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Updated: September 24, 2024
The hunger-strike itself, with all its grim horrors and heroisms, was like the plot of a Gilbertian opera. It placed the Government on the horns of an Irish bull. Either the law must kill or torture prisoners condemned for mild offenses, or it must permit them to dictate their own terms of durance.
But the final proof that the Victorians were alive by this laughter, can be found in the fact they could manage and master for a moment even the cosmopolitan modern theatre. They could contrive to put "The Bab Ballads" on the stage. To turn a private name into a public epithet is a thing given to few: but the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer than the name Gilbert.
Really, when reading the report of this admirably conducted inquiry one isn't certain at times whether it is an Admirable Inquiry or a felicitous opera-bouffe of the Gilbertian type with a rather grim subject, to be sure. Yes, rather grim but the comic treatment never fails.
He wore a sack suit and a Panama hat and his thin, fine face, the puff of curled white hair at the back of his neck, the gayety of his glance gave an almost theatric touch to his appearance, so that one felt he might at any moment come down stage and sing a topical song in the best Gilbertian manner. It was an old scene with a new setting.
Looking at this country with what I call my French eyes it nauseates me. It seems so utterly petty. . . . What the devil are we fighting for? It's going to be a splendid state of affairs, isn't it, if the immediate result of beating the Boche is anarchy over here? . . . . And one feels that it oughtn't to be so; one feels that it's Gilbertian to the pitch of frenzied lunacy.
He wore a sack suit and a Panama hat and his thin, fine face, the puff of curled white hair at the back of his neck, the gayety of his glance gave an almost theatric touch to his appearance, so that one felt he might at any moment come down stage and sing a topical song in the best Gilbertian manner. It was an old scene with a new setting.
It was a distinctly Gilbertian situation, and the people to whom they introduced me were quite as picturesquely disreputable as themselves. So you see " Holcombe stopped here and read over what he had written, and then tore up the letter. The one he sent in its place said he was getting better, but that the climate was not so mild as he had expected it would be.
Go to! thou art surely a Gilbertian travesty, a deliciously droll compound of vulgar patriotism and maudlin pathos. And yet somehow there are tears on the smiling cheeks of the Man from Town. Let us go out and hear the nightingales and be sentimental under the moon. Hark how they precipitate their notes in a fine lyric rapture.
He put in Hours and Hours hand-embroidering the Verses. When he made "Society" rhyme with "Propriety," he thought he was getting Gilbertian. While these Lyrics were still quivering, he would take them out and read them to his wife and the Hired Girl and the man who attended to the Furnace, and get their Impartial Judgement. They agreed that it was Hot Gravy and too good for the Stage.
Whether what he heard in boyhood was violent Nationalism or virulent Unionism, it was at least something which wanted a certain principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be in office. Of him the great Gilbertian generalisation is untrue; he was not born either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative.
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