1922] on Gilbert and Sullivan 595 



English that it has taken years to obtain serious recognition. The 

 tunes achieved instant popularity because they were English, but it 

 was probably because of this instantaneous and widespread success 

 that people failed to perceive the rarity and the value of the gifts 

 which were being so freely bestowed upon them. They knew the 

 tunes were catchy. They kept on humming them. They admitted 

 them to be pretty ; but they did not realise their inestimable, their 

 unique artistic price. They felt as people feel when they see the 

 work of a great water-colourist, or, indeed, of any great artist. 

 " Oh, anyone could do that ! We could do it ourselves if we knew 

 how to paint or to compose." It seemed so simple, so easy. The 

 essentially English quality of the stuff made them feel this all the 

 more strongly. 



The tunes seemed as easy to produce as the improvisations of a 

 schoolboy playing with one finger. It was only when Sullivan was 

 dead, and after many years of experience of the barren fruits of 

 English musical comedy, that the public began to wonder whether 

 after all the matter was quite as simple as they had thought. And 

 when, after many years, there was two years ago a revival on a large 

 scale, in London, of the greater number of the operas, many of us 

 experienced a shock of surprise. The tunes were as catchy as ever, but 

 the daintiness, the elegance, the finish, the workmanship, the beauti- 

 ful businesslike quality of the work, its ease and distinction, its 

 infinite variety, forced themselves upon the attention of everybody. 

 The large public recognised at once that here was something which 

 not everyone could do ; and that nothing at all like it was being 

 done, or had been done, by anyone else for years. The revival of 

 The Beggar's Opera underlined the fact. That garden of English 

 melody enhanced the authenticity of Sullivan's gift. It endorsed the 

 credentials and the lineage of his music, and of his charm. It 

 proved that he was no bastard and no pretender, but a rightful 

 heir of Purcell, and a lawful representative of Merry England. 

 What a joy it was, we all felt, when Gilbert and Sullivan and 

 The Beggar's Opera were revived, to hear real English music once 

 more ! Not the slosh of ballad concerts, nor the jangle and rattle 

 of ragtime and of modern revues, with their grating metallic tang 

 and twang, their exasperating hesitations and their alien languor, 

 but the music of the English soil ; so noble, so gay, so debonair, so 

 beautiful. The music that grew in England like wayside flowers, of 

 which Purcell wove garlands, which the cavaliers put in their velvet 

 hats, and the soldiers of the Georges wore as a cockade or flung to 

 the girls they left behind them ; flowers which were then neglected 

 for many years, until Sullivan planted his rollicking border ; flowers 

 which were forgotten, buried under rubbish, and artificial and tawdry 

 exotics, until the war at moments cleared those weeds away, and the 

 soldiers in Flanders and France marched once more to the old 

 rhythms, and invented preposterous but entirely English words to 



