Gilbert: compared with Robertson--His first Literary Efforts--The _Bab
Ballads_--_Sweethearts_--A Series of Experiments--Gilbert's Psychology and
Methods of Work--_Dan'l Druce_, _Engaged_, _The Palace of Truth_, _The
Wicked World_--_Pygmalion and Galatea_--The Gilbert and Sullivan Operas.
When Marie Wilton's company, during their first holiday, went on tour to
Liverpool, they happened upon the autumn assizes. The young London
barristers who followed the circuit made haste to fraternise with the
theatrical folk, and a sort of little colony came into being in which
everyone rejoiced and made merry. Grotesque trials were represented in
which Marie Wilton, got up as the Lord Chief Justice in wig and gown, gave
forth admirable verdicts; she tells of these frolics in her Memoirs,
adding pleasantly: "We were all young then, and the fun perhaps appeared
greater than it would now, but it was a very happy time."
Among these young barristers there was one named Gilbert. He was soon to
throw aside his gown in order to devote himself to the calling in which he
was to achieve a reputation as great as Robertson's,--a reputation which
still lives. The contrast between the two dramatists is striking.
Robertson is a craftsman, brought up in the theatre, amenable to outside
influences; he collaborates with his actors, with the public,--one may
say, with his entire generation. The ideas of his time, good, bad and
indifferent, exude from him at every pore. He becomes, therefore,
unconsciously, a representative man and the leader of a school. Where
Robertson is a natural product, a symptom, Gilbert is a freak, an
accident. He might have "occurred" at any time in the century, or indeed
in any century. One can neither trace his ancestry nor imagine his
posterity. Born and bred a gentleman, he loved the theatrical world
without being of it. Actors have accused him of being cold in his manner
to them, high and mighty, even disdainful. So much for his personal
character;--in discussing a living writer, more than this would be
improper. As to his bent of mind, its originality was evident from the
first, but that originality was at all times somewhat shallow and liable
to run dry; and instead of widening it, he scooped it out.
He exploited his talent by a kind of mathematical system, to its utmost
limit, to the point of absurdity, in fact, and even further. His literary
career may be described as containing three periods: in the first he felt
his way; in the second he achieved brilliant and legitimate successes; in
the third he met with even more fruitful triumphs, but of a kind which
arouse little sympathy in a critic, and of which, I think, even he
himself grew a bit tired. But he is so true an artist, and at the same
time so typically English, that a French critic may well study him, even
in his errors, without feeling that it is waste of time.
It was some verses which he contributed from week to week to _Fun_ that
first attracted attention to him. He reprinted them under the title, _Bab
Ballads_, and as the public seemed to want them he followed these up with
_More Bab Ballads_. Some of them were set to music and are still popular
as songs, but these are not the ones which have the most flavour. It is
difficult to describe this flavour; it consisted in a kind of naive irony,
expressed in a form that was sometimes extravagant, sometimes studiously
careless,--a blend of the deliberately prosaic with amazing fantasy. Some
of these ballads finished up with a surprise, the others did not finish up
at all,--which was a surprise too.
Gilbert offered to his friends at the Prince of Wales's a pleasant little
comedy entitled _Sweethearts_. A young man is about to start for India,
where he is to make a career for himself, but he is in love with a young
girl who lives near his country home. She has but to say a word and he
will not go, or will not go alone. She does not say this word. What
prevents her? Is it timidity, bashfulness, pride, or that strange spirit
of contradiction or of coquetry which sometimes keeps the tongue from
obeying the dictates of the heart? However that may be, she lets him go.
Thirty years ensue. The lover returns, grey haired now,--a lover, indeed,
no longer.
Distance in time, as in space, makes things look small. His "grande
passion" seems to him now a boyish fancy. He merely wishes to see the spot
again; that is all. She, too, is there, seated under the shade of the tree
which they planted together, retaining still the flower which he had given
her, faithful to the memory of the love she had seemed to scorn. The old
boy's scepticism gives way to tenderness. They marry. But will they ever
find the thirty years that they have lost?
Here is one of those pleasingly fanciful ideas that a man like Octave
Feuillet may work out delightfully. Sadness and gladness should alternate
in it like mist and sunshine on an autumn day. Now, Gilbert is a cynic,
though a refined cynic, and he could deal only with half of his subject.
In his little comedy, one or other of its two characters is always carping
at love. In the first act it is the woman, in the second the man. Gilbert
speaks, and very cleverly, through the mouth of this railer, but, alas!
there seems nothing to be said on the other side. From the moment of this
first attempt of his, the young author had to face the fact that he had a
great disqualification for the writing of dramas; he could neither depict
love nor reproduce its language. Is it out of a kind of revenge that he
has continued to rail at love ever since?
Nevertheless, he made some further efforts during the years which
followed. He wrote _Broken Hearts_, a fantastic drama in verse, and made
it clear even to himself that he was unequal to such high flights. He
aimed at freeing Goethe's Margaret from all that philosophy which
surrounds and obscures her, and he discovered that the idyll thus
disencumbered, and naturally told, became flat and commonplace. He was
then inspired by history, and the idea entered his head--probably after
some reading that had moved him and awakened in him some dormant atavistic
instinct--that his misanthropy would have a new force in the mouth of a
puritanical peasant of the seventeenth century. But how difficult it is
for a university man, a Garrick Club man, to feel and speak like such a
character! As far as mere language is concerned, the author was fairly
successful; _Dan'l Druce_ is a pleasing mosaic of archaic phrases, an
ingenious transcription of the speech of those days. (But was the public
which applauded _School_ and _Society_ sufficiently advanced in its
artistic education to enjoy these things?) Can one say the same, however,
of the ideas? Had one submitted, for instance, to a contemporary of John
Fox or of Bunyan the moral question on which Mr. Gilbert's drama turns,
would he really have solved it after the fashion of _Dan'l Druce_? Surely
not.
It is an interesting problem, though, of course, not new. To which of the
two does the child belong--to him who begat but abandoned it, or to him
who took pity on it and brought it up? It is the modern conscience that
decides in favour of the second; the Puritan conscience of former days
would have feared to interfere with that natural order of things in which
it saw the guiding hand of God. As all things in this world and the next
were pre-ordained, the father must remain the father in spite of
everything, just as the chosen remained chosen, and the evil evil; the
heart might bleed, but Divine Providence must have its way. This, it seems
to me, had been the Puritan solution. But while we are reflecting upon
these things, this problem, by a characteristic Gilbertian stroke, is
turned upside down through a series of utterly incredible complications,
the real father becomes the adoptive, and the adoptive father the real.
Thenceforth we tumble from psychology into melodrama, and there remains no
problem to solve.
A love-scene was required in the play, as there were a young man and a
girl amongst its characters. Their conversation--apart from certain pretty
archaic touches which continue to delight me--is a sort of subtle
intellectual game. Each seizes upon some one word in the last phrase of
the other, works it up into a new phrase and darts it back. Thus the
dialogue is bandied about to and fro, the great thing being to keep it up.
Sometimes, however, it falls to the ground. "I don't know what to say,"
Dorothy's answer to her lover's proposal, seems to suggest that the author
himself is in a difficulty. This Dorothy is a thoroughly ingenuous young
person, naively outspoken to the point of silliness. She is not sure of
being in love, and discusses the subject like a question of conscience
with him whose interest in it is most at stake. "These are my feelings,"
she tells him. "Is this love or is it not?" This self-analysing _ingenue_
is the only woman's character in the whole of Gilbert's dramatic work.
Before writing _Engaged_, some such thoughts as these must have passed
through his mind. "I shall turn out the human soul like a bag and show its
lining instead of its cover. It will be very ugly, but all the more
amusing. What does a man want when he puts aside all hypocrisy and all
regard for social conventions, and gives the rein to his appetites and
instincts?--To eat, to drink, to sleep, to be at his ease; to see all
those die off from whom legacies are to be expected; to win, honourably or
otherwise, every pretty woman who comes across his path. And what does a
woman want?--To shine in society, to have fine dresses, to be admired, to
marry a man who may give her a good position in the world. What is the
meeting-point of the feelings of both man and woman?--The greed for money
wherewith to buy the rest.
"My _dramatis personae_ shall be neither good nor bad, they shall be
naively and absolutely selfish,--their selfishness shown clearly, but in
the thousand shades which civilisation has imparted to characters; it
shall be expressed not bluntly but in the thousand shades which well-bred
people bring into the utterance of fine sentiments and correct
commonplaces. They shall lack only the moral sense; of this organ I shall
deprive them as neatly and gently as possible. _Fiance_ and _fiancee_,
father and daughter, friend and friend, shall become enemies the moment
their interests clash; the moment their interests agree they shall clasp
hands and kiss again as before. Three couples will perform these
evolutions and manoeuvres before the audience, and the young girls will
change their lovers as complacently as they would their partners in a
quadrille. In a few minutes Cheviot Hill will propose to three different
women; within the same space of time Simperson will throw his daughter at
the head of Cheviot Hill, and drive his intending son-in-law to suicide.
Belvonny will expend all his energies in the first half of a scene in
denying a certain fact, and during the second half of it will make no less
desperate efforts to establish this fact. Thus will the changeableness of
men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are
monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told
that '_Il faut se hater d'en rire de peur d'etre oblige d'en pleurer_.'"
So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces
to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three
ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. The spectators
laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their palate. It was at once too
unreal and too true. Such cynical outspokenness might mark the
conversation of the inhabitants of some dreamland. But it was incongruous
where people travelled by railway and read the daily paper. Gilbert had
but to transfer his puppets to the enchanted region where he located his
_Palace of Truth_ for the big children who composed the public to accept
them with glee.
The _Palace of Truth_ is a pleasant piece based on the same notions of
psychology as _Engaged_, but the satire is less bitter and less obvious.
Here there is no mistake possible. Before seeing the characters as they
really are, we have seen them playing every role in the human comedy. In
the second act the faithful husband flirts indiscriminately to every side
of him; the devoted girl-friend is a machiavelian coquette; the ardent
lover, so generous of madrigals and sighs, is a vain and selfish coxcomb;
the _ingenue_, chaste and correct almost to the point of coldness, is
beyond herself with love; the honey-lipped courtier becomes candid and
insolent to all the world; finally, the most amusing metamorphosis of all,
the professional boor, who has achieved notoriety by his merciless
criticisms, is the only person sincerely content with his life. Alceste
has changed skins with Philinthe.
In this world of fantasy, Gilbert was at last thoroughly at home. He
experimented without restraint, like those physiologists who practise upon
animals, depriving this one of viscera, that one of a cerebral lobe, a
third of some nerve essential to motion. His _Creatures of Impulse_ do
everything that comes into their heads, obeying every dictate of their
instincts. In the case of the inhabitants of the _Palace of Truth_, their
language is sincere enough, it is their manner that is hypocritical. The
denizens of fairyland in _The Wicked World_ are unacquainted with love;
they form a kind of puritanical society up in the clouds. Once they are
made to know the sentiment which they have lacked, every evil springs from
the Pandora's box. Selene passes through every stage of the malady. Joy,
ecstasy, absolute security,--the celestial period; then vague disquietude,
anxiety, with fierce jealousy on their heels; then anger, quarrels,
threats of vengeance, finally, profound humiliation. The mocker had it all
his own way, hitting to right and to left. On the one side, at the
colourlessness, the shabbiness, the squalid monotony of virtue; on the
other, at the enervating and degrading effects of vice.
But Gilbert never soared so high either in his philosophy or in his art as
in _Pygmalion and Galatea_. This was one of the great successes of the
Haymarket in 1871 and 1872. Galatea was impersonated by Madge Robertson,
the young sister of the dramatist, then in the flower of her twenty-second
year; and Kendal, whose wife she was soon to be, was Pygmalion. Miss
Robertson's grace of person, her pure and noble diction, were aids to
success, though it was not to them that success was due. Even had the
piece fallen quite flat, however, I should still give it a place above all
the other productions of the author.
I know, of course, what captious critics have had to say on the subject.
Nothing is easier, indeed, than to pull to pieces the figure of Galatea;
to show how far it is from plausibility; how inconsistent Gilbert was in
his composition of it; to show how, almost in the same breath, she asks
the most childish, almost imbecile, questions, and indulges in an analysis
of her emotions as subtle as Joubert's or Amiel's; how this absolutely
ignorant creature, who asks whether the room in which she comes to life is
the world, has yet the faculty of explaining the stages of consciousness
through which she has passed on her way to full existence; how she can
distinguish between an original and a copy, and be jealous at another's
having sat as a model for her features, although she does not know the
difference between a man and a woman.
Then, again, there is her characterisation of a soldier, when she has the
meaning of the word explained to her, as a "hired assassin." Her
comprehension of these two words "assassin" and "hired" presuppose some
rudimentary knowledge of the principal social institutions which affect
the preservation of life, as well as of penalties, and salaries, and of
the circulation of money and of the economic laws which it obeys. The
soldier, she is told, attacks only the strong. That may be so; still war,
she insists, is cruel. As for hunting, it is cowardly. All these
reflections and comparisons, all this reasoning in a brain of marble which
could not think, which did not exist, a few hours before!
These examples might be multiplied, but to no end. All such criticisms are
vain, because they assume our acceptance of a general thesis more
improbable than all the minor ones which it involves. No statue ever did
come to life, but if one were to, it would find itself in the position of
a newborn child. Before learning to moralise, it would first have to learn
how to walk and how to talk; its first movement would be a tumble, its
first utterance inarticulate: whoever submits such myths to this kind of
critical examination is to be sincerely pitied, for whether he realise it
or no he thus deprives himself of whatever of poetry or of suggestiveness,
of charm, or of profundity, they may contain.
For Gilbert the fable of Galatea, of the statue come to life, was
something more than it had ever been either for artist or man of thought:
it offered a form to that dream by which he was haunted, a frame for that
favourite picture he had so often sketched out already--the woman whose
heart is a _tabula rasa_, whose mind is an instrument that has never been
used, but is perfected and ready for use, who for the expression of her
unsophisticated feelings has all the resources of intelligence and
language at her command. What _we_ learn during the toilsome schooling of
twenty or thirty years _she_ apprehends at a glance, and it would seem
that she is the better able to judge of life in that she sees it
reflected, as it were, in a single picture suddenly unveiled.
Mr. Gilbert's Pygmalion is married to a woman whom he loves, and who sits
to him as a model. He is not in love with the statue at the outset. He is
jealous, however,--and in this conception the author is more Greek than
the Greeks themselves,--of the gods, in that they alone have the power of
giving life. _He_ is capable only of producing this inanimate figure. As
for death, any common murderer can achieve that better than he. It is not
Venus who gives life to Galatea to satisfy mere lust; it is Diana, whose
priestess Cynisca he had taken from her, and who avenges herself by this
cruel gift, whilst humbling at the same time the pride of the sons of
Prometheus. Thus it comes that Pygmalion's feeling upon first noting the
aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious
awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the
gradual passage from this feeling to that of love which constitutes the
life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the
first question of Galatea, "Who am I?"--"A woman." "And you, are you also
a woman?"--"No, I am a man." "What, then, is a man?" Upon this the pit
would burst out in a roar of laughter which must have hurt the ears of the
author. How few of those who laughed were qualified to appreciate
Pygmalion's reply--
"A being strongly framed,
To wait on woman, and protect her from
All ills that strength and courage can avert;
To work and toil for her, that she may rest;
To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh;
To fight and die for her, that she may live!"
Galatea learns the right which another woman possesses to Pygmalion, the
thousand shackles by which men are content to limit their slender liberty
and to diminish their fugitive enjoyments. The evening comes, and with it
sleep. She thinks she is turning again to stone, then she dreams, and then
she sees the light once more. But is life the dream or is the dream life?
She asks Myrine, Pygmalion's sister, for an explanation of all these
things. Myrine replies--
_Myrine_: "Once every day this death occurs to us,
Till thou and I and all who dwell on earth
Shall sleep to wake no more!"
_Galatea_: (_Horrified, takes Myrine's hand_) "To wake no more?"
_Pygmalion_: "That time must come, may be, not yet awhile,
Still it must come, and we shall all return
To the cold earth from which we quarried thee."
_Galatea_: "See how the promises of newborn life
Fade from the bright life-picture one by one!
Love for Pygmalion--a blighting sin,
_His_ love a shame that he must hide away.
Sleep, stone-like, senseless sleep, our natural state,
And life a passing vision born thereof,
From which we wake to native senselessness!
How the bright promises fade one by one!"
At this point the idea reaches its full expression. The scenes written for
old Buckstone, as an Athenian dilettante who judges statues by their
weight; his dialogue with Galatea, in which the piece returns to the old
groove of fun and folly and sinks almost to the level of burlesque, and
finally, the domestic drama in which Pygmalion and Cynisca are concerned,
and then the renunciation of self which moves Galatea to become once again
the lifeless statue, that she may thus bring back peace and happiness to
those upon whom she had entailed trouble and disunion: all this adds but
little to the value of the piece, though it cannot be said to spoil it. It
remains one of the most delicate, graceful, and ingenious of modern
English plays.
Gilbert had felt the need more than once of providing some sort of musical
accompaniment for his paradoxical fantasies, for is not music the natural
background to the land of dreams? This accompaniment seemed to soften the
outlines of his thought and to temper the bitterness of his satire. The
writer had experimented first with the music of his own verses, but this
was not a success. Why then should he not secure the aid of real music by
a musician? He did so in _Trial by Jury_, a very amusing one-act piece,
suggested in part by his joyous reminiscences of Liverpool. It was a
little piece, but it had a big success. Then came the long series of comic
operas which have rendered the Gilbert and Sullivan combination as popular
in England as that of Meilhac and Halevy with Offenbach was with us during
the last ten years of the Empire. The English owe a debt of gratitude to
their compatriots for having dethroned burlesque and operetta, two imports
from France which competed with the national manufacture. So far so well,
but I doubt whether the native comic opera will survive its originators.
Already they are out of fashion.
For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at _Princess Ida_, unless it
was at _Patience_. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of
Tennyson, which bears the similar title _The Princess_, and is a satire
upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the
aesthetic movement. In _Iolanthe_ I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been
married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his
colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in
their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence
(expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the shining face of
Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down
before Whitehall.
In _The Pirates of Penzance_, and in _Pinafore_, mankind seems to be
walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in
making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected
from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is
the plot of the _Pirates_. Frederic's nurse was charged by his parents to
make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood
and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract
of apprenticeship, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty
accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen
of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set
himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by
the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall
have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born
on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years
still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw's devotion to strict
legality--this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the
production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of
the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would
you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish
forth three hours' entertainment? But the author was justified by the
result.
Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and
Lincoln's Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer
all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his
dialectical resources, by his proneness to subtle distinctions and
interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against
realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty
for losing good cases and winning bad ones.