A night at the opera
Benny Green
It has often been said that the great glory of that pragmatic pearl, the English Constitution, is that it was never written down. It may be that its even greater glory is the quality of those attacks upon it which have been written down. The Cooclle-Doodle-Foodle vituperations of Dickens remain the most contemptible, but there is a case to be made for the claim that to savour fully the most diverting assault on the idiotic solemnities of British political life, it is necessary to hire a hundred singers and musicians. The other night, watching lolanthe, 1 was charmed by the continuing relevance of a few of Gilbert's choicest barbs. It is a great pity, to say nothing of a gross aesthetic injustice, that the libretto's most widely celebrated quatrain should be marred by a most unGilbertian maladroitness both in rhythm and rhyme: . . . That every boy and every gal That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative.
especially as the rest of the polemical doggerel is metrically immaculate, down to the last syllable.
As for the preoccupation with fairies, it seems to have been prevalent enough to stand as a symbol of the sentimentality of the period, Barrie and Conan Doyle being among those who succumbed to it. But what makes Gilbert's persistent use of fairies doubly unfortunate is that today the word's sexual overtones have played havoc with the writing. Certainly Gilbert, who once told an investigating committee on censorship that the stage was "not the proper platform on which to discuss questions of adultery and free love before a mixed audience," would have been appalled to learn how time has endowed his harmless if flatfooted jokes about Strephon being a fairy from the waist up with a new life.
But the lampoon of the British Peerage continues to amuse, if only because the Peerage itself has somehow managed to survive in a form which would not be altogether unrecognisable to the audiences of ninety years ago. When the Earl of Mountararat says that "if there is an institution in Great Britain which is not susceptible of any improvement at all, it is the House of Peers," he is expressing an opinion by no means merely historical. And when the fairies arrange to have that House thrown open to competitive examination, our thoughts fly instantly to those Life Peerages
which have proved the joke to be at least half-true. If there is any single reason why Gilbert and Sullivan have survived, and why Arnold Bennett was wrong when he confided to his dairy in 1924, "Fundamentally the thing is dead," it is because the British take so long to solve their problems. In that superlative but sadly neglected libretto Utopia Limited, Gilbert ends the play with: By doing so, we shall, in course of time, . . regenerate completely our entire land — Great Britain is that monarchY sublime.
To which some add (but others do not) Ireland.
1 ncredi aly, a political joke writ ten in 1893 still holds good. For the same reason, that the Westminster facade has undergone so little renovation since the first night of lolanthe, the opera remains a central point of reference for anyone who undertakes the charting of the drifts in our politi• cal life. In that famous book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield, dealing with the constitutional crisis of 1911, quotes Gilbert's line beginning, "And while the House of Peers withholds its legislative hand and then remarks, "those lines seem t9 accompany all their lordships subsequent follies." Certainly there seems little to choose be tween Mountararat and Tolloller on-the one hand, and Willoughby de Broke and Halsbury on the other, Very much more recently, less than a year ago in fact, Harold Wilson, speechifying about the Industrial Relations Act, made the following observation: Even Gilbert and Sullivan could not have envisaged such a situation in court as occurred yesterday, the dramatic intervention of the Good Fairy. in the unlikely shape of the Official Solicitor, as though the conductor. whoever is conducting the orchestra these days, had got the scores of Trial by Jury and lolanthe mixed. (June 17, 1972.) The irony in all this is that Gilbert's interesting theory that the human race is comprised entirely of idiots led him irrevocably into the kind of political nihilism that was the despair of his contemporaries. In 1909 the Liberals, wishing to quote his lolanthe lines in the battle against an intransigent House of Lords, received the following reply: "I cannot permit the verses from lolanthe to be used for electioneering purposes. They do not at all express my own views. They are supposed to be the views of the bone-headed donkey who sings them." The Liberals had evidently failed to notice that if Gilbert's peers were ridiculed as nincompoops, his commoners were derided as sheep. Knowing Gilbert's genial irascibility, it surprises me that he did not give the Asquithians permission to quote from lolanthe, so long as he nominated the passage. Then he could have nominated this one:
When in that House MP's divide, If they've a brain and cerebellum too, They've got to leave that brain outside, And vote just as their leaders tell 'em
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