CHAPTER V
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 naïve 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?