'"Whate'er thy countrymen have done,
By law and wit, by sword and gun,
In thee is faithfully recited;
And all the living world that view
Thy work, give thee the praises due,
At once instructed and delighted.
'"Yet for the fame of all these deeds,
What beggar in the Invalides,
With lameness broke, with blindness smitten,
Wished ever decently to die,
To have been either Mezeray,
Or any monarch he has written?
'"It strange, dear author, yet it true is,
That down from Pharamond to Louis
All covet life, yet call it pain:
All feel the ill, yet shun the cure;
Can sense this paradox endure?
Resolve me Cambray[26] or Fontaine.
'"The man in graver tragic known
(Though his best part long since was done),
Still on the stage desires to tarry;
And he who played the Harlequin,
After the jest still loads the scene,
Unwilling to retire, though weary."'
John Gay (1685-1732).
Gay, who enjoyed an unbroken friendship with the brotherhood of wits, and was treated by them like a spoilt child, was born at Barnstaple in 1685, and left an orphan at the age of ten. He was educated at the free grammar school in the town, and was afterwards, to his discontent, apprenticed to a mercer in London. He escaped from this uncongenial employment to be dependent on an uncle, and thus early exhibited his life-long disposition to rely upon others for support. 'Providence,' Swift writes, 'never designed Gay to be above two-and-twenty by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as a girl of fifteen.' His weakness, it has been said, appealed to Swift's strength, and Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot were Gay's most faithful friends. They found something in him to laugh at and to love. Ladies, too, treated him with the kind of friendliness which has a touch of commiseration. In 1714 Gay was appointed secretary to Lord Clarendon, a post which he owed to Swift, but the death of Queen Anne in that year brought the Whigs into office, and destroyed the poet's prospects. Prior to this he had been secretary to the imperious Duchess of Monmouth. He was now left without money or employment, and owed much to the generosity of Pope. It was Gay's lot 'in suing long to bide,' to be always hoping, and nearly always disappointed. 'He seems,' says his latest biographer, 'to have begun his career under the impression that it was somebody's duty to provide for him in the world, and this impression clung to him through nearly the whole of a lifetime.'[27] Ten years before his death he was eagerly looking to others for support. Writing to Swift, he says: 'I lodge at present in Burlington House, and have received many civilities from many great men, but very few real benefits. They wonder at each other for not providing for me, and I wonder at them all.'
Gay's first poem of any mark was The Shepherd's Week (1714), six burlesque pastorals, a subject proposed to him by Pope, who was then smarting from the praise Philips had received in The Guardian. But if Pope meant Gay to poke his fun at Philips in The Shepherd's Week, he must have been disappointed, for the poems were accepted as genuine bucolics, and although humorously absurd, are, to say the least, more true to rustic life than the pastorals either of Philips or of Pope. The Shepherd's Week was followed by Trivia (1715), a piece suggested by Swift's City Shower. It is one of Gay's most notable productions, not as a poem, but as a vivid description of the streets of London nearly two hundred years ago. The great reputation he obtained as the author of The Fables (1727), and still more of The Beggar's Opera (1728), the idea of which was suggested to Gay by Swift, survived him for some years. The Fables were written for and dedicated to the youthful Duke of Cumberland, who is asked to "accept the moral lay, and in these tales mankind survey." There is skill and ingenuity in the poems, but higher merit they cannot boast, and young readers are likely to prefer the illustrations which generally accompany The Fables to the letterpress. Many of Gay's allusions are beyond the apprehension of the young, and have a political flavour. The Beggar's Opera was intended as a burlesque of the Italian opera, which had been long the laughing-stock of men of letters, and as the play was thought to have political significance, and the character of Macheath to be a portrait of Walpole, it was received with enthusiasm, and acted in London for about sixty nights. So popular did the opera become, that ladies carried about the songs on their fans.
Eight years before, Gay had published his poems by subscription, and in those happy days for versemen had gained £1,000 by the venture. He put the money into South Sea stock, and lost it all. For The Beggar's Opera he received about £800. It was followed by Polly, a play of the same coarse character, which, for political reasons, was not allowed to be acted. The result was that it had a large sale, and put money in Gay's purse. Ten thousand five hundred copies are said to have been printed in one year, and the £1,200 realized by the sale were very wisely retained for the poet's use by the Duke of Queensberry, under whose roof he had at length found a warm nest. To the student Gay is chiefly interesting as the only noteworthy poet of the period, south of the Tweed, gifted with a lyrical capacity. Two or three of his songs and ballads, and especially Black-Eyed Susan, have a charm beyond the reach of the mechanical versifier. But the art of song is at a low level even in the hands of Gay. The lyric which the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets loved so well, and of which the present century has produced specimens to be matched only by Shakespeare, may be said to have been lost to English poetry for the first half of the last century, since neither Prior's verse, delightful though it be, nor the songs of Gay, have enough of the poetical element to form exceptions to this statement.
In his Tales he follows Prior in grossness, while inferior to him in art. Like the greater number of the Queen Anne poets, Gay flatters with a free hand. In an epistle addressed to Lintot, the bookseller, he declares that Anacreon lives once more in Sheffield, and Waller in Granville, that Buckingham's verse will last to distant time; while Ovid sings again in Addison, and 'Homer's Iliad shines in his Campaign.'
One of the liveliest and most graceful of Gay's poems is addressed to Pope 'On his having finished his translation of Homer's Iliad.' It is called A Welcome from Greece, and describes the friends who assembled to greet the poet on his return to England.