On the Past, Present, and Future: 66 Essays by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780880299398
Google: B2aEYgEACAAJ
Amazon: 0880299398
Goodreads: 837219
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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his occasional cruelty to Watson, make him all the more “real.”

So I, too, am a member of the Baker Street Irregulars.

35

G I L B E R T & S U L L I V A N

Some thinp simply seem to go together: ham and eggs, corned beef and cabbage, hot dop and mustard, lox and cream cheese on a bagel. Such things can be eaten separately or in other combinations, but they never have quite the satisfactory taste that they have together.

It’s sometimes that way with fictional couples. Can you imagine Romeo without Juliet, or Antony without Cleopatra, or, for that matter, Rhett without Scarlett?

And, in one case I can think of, it works for a pair of real-life people, where the ampersand in between the names is far more essential than either name.

William Schwenk Gilbert was born in 1836, and throughout his life he was a cantankerous curmudgeon who worked very hard to earn social unpopularity and invariably succeeded in this endeavor. He was a most unlikely person to decide to make a living as a humorist, but he succeeded in this endeavor alsoafter a fashion.

He wasn’t a humorist to start with, of course. He tried the army and didn’t enjoy it, he tried being a bureaucrat and hated it, he tried being a lawyer but had no talent for it. However, midcentury was the time of an efflorescence of humor magazines in Great Britain, and Gilbert attempted to earn a few shillinp writing funny pieces for them.

Gilbert succeeded at this, particularly since he showed an unparalleled talent for writing comic verse, to which he appended delightful comic illustrations.

This verse was eventually collected as Bab Ballads (“Bab” being used by Gilbert as a signature for his illustrations).

Gilbert’s humor was of the type we would call “dark” (sometimes very dark indeed). The best Bab ballad is “Etiquette,” in which the humor arises out of two men being marooned on an island after a shipwreck and in their not being rescued. The most frequently reprinted Bab ballad is “The Yam of Nancy Bell,”

which tells the story of another shipwreck; cannibalism is thrown in for additional laughs.

Nevertheless, comic verse has no great lasting value, and except for an occasional appearance of a Bab ballad in poetry anthologies of the lighter sort, Gilbert’s ballads would probably be forgotten today if they were all we had.

Gilbert also began to write plays, some of which were simply comedies ( occasionally in bJank verse) and some of which contained verses that could be

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set to music by some nonentity or other. He wrote about seventy plays altogether that have by now completely vanished from world consciousness, although they were moderately popular in their own time.

To be brief (and cruel), Gilbert, as Gilbert, left no lasting mark, and there is no reason on Earth why I ought to be writing about him now; that is, about Gilbert, as Gilben.

Arthur Seymour Sullivan was born in 1842 and even as a teen-ager showed unmistakable musical talent. His first published hymn appeared when he was thirteen years old.

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