Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 417
But there are other differences between Wonderland and the Balladland: the people in Wonderland have no names. They are all generalizations — the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen, or fictions like Humpty Dumpty and Tweedledee. But in the Ballads they are all real people, with names and rank. Here are Captain Reece, R.N., and Captain Parklebury Todd; here is the Reverend Simon Magus — people you might meet in London any day. The scholarly world is represented by Gregory Parable, LL.D., and here is little Annie Profterie who kept a small post office in the neighbourhood of Bow — just what she would naturally do. Any one guesses at once, as Gilbert admitted in advance, that Macphairson Clonglocketty Angus McClan was a Scotchman. The whole setting is intended to show that we are dealing with real life, simply presented. Even the outsiders, not English, are equally convincing. Alum Bey is a proper Turk. The name of King Borria Bungalee Boo certainly indicates him as a “man-eating African swell.” Yet in spite of all these features of normality, these home touches, so to speak, the world of Gilbert’s “Bab” Ballads is just as topsy-turvy as the world of Alice’s Wonderland.
Let us see how it originated.
The name of W. S. Gilbert is known to most people today only as the larger half of Gilbert and Sullivan, a combination now as familiar as Damon and Pythias or Lea and Perrins. But, in reality, Gilbert had already achieved quite a celebrity in London before the resounding and prolonged triumph of the Savoy Operas.
W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) was born a gentleman — a matter that must have been a permanent satisfaction to him. His father was a surgeon in the Royal Navy and later a novelist, a fiery, peppery old gentleman who went around trying to give editors a thrashing and offering to throw people out of the window — in short, right out of the “Bab” Ballads alongside of Captain Parklebury Todd who “couldn’t walk into a room without ejaculating, ‘Boom!’” Gilbert went to the kind of private school called, in England, a public school, and was to have been sent up, or down, whichever it is, to Oxford. But the outbreak of the Crimean War led him to take a quicker training at King’s College, London, in order to get a commission in the army. Just as he finished it, the war ended. So Gilbert got neither Oxford nor war and turned off sideways to the bar. At the bar he acquired that wealth of legal phrases which adorned all his works and broke into song again and again in the operas— “When I went to the bar-as-a-very-young-man, said I to myself, said I.”
Gilbert had, in all, twenty clients in five years. One, a Frenchman, acquitted, threw his arms around Gilbert’s neck in court and kissed him. Another, a woman pickpocket, convicted, threw her book at him in disgust. Another, an Irishman, prosecuted by him, kept shouting, “Sit down, ye devil, sit down!”
So Gilbert gave up the law and turned to art and humour and was an immediate success. His mock-heroic ballads and the drawings he made for them became the leading feature of Fun, the new comic journal that was running Punch hard in the Sixties. They were signed Bab, which had been a childish nickname for Gilbert himself, and so when published as a book, they appeared as the “Bab” Ballads — first in 1869, and then enlarged, and reprinted, and recollected and so around the world.
Hence W. S. Gilbert was already quite a celebrity in London long before the Gilbert and Sullivan operas turned celebrity to glory. But in a way it was not altogether an enviable celebrity. Gilbert from all accounts was a singularly disagreeable man, self-important and domineering, rating everybody else as poor trash. By good rights, great humourists ought to be gentle, agreeable people to meet, with a breadth of view and a kindly tolerance of trifles — such as they show in print. Mostly they are not. Charles Dickens, in spite of a boundless energy and exuberance of fun, was an intolerable egotist who had to be “it” all the time, who supplied sob-words and slow music for the fathers of broken homes and smashed his own with an axe. Mark Twain, though good, easy company when young, became, so some people tell us, intolerably boring in old age. Lewis Carroll was a sissy, and Gilbert was a bully, over-conscious of his own talent.
Thus Gilbert used his, this singular talent, to point the barbs of his retorts and jokes. Very funny to read, they are, these retorts and repartee. But some of them must have cut people to the heart.
“What did you think of my Hamlet?” asked an actor friend in the first flush of his pride in his new part.... “Excellent,” said Gilbert, “funny all through, but never vulgar.”
A barber cutting Gilbert’s hair once bent over his ear to murmur, “When are we to expect anything further, Mr. Gilbert, from your fluent pen?”
“What do you mean, sir, by fluent pen?” snapped Gilbert. “There is no such thing as a fluent pen. A pen is an insensible object. And, at any rate, I don’t presume to enquire into your private affairs; you will please observe the same reticence in regard to mine.”
Any one who could thus snub a barber out of his one privilege, would strike a child ... though, as a matter of fact, Gilbert wouldn’t. He was friendly and companionable with children, just as he was an excellent host and a generous supporter of charitable things. He kept his quarrels for his own world, and for the law courts, where he lived in litigation.... “The judge,” he said, in writing of one of his lost actions, “summed up like a drunken monkey. He’s in the last stage of senile decay.” After Sir Edward Carson won a case against him, Gilbert made a point of cutting him dead.
As a result, Gilbert’s life was filled with bitter quarrels. There were some people he wouldn’t speak to for ten years; others were on the twenty-year list. As his old age drew on, a strange repentance seized him, especially as the former friends, put on the silent list, began to pass into a silence longer still. As each died, Gilbert was all contrition, with flowers sent to hospitals, looking for old ties to rebind, the egotism all paled out of him. He could have made a wonderful Ballad out of it — The Contrite Playwright.
But all that was far away at the time of which we speak.
But to understand the “Bab” Ballads we need not only to understand Gilbert himself but to see in its proper perspective the period in which he wrote.
This was the period of the Great Peace, after 1815, that was going to last forever; everybody knew it, and the Crystal Palace proved it. There might be wars as a matter of distant adventure, like the Crimean War; or wars in suitable out-of-the-way places like Ashantee; and among crazy European revolutionists. But, for England, war had been removed forever by Trafalgar and Waterloo. There sat the right little tight little island, snug behind the waves, and you couldn’t get at it. “The English,” wrote a very witty person of the time in referring to the new misty German philosophy, “are supreme on the sea, the French on the land, and the Germans hold the supremacy of the air.” How strange it sounds now.
In this safeness and snugness, with outside protection and internal order and personal liberty guaranteed, all values shifted. The things that seemed so vital before — religion that people burned for, liberty that people hanged for, defence that people died for — began to be taken for granted. They were all embodied in the policeman, the magistrate, the M.P. and the justices of the peace. With the sole proviso of keeping the poor in the proper place, if need be by shooting them, the government had nothing to do. Hence the whole apparatus of government, British constitution and all, began to seem amazingly funny, especially because of all its forms and its feathers and its fuss, its Beef-eaters and Yeomen of the Guard.
In fact, to clever men like young Dickens and young Gilbert, it was really a huge joke, just a scream. Take the Royal Family, with its multiplying household and its German regularity and parsimony.
The Queen she kept high festival in Windsor’s lofty hall,
And round her sat her gartered knights and ermined nobles all,
There drank the valiant Wellington, there fed the Wary Peel,
While at the bottom of the board Prince Albert carved the veal.
Carved the veal! Pretty funny, eh? And, of course, the statesmen and the cabinet, chasing one another in and out of office, were just as funny — what was it Dickens called them? Coodle, and Doodle and Foodle! ... and the Members of Parliament always making speeches and laying their hands on their heart! ... and the army, now there is something to laugh at! all drooping plumes and dangling swords! What did they think they were out to kill anyway? And the House of Lords, all in robes doing nothing, and the clergy all in gaiters doing less. Let’s have a song about the House of Lords which, throughout the War, did nothing in particular and did it rather well! And let’s make up comic verses about the Bishop of Rum-ti-Foo.
All these things seemed out of date! We can see it all better now. A generation that has seen the world swept back into barbarism by two world wars can see reality again. Why, these mean the things — this funny Parliament, this comic magistrate, even Coodle and Doodle — the things that people die for.
But not being able to see it, the world seemed all topsy-turvy.
We left out the navy above. Was it comic or real? They weren’t quite sure. The sea lies close to the British heart. Even Gilbert was an amateur Yo-ho yachtsman of the coast. Hence the England of this epoch never knew whether to admire the navy, or to laugh at it like the army. And the government never knew whether to improve its lot and feed and warm it decently or whether to “give it every day at least six dozen lashes,” as Gilbert gave to Joe Golightly.
So Gilbert took the navy both ways. Here belongs the famous ballad of Captain Reece, Commander of The Mantelpiece that turned later on into the opera Pinafore. Captain Reece represents that fatal pelting of the seamen under the new philanthropy in which the real old blue-water school saw the approaching downfall of England, the scuttling of the ship.
CAPTAIN REECE
Of all the ships upon the blue,
No ship contained a better crew
Than that of worthy Captain Reece,
Commanding of The Mantelpiece.
He was adored by all his men,
For worthy Captain Reece, R.N.,
Did all that lay within him to
Promote the comfort of his crew.
If ever they were dull or sad,
Their captain danced to them like mad,
Or told, to make the time pass by,
Droll legends of his infancy.
A feather bed had every man,
Warm slippers and hot-water can,
Brown Windsor from the captain’s store,
A valet, too, to every four.
Did they with thirst in summer burn?
Lo, seltzogenes at every turn,
And on all very sultry days
Cream ices handed round on trays.
Kind-hearted Captain Reece, R.N.,
Was quite devoted to his men;
In point of fact, good Captain Reece,
Beatified The Mantelpiece.
This idyllic situation culminated in the happy idea of marrying all the crew to Captain Reece’s sisters cousins and aunts. Even the captain was not forgotten.
The boatswain of The Mantelpiece,
He blushed and spoke to Captain Reece:
“I beg your honour’s leave,” he said,
“If you would wish to go and wed,
“I have a widowed mother who
Would be the very thing for you —
She long has loved you from afar,
She washes for you, Captain R.”
And the curtain falls on a happy and united family crew. Such a picture must have another side. The navy was not all human kindliness and new philanthropy. There was still the same old brutality to denounce where some ferocious martinet got his evil way, flogging his crew into submission. Tennyson denounced this in his own melodramatic way; Gilbert showed how topsy-turvy it was; in fact turned it into fun. Which helped more to abolish it?
Tennyson begins:
He that only rules by terror
Doth a grievous wrong,
Deep as hell I count his error.
Let him hear my song.
and goes on to tell of a brutal ship’s captain whose men took vengeance on him in a naval engagement by curling up and dying on the deck without fighting. It sounds a little bit like the Chinese system of getting even with an enemy by committing suicide on his doorstep.
Now let us see how Gilbert does it. The Admiralty have heard about The Mantelpiece and are horrified at Reece’s leniency. A new commander, Sir Berkely, a martinet is sent to take over:
Sir Berkely was a martinet —
A stern, unyielding soul —
Who ruled his ship by dint of whip
And horrible black-hole.
When first Sir Berkely came aboard
He read a speech to all,
And told them how he’d made a vow
To act on duty’s call.
Then William Lee, he up and said
(The Captain’s coxswain he):
“We’ve heard the speech your honour’s made,
And werry pleased we be.
“We don’t pretend, my lad, as how
We’re glad to lose our Reece;
Urbane, polite, he suited quite
The saucy Mantelpiece.
“But if your honour gives your mind
To study all our ways,
With dance and song we’ll jog along
As in those happy days.
“I like your honour’s looks, and feel
You’re worthy of your sword.
Your hand, my lad — I’m doosid glad
To welcome you aboard!”
Sir Berkely looked amazed, as though
He didn’t understand.
“Don’t shake your head,” good William said,
“It is an honest hand.
“It’s grasped a better hand than yourn —
Come, gov’nor, I insist!”
The Captain stared — the coxswain glared —
The hand became a fist!
“Down, upstart!” said the hardy salt;
But Berkely dodged his aim,
And made him go in chains below:
The seamen murmured “Shame!”
A sailor who was overcome
From having freely dined,
And chanced to reel when at the wheel,
He instantly confined!
And tars who, when an action raged,
Appeared alarmed or scared,
And those below who wished to go,
He very seldom spared.
E’en he who smote his officer
For punishment was booked,
And mutinies upon the seas
He rarely overlooked.
In short, the happy Mantelpiece
Where all had gone so well,
Beneath that fool Sir Berkely’s rule
Became a floating hell.
This intolerable situation very naturally led the crew to shoot Sir Berkely. The Admiralty on hearing the news of his death realized the wrong that had been done and restored the noble Reece to his command.
But Gilbert’s topsy-turvy navy would, of course, not be complete without a picture of the life and sorrows of the common seaman. This is given to us in the pathetic story of Joe Golightly, who had fallen hopelessly in love at a distance, an immeasurable social distance, with the daughter of the First Lord of the Admiralty. Having no other way to voice his love, Joe sang it on board his ship to the mournful thrumming of a guitar:
The moon is on the sea,
Willow!
The wind blows towards the lee,
Willow!
But though I sigh and sob and cry,
No Lady Jane for me,
Willow!
She says, “‘Twere folly quite,
Willow!
For me to wed a wight,
Willow!
Whose lot is cast before the mast;’
And possibly she’s right.
Willow!
His skipper (Captain Joyce)
He gave him many a rating,
And almost lost his voice
From thus expostulating:
“Lay out, you lubber, do!
What’s come to that young man, Joe?
Belay!— ‘vast heaving! you!
Do kindly stop that banjo!
“I wish, I do — oh, Lor’! —
You’d shipped aboard a trader:
Are you a sailor, or
A negro serenader?”
But still the stricken cad,
Aloft or on his pillow,
Howled forth in accents sad
His aggravating “Willow!”
Stern love of duty had
Been Joyce’s chiefest beauty:
Says he, “I love that lad,
But duty, damme! duty!
“Twelve years’ black-hole, I say,
Where daylight never flashes;
And always twice a day
Five hundred thousand lashes!’
But Joseph had a mate,
A sailor stout and lusty,
A man of low estate,
But singularly trusty.
Says he, “Cheer hup, young Joe,
I’ll tell you what I’m arter,
To that Fust Lord I’ll go
And ax him for his darter.
“To that Fust Lord I’ll go
And say you love her dearly.”
And Joe said (weeping low),
“I wish you would, sincerely!”
That sailor to that Lord
Went, soon as he had landed,
And of his own accord
An interview demanded.
