Sadness Set to Song

I often wake up in the night, usually about four or five in the morning, and I lie in the darkness, depressing myself with gloomy thoughts about the world, and death, and the unsatisfactory aspects of my life. In my experience an interest in comedy is allied to a melancholic or depressive attitude to life. This is well known, but easily dismissed with the somewhat contemptuous phrase about the tears of the clown which everyone knows. But enough about that. Let's talk about Gilbert instead.

At the start of his career, when he was writing weekly for the comic paper Fun, he developed two comic personae: the Comic Physiognomist and Our Own Correspondent. The article "Our Own Correspondent at a Bal Masque" (29 October 1864) sees him in a highly depressed mood:

"Your correspondent is writing this article in the lowest possible spirits... he witnessed last night three hours' length of human idiocy in its most aggravating form, and... he has not yet recovered from the depression induced thereby. He has been awake all night endeavouring to argue himself into the belief that as the drivelling revellers with whom he came into contact last night were men, therefore he is nota man, but he regrets to say that he has not yet arrived at that desirable conclusion. In the meantime--until the problem is satisfactorily worked out, and he has convinced himself that he is a pig or a dog--please address communications to him as heretofore."

It is clear even from the operas that Gilbert was subject to moods of melancholia and despair. Even in The Mikado he intrudes a lyric inquiring into the mysteries of the world:

Is it but a world of trouble--

Sadness set to song?

Is its beauty but a bubble

Bound to break ere long?

Are its palaces and pleasures

Fantasies that fade?

And the glory of its treasures

Shadow of a shade?

In everything he writes there is a constant feeling that Gilbert saw life as a senseless show in which people act according to rules which make no sense. He saw life as topsyturvydom, in which people act in ways that are the direct opposite of rational good sense. Sent to Paris to report on the impending siege in 1870, he watched the Parisians and saw nothing but a pageant of absurdity.

He was in many ways a tough man, and he withstood a barrage of vicious criticism throughout his working life. But in later years certainly he began to feel somewhat bitter about the public reaction to his work, taking his frivolous nonsense to their bosom and ignoring his serious, solid work. The passing years saw the passing of his friends, and he saw himself as a tree with the leaves fallen. Every birthday was, he insisted, a cause for commiseration and not celebration. Some of his best lyrics are not in the least comic. They are meditations on this strange world of ours and our place in it.

Is life a boon?

If so, it must befall

That Death, whene'er he call,

Must call too soon.

Though fourscore years he give,

Yet one would pray to live

Another moon!

What kind of plaint have I,

Who perish in July?

I might have had to die,

Perchance, in June!

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit!

Man is well done with it;

Soon as he's born

He should all means essay

To put the plague away;

And I, war-worn,

Poor captured fugitive,

My life most gladly give--

I might have had to live

Another morn!