I but it is meet that I should die,
For I can turn my head but not my heart
And I can close my eyes, but not my heart
And still my foolish tongue, but not my heart
So, Faustus, it is meet that I should die."
Gilbert's other earlier dramatic work included various
adaptations from the French which no Victorian dramatist
ever succeeded in avoiding Foggerty's Fairy, a fairy comedy
founded on a story written many years before, which was
produced at the Criterion in December, 1881 ; Comedy and
Tragedy, which Mary Anderson produced at the Lyceum in
1884 ; Brantinghame Hall, produced at the St. James's Theatre
in 1888, with a cast that included Louis Waller, Rutland
Barrington, Norman Forbes, Mrs. Gaston Murray, Miss Julia
NeUson, and Miss Rose Norreys ; and Rosencrantz and Guildern-
stern, a burlesque of Hamlet, produced at the Vaudeville Theatre
in June, 1891.
When he was knighted, Gilbert confessed that he was the
author of over seventy plays. He was an industrious and
prolific writer, and he is almost unique among writers of
genius from the fact that his fame rests on a comparatively
small number of masterpieces, while a great part of his work
is almost forgotten.
In Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, Gilbert returns to the
blank verse into which, like another Silas Wegg, he had a
THE FIRST PLAYS 57
constant desire to drop. It is an amusing piece of fooling,
and in one of Ophelia's speeches there is an admirable burlesque
summary of the never-ending discussions concerning the
sanity of Hamlet:
" Opinion is divided. Some men liold
That lie's the sanest far of all sane men
Some that he's really sane, but shamming mad
Some that he's really mad, but shamming sane
Some that he will be mad, some that he was -
Some that he couldn't be. But on the whole
(As far as I can make out what they mean)
The favourite theory's somewhat like this :
Hamlet is idiotically sane
With lucid intervals of lunacy,"
Bmntinghame Hall, produced by Rutland Barrington at the
St. James's Theatre on November 27, 1888, is a melodrama
that begins in the Australian bush and finishes in England,
but it is melodrama with many Gilbertian touches. The
speech of the clergyman in the first act is an echo of the
vicar's song in The Sorcerer:
" I'm desperately impressionable, and with half the women of my
parish setting their caps at me, I wasn't safe. They never left me.
Presents showered down upon me. It literally rained carriage-rugs,
altar-cloths, birthday-books, paper-knives, letter-weights, pocket-
diaries, knitted waistcoats, and presentation inkstands. I was the
repository of all their confidences. I had to devote two hours every
day to deciding cases of female conscience of the most complicated
and delicate description. My photographs were bought up as fast
as they could be printed ! Half-a-dozen ladies of exalted station were
carried out in convulsions whenever I preached. The situation became
serious ; it was more than a highly susceptible clergyman ought to be
called upon to bear. To make a long story short, there was nothing
for it but flight. So, one night, one dark November night, I fled !
I sailed at once for Sydney, and here I am, a hard-working bush mission-
ary with thirty or forty miles to ride every day a fine field of useful-
ness before me and except for your wife, whom I am much obliged
to you for having married nothing in the shape of a handsome woman
within a week's march. I weathered 'em, sir ; I weathered 'em. It
was a hard fight, but, by Jove, I won it, sir. By Jove, I won it."
The last act is sometimes very human, as when " an infernal
rascal " does " an uncommonly fine thing/' Infernal rascals
58 W. S. GILBERT : HIS LIFE AND LETTERS
are always doing uncommonly fine things in the real world,
which is one of the phenomena that make life thrilling and
bewildering. But they are rarely permitted to do fine things
on the stage. And in this last act, too, Gilbert is sometimes
the real Gilbert, as when the country gentleman says :
" Anticipating this interview, I have taken the precaution, as a
magistrate, to bind myself over to keep the peace towards all Her
Majesty's subjects for the space of three calendar months."
Comedy and Tragedy is an effective one-act play. It is
curious to note that Gilbert wrote best when he did not write
at any length. The libretti of the operas are all very short.
The short Comedy and Tragedy is superior to many of his
comedies, and The Hooligan, the best of his dramas, is in
one act.
Gilbert once declared that no man creates anything worthy
of himself until the age of forty. History, certainly, does
not justify this statement, but it is, to a large extent, true
of his own career. Trial by Jury, the first of the Gilbert
and Sullivan operas, was produced when Gilbert was thirty-
nine, and The Sorcerer when he was forty-one. It should,
however, be remembered that several of the plays with which
we are concerned in this chapter were written after the drama-
tist had begun to explore we quote one of his early American
critics " a mine rare, indeed, in quality/'
To the end of his days Gilbert rebelled against confinement
to one form of dramatic work, even though that work was
supremely his own. With his libretti, as Mr. William Archer
has said, " he restored the literary self-respect of the English
stage. " But he was not content with that ; he was ever anxious
to attempt other forms of dramatic writing. We have already
suggested the essential quality of Gilbert's genius. The
Gilbert of the early Bab Ballads is, almost without change
in idea or development in craftsmanship, the Gilbert of the last
libretti. Similarly his interests,, notably the law, remained
the same all through his life, and his early enthusiasms never
left him.
THE FIRST PLAYS 59
Robertson was in some respects his master. From him,
he himself said, he had learned the art of stage-management.
Gilbert told Mr. William Archer :
" Robertson was an exceedingly skilful dramatic tailor. He knew
the stage perfectly, and tie knew perfectly the company he had to
write for the then Prince of Wales' s stock company, which varied
very little. He fitted each character with the utmost nicety to the
man or woman who was to play in it ; and he was there to instruct
them in every movement, every emphasis. But when these parts
are transferred to other actors who knew not Robertson, the very
nicety of their adjustment to their original performers is apt to render
them misfits. I think that accounts in great measure for the compara-
tive ineffectiveness of his plays in revival their charm was so largely
dependent on Robertson's personal inspiration. . . .
" He invented stage-management. It was an unknown art before
his time. Formerly, in a conversation scene, for instance, you simply
brought down two or three chairs from the flat and placed them in
a row in the middle of the stage, and the people sat down and talked,
and when the conversation was ended the chairs were replaced. Robert-
son showed how to give life and variety and nature to the scene by
breaking it up with all sorts of little incidents and delicate by-play.
I have been at many of his rehearsals and learnt a great deal from
them."
Like master, like pupil. The American writer whom we
have already quoted said of Gilbert in the early eighties :
" Always his own stage manager, he never permits his plays to be
brought out in London without prolonged rehearsals, at which he
goes through every part and arranges every bit of ' business/ He also
frequently sketches the scenery and models the ' properties,' and if
it is necessary to instruct the ballet, he is still in his element, being
an adept even in the harlequin art."
But it was not only in his stagecraft that Gilbert resembled
Robertson. Both men were sentimentalists, and of the
two Gilbert was probably the more whole-hearted.
