The time has come when a serious attempt must be made to determine Gilbert and Sullivan's permanent place in the world of creative art. A brief review of the musical-comedy output during the last theatrical season will convince any one that we are sufficiently far removed from "Pinafore" and "The Mikado" to insure a true perspective.

Happily, the material for a systematic examination of the subject is accessible. It is true that we are still without a definitive text of the Gilbert librettos. For this we must wait until Professor RÜcksack, of the University of Kissingen, has published the results of his monumental labours. So far, we have from his learned pen only the text for the first half of the second act of "The Mikado." This is in accordance with the best traditions of German scholarship, which demand that the second half of anything shall be published before the first half. In the meanwhile, there are several editions of Gilbert available which, though somewhat imperfect, ought to present no difficulties to the scholar. For example, in my own favourite edition of "The Mikado" (Chattanooga, 1913), the text reads:

And he whistled an air, did he,
As the sabre true
Cut cleanly through
His servical vertebrae!

where "servical" is evidently a misprint for "cervical." So, too, the trained eye will at once discern that in the following passage from the Peers' chorus in "Iolanthe":

'Twould fill with joy
And madness stark
The hoi polloi
(A Greek rebark),

the sense is greatly improved by reading "remark" for "rebark," unless we argue that the chorus had a slight cold in the head, an assumption which nothing in the text would justify us in bringing forward, and which, indeed, would be contradicted by the highly emphasised summer style in which the chorus is apparelled. Thus forewarned, then, we are ready to enter upon a detailed examination of the intensely animated men and women in whom Sir William S. Gilbert has embodied his ultima ratio, his dernier cri, and his Weltanschaung.

In Ko-Ko, the author has given us a Man, with none of the sentimentalities of August Strindberg, with nothing of the limited, vegetarian outlook upon life of Bernard Shaw, with nothing of the over-refinement of Mrs. Wharton. Ko-Ko is atingle with all the passion and faults of humanity. He is both matter and spirit. He comes close to us in his rare flashes of insight and in his moments of poignant imbecility. The human being is not lost in the Lord High Executioner. He is alive straight through to his entrails and liver, as Jack London might say. He is infinite, even as life is infinite. He is, by turns, affable, as with Pitti-Sing; cynically disdainful, as with Pooh-Bah; paternal, as with Nanki-Poo.

In the presence of Yum-Yum he is that most appealing figure, a strong man in love torn between desire and duty. The firmness with which he rejects the suggestion that he decapitate himself, arguing that in the nature of things such an operation was bound to be injurious to his professional reputation, reveals a character of almost Roman austerity. There is something of the Roman, too—or shall we say something of the German?—in the thoroughness with which he would enter on his career. He would prepare himself for his functions as Lord High Executioner by beginning on a guinea pig and working his way through the animal kingdom till he came to a second trombone. This is the old standard of conscientiousness of which our modern world knows so little.

And yet a very modern man withal, this Ko-Ko. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Chesterton would have loved him, and would have had no difficulty in proving that his name should be pronounced not Ko-Ko, but the second syllable before the first. He is modern in his extraordinary adaptability to time and circumstance. Starting life as a tailor, he adapts himself to the august functions of Lord High Executioner. He adapts himself to Yum-Yum. He adapts himself to Katisha. No sooner is he released from prison to become Lord High Executioner than he has ready his convenient little list of people who never would be missed. Of his powers of persuasion we need not speak at great length. His wooing of Katisha is a triumph of romantic eloquence. It carries everything before it, as in that superb climax when Katisha inquires whether it is all true about the unfortunate little tom-tit on a tree by the river, and Ko-Ko replies: "I knew the bird intimately." He is modern through and through, our Ko-Ko. He is at one with Henri Bergson in asserting that existence is not stationary but in constant flux, and that the universe takes on meaning only from our moods:

The flowers that bloom in the spring,
Tra la,
Have nothing to do with the case.

Far less subtle a character is the Lord High Chancellor in "Iolanthe," although, within the well-defined liminations of his type, he is as real as Ko-Ko. Like Ko-Ko he has risen from humble beginnings. But whereas our Japanese hero attains fortune by trusting himself boldly and joyfully to life, letting the currents carry him whither they will, like Byron, like Peer Gynt, and like Captain Hobson, the Lord High Chancellor's rise is the result of painful concentration and steadfast plodding. Ko-Ko is at various times the statesman, the poet, the lover, the man of the world (as when he is tripped up by the Mikado's umbrella-carrier). The Lord High Chancellor is always the lawyer. In response to Strephon's impassioned cry that all Nature joins with him in pleading his love, that dry legal soul can only remark that an affidavit from a thunderstorm or a few words on oath from a heavy shower would meet with all the attention they deserve.

Plainly, we have here a man who has won his way to the highest place in his profession by humdrum methods; the same methods which Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., employed when, by writing in a hand of remarkable roundness and fluency, he became the ruler of the Queen's navee; the same methods brought into play by Major-General Stanley, of the British army and Penzance, when he qualified himself for his high position by memorising a great many cheerful facts about the square of the hypothenuse.

There is matter enough for an entire volume on Gilbert's self-made men—Ko-Ko, the Lord High Chancellor, Major-General Stanley, and the lawyer in "Trial by Jury," who laid the foundation of his fortunes by marrying a rich attorney's elderly ugly daughter. I throw out the suggestion in the hope that it will be some day taken up as the subject of a Ph.D. thesis in the University of Alaska. That is only one hint of the unworked treasures of research that await the student in these librettos. How valuable would be a really comprehensive monograph on the royal attendants in Gilbert, including a comparison of the Mikado's umbrella-carrier with the Lord High Chancellor's train-bearer!

As for Gilbert and Sullivan's women, I find that even if I were not so near to the end of my chapter, I could not enter upon a discussion of the subject. The field is too vast. I must content myself with merely pointing out that Gilbert's ideas on women were painfully Victorian. It is true that the eternal chase of the male by the female was no secret to him. In Katisha's pursuit of Nanki-Poo we have a striking anticipation of Anne's pursuit of John Tanner in "Man and Superman." But on the whole, Gilbert describes his women of the upper classes as simpering and sentimental—Josephine, Yum-Yum, Mabel, Iolanthe—and his women of the working classes as ignorant and incapable. What an extraordinary example of ineptitude is afforded by Little Buttercup, who, in her capacity as baby-farmer, so disastrously mixes up Ralph Rackstraw with Captain Corcoran. Or by Nurse Ruth of Penzance, who fails to carry out orders and, instead of apprenticing her young charge to a pilot, apprentices him to a pirate. Miss Ida Tarbell could not have framed a severer indictment of inefficiency in the home.