JOHN GAY.
The first half of the eighteenth century was in England the poet’s playground. These rhyming gentry had then a status, a claim upon private munificence and the public purse which has long since been hopelessly barred. A measure of wit, a tincture of taste, and a perseverance in demand would in those days secure for the puling Muse slices of solid pudding whilst in the flesh, and (frequently) sepulture in the Abbey when all was over.
What silk-mercer’s apprentice in these hard times, finding a place behind Messrs. Marshall and Snelgrove’s counter not jumping with his genius, dare hope by the easy expedient of publishing a pamphlet on ‘The Present State of Wit’ to become domestic steward to a semi-royal Duchess, and the friend of Mr. Lewis Morris and Mr. Lecky, who are, I suppose, our nineteenth-century equivalents for Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift? Yet such was the happy fate of Gay, who, after an idle life of undeserved good-fortune and much unmanly repining, died of an inflammation, in spite of the skilled care of Arbuthnot and the unwearying solicitude of the Duchess of Queensberry, and was interred like a peer of the realm in Westminster Abbey, having for his pall-bearers the Earl of Chesterfield, Viscount Cornbury, the Hon. Mr. Berkeley, General Dormer, Mr. Gore, and Mr. Pope. Such a recognition of the author of ‘Fables’ and ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ must make Mr. Besant’s mouth water. Nor did Gay, despite heavy losses in the South Sea Company, die a pauper; he left £6,000 behind him, which, as he was wise enough to die intestate, was divided equally between his two surviving sisters.
Gay’s good luck has never forsaken him. He enjoys, if, indeed, the word be not the hollowest of mockeries, an eternity of fame. It is true he is not read much, but he is always read a little. He has been dead more than a century and a half, so it seems likely that a hundred and fifty years hence he will be read as much as he is now, and, like a cork, will be observed bobbing on the surface of men’s memories. Better men and better poets than he have been, and will be, entirely submerged; but he was happy in his hour, happy even in his name (which lent itself to rhyme), happy in his nature; and so (such at least is our prognostication) new editions of Gay’s slender remains will at long intervals continue to appear and to attract a moment’s attention, even as Mr. Underhill’s admirable edition of the poems has lately done; new anthologies will contain his name, the biographical dictionaries will never quite forget him, his tomb in the Abbey will be stared at by impressionable youngsters, Pope’s striking epitaph will invite the fault-finding of the critical, and his own jesting couplet incur the censure of the moralist, until the day dawns when men cease to forget themselves in trifles. As soon as they do this, Gay will be forgotten once and for ever.
Gay’s one real achievement was ‘The Beggars’ Opera,’ which sprang from a sprout of Swift’s great brain. A ‘Newgate pastoral might make an odd, pretty sort of thing,’ so the Dean once remarked to Gay; and as Mr. Underhill, in his admirable Life of our poet, reminds us, Swift repeated the suggestion in a letter to Pope: ‘What think you of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and thieves there?’ But Swift’s ‘Beggars’ Opera’ would not have hit the public taste between wind and water as did Gay’s. It would have been much too tremendous a thing—its sincerity would have damned it past redemption. Even in Gay’s light hands the thing was risky—a speculation in the public fancy which could not but be dangerous. Gay knew this well enough, hence his quotation from Martial (afterwards adopted by the Tennysons as the motto for ‘Poems by Two Brothers’), Nos hæc novimus esse nihil. Congreve, resting on his laurels, declared it would either take greatly, or be damned confoundedly. It took, and, indeed, we cannot wonder. There was a foretaste of Gilbert about it quite enough to make its fortune in any century. Furthermore, it drove out of England, so writes an early editor, ‘for that season, the Italian opera, which had carried all before it for several years.’ It was a triumph for the home-bred article, and therefore dear to the souls of all true patriots.
The piece, though as wholly without sincerity as a pastoral by Ambrose Philips, a thing merely of the footlights, entirely shorn of a single one of the rays which glorify lawlessness in Burns’s ‘Jolly Beggars,’ yet manages through the medium of the songs to convey a pleasing though absurd sentimentality; and there is, perhaps, noticeable throughout a slight—a very slight—flavour of what is cantingly but conveniently called ‘the Revolution,’ which imparts a slender interest.
‘The Beggars’ Opera’ startled the propriety of that strange institution, the Church of England—a seminary of true religion which had left the task of protesting against the foulness of Dryden and Wycherley and the unscrupulous wit of Congreve and Vanbrugh to the hands of non-jurors like Collier and Law, but which, speaking, we suppose, in the interests of property, raised a warning voice when a comic opera made fun, not of marriage vows, but of highway robbery. Dr. Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, plucked up courage to preach against ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ before the Court, but the Head of the Church paid no attention to the divine, and, with the Queen and all the princesses, attended the twenty-first representation. The piece brought good luck all round. ‘Everybody,’ so Mr. Underhill assures us, ‘connected with the theatre (Lincoln’s Inn Fields), from the principal performer down to the box-keepers, got a benefit,’ and Miss Lavinia Fenton, who played Polly Peachum, lived to become Duchess of Bolton; whilst Hogarth painted no less than three pictures of the celebrated scene, ‘How happy could I be with either—were t’other dear charmer away.’
Dr. Johnson, in his ‘Life of Gay,’ deals scornfully with the absurd notion that robbers were multiplied by the popularity of ‘The Beggars’ Opera.’ ‘It is not likely to do good,’ says the Doctor, ‘nor can it be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil.’ The Church of England might as well have held its tongue.
Gay, flushed with success, was not long in producing a sequel called ‘Polly,’ which, however, as it was supposed to offend, not against morality, which it undoubtedly did, but against Sir Robert Walpole, was prohibited. ‘Polly’ was printed, and, being prohibited, had a great sale. It is an exceedingly nasty piece, not unworthy of one of the three authors who between them produced that stupidest of farces, ‘Three Hours after Marriage.’
Gay’s third opera, ‘Achilles,’ was produced at Covent Garden after his death. One does not need to be a classical purist to be offended at the sight of ‘Achilles’ upon a stage, singing doggerel verses to the tune of ‘Butter’d Pease,’ or at hearing Ajax exclaim:
‘Honour called me to the task,
No matter for explaining,
’Tis a fresh affront to ask
A man of honour’s meaning.’
This vulgar and idiotic stuff ran twenty nights.
Gay’s best-known poetical pieces are his ‘Fables,’ and his undoubtedly interesting, though intrinsically dull ‘Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London,’ though for our own part we would as lief read his ‘Shepherds’ Week’ as anything else Gay has ever written.
The ‘Fables’ are light and lively, and might safely be recommended to all who are fond of an easy quotation. To lay them down is never difficult, and if, after having done so, Swift’s ‘Confession of the Beasts’ is taken up, how vast the difference! There are, we know, those in whose nature there is too much of the milk of human kindness to enable them to enjoy Swift when he shows his teeth; but however this may be, we confess, if we are to read at all, we must prefer Swift’s ‘Beasts’ Confession’ to all the sixty-five fables of Gay put together.
‘The Swine with contrite heart allow’d
His shape and beauty made him proud
In diet was perhaps too nice,
But gluttony was ne’er his vice;
In every turn of life content
And meekly took what fortune sent.
Inquire through all the parish round,
A better neighbour ne’er was found.
His vigilance might some displease;
’Tis true he hated sloth like pease.
‘The Chaplain vows he cannot fawn,
Though it would raise him to the lawn.
He passed his hours among his books,
You find it in his meagre looks.
He might if he were worldly wise
Preferment get and spare his eyes;
But owns he has a stubborn spirit
That made him trust alone to merit;
Would rise by merit to promotion.
Alas! a mere chimeric notion.’
Gay was found pleasing by his friends, and had, we must believe, a kind heart. Swift, who was a nice observer in such matters, in his famous poem on his own death, assigns Gay a week in which to grieve:
‘Poor Pope would grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day;
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear;
The rest will give a shrug and cry,
“I’m sorry, but we all must die.”’
It is a matter of notoriety that Gay was very fat and fond of eating. He is, as we have already said, buried in Westminster Abbey, over against Chaucer. When all the rubbish is carted away from the Abbey to make room for the great men and women of the twentieth century, Gay will probably be accounted just good enough to remain where he is. He always was a lucky fellow, though he had not the grace to think so.