Pooh to a Callow Throstle

PLAYS AND POEMS (1,218 pp.)--W. S. Gilbert--Random House ($3.50).

It was a robber's daughter, and her name was Alice Brown,

Her father was the terror of a small Italian town;

Her mother was a foolish, weak, but amiable old thing;

But it isn't of her parents that I'm going for to sing. . . .

"Oh, holy father" Alice said, "'twould grieve you, would it not?

To discover that I was a most disreputable lot! . . .

I have helped mamma to steal a little kiddy from its dad, "

I've assisted dear papa in cutting up a little lad.

I've planned a little burglary and forged a little cheque,

And slain a little baby for the coral on its neck!"

Bab Ballads

Some of William Schwenck Gilbert's own infancy must have gone into this carefree jingle. Aged two (and known to his doting parents as "Bab"), Gilbert was being wheeled in his pram along an Italian country road when the local bandits appeared on the scene. They tipped their hats to the nursemaid, suavely persuaded her that they had been sent by father Gilbert to fetch his son, and disappeared into the mountains with Bab (in later life, Gilbert insisted that he remembered the scenery as being very fine). The bandits demanded, and promptly received, a ransom of -L-25.

Is There a Baby In the House?

Today, most citizens of the English-speaking world would feel that Bab was cheap at the price. They might also feel that without this firsthand experience of Italian opera bouffe at an impressionable age, Gilbert would never have furnished his famed librettos* with some of their most striking characteristics, e.g., the plausible ruffians and harried nursemaids, the wacky plots that hinge on babies stolen and strayed, the identities lost in enigmas and found through

. . . wondrous revelation!

. . . Unlooked-for situation!

Masters of Mayhem. Bab Gilbert grew up in that peculiarly Victorian period which saw the rise of the limerick, the nonsense-rhyme, the deadpan fantasy, the whimsical fairytale, the gay and dexterous verse-strummings on themes of mayhem, decapitation, kidnaping, cannibalism--an era that began with Thackeray, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Gilbert himself, and was carried on into the 20th Century by James Barrie, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Evelyn Waugh.

Like most of these brilliant irreverents and fantasists, W. S. Gilbert was a diehard conservative by conviction, a palace-revolutionary by temperament. When Gilbert heard that suffragettes had chained themselves to the railings in Downing Street, crying "Votes for Women!" he barked: "I shall chain myself to the railings outside Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital and yell 'Beds for Men!' " Gilbert's tributes to Queen and Country were usually proffered on the end of a spear. He satirized royalty, the peerage, the law, the clergy, bureaucrats, the Army & Navy.

He began adult life as a barrister, quit (to write light verse and opera) after he inherited a small income--and after a female thief he was unsuccessfully defending whipped off one of her boots in court, and aimed it at his head. The law and its devotees became one of his favorite butts--as witness the court usher's song in Trial by Jury:

From bias free of every kind, This trial must be tried . . . Oh, listen to the plaintiff's case:

Observe the features of her face-- The broken-hearted bride. . . .

And when amid the plaintiff's shrieks, The ruffianly defendant speaks--Upon the other side; What he may say you needn't mind--From bias free of every-kind,

This trial must be tried!

Bluff, brusque, beefy Gilbert rated his own comedy highly, but had as little respect for Partner Arthur Sullivan's desire to write "solemn" music as he had for the poetical esthetes he pilloried in Patience. In fact, satirical Gilbert and solemn Sullivan collaborated best when they kept apart, exchanging their respective words and music chiefly by mail. But Sullivan, sentiment, and a first-rate business sense all combined to keep Gilbert's satirical aptitude in bounds.

Colorful Cabinet. Even so, there were many who were not amused. Prudish Lewis Carroll found the expression "Damn me!" in H.M.S. Pinafore "sad beyond words," and Queen Victoria decided that what was sauce for the Emperor of Japan in The Mikado was a lot too saucy for her in Utopia, Limited (an almost forgotten G. & S. opera in which members of the British Cabinet were portrayed as blackface minstrels). Certain noble ladies forbore to confess with the mercenary Duchess in The Gondoliers:

I write letters blatant On medicines patent--And use any others you mustn't--And vow my complexion Derives its perfection

From somebody's soap--which it

doesn't--Duke (significantly): It certainly doesn't.

Strumpet Call. As producer as well as librettist of the famous operas, Gilbert was the driving power behind the scenes. Through him, the light-opera chorus ceased to be a mere massed accompaniment to the soloists, became vociferous participants in the speedy, highly involved counterpoint of Gilbertian song. Through him, too, many a D'Oyly Carte Company member rose from the ranks to stardom. It was rarely a smooth rise: Gilbert's temper was as full of spikes as a bag of nails, his rehearsals long and terrifying. Once, when a player warmly urged his untalented mistress on Gilbert for a star part, Gilbert turned to a friend, said: "The fellow's obviously trying to blow his own strumpet."

An admirer of plain speaking (especially his own), Gilbert detested hypocritical modesty in women, and such "ideal" types as mild-mannered curates. Of the clergy in general he was shy and suspicious. He also disliked his fellow dramatist William Shakespeare, whose writing he considered "obscure." "What do you think of this passage?" he scornfully asked a Shakespearean enthusiast: " 'I would as lief be thrust through a quicket hedge as cry Pooh to a callow throstle.'" The enthusiast explained: "A great lover of feathered songsters, rather than disturb the little warbler, would prefer to go through a thorny hedge. But I can't for the moment recall the passage." Said Gilbert: "I have just invented it, and jolly good Shakespeare, too."

Birds in Their Little Nests. After the last of many temperamental disagreements with Sullivan, Gilbert retired to the country, where he became a somewhat eccentric justice of the peace. "Had you been a gentleman," he said to a chauffeur whom he had just fined -L-5 for reckless driving, "I should have fined you ten." Gilbert himself bought an American Locomobile--in which he promptly ran over a bicycling curate and sent his own wife flying into a hedge. "She looked like a large and quite unaccountable bird's nest," he mused.

One hot summer's day in 1911, a visitor who was bathing in his lake momentarily got out of her depth, screamed for help. Seventy-four-year-old Gilbert promptly swam out, and ordered: "Put your hand on my shoulder." She obeyed--and he sank like a stone. Only a short while before he had made one of his most typical--but most inaccurate--witticisms: "I fancy that posterity will know as little of me as I shall know of posterity."

* All 14 of which, plus the Bab Ballads with Gilbert's own illustrations, are included in this reissue.

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