So few people are as interesting as their work—they reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books. W. S. Gilbert was an exception—he was as amusing as his Bab Ballads, and as sarcastic as “H.M.S. Pinafore.” A sparkling librettist, he was likewise a brilliant talker.
How he loved a joke, even against himself! How well he told a story, even if he invented it on the spot as “perfectly true.” His mind was so quick he grasped the stage setting of a dinner-party at once, and forthwith adapted his drama of the moment to exactly suit his audience.
After a lapse of nearly twenty years “Iolanthe” was revived at the Savoy. Not one line or one word of the original text had been altered. “Pinafore,” when it was revived for the second time, just twenty-one years after its first performance, ran for months. How few authors’ work will stand such a test of excellence, yet Gilbert penned a dozen light operas.
The genesis of “Iolanthe” is referable, like many of Gilbert’s libretti, to one of the Bab Ballads. The “primordial atomic globule” from which it traces its descent is a ballad called “The Fairy Curate.”
It is a well-known fact that almost every comedian wishes to be a tragedian, and vice versa—look at Irving and Beerbohm Tree—and Gilbert had a great and mighty sorrow all his life. He 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 bark as a librettist he had to persevere in penning what he called “nonsense.”
The public were right; they knew there was no other W. S. Gilbert, they wanted to be amused. Some say the art of comedy-writing is dying out, and certainly no second Gilbert seems to be rising among the younger men, no humorist who can call tears or laughter at will, and can send his audience away happy every night. The world owes a debt of gratitude to this gifted scribe, for he never put an unclean line upon the stage and yet provoked peals of laughter while slyly giving his little digs at existing evils. His style has created a name of its own; to be Gilbertian is all that is smart, brilliant, caustic, and clean.
Mr. Gilbert proudly remarked when he was just sixty-five, that he had cheated the doctors, and signed a new lease of life on the twenty-one-year principle. During those sixty-five years he had turned his hand to many trades. After a career at the London University, where he took his B.A. degree, he read for the Royal Artillery; but on the Crimean War coming to an end and no more officers being wanted, he became a clerk in the Privy Council Office, and was subsequently called to the Bar. He was also a Militiaman, and at one time an occasional contributor to Punch, becoming thus an artist as well as a writer. His pictures are well known, for all the two or three hundred illustrations in the Bab Ballads are from his clever pen. I saw him make an excellent sketch in a few minutes at his home on Harrow Weald; but photography cast its web about him and he disappeared into some dark chamber for hours at a time, alone with his thoughts and his photographic pigments. The results were charming.
What a lovely home that is, standing in a hundred and ten acres right at the top of Harrow Weald, with a glorious view over London, Middlesex, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire. He farmed the land himself, and talked of crops and stock with a glib tongue, although the real enthusiast was his delightful wife, who loves her chickens and her roses.
Sullivan always wrote the music after Gilbert had written the words. Gilbert’s ear for time and rhythm was impeccable, but he freely admitted that he had a very imperfect sense of tune.