WS Gilbert A Mid-Victorian Aristophanes - Haddon Hall

20 THE ENGLISH ARISTOPHANES
This quality is the more remarkable when we consider to what grace it is allied. It would
be difficult to beat Pygmalion’s compliment to his wife Cynisca — a compliment truly
poetical: Why, here’s ingratitude, to slander Time,
Who in his hurried course has passed thee by!
Or is it that Cynisca won’t allow
That Time could pass her by, and never pause
To print a kiss upon so fair a face?
Gilbert is best known by his operettas, but some of his chief creations are the satires
without songs given before his genius won a wider popularity through the marriage of his
muse to Sullivan’s entrancing music. Who now reads or sees Charity? Yet it is well
worth reading, and might be revived with advantage on the stage. It handles what would
now be termed a problem with insight, exposing the subterfuges of false philanthropy and
transfiguring the loving kindness of an erring heroine. The tramp, “Ruth Tredgett” — the
simple objective of both — reveals herself seriously, and in one of her sentences she
strikes the very keynote of all Gilbert’s future work:
“We meet in a strange way after so many years,” exclaims the hypocrite “Smalley,”
encountering his former victim. “Yes,” she answers, “we do meet in a strange way.
Seems to me it’s something of a topsy-turvy way. But it’s a topsy-turvy world, ain’t it?”
There we get Gilbert’s whole gay-grave faculty — the inverting power which deals
breezily with the cant of coincidence. That note had, of course, been struck in his Bab
Ballads, but Gilbert came to see that there was more than farce in it, and that the quaint
pathos which he had singled out in his ballad of the poor ballet-girl was universal. That is
his irony. Everywhere it seizes on the impasses of existence and the strange contrasts of
the commonplace. He saw them in all the conventions around him, and still more in the
sham defiance of those conventions. A straight line was a straight line, and his ingenuity
reveled in devising comical retributions for such as persisted in calling it crooked.
Solemn shams and pompous incapacity were his butts, but everywhere he put these old
laughingstocks into new positions, till their futility became piteous, and everywhere he
descried a sort of romance, and weird glamour, in the familiar. Give him a garret and a
broken-down beau, and he would at once evolve trains of circumstance outvying
Aladdin’s palace. Or give him a stingy philanderer and the Scotch marriage laws — the
Nemesis of Greek tragedy is in sight. Give him a stray “bobby,” and at once, in a ruined
chapel by moonlight, which does not contain the tombs of the “modern major-general’s
ancestors”— a whole chorus of heroic constables will assure us that:
When the coster’s finished jumping on his mother
He loves to lie a-basking in the sun.
Ah, take one consideration with another,
The policeman’s life is not a happy one.