The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

by Augustin Filon

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 Halévy 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.