THE UNDYING CHARM OF GILBERT and SULLIVAN

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 5, 1 November 1924, Page 47

THE UNDYING CHARM OF GILBERT and SULLIVAN

An Antidote for Jazz

NO TWO NAMES ARE MORE INDISSOLUBLY ASSOCIATED THAN THOSE OF THE CREATORS OF THE EVER POPULAR SAVOY OPERAS—NO COMBINATION WAS EVER MORE PERFECT

r J'' 0 think of the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan is to think of old friends, of rosy memories, of laughter without malice, and indulgences without regrets; for Gilbert and Sullivan, like their own sorcerer, are dealers in magic and spells. These operas have become an institution. They are the perfect result of the happy collaboration of a great author with a great composer, two men of genius almost miraculously qualified to help each other’s creation and complete each other’s work. We know their airs by heart. We know their words by heart. We know every action of the ridiculous, delightful figures. Like the droll creations of Shakespeare and Dickens, they have become a part of our artistic and humorous equipment. They have made secure their place in the tradition we call England. No Alteration No clowning, no gagging; these are classics, and good taste will condemn the smallest innovation as a blot. To alter a word of Gilbert is an offence as rank as to alter a phrase of Sullivan. These works of English art are an heirloom, and should be held inviolate. To me, it seems always something of a hardship that those who gave to us our music and our songs should be deaf to our applause and oblivious of our gratitude when we sing and play them. Let us hope they all are happily engaged creating new music and new laughter in some other planet. Sullivan was more than a great musician; he was a humorist. Gilbert was more than a wit and satirist he was an artist. Of how many librettists and composers may so much lie said ? Perhaps in no scene did the allied magicians work so unctuously or produce so perfect a combination of burlesque music and language as in the immortal march of the peers in “lolanthe.” And who that has seen it can forget the delicate brilliance and dainty vivacity of the entrance of the schoolgirls in “The Mikado”? Never, surely, through the ivory gate has tripped a more graceful troop of pretty, bubbling fairies. Gilbert was a consummate artist and stage manager, with an artist’s sense of form and colour, of light and shade, of grotesque or poetic action. And Sullivan wove each gay conceit with marvellous deftness into the iriscoloured pattern of his intoxicating numbers. A poet in form and colour, Gilbert, as a-writer, lacked warmth and tenderness, or concealed them, but it must be said of his finished art and polished satire that they are instinct, with a quality which reduces such a wit as Bernard Shaw to the status of a leering buffoon. Gilbert charms the eye, tickles the humour, and delights the intellect, but it is Sullivan who warms the blood and touches the heart. It is the music that brings pleasure into our homes, for unique as is the humour of Gilbert’s songs, we should repeat or read them seldom were it not for their setting of golden melody. A Master of Prose Gilbert’s dialogue was written in clean, nervous English, nor did its wit or fantasy baulk the comprehension of the least cultured auditors. I listened with delight, on the first night of “The Mikado,” to the speeches of Pooh Bah superbly spoken by Rutland Barrington. Pooh Bah: Don’t mention it. I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal, primordial, atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can’t help it. 1 was born sneering. What cleanness of point, what felicity of phrasing! Gilbert was a master of prose. But besides the music and the language, there is another special characteristic of these operas which accounts in a great measure for their phenomenal and perennial popularity. How is it that a Gilbert and Sullivan performance keeps an audience in good spirits and sends them away gratified and pleased? The explanation is quite simple. It has been often said of a delectable vintage that it does not contain a headache in a hogshead. Well, there is not a* heartache in any one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In all the mirthful, mocking, glittering scenes of these wonderful

plays there is nothing to wound or shock. This it is, above all, that accounts for their attraction. They take us out of a grey and anxious Avorld. They soothe our ears with seductive harmony and please our eyes with beauty, and afford us a blessed respite from worry and suspicion and sad memories and rating cares. The Enchanted Circle The associated magicians waft us into fairyland. Their characters are elves. They live and move in a world of their own— and what a world it is. It is a sunny world, a world of laughter and dance and song, where the pains and sorrows are but make-believe and no real tragedy ever easts a lingering shadow. Once within the enchanted circle we have regained the golden age. We are made free of the flower-like freshness and youthful gaiety of the Greek pastorals. We are,assured of “heart-easing mirth,” and know well that not even the lovers will mix bitters in the cup, nor the mistresses distress us with the fickle cruelties of a Moeris or Heliodora. Over the gates of Titipu or Barabaria should be inscribed the words, “Abandon care all ye who enter here.” In that smiling Never-Never Land there lurk not for our undoing any slouching crime, nor Avan grief with scalding tears, nor mean tragedy of want, nor any pale horror with dishevelled hair. The characters are common types, but how “translated The judge, the naval captain, the sardonic jailer, the sergeant of police, the majorgeneral, the peers; wearing modern clothing, speaking modern English, they are familiar yet strange, like reflections in a magic mirror. Dogberry, Justice Shallow, Ancient Pistol, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Mr. Micawber, Dugald Dalgetty—-these are men. Their characters are grotesque and comic, but quite human. But the people we meet in Savoyland are such as exist only in dreams. They are more than droll, they are queer. Yet with all their queerness they never annoy or offend. They are compounded of paradoxical pleasantries, of fantastic jocularities, of simulated passions and grimnesses unsubstantial. Being, as they are, mere figments of a humorous brain, irresponsible as Punch and Judy, or Pierrette or Pierrot, we never take them seriously. Dick Deadeye, the Pirate King, Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.8., Pooh Bah, King Gama, the Duke of Plaza Toro —these and their confreres have endeared themselves to the British people, as did Puck and Ariel and Robin Goodfellow. Music and Wit They are elves pretending to he comic mortals. Their fairy figures cast no shadows. heir mockery leaves no sting. Their odd, dispassionate behaviour might leave us cold were it not suffused in a glamour of sensuous melody. They sing deliciously, these bright motes in a gay sunbeam. They sing under the most untoward circumstances, foil threats with persiflage, and dance like leaves in the wind though the wind be from the East. Never weary, never sorrowful, never dull, their repartee and banter click like castanets or ring like cymbals. What “quips and cranks and wanton wiles” they all indulge in. Comus himself never “hurled such dazzling spells into the spongy air.” And so, with never a shock or a sigh to fetch them back to earth, their audiences laugh and smile and thoroughly enjoy themselves. That, I think, is the reason for the increasing prestige of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. They are all fun and music and wit and fancy; sparkling cups of pleasure, sans dregs or sting. I don’t know what our readers will think of ray opinion, but, to be frank, I would rather see and hear a Gilbert and Sullivan opera than a Shakespearean play. Shakespeare always seems to me too big for the theatre, too big for the players. I prefer to read him. Gilbert, looked at through the coloured glass of Sullivan’s genius, is less exacting, more consistently restful and amusing. I feel confident that so long as these operas are well staged and well played they will hold their pride of place against all rivals. And, as I have said, the music and the songs we can take with us into the bosom of our families. Long may our young people sing them and play them upon their domestic pianos. They arc a sure antidote to the jazz and other blatant vulgarities, for familiarity with real music breeds contempt for the meretricious and the loud.