WS Gilbert A Mid-Victorian Aristophanes - Haddon Hall

16 THE ENGLISH ARISTOPHANES
THE ENGLISH ARISTOPHANES BY WALTER SICHEL
When a new voice makes a new world dance to a new tune we acknowledge a genius.
Sometimes he does so in a way that may be pursued: he founds a school which expands.
So, after many colloquial experiments, Montaigne’s essay in essays blossomed into the
present cosmopolitan novel which barely permits its forefather to recognize himself. But
sometimes his enchantment is limited to his own originality, which no copyist can
develop. He has achieved all that was possible in his peculiar sphere: he is a
phenomenon. Such was Aristophanes; such, in his measure, Sir William Gilbert — both,
in whatever respects incomparable with each other, wholly incomparable with anyone
else; both, poet-ironists and creators of fresh provinces; both, inverters of what is termed
the real, and realizers of the world’s inversions.
Gilbert has left us, but his works will not easily pass away so long as poetic humor and
prose-fairyland hold their own, so long as “superior persons” are kept at a respectful
distance. His dramatic humoresques have already become literature, and in both aspects
they are signal. Our English Aristophanes was eminently a stylist and constructor. He
was a master of the comic and lyric stage in nearly all their departments. His rhymes and
his rhythms harmonize even the most extravagant of his capers and caprices, and, while
they dance hand and foot with them, they restrain their antics almost severely. He is the
most critical of creators, the most creative of critics in an atmosphere which he may be
said to have rediscovered. For that atmosphere, despite the centuries, is, after all, the
atmosphere of Aristophanes. Their world is one not of nonsense but of sense upside
down. It laughs thought into us. And though it is in both cases a sphere as light as down,
it is not ethereal, but a borderland between empyrean and the too solid earth. Its welkin
rings with everyday laughter, and the mirage of a masquerade contracts the countenances
with the visors. Truth smiles from the bottom of a most sparkling fountain, the spray of
which is hued with rainbow ironies. With all the magic of its background, the victory of
whim is short-lived. It is the triumph of hypothesis, resembling one of those systems that
proceed logically from paradox; inconsequence turns consequent, while fantasy lends
wings to the logic of the illogical like Pirates of Penzance’s:
How quaint the ways of paradox,
At common sense she gaily mocks.