When the company had become familiar with the broader outlines of the piece, he would concentrate attention upon the effects upon the audience that could be attained only by the aid of facial expression, gesture and ensemble arrangement. Not only did he lay down his wishes, but he insisted that they must be implicitly obeyed, and a principal who had not reached perfection in the part he was taking would be coached again and again. I remember once that, in one of those moods of weariness and dullness that occasionally steal over one at rehearsals, I did not grasp something he had been telling me, and I was indiscreet enough to blurt out, "But I haven't done that before, Sir William." "No," was his reply, "but I have." The rebuke to my dullness went home! It was Durward Lely, I think, whom he told once to sit down "in a pensive fashion." Lely thereupon unmindfully sat down rather heavily--and disturbed an elaborate piece of scenery. "No! No!" was Gilbert's comment, "I said pensively, not ex-pensively." That quickness of wit was very typical.
George Grossmith once suggested that the introduction of certain business would make the audience laugh. Gilbert was quite unsympathetic. "Yes!" he responded in his dryest vein, "but so they would if you sat down on a pork pie!" Grossmith it was, too, who had become so wearied practising a certain gesture that I heard him declare he "had rehearsed this confounded business until I feel a perfect fool." "Ah! so now we can talk on equal terms" was the playwright's instant retort. And the next moment he administered another rebuke. "I beg your pardon," said the comedian, rather bored, in reference to some instructions he had not quite understood. "I accept the apology," was the reply. "Now let's get on with the rehearsal."
You will remember that in "The Yeomen" poor _Jack Point_ puts his riddle, "Why is a cook's brainpan like an overwound clock?" The Lieutenant interposes abruptly with "A truce to this fooling," and the poor Merry-man saunters off exclaiming "Just my luck: my best conundrum wasted." Like many in the audience, I have often wondered what the answer to that conundrum is, and one day I put a question about it to Gilbert. With a smile he said he couldn't tell me then, but he would leave me the answer in his will. I'm sorry to say that it was not found there--maybe because there was really no answer to the riddle, or perhaps because he had forgotten to bequeath to the world this interesting legacy.