With a congenial companion Mr. Gilbert is in his element. He is a fine-looking man with white hair and ponderous moustache, and owing to his youthful complexion appears younger than his years. He loves to have young people about him, and is never happier than when surrounded by friends.
In 1901, after an interval of nearly twenty years, his clever comic opera Iolanthe was revived at the Savoy with great success. Not one line, not one word of its original text had been altered, yet it took London by storm, just as did Pinafore when produced for the second time. How few authors’ work will stand so severe a test.
The genesis of Iolanthe is referable, like many of Mr. Gilbert’s libretti, to one of the Bab Ballads. The “primordial atomic globule” from which it traces its descent is a poem called The Fairy Curate, in which a clergyman, the son of a fairy, gets into difficulties with his bishop, who catches him in the act of embracing an airily dressed young lady, whom the bishop supposes to be a member of the corps de ballet. The bishop, reasonably enough, declines to accept the clergyman’s explanation that the young lady is his mother, and difficulties ensue. In the opera, Strephon, who is the son of the fairy Iolanthe, is detected by his fiancée Phyllis in the act of embracing his mother; Phyllis takes the bishop’s view of the situation, and complications arise.
Mr. Gilbert has penned such well-known blank verse dramas as The Palace of Truth, Pygmalion and Galatea, The Wicked Worlds, Broken Hearts, besides many serious and humorous plays and comedies—namely, Dan’l Druce, Engaged, Sweethearts, Comedy and Tragedy, and some dozen light operas.
It is a well-known fact that almost every comedian wishes to be a tragedian, and vice versâ, and Mr. Gilbert is said to have had a great and mighty sorrow all his life. He always wanted to write serious dramas—long, five-act plays full of situations and thought. But no; fate ordained otherwise, when, having for a change started his little barque as a librettist, he had to persevere in penning what he calls “nonsense.” The public were right; they knew there was no other W. S. Gilbert; they wanted to be amused, so they continually clamoured for more; and if any one did not realise his genius at the first production, he can hardly fail to do so now, when the author’s plays are again presented after a lapse of years, without an altered line, and still make long runs. Some say the art of comedy-writing is dying out, and certainly no second Gilbert seems to be rising among the younger men of the present day, no humourist who can call tears or laughter at will, and send his audience away happy every night. The world owes a debt of gratitude to this gifted scribe, for he has never put an unclean line upon the stage, and yet provokes peals of laughter while shyly giving his little digs at existing evils. His style has justly created a name of its own.
W. S. Gilbert has always had a deep-rooted objection to newspaper interviews, just as he refuses ever to see one of his own plays performed. He attends the last rehearsal, gives the minutest directions up to the final moment, and then usually spends the evening in the green-room or in the wings of the theatre. Very few authors accept fame or success more philosophically than he does. When Princess Ida was produced he was sitting in the green-room, where there was an excitable Frenchman, who had supplied the armour used in the piece. The play was going capitally, and the Frenchman exclaimed, in wild excitement, “Mais savez-vous que nous avons là un succès solide?” To which Mr. Gilbert quietly replied, “Yes, your armour seems to be shining brightly.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the Frenchman, with a gesture of amazement, “mais vous êtes si calme!”
And this would probably describe the outward appearance of the author on a first night; nevertheless nothing will induce him to go in front even with reproductions.