WS Gilbert A Mid-Victorian Aristophanes - Haddon Hall

36 THE ENGLISH ARISTOPHANES
But there is one which has never, I believe, been published about the affable and
generous railway director in Thespis who “tipped all the outside porters” and
Gave his friends some shooting
In his little place at Tooting.
Eventually, through a series of amusing misfortunes, he falls on evil days, and now
The shareholders are all in the Work’us,`
And he sells lights in the Regent Circus.
How good, too, is his irony even on irony; and how unexpected! To illustrate its
idioms would be to requote his plays, but one song has been half forgotten and must be
recalled. It comes from Princess Ida, and it is sung by the redoubtable “Arac”:
This helmet, I suppose, Was meant to ward off blows;
It’s very hot, And weighs a lot,
As many a guardsman knows, So off that helmet goes.
This tight-fitting cuirass Is but a useless mass;
It's made of steel, And weighs a deal,
A man is but an ass, Who fights in a cuirass,
So off goes that cuirass.
These things I treat the same (leg pieces) I quite forget their name,
They turn one’s legs To cribbage-pegs.
Their aid I thus disclaim, Though I forget their name.
Nowhere, too, is his irony more marked than in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where
the soliloquizing Hamlet figures as the worst bore in England. Nor should the Pirates’
disclaimer of poetry be omitted; it brings us back again to our starting-point of Gilbert’s
own faculty of deromanticising what he also romanticizes:
Although our dark career
Sometimes involves the crime of stealing,
We rather think that we’re
Not altogether void of feeling.
Although we live by strife,
We’re always sorry to begin it,
And what we ask is life
Without a touch poetic in it.
To which replies the chorus,
Hail, Poetry, thou heaven-born maid, Thou gildest e’en the pirate’s trade!
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment! All hail, Divine Emollient!