Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/87

Rh gibe for gibe with Gilbert's book and lyrics. Not a note but what is in harmony with the spirit of the words, not a lyric or a phrase but what tells the story. There is no padding, no stuffing, no irrelevancies.

Much of Gilbert's swordplay was directed at follies of the day and institutions peculiarly British. The lapse of time and the subtlety of his shafts have removed the sting and left some of his most famous lyrics merely delightful nonsense to the bulk of present-day audiences. Such auditors, hearing a Gilbert and Sullivan opera for the first time, too, will recognize endless catch phrases and popular allusions, the original source of which they have not suspected—such as the Lord Chancellor's "Said I to Myself, Said I" song in "Iolanthe." The man who grumbled that Shakespeare's plays were nothing but a lot of quotations might have brought a similar charge against "The Mikado", "Pinafore" and others.

There are not so many laughs in the best of plays that the cast is apt to overlook them in rehearsal, yet we continually find new ones in Gilbert. I discovered one only last season in "Pinafore" that I had wasted for many seasons. So is it a rare sight to see a performer laughing