Ph.D.
The time has come when a serious attempt must be made to determine
Gilbert and Sullivan's permanent place in the world of creative art. A
brief review of the musical-comedy output during the last theatrical
season will convince any one that we are sufficiently far removed from
"Pinafore" and "The Mikado" to insure a true perspective.
Happily, the material for a systematic examination of the subject is
accessible. It is true that we are still without a definitive text of
the Gilbert librettos. For this we must wait until Professor Rücksack,
of the University of Kissingen, has published the results of his
monumental labours. So far, we have from his learned pen only the text
for the first half of the second act of "The Mikado." This is in
accordance with the best traditions of German scholarship, which demand
that the second half of anything shall be published before the first
half. In the meanwhile, there are several editions of Gilbert available
which, though somewhat imperfect, ought to present no difficulties to
the scholar. For example, in my own favourite edition of "The Mikado"
(Chattanooga, 1913), the text reads:
And he whistled an air, did he,
As the sabre true
Cut cleanly through
His servical vertebrae!
where "servical" is evidently a misprint for "cervical." So, too, the
trained eye will at once discern that in the following passage from the
Peers' chorus in "Iolanthe":
'Twould fill with joy
And madness stark
The hoi polloi
(A Greek rebark),
the sense is greatly improved by reading "remark" for "rebark," unless
we argue that the chorus had a slight cold in the head, an assumption
which nothing in the text would justify us in bringing forward, and
which, indeed, would be contradicted by the highly emphasised summer
style in which the chorus is apparelled. Thus forewarned, then, we are
ready to enter upon a detailed examination of the intensely animated men
and women in whom Sir William S. Gilbert has embodied his _ultima
ratio_, his _dernier cri_, and his _Weltanschaung_.
In Ko-Ko, the author has given us a Man, with none of the
sentimentalities of August Strindberg, with nothing of the limited,
vegetarian outlook upon life of Bernard Shaw, with nothing of the
over-refinement of Mrs. Wharton. Ko-Ko is atingle with all the passion
and faults of humanity. He is both matter and spirit. He comes close to
us in his rare flashes of insight and in his moments of poignant
imbecility. The human being is not lost in the Lord High Executioner. He
is alive straight through to his entrails and liver, as Jack London
might say. He is infinite, even as life is infinite. He is, by turns,
affable, as with Pitti-Sing; cynically disdainful, as with Pooh-Bah;
paternal, as with Nanki-Poo.
In the presence of Yum-Yum he is that most appealing figure, a strong
man in love torn between desire and duty. The firmness with which he
rejects the suggestion that he decapitate himself, arguing that in the
nature of things such an operation was bound to be injurious to his
professional reputation, reveals a character of almost Roman austerity.
There is something of the Roman, too--or shall we say something of the
German?--in the thoroughness with which he would enter on his career. He
would prepare himself for his functions as Lord High Executioner by
beginning on a guinea pig and working his way through the animal kingdom
till he came to a second trombone. This is the old standard of
conscientiousness of which our modern world knows so little.
And yet a very modern man withal, this Ko-Ko. I cannot help thinking
that Mr. Chesterton would have loved him, and would have had no
difficulty in proving that his name should be pronounced not Ko-Ko, but
the second syllable before the first. He is modern in his extraordinary
adaptability to time and circumstance. Starting life as a tailor, he
adapts himself to the august functions of Lord High Executioner. He
adapts himself to Yum-Yum. He adapts himself to Katisha. No sooner is he
released from prison to become Lord High Executioner than he has ready
his convenient little list of people who never would be missed. Of his
powers of persuasion we need not speak at great length. His wooing of
Katisha is a triumph of romantic eloquence. It carries everything before
it, as in that superb climax when Katisha inquires whether it is all
true about the unfortunate little tom-tit on a tree by the river, and
Ko-Ko replies: "I knew the bird intimately." He is modern through and
through, our Ko-Ko. He is at one with Henri Bergson in asserting that
existence is not stationary but in constant flux, and that the universe
takes on meaning only from our moods:
The flowers that bloom in the spring,
Tra la,
Have nothing to do with the case.
Far less subtle a character is the Lord High Chancellor in "Iolanthe,"
although, within the well-defined liminations of his type, he is as real
as Ko-Ko. Like Ko-Ko he has risen from humble beginnings. But whereas
our Japanese hero attains fortune by trusting himself boldly and
joyfully to life, letting the currents carry him whither they will, like
Byron, like Peer Gynt, and like Captain Hobson, the Lord High
Chancellor's rise is the result of painful concentration and steadfast
plodding. Ko-Ko is at various times the statesman, the poet, the lover,
the man of the world (as when he is tripped up by the Mikado's
umbrella-carrier). The Lord High Chancellor is always the lawyer. In
response to Strephon's impassioned cry that all Nature joins with him in
pleading his love, that dry legal soul can only remark that an
affidavit from a thunderstorm or a few words on oath from a heavy shower
would meet with all the attention they deserve.
Plainly, we have here a man who has won his way to the highest place in
his profession by humdrum methods; the same methods which Sir Joseph
Porter, K.C.B., employed when, by writing in a hand of remarkable
roundness and fluency, he became the ruler of the Queen's navee; the
same methods brought into play by Major-General Stanley, of the British
army and Penzance, when he qualified himself for his high position by
memorising a great many cheerful facts about the square of the
hypothenuse.
There is matter enough for an entire volume on Gilbert's self-made
men--Ko-Ko, the Lord High Chancellor, Major-General Stanley, and the
lawyer in "Trial by Jury," who laid the foundation of his fortunes by
marrying a rich attorney's elderly ugly daughter. I throw out the
suggestion in the hope that it will be some day taken up as the subject
of a Ph.D. thesis in the University of Alaska. That is only one hint of
the unworked treasures of research that await the student in these
librettos. How valuable would be a really comprehensive monograph on the
royal attendants in Gilbert, including a comparison of the Mikado's
umbrella-carrier with the Lord High Chancellor's train-bearer!
As for Gilbert and Sullivan's women, I find that even if I were not so
near to the end of my chapter, I could not enter upon a discussion of
the subject. The field is too vast. I must content myself with merely
pointing out that Gilbert's ideas on women were painfully Victorian. It
is true that the eternal chase of the male by the female was no secret
to him. In Katisha's pursuit of Nanki-Poo we have a striking
anticipation of Anne's pursuit of John Tanner in "Man and Superman." But
on the whole, Gilbert describes his women of the upper classes as
simpering and sentimental--Josephine, Yum-Yum, Mabel, Iolanthe--and his
women of the working classes as ignorant and incapable. What an
extraordinary example of ineptitude is afforded by Little Buttercup,
who, in her capacity as baby-farmer, so disastrously mixes up Ralph
Rackstraw with Captain Corcoran. Or by Nurse Ruth of Penzance, who fails
to carry out orders and, instead of apprenticing her young charge to a
pilot, apprentices him to a pirate. Miss Ida Tarbell could not have
framed a severer indictment of inefficiency in the home.