W. S. Gilbert*

Dramatist, Humorist, Poet, Lawyer

The Man. Charles Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson, Thackeray, acting, conjuring, photography, the Book of Job, the law, the sea, were among the major interests of William Schwenk Gilbert. He was a witty man with a quick temper and a kind heart. He never 'wittingly killed a black-beetle.' Fond of dancing, he was a master of the Scotch Reel. His genius for versification found outlet in his private life by innumerable informal limericks. His only pets were two ring-tailed lemurs, who later (in 1905) combined happily to produce a thrill, "the first born in captivity since 1881." Gilbert's hasty temper became famous. It was quick to rise, quicker to cool. He was a man of close friendships and warm affections. Women he liked. He preferred to talk to them than to men.

Early Life. Gilbert was born in London, 1836. His father was a naval surgeon and a mediocre writer. He was educated at Boulogne, Ealing (a notable establishment), King's College, London. When the end of the Crimean War prevented his taking a commission in the Royal Artillery, he went into the Civil Service. For four years he was an excessively bored clerk in the Education Department of the Privy Council Office. Then he became a barrister.

Lawyer. Fortunately W. S. Gilbert was a very bad lawyer. His failure at the bar took him four years, in the course of which he earned -L-75. His first client, a woman, on the unfortunate termination of the case, removed her heavy boot and threw it at his head. Missing Gilbert the boot hit a reporter. Newspaper report of the trial was conspicuously unfavorable.

Gilbert averaged five clients yearly. Finding this an insufficient triumph, he set about the business of keeping body and soul together by the not unusual expedient of writing short stories, humorous bits, light verse. He became a contributor and later a member of the staff of Fun, humorous weekly edited by an indomitable maker of puns named H. J. Byron.

Bab Ballads. Gilbert's first work of conspicuous note. The Bab Ballads ("Bab" was a childhood nickname) came into being through Fun. They are nonsense verses in a class by themselves, illustrated by inimitable thumbnail sketches by their author.

Gilbert and Sullivan. The 13 great comic operas produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan appeared between 1875 and 1896. It is one of the happiest instances of united artistic effort in history. The series -- including The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, H. M. S. Pinafore, Ruddigore, Patience, The Yeoman of the Guard-- is alone in its class, among the supreme achievements of English humor. Any discussion of the respective importance of Gilbert and Sullivan is irrelevant. There is glory enough for two. Most of the mechanical details of production fell to Gilbert. It was he, of course, who furnished plots, characters, situations, words, to which Sullivan fitted his music. Too much has been made of the breach which later took place between the collaborators. Save for the brief period of estrangement, their association was completely agreeable.

The Artist. Gilbert had an eye for the absurd, in government, in the Law, in personalities. He was never tired of mocking the foibles of the England he loved. But in this book he is represented as a sentimentalist gone wrong. He himself was fonder of his serious comedies than of his triumphant excursions into topsy-turvydom. He was never fully aware of the peculiar quality of his own genius. Up to the end, he rebelled against the critics who, he felt, were forcing him to don the cap and bells, which became him so well.

Death. Gilbert died in 1911, aged 74, still vigorous, in the act of saving one of his guests, a lady, from drowning in a swimming-pond which had been one of his chief pleasures. It was a fitting end to a gallant life, a death befitting a man who was at all times a gentleman.

High Spots

Alpine Sticks and Cleated Shoes for the Yodelling Authors

Artists and mountain climbers have at least one common qualification. Dizziness must have no terrors for either. Perched on their respective peaks, the world becomes for them a distant and not particularly agreeable noise, wafted irrelevantly from an ignoble abyss. Conversely, the world is insignificantly concerned with the doings of the Alp scalers. Once you get appreciably above sealevel, you cease to be anybody's business. Incidentally, you cease to have any business of your own. Therein lies the glorious, soaring futility of art and mountaineering alike. Neither of them have any conceivable relation to life and the practical living thereof. At the same time they depend on the very intensity of life for their chief claim to continued existence.

The contracts of the literary artist with life are conspicuously Alpine. He looks upon the mortal world from a great height, but tolerantly. His vision is embracing, a little supercilious, but not antagonistic. At times, permitting himself a specialization of curiosity, he draws his trusty telescope and applies its concentrated vision to a limited section of the horizon. An Arnold Bennett may contrive to narrow the scope of his mundane investigation to the intensive inspection of one unsavory Soho basement. Joseph Conrad, his seaman's vision scorning the intervention of the spyglass, embraces the entire Mediterranean in a searching survey. Frank Swinnerton, perched on a suburban rooftop, observes with an amiable sympathy the beginnings of young Felix's cheerful misadventures.

A few of the incorrigibles, notably James Cabell, endeavor with some small degree of success, to hoist their less agile following to their own high places of the spirit. But even Cabell permits himself a not infrequent glance at the dwellers in the piquant values of material dalliance.

The writer is at his worst when he loses his grip on the pinnacle and goes tumbling down the mountain side to land with a dull and prosy thud in the world of his creation. As soon as he ceases to be the hermit of the high place; as soon as he begins to share the whims and fancies of mortality; as soon as he begins to take sides and see his characters as mouthpieces of his merely temporal cogitations, he ceases to be the climbing demigod, becomes the plodding propagandist. J.A.T.

Pirandello

Old, He Writes Wise Satires

Luigi Pirandello is a short, slight, active Italian gentleman of some 56 years, with a gray beard and bright brown eyes. He has come to America to witness the performance of a cycle of his plays,* soon to be presented in Manhattan. He has had a remarkably active literary life. After his early studies he became a teacher, an occupation which he has followed at intervals ever since. His output has been stupendous, including six volumes of verse, 365 short stories, novels and 22 plays of varying character. At the root of all his work is a scornful yet not too grim irony. To date Six Characters in Search of an Author and Floriani's Wife are his only plays to be produced here.

Signer Pirandello speaks no English. He speaks in rapid melodious Italian, with few gestures of hands but with great facial mobility. When I heard him he was discussing two kinds of art--that of persons and that of things. There is the contemplative artist, he says, who withdraws from the world and finally becomes lost in the secure observation of his own mentality. There is the artist who is stimulated by action, the sort of action that Mussolini now represents in Italy, whose interest is in people rather than in the mind.

This career of Pirandello's is an extraordinary one. He did not begin writing plays until he was 50 years of age and he was not really famous until he began writing plays. When you consider that three or four of our most brilliant American dramatists have ceased writing plays at an even earlier age than 50, there seems a good lesson in the activities of Pirandello. Why shouldn't a man keep his creative vitality until he reaches that period in which ihe can look at life with amused toler- ance, in which he is capable of interpreting life as a gay, mad, foolish show through which he has passed? Surely the wisest satire must be written by the old. The young can puncture bubbles; but only the man who has lived widely can destroy mountains. J.F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

TULIPS AND CHIMNEYS--E. E. Cummings--Seltzer ($2.00). E. E. Cummings was in a French prison during a great part of the war. His protest took the shape of a highly naturalistic narrative called The Enormous Room. In the present volume we have a collection of his poetry. His work is always distinguished by a rigid adherence to freedom. He would rather die than be usual. The result is a riot of noise and color, of poems sprawling across and around and through the page. His phrases are unforgettable and wholly unique. Whether or not he has the gift of the inevitable word, he at least can always find the unexpected one. Cummings is intrusively frank, self-consciously courageous, flinging his novelties with a somewhat superfluous clamor into his reader's face. Out of his experimentation may come almost anything.

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS (Fourth Series.) -- Frank Harris -- Brentano ($2.50). Frank Harris has known practically everyone of any prominence. Of all the people he knows, he retains his highest admiration for himself. However, he is not averse to discussing the contacts of his fellow Olympians with himself. In this collection he describes in a manner highly anecdotal some 32 persons varying from Charles S. Chaplin and Sarah Bernhardt to Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, James Larkin, Emma Goldman, Lord Curzon. Otto Kahn and Leon Trotzky he compares as "two great captains." His rule, he tells us, has been to take people he has "known intimately and like'd if not loved." Among his exceptions to this rule are Roosevelt, Wilson, Harding, whom he neither likes nor loves, and groups under the heading "Gargoyles."

THE DANCE OF LIFE -- Havelock Ellis -- Houghton Miff tin ($4.00). Havelock Ellis, psychologist and essayist, called "the most civilized Englishman living today," writes his philosophic view of life and the living thereof. "It has always been difficult," he begins, "for Man to realize that his life is all an art." In the development of his thesis--which is considerably more an attitude than a theory--Mr. Ellis has written what will probably stannd as one of the most significant achievements of contemporary thought.

*W.S. GILBERT, His LIFE AND LETTERS-- Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey--Doran ($5.00).

*The cycle will include Henry IV, Right You Are and a revival of Six Characters in Search of an Author. Henry IV has appeared simultaneously in London, Paris, Moscow.