The Evening Star SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1937. THREE GREAT MIRTHMAKERS.

Evening Star, Issue 22578, 20 February 1937, Page 14

The Evening Star SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1937. THREE GREAT MIRTHMAKERS.

There must have been something favourable to humour in the air of a hundred years ago, because within eleven days of each other were born W. S. Gilbert, writer of comedies, and Francis Burnand, whose strength lay in the older burlesques, and while they were still in swaddling clothes, Richard Harris Barham was reading the proofs of the first of his 1 Ingoldsby Legends,’ which appeared in ‘ Bentley’s Miscellany ’ (edited by Dickens) at the beginning of 1837. Gilbert is the best remembered of this trio to-day and Burnand is almost forgotten. It is recalled only that he wrote burlesques, which came to be reckoned crude, oldfashioned things in the light of Gilbert’s new and elaborate comedy, and that he was for many years editor of ‘ Punch.’ He was also the chief punster of a time when puns made the stock humour of burlesques, and, were he alive to-day, would be unbeatable at the game of “Knock-Knock.” A recaller t of him in ‘ Punch ’ on the occasion of the centenary of his birth observed that if he could return to these scenes there is no doubt that he would “ refer to himself merrily as a sent-in-error-’un; but we should be very far from agreeing with him.” A pun on his own name, he used to say, could be made only by a drunken man with slurred utterance: “ A Burnand’s worth two in the bush.” Gilbert might have argued that if it had not been for the alteration in the calendar made one hundred years earlier he and Burnand would have been born on the same day. In the memory of this age Richard Barham holds a position midway between his two fellow-humourists who have been mentioned. It is probable that the ‘ Ingoldsby Legends,’ as a whole, are very seldom read to-day, and those that were most characteristic of his age, dealing with the saints and gibbets, friars and crusaders, (lends and goblins of the Middle Ages in which his imagination loved to revel, least of all. But ‘ The Jackdaw of Rheims ’ (or fragments of it), the story of the “ little vulgar boy ” at

Margate, ‘ Nursery Reminiscences,’ and a few others must be still well loved, and, with their swift, a-attling narrative and their incredible rhymes, those less known make a lively entertainment —or series of entertainments —if they are not taken too many at a time. The vogue for medievalism had had a long mn when Barbara turned to it’ exploiting chiefly its macabre side. In its more obvious phases the fashion was to die with him and with Harrison Ainsworth, but it has been continued spiritually by Mr G. K. Chesterton and some others.-

Barham, when he was not “ Thomas Ingoldsby,” was a jolly churchman and a sub-canon of St. Paul’s. His legends, when they deal most with the past, can be also a record of his own time, because he mixed up the , twq unrestrainedly for the sake of the humour of their juxtaposition. There is sharp satire on his time joined with their grisly humour in the verses which describe how “ My Lord Tomnoddy ’’ missed the execution, and, despite his chagrin at the prospect of being the butt of the town for not having seen the one and only sight, went home to bod like a philosopher, since the man could not be hanged again. After the manner of His op, and as an example to Mr Hilaire Belloo in his ‘ Cautionary Tales,’ most of Barham’s poems have their “morals,” whose sound sense is as apparent as their humour. Perhaps because he was by nature discursive Barham does not seem to have tried his hand at plays, though he was an inveterate theatre-goer. Gilbert, who confined himself to his comedies, and the ‘ Bab. Ballads,’ which furnish the plots for almost all of them, is so well known still, and so much has been written about him, that it would be superfluous for more than the briefest reference to be made to him here. The latest edition of ‘ Benham’s Book of Quotations ’ gives six citations from Burnand, forty-nine from .Barham, and 129 from Gilbert. Gilbert was fortunate first in devising an entirely new form of comedy in which he could show himself a supreme master, and secondly in a musical collaborator, whose genius was the exact complement of his own. His comedies are also a record of their time, and a book has just been published in which all their topical allusions are sought to be explained, but these have the least importance. For a week to come Dunedin play-goers will have their opportunity of enjoying the plays, and they will do so the more io the extent that they are interpreted by one and all impersonators in the spirit of Gilbert. To quote their most recent analyst: “It is not a world of human men and women, but it is a world of creatures just as alive and unique in their individuality as the monsters of Dickens and Victor Hugo. That may be better appreciated when producers of the operas learn to insist once more upon their being acted with all their delicacy of characterisation, not merely projected as mirthmakers upon the stream of Sullivan’s melody.”.