3-070-881 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches from "Patience," at the Opera Comique, 1881. London stage show satirising Oscar Wilde, '...so cleverly written by Mr W. S. Gilbert, and exquisitely sung to by Mr. Arthur Sullivan...A tear-drop dews each martial eye!; Bunthorne; two love-sick maidens; Aesthetic! He is Aesthetic! Yes, yes - I am Aesthetic and Poetic!; Patience; Jane - "No. Not pretty. Massive"; "I shall have to be contented with their heartfelt sympathy!"; Nobody be Bunthorne's bride!; "I'm a steady and stolid-ly jolly bank-holidy every-day young man!"...Much of the satire is clearly on the surface, but "Patience" goes deeper than the rest into the mystery of aestheticism...It is amusing; but it is terribly true. It is a satire of a human weakness, more than of a society craze...The...Dragoon Guards, the portentous Lady Jane with her muscular development, the half-starved Bunthorne, the massive Grosvenor, the maidens with their lyres and mandolins who crown their devoted poet with roses, all the modern revivalists of a form of obsolete pagan worship, even the "steady and stolidy, jolly bank-holiday, everyday young man" would not be nearly so amusing were it not for those strains by Arthur Sullivan that grow upon the ear and become more popular by repetition'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.