[This article appeared in GASBAG no. 206 (Winter 1998).]
In 1891, Gilbert told Harry How in a Strand interview: "I consider the two best plays I ever wrote were 'Broken Hearts' and a version of the Faust legend called 'Gretchen.' I took immense pains over my 'Gretchen,' but it only ran a fortnight. I wrote it to please myself, and not the public."[1] And Hesketh Pearson quotes Gilbert has having said: "There is more of the real me in Broken Hearts than in anything I have written."[2]
Writers on Gilbert have always found it puzzling that he should have set so much store by these two plays, which most people who have read them agree are dreary, embarrassing stuff. But of course there is no contradiction in this: these plays were of great personal importance to Gilbert, but their appeal was perhaps too exclusively personal to him. We find him at his best when he explores ideas of more general interest to the society in which he lived. There is a place in literature for intensely private meditation, but most would agree that Gilbert's strengths did not lie in that area.
However, this is not to say that these plays do not repay study, though perhaps they are more interesting from a biographical than a literary point of view. Given Gilbert's own assurances that they were works of great personal significance to him, it is surely legitimate to examine them and try to discover where this significance might lie. David Eden addressed precisely this issue in his book Gilbert and Sullivan: The Creative Conflict, but though he did have some good things to say in his analysis, I disagree profoundly with many of his conclusions. I hope that, by approaching the subject from a less hostile angle, I might come to a better understanding of what is happening in these plays.
Gilbert and the Hunchbacks
Both the hunchbacks who appear in the Savoy Operas may be seen as, to some extent, Gilbert figures. Dick Deadeye is the one character in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) who expresses what is clearly Gilbert's own viewpoint, that "When people have to obey other people's orders, equality's out of the question"[3]: as Charles Hayter notes, he is "the spokesman for the most practical and realistic attitudes in the opera"[4]. The identification with Gilbert is confirmed by a passage in Gilbert's retelling of the opera for children:
Now Dick Deadeye was generally disliked because he was so unpleasant to look at, but he was really one of the best and kindest and most sensible men on board the Pinafore, and this shows how wrong and unjust it is to judge unfavourably of a man because he is ugly and deformed. I myself am one of the plainest men I have ever met, and at the same time I don't know a more agreeable old gentleman.[5]
But Dick Deadeye is not simply Gilbert in a mask: he plays the villain's role in the opera, and even gets to say: "Ha! ha! They are foiled - foiled - foiled!"[6] Though we are encouraged to sympathise with him when we first meet him, he is also a caricature, and we are always kept at a safe comic distance from him.
King Gama in Princess Ida (1884) reflects Gilbert in a different way. Leslie Baily notes that Gama "is really a jocular self-portrait of Gilbert", adding the comment which George Grossmith quotes Gilbert as having made in rehearsal: "I meant it for myself: I thought it my duty to live up to my reputation!"[7] It is kin to the other "jocular self-portrait" which is sometimes reproduced, a sketch caricature of Gilbert surrounded by signed confessions such as "I am an overbearing beast" and "I like pinching little babies"[8]. The intention behind these self-portraits is difficult to gauge, but perhaps it is fair to call them confessions made on the understanding that they are not to be believed.
A pattern is beginning to emerge. Both Dick Deadeye and King Gama may be seen as Gilbert-figures, but in both cases we are prevented from sympathising completely with them because of their less likeable qualities. (However, Gama becomes paradoxically more likeable because he takes such relish in not being likeable: he is one of those characters that we love to hate.) Significantly, these two characters are united by their sense of isolation from other people: Dick Deadeye's despairing cry of "for you all hate me, don't you?"[9] is echoed in Gama's "Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!"[10] Set apart from society by their appearance, it is scarcely surprising that they should start playing up the villain's role that has been forced on them.
The hunched back is a symbol of this divided response. It provokes sympathy but also sets the character apart. Gilbert's hunchbacks are, inevitably, outsiders, and they have an ambiguous attitude to the society from which they are excluded. They seem to despise society, but there are hints that they also crave acceptance. (This can be seen in Dick Deadeye's first scene[11], for instance.) There is a clear connection with Gilbert himself in all this: Gilbert, who found it difficult to mix socially and whose life was punctuated with bitter rows with his oldest friends; Gilbert, whose attitude to the established social order was fundamentally divided between contempt and admiration. But because Gilbert was what he was, he could not portray his hunchbacks in such a way as to solicit undivided sympathy for them: he wanted them to be kept at arms' length, because that was also what he wanted for himself.
Mousta and Florian
One of the central characters in Broken Hearts (1875) is Mousta, "a deformed, ill-favoured dwarf, hump-backed and one-eyed"[12]. We are perhaps now in a position to view Mousta from the right angle: to see in him more than a "comic element... too full of self-pity to be very amusing"[13], which was Max Keith Sutton's assessment. We may find confirmation of our suspicion in one of Gilbert's portrait-photograph cards, reproduced in Reginald Allen's W.S. Gilbert: An Anniversary Survey. On its back Gilbert wrote:
What do we do with such a thing as this
When it dares claim a fellowship with Man?
We tread it under foot -
we stamp it down,
Lest other reptiles take their cue from it
And say
"If he is human, so are we!"[14]
These lines from Broken Hearts refer to Mousta, and come from the play's most disturbing and memorable scene[15]. Again we find Gilbert confessing to his identity with a hunchbacked character, under the cover of a joke.
The play concerns a group of noblewomen who, having loved and lost, have retreated to the Island of Broken Hearts, vowing to love no living thing. But they have transferred their loves to inanimate objects: Lady Vavir loves a sundial (a symbol of mortality), and Lady Hilda a fountain (a symbol of vitality). The dashing Prince Florian invades the island: Vavir falls in love with him, and, following the example of many another Victorian heroine, falls ill and dies. Hilda, however, is made of sterner stuff and will, we understand, marry Florian after the play ends.
Mousta, the ladies' servant, is tolerated on the island (where men are forbidden) because, as he says bitterly, "by reason of my face and form/I do not count as man...."[16] He feels cruelly tormented by his situation, and he warns the women:
I'm an ape...
Who claims a place amid
this loveliness
By title of his sheer deformity!
Now, monkey though I
be, I am a man
In all but face and form - I've a man's heart,
A man's
desire to love - and to be loved - (HILDA seems amused.)....
It's well you should know this - be on your guard![17]
This is as clear an indication of sexual frustration as anyone could wish. And that casual stage direction "HILDA seems amused" is a fair indication of the lack of sympathy which all the other characters show for Mousta throughout the play. They refuse to consider him a human being like them, in spite of all his most impassioned protests.
Thus in a climactic scene between Mousta and the play's "hero" Prince Florian, the latter discovers that Mousta has used a veil which confers invisibility to trick Lady Hilda into declaring love for him. And Prince Florian (who, earlier in the play, had used the veil to play a similarly cruel practical joke) responds furiously:
Thou lovest her? Is there no blasphemy
That devils shrink from? Hast thou seen thyself? (Seizing MOUSTA
and holding his head over the pool.)
Look in the fountain - bend thy
cursed head!
Look at it - dog-face! (MOUSTA struggles.) Shrink not
back appalled -
It will not harm thee, coward - look at it!
What do we
do with such a thing as that....[18]
And so on to the lines which Gilbert quoted on his portrait-photograph card (with slight variations). Florian's brutality is exposed - his casual assumption that a good mind can exist only in a beautiful body. Florian's name (borrowed from Tennyson's The Princess) indicates his character perfectly: he is a flower of chivalry, a handsome dandy with the vanity and arrogance of one who knows he fits the social order perfectly. He is Mousta's absolute antithesis - as Mousta recognises, pleading with Florian as the latter threatens him with death:
Look at yourself, sir knight, then look at
me!
You, comely, straight-limbed, fair of face and form -
(I say not
this to court your favour, sir -
The Devil take your favour!) - I, a
dwarf,
Crooked, humpbacked, and one-eyed - so foul a thing
That I am
fain to quote my love for women
To prove that I have kinship with
mankind.
Well, we are deadly rivals, you and I.
Do we start fair, d'ye
think?[19]
It takes this to persuade Prince Florian to spare Mousta's life (noble fellow!). Mousta's character, a compound of fury, bitterness and self-loathing, has been formed because of his deformity and the reactions of his fellow-humans to it. Even on this isolated island he is an outsider, consistently treated as a lower form of life.
Mousta, like the other examples I have already mentioned, has his flaws: he is given to self-pity, and he behaves with cruel selfishness by tricking Lady Hilda into promising to love him. When threatened, he cringes. We cannot sympathise with him completely - but then, neither can we with the foppish Florian. Here, as in so many of Gilbert's plays, we feel Gilbert's distrust of "heroes". We are made to see Florian's casual arrogance and cruelty as well as his real chivalry.
The play may be seen as a duel between Mousta and Florian for the love of the women - a duel which Florian must inevitably win. But how are we to view Florian? This is only a tentative suggestion, but perhaps he is best seen as a kind of "dream-Gilbert", as Mousta is a "nightmare-Gilbert". Mousta is what Gilbert feared he was, and Florian is what he hoped he might be. Florian is, after all, a chivalrous knight, motivated by genuinely noble impulses as well as by the imp of thoughtless mischief with which he begins the play; whereas Mousta is, for whatever reason, a bitter man driven by sexual frustration. If the conflict is between these two halves of Gilbert, his "noble" and "base" elements, then the triumph of Florian may be seen as not only inevitable but also, perhaps, deserved. But I repeat, this is only a suggestion - with which I am not entirely convinced. Poor old Mousta is not so easily banished.
Faustus
Elements of both Florian and Mousta reappear in Gretchen (1879), in the single figure of Faustus (and it is only in the process of writing these words that I realise how close in sound "Mousta" and "Faustus" are). Faustus had once been a soldier, brave and worldly, but had quitted the world and become a monk when deceived by the woman he loved:
... She left me, for a man whose proffered
love
Had formed the theme of many an idle jest.
But he was rich - and
so - she went to him!
At once the open volume of her life
Lay plain
before me, and I read therein,
That she was - womankind!
Mad with the
frenzy of a shipwrecked heart...
I cursed the world and all the women in
it,
And here sought sanctuary.[20]
This story of Faustus's is paralleled in several other of Gilbert's plays: it is the reason why the title character of Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith (1876) became a misanthropic miser[21], and why Jeffrey Rollestone, the hero of The Ne'er-Do-Weel (1878), became a wandering tramp. A disappointment in love leads them to retreat from the world, to become misanthropes and outcasts.
The existence of these several examples suggests that this was a theme of some significance to Gilbert - as David Eden also notes. But we do not have enough solid evidence to justify our pretending to uncover the specifics of this significance.
Faustus has changed from being a foppish Florian-figure into an isolated Mousta. Faustus calls himself
[a] fierce, embittered cynic,
Who, in
heart-misery, sought refuge here,
As a poor, worried, over-hunted fox,
Cursing his persecutors, runs to earth
To lick his bleeding
flanks....[22]
However, though he has turned his back on the world which hurt him so deeply, he is no happier in his sanctuary:
No hope! no hope! no hope! For life entombed -
For life cut off from life - a breathing man,
Wrapped in a
winding-sheet of his own weaving!
A living heart, inurned and
sepulchred![23]
His problem is that he can no longer be happy in either the Church or the secular world, since he is out of sympathy with the values of both.
Faustus, hearing of a pure young maiden, Gretchen, "A psalm incarnate - an embodied prayer"[24], falls in love with her for her purity. Faustus hopes to be purified by loving her, but in the event the influence is all the other way: he corrupts her, and so kills her. (Gretchen is another Vavir-figure, welcoming death with suspicious eagerness.) Faustus, anguished with guilt at what he has done, cries: "Send me my death, oh Heaven - send me my death!"[25], and immediately Gottfried, a cousin of Gretchen, enters in a murderous fury. In a scene reminiscent of the scene between Florian and Mousta, Faustus pleads with Gottfried to kill him for what he has done (as Mousta had with Florian) - but here it is not the would-be slayer, but the dying Gretchen, who prevents the murder from taking place. Though Gretchen dies in the play's final moments (to the background of a sunrise, as Vavir's death was backed by a sunset), Faustus survives, and we understand that he will strive to follow Gretchen's advice:
Thou shalt atone, for thou hast greatly sinned
-
Thou shalt atone with worthy deeds lifelong;
Thou shalt atone with
steadfast, humbled heart,
With faith, and truth, and works of charity.
Atone with life - with brave and blameless life,
And not with coward death.
Resign thyself.[26]
But we have no reason to suppose that he will be any better able to resign himself to such a life now than in Act One. The action of the play has not resolved his dilemma between the Church and the secular world: it has only shown that his soul is too corrupt for the Church, though he remains bound to it by vows and conscience.
So Gretchen can be seen as a play about the unresolvable paradox of the outsider who seeks acceptance, the misanthrope who wants to be loved. Faustus has cut himself off from his natural roots and has been unable to find an environment where he can sprout new ones: and so he is left alone and rootless, with nowhere he can call home. And again we can see in Faustus at least an aspect of Gilbert himself. Faustus calls himself a cynic, as the critics often called Gilbert, but retains his belief in female purity - a sentimental aspect of Gilbert which is demonstrated clearly enough in the two plays I have been discussing. Also, just as Gilbert satirised the Establishment of which he became at length a part, so Faustus scorns worldly things and at the same time desires them.
It is not the fate of the outsider-figures I have been discussing to be given happy endings. Mousta escapes with his life, and is made to feel lucky to do so; Faustus must resign himself to a life of devotion which, if past experience is anything to go by, cannot satisfy him. The outsider must remain an outsider.
However, it is interesting to note that the outsiders in the two prose dramas I have mentioned have a much pleasanter fate. Dan'l Druce wins the love of his daughter and, casting off his misanthropy, becomes happy; Jeffrey Rollestone of The Ne'er-Do-Weel will wed Maud Callendar, the woman who caused his downfall by marrying another, and who is now a widow. Here the outsiders are accepted back into society.
Jack Point
In Broken Hearts, Prince Florian had played the cruel joke of pretending to be the voices of the inanimate objects loved by the women on the Island of Broken Hearts. No doubt this compound of chivalry and casual cruelty has reminded many readers of another Gilbert character, Colonel Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard (1888). Fairfax may be brave and gallant, but how cruel is the joke he plays on Elsie in Act Two of the opera! He and Florian are kindred spirits.
But if Florian comes, can Mousta be far behind? He reappears, of course, in the form of Jack Point. A strolling jester, first seen pursued by a mob which threatens to throw him in the river, his status as outsider is established immediately. Though there is nothing in the text to say he is a hunchback, it is well known that the medieval fools and jesters were often physically deformed in some way: the jester's costume may be described as a kind of artificial deformity.
Jack Point has the cynical patter of the professional comic, and his manner seems designed to prevent emotional involvement. Like many another comedian, he is unable to resist an easy joke, even though it might seem hurtful:
Lieut.... Are ye man and wife?
Point. No, sir; for though I'm a fool, there is a limit to my folly.[27]
In his first solo he preens himself on the nobility of his profession: "I ply my craft/And know no fear,/I aim my shaft/At prince or peer"[28], but in his second solo, in bitter mood, he recognises his ignominious position: "If the family fool/Tells a joke that's too French,/Half a crown is stopped out of his wages!"[29] The comic manner is a mere veneer, concealing a pit of bitterness, despair, and self-pity. Even when he sees Fairfax stealing Elsie away from him under his very nose, he does nothing practical to stop it happening, preferring morbid self-pity, because of his deep conviction of Fairfax's innate superiority. It is the Florian/Mousta duel all over again, though not conducted in such brutal terms this time. Point does not need Fairfax to hold him over a pool before he can be convinced that he does not deserve to be loved. Here, as before, the duel can only have one outcome - the triumph of the Florian-figure.
But there is a difference in the plot this time: whereas in Broken Hearts Mousta had been humiliated but had escaped with his life, here Point is utterly destroyed by losing Elsie: it is widely accepted that the final stage direction that "POINT falls insensible"[30] means that he dies. It is tempting to equate this with the deaths of Vavir and Gretchen in the earlier plays, though they had died because they had been loved, whereas Point dies because he is not loved.
The triumph of handsome, chivalrous Florian remains absolute, though in Yeomen we are invited, for the first time, to sympathise with the outsider in the hour of his humiliation as the drama ends: Jack Point succeeds in drawing attention away from the happy couple rejoicing in their youth, and reminds the audience that he has been very badly treated by events. This is much more than Mousta managed in Broken Hearts.
The identification of Jack Point with Gilbert has long been accepted. For instance, Hesketh Pearson wrote in 1935 that Gilbert "put a great deal of what he thought was his essential self into the character of 'Jack Point'"[31]. As in my previous examples, the identification should not be taken as absolute: Jack Point's self-pity, inherited from Mousta, distances us from him somewhat. (Jane W. Stedman notes that "J.M. Gordon's unpublished memoirs say that Gilbert intended Point to be 'a coward, playing on his own grievances'"[32].) Still, bearing in mind this caveat, I believe we may still accept the identification as broadly true.
A Tentative Conclusion
In Gilbert and Sullivan: The Creative Conflict, David Eden painted a portrait of Gilbert as an arrogant, domineering ogre with grotesque psychological problems. Now there are parts of this portrait which I do not deny are accurate. He could be very unpleasant, particularly in rehearsal. I am convinced that I should not have liked him very much if I had known him personally. I think his arrogant manner was a cover for his personal insecurities; but such justifications would have meant nothing to those who were on the receiving end of the arrogance. Not everyone was as understanding as Madame Novarro who wrote that Gilbert "was a very kind-hearted man, but he did not want anybody to know it"[33].
Eden's theories about Gilbert are flawed because for the most part they derive not from direct historical evidence, but from the evidence of Gilbert's writings, interpreted in ways which seem to me questionable. However, the careful reader will have noticed that my own chain of evidence, too, has many missing links. In several of my examples - notably that of Faustus - I have been unable to establish evidence for an identification between the character and Gilbert: I have used these examples simply because I feel they fit in usefully with other examples where the evidence is a little stronger.
Of course when I say that there is an identification between Gilbert and these characters, I do not mean that Gilbert "is" them in a simple sense. They are achieved characters in their own right, distinct from each other as well as from him. I only mean that Gilbert felt a sympathy for some of their motivations, especially those arising from their roles as outsiders. Gilbert, though born a middle class white male in the capital city of the country which was undoubtedly the dominant world power of the day, still felt separate from society, and this sense of exclusion makes itself felt throughout his works.
I contend that if we review all the examples I have been discussing - Mousta and Faustus and Jack Point, Dan'l Druce and Jeffrey Rollestone, even Dick Deadeye and King Gama - then we may be able to see in broad terms Gilbert as he saw himself; and we may come to understand that, formidable and domineering as he may have been, he was at heart a deeply insecure man.
I am aware that that last phrase is rather a wearisome cliché. And yet I believe it to be true. We may argue about the meaning of Gilbert's behaviour, but there can surely be no doubt that it was not the behaviour of a man who felt comfortable in society. His many lawsuits, which imply an assumption that the rest of the world was against him; his blazing rows about his plays, suggesting an insecurity about his writing which could only be hidden by over-emphatic defence; his blazing rows about other matters, for which similar explanations could be suggested: they all declare that he was a man not at ease with himself. He once wrote to Maud Tree: "I don't think I am a vain man or I shouldn't have so poor an opinion of what I do"[34]: and the biographies are full of anecdotes in which he expressed his poor opinion. He felt uneasily separate from society. All this expresses itself in his writings - and not only in the instances I have already explored.
One would expect that the writings of such a physically strong man, so dominating in personal manner, would assume the supremacy of the strong over the weak. But the strongest men in the Savoy operas are the three intensely dense sons of King Gama - who are rather an argument against physical strength. The Mikado is a hard, cruel man with no real human sympathy with those less important than he: he is an ogre, made acceptable only by the knowledge that he exists in a comic opera and will not be allowed to kill anyone. Gilbert directs audience sympathies instead towards Ko-Ko, the "little-man" comic hero. Gilbert's most appealing characters are downtrodden people struggling against adversity, like Ko-Ko or Robin Oakapple. Of course they are ridiculed for their petty vanities, but that serves only to make them more approachably human.
And yet... one is reminded that many of Gilbert's heroes are, after all, Florians, not Moustas. Fairfax is the hero of Yeomen, not Jack Point; Alexis is the hero of The Sorcerer, not J.W. Wells. Florian, too, was part of Gilbert, the part that encouraged Gilbert to establish his superiority over everyone else. Fortunately, Gilbert was too intelligent to portray this part of him uncritically: Alexis is a deliberate figure of fun, mercilessly mocked for his pomposity and arrogance. But it is not so clear if Gilbert intended characters like Florian and Fairfax to be viewed similarly. Their cruelty is not pointed up in the same way: it is simply presented to us, and we are left to make our own decisions. As a result our allegiances remain uncertainly divided between, for instance, Fairfax and Jack Point: and it may be that Gilbert (who put parts of himself into both characters) intended this division. We do him an injustice if we assume he was incapable of subtlety.
So we may tentatively conclude that Gilbert did indeed put different aspects of his own personality into those seeming opposites, Florian and Mousta, and their successors. Florian remains in control: he knows he is right, and he always comes out on top; but Mousta, who is powerless and inevitably loses the duel, does at least earn the sympathies of the audience - the legitimate earnings of the underdog. As to where the sympathies of Gilbert himself lay in all this, that is not so easy to decide: for this was a real division in his mind that he was expressing, and that is what makes it a real duel, and not merely a fixed fight between "right" and "wrong" attitudes.
NOTES
1. Harry How, "Illustrated interviews, no.
IV. - Mr. W.S. Gilbert", Strand magazine 2 (October 1891), p339.
2.
quoted Hesketh Pearson, Gilbert: his life and strife (London: Methuen
& Co. Ltd., 1957), p46.
3. W.S. Gilbert, Original plays: second
series (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925), p283.
4. Charles Hayter,
Gilbert and Sullivan (London: Macmillan, 1987), p89.
5. W.S.
Gilbert, The story of H.M.S. Pinafore (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.,
1913), p17.
6. Gilbert, Original plays 2, p295.
7. Leslie
Baily, The Gilbert and Sullivan book (London: Cassell, 1952), p229:
quotation from George Grossmith, "Recollections of Sir W.S. Gilbert",
Bookman, July 1911.
8. reproduced as frontispiece to Reginald
Allen, W.S. Gilbert: an anniversary survey and exhibition checklist
(Charlottesville, Virginia: The Bibliographical Society of the University of
Virginia, 1963), also David Eden, Gilbert and Sullivan: the creative
conflict (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), p32.
9.
Gilbert, Original plays 2, p274.
10. W.S. Gilbert, Original
plays: third series (London, Chatto & Windus, 1923), p138.
11.
Gilbert, Original plays 2, p274.
12. ibid., p3.
13. Max Keith
Sutton, W.S. Gilbert (Boston: Twayne, 1975), p71.
14. Allen,
W.S. Gilbert: an anniversary survey and exhibition checklist, p81.
15. Gilbert, Original plays 2, p34.
16. ibid., p5.
17. ibid.,
pp5-6.
18. ibid., p34.
19. ibid., p34.
20. ibid., p155.
21.
ibid., pp114-5.
22. ibid., pp155-6.
23. ibid., p156.
24. ibid.,
p158.
25. ibid., p197.
26. ibid., p200.
27. Gilbert, Original
plays 3, p274.
28. ibid., p276.
29. ibid., p289.
30. ibid.,
p305.
31. Hesketh Pearson, Gilbert and Sullivan: a biography
(London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1935), p181.
32. Jane W. Stedman, W.S.
Gilbert: a classic Victorian and his theatre (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), p252.
33. quoted Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey, W.S.
Gilbert: his life and letters (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1923),
p157.
34. quoted Pearson, Gilbert: his life and strife,
p259.