Triple play: From Gilbert to Sullivan to the digital monster to Seven Kinds of Ambiguity
Gleaned decades ago by a dedicated reader
Gilbert to Wilde to Benny: Among "unkillable hymn-tunes" by the composer Sullivan, Gilbert's partner, is "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Sullivan has a following today, but not Gilbert, with all his "colossal verbal skill and prodigious industry," said reviewer X.J. Kennedy in New Criterion, January, 1997.
The two didn't get along, and each longed to do more serious work on his own. But they stayed together, bound by financial needs: Sullivan was supporting a mistress and Gilbert an expensive wife, yacht, and country estate. Neither could make as much money separately.
Gilbert invented the (comical) straight face, setting the stage for Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." And Jack Benny, for that matter. As a dominant writer-director, he set the stage also for the dominating writer-director G.B. Shaw. He also sued people a lot, having been a barrister.
The book under review was W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre, by Jane W. Stedman (Oxford).
Gilbert died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. She'd been screaming but was not in danger. He drowned. His widow doted on fresh fruit and while on holiday had peaches sent her from his sumptuous estate.
Another one-eyed monster: We can't digitize whole libraries, says Francis Morrone in New Criterion. We should be careful about weening kids away from books to the computer screen, because there's far more out there than has ever been keyed or scanned.
He speaks as a user, warning against abuse. Digital information is seductive, he says -- info from the Internet, compact disc, however it hits the screen, some of it with blinding speed.
I'll say. I have trouble getting past books on a shelf. I'm an inveterate discoverer of things while looking up other things. Call me Distracted.
So when the screen fills up with seemingly endless possibilities (there is an end to it, but no one has found it yet), I am seduced beyond my fondest dreams.
Hypertexts and hyperlinks beckon. Point and click, say the Internet salesmen. Indeed. Point and click and get hooked. Seductive, addictive, sometimes enervating, the whole package. It's a jungle in there. Be careful.
So much and so little time: A great poem has "a general sense of compacted wealth," says Wm. Empson in Seven Kinds of Ambiguity. Lots of meaning packed in. You needn't know all of it or have it all in mind at once, no more than you have to know all the notes of a symphony. What you want is awareness of a poem's "elaborate balance of variously associated feeling." Just as I was saying the other night at the Ale House.