WS Gilbert A Mid-Victorian Aristophanes - Haddon Hall

42 A CLASSIC IN HUMOUR
I enjoy the story of Babette’s love for a very stout English sailor who leant gracefully
against posts on the quay of Boulogne. But how impoverished that story would be if we
had not Mr. Gilbert’s own description of the captain’s view of the situation!
He wept to think a tar of his Should lean so gracefully on posts,
He sighed and sobbed to think of this, On foreign, French, and friendly coasts.
“It’s human nature, p’raps — if so, Oh isn’t human nature low?”
He called his Bill, who pulled his curl, He said, “My Bill, I understand
You’ve captivated some young gurl On this here French and foreign land.
Her tender heart your beauties jog — They do, you know they do, you dog.
You have a graceful way, I learn, Of leaning airily on posts,
By which you’ve been and caused to burn A tender flame on these here coasts.
A fisher gurl, I much regret, Her age, sixteen—her name Babette.”
When I analyse the delightfulness of this passage, I find that it consists mainly in the
sudden changes of tone in the Captain’s manner — his ranging between extreme
vulgarity and gentility, and between sternness and jocularity. Note, too, the cunning
repetition of “French and friendly.” All the Bab Ballads abound in such tricks, and much
of the fun depends on them. But, artist though Mr. Gilbert is, his art is always natural and
spontaneous. He is never academic. Had he been a don at one of the Universities, he
would have polished and polished his verses till half the fun had been polished out of
them. He would have been a mere Calverley. Humour must be spontaneous; else it is
deadly. And the artistic expression of humour must, likewise, be spontaneous, to a certain
degree. It is well for Mr. Gilbert, and for me, that when he wrought the Ballads he was in
the thick of the rough-and-tumble Bohemian journalism of the ’sixties. Art was too
strongly innate in him to be killed by that atmosphere. Elsewhere it would have become
over-refined for the purpose of these Ballads.