John Gay.
Some of these highwaymen were hung up in literature too, and made a figure there; but not, I suspect, in way of warning. It was the witty Dean Swift who suggested to the brisk and frolicsome poet, John Gay, that these gentlemen of the high-road would come well into a pastoral or a comedy; and out of that suggestion came, some years later, “The Beggar’s Opera,” with Captain Macheath for a hero, that took the town by storm—ran for sixty and more successive nights, and put its musical, saucy songlets afloat in all the purlieus of London. It was, indeed, the great forerunner of our ballad operas; much fuller, indeed, of grime and foul strokes than Mr. Gilbert’s contagious sing-song; but possessing very much of his briskness and quaint turns of thought, and of that pretty shimmer of language which lends itself to melody as easily as the thrushes do.
This John Gay[106]—whose name literary-mongers will come upon in their anthologies—was an alert, well-looking young fellow, who had come out of Devonshire to make his way in a silk-mercer’s shop in London. He speedily left the silk-mercer’s; but he had that about him of joyousness and amiability, added to a clever but small literary faculty, which won the consideration of helpful friends; and he never lost friends by his antagonisms or his moodiness. Everybody seemed to love to say a good word for John Gay. Swift was almost kind to him; and said he was born to be always twenty-two, and no older. Pope befriended and commended him; great ladies petted him; and neither Swift nor Pope were jealous of a petting to such as Gay; his range was amongst the daisies—and theirs—above the tree-tops. A little descriptive poem of his, called Trivia, brings before us the London streets of that day—the coaches, the boot-blacks, the red-heeled cavaliers, the book-stalls, the markets, the school-boys, the mud, the swinging sign-boards, and the tavern-doors. In the course of it he gives a score or more of lines to a description of the phenomena of the solidly frozen Thames—sharply remembered by a good many living in his time[107]—with booths all along the river, and bullocks cooked upon the frozen roads which bridged the water; and he tells of an old apple-woman, who somehow had her head lopped off when the break-up came, and the ice-cakes piled above the level—tells it, too, in a very Gilbert-like way, as you shall see:
“She now a basket bore;
That head alas! shall basket bear no more!
Each booth she frequent past, in quest of gain,
And boys with pleasure heard her thrilling strain.
Ah, Doll! all mortals must resign their breath,
And industry itself submit to Death;
The cracking crystal yields; she sinks; she dies,
Her head chopt off, from her lost shoulder flies;
Pippins! she cry’d; but death her voice confounds;
And—Pip—Pip—Pip—along the ice resounds!”
Then there is the ballad, always quoted when critics would show what John Gay could do, and which the Duchess of Queensberry (who greatly befriended him) thought charming; I give the two final verselets only:
“How can they say that nature
Has nothing made in vain;
Why then beneath the water
Should hideous rocks remain?
No eyes the rocks discover,
That lurk beneath the deep,
To wreck the wandering lover,
And leave the maid to weep?
“All melancholy lying,
Thus wailed she for her dear;
Repaid each blast with sighing,
Each billow with a tear;
When o’er the white wave stooping,
His floating corpse she spied;
Then, like a lily drooping,
She bowed her head, and died!”
I think I have shown the best side of him; and it is not very imposing. A man to be petted; one for confections and for valentines, rather than for those lifts of poetic thought which buoy us into the regions of enduring song.
Yet Swift says in a letter, “‘The Beggar’s Opera’ hath knocked down Gulliver!” This joyous poet lies in Westminster Abbey, with an epitaph by Alexander Pope. How, then, can we pass him by?