Go, Damon, bid the Muse display
The justice of thy Chloe's sorrow.
Damon's knell was rung in 1721. May his turf lie lightly on him! Deus sit propitius huic potatori, as Walter de [pg 584] Mapes sang.[112] Perhaps Samuel Johnson, who spoke slightingly of Prior's verses, enjoyed them more than he was [pg 585] willing to own. The old moralist had studied them as well as Mr. Thomas Moore, and defended them, and showed [pg 586] that he remembered them very well too on an occasion when their morality was called in question by that noted puritan, James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck.[113]
In the great society of the wits, John Gay deserved to be a favourite, and to have a good place.[114] In his set all were fond of him. His success offended nobody. He missed a fortune once or twice. He was talked of for Court favour, and hoped to win it; but the Court favour jilted him. Craggs gave him some South-Sea Stock; and at one [pg 587] time Gay had very nearly made his fortune. But Fortune shook her swift wings and jilted him too: and so his friends, instead of being angry with him, and jealous of him, were kind and fond of honest Gay. In the portraits of the literary worthies of the early part of the last century, Gay's face is the pleasantest perhaps of all. It appears adorned with neither periwig nor nightcap (the full dress and negligée of learning, without which the painters of those days scarcely ever portrayed wits), and he laughs at you over his shoulder with an honest boyish glee—an artless sweet humour. He was so kind, so gentle, so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at others, such a natural good creature that the Giants loved him. The great Swift was gentle and sportive with him,[115] as the enormous Brobdingnag maids of honour were with little Gulliver. He could frisk and fondle round Pope,[116] and sport, and bark, and caper without offending the most thin-skinned of poets and men; and when he was jilted in that little Court affair of which we have spoken, his warm-hearted patrons the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry[117] (the [pg 588] “Kitty, beautiful and young”, of Prior) pleaded his cause with indignation, and quitted the Court in a huff, carrying [pg 589] off with them into their retirement their kind gentle protégé. With these kind lordly folks, a real Duke and Duchess, as delightful as those who harboured Don Quixote, and loved that dear old Sancho, Gay lived, and was lapped in cotton, and had his plate of chicken, and his saucer of cream, and frisked, and barked, and wheezed, and grew fat, and so ended.[118] He became very melancholy and lazy, sadly plethoric, and only occasionally diverting in his latter days. But everybody loved him, and the remembrance of his pretty little tricks; and the raging old Dean of St. Patrick's, chafing in his banishment, was afraid to open the letter which Pope wrote him, announcing the sad news of the death of Gay.[119]
Swift's letters to him are beautiful; and having no purpose but kindness in writing to him, no party aim to advocate, or slight or anger to wreak, every word the Dean says to his favourite is natural, trustworthy, and kindly. His admiration for Gay's parts and honesty, and his laughter at his weaknesses, were alike just and genuine. He paints his character in wonderful pleasant traits of jocular satire. “I writ lately to Mr. Pope,” Swift says, writing to Gay; “I wish you had a little villakin in his neighbourhood; but you are yet too volatile, and any lady with a coach and six horses would carry you to Japan.” “If your ramble,” says Swift, in another letter, “was on horseback, I am glad of it, on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage-coaches and friends” coaches—for you are as arrant a Cockney as any hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into yours, that you ought to have some great work in scheme, which may take up seven years to finish, besides two or three under-ones that may add another thousand pounds to your stock, and then I shall be in less pain about you. I know you can find dinners, but you love twelvepenny coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day:' and then Swift goes off from Gay to pay some grand compliments to her Grace the Duchess of Queensberry, in whose sunshine Mr. Gay was basking, and in whose radiance the Dean would have liked to warm himself too.
But we have Gay here before us, in these letters—lazy, kindly, uncommonly idle; rather slovenly, I'm afraid; for ever eating and saying good things; a little, round, French abbé of a man, sleek, soft-handed, and soft-hearted.
Our object in these lectures is rather to describe the men than their works; or to deal with the latter only in as far as they seem to illustrate the character of their [pg 591] writers. Mr. Gay's Fables, which were written to benefit that amiable prince, the Duke of Cumberland, the warrior of Dettingen and Culloden, I have not, I own, been able to peruse since a period of very early youth; and it must be confessed that they did not effect much benefit upon the illustrious young prince, whose manners they were intended to mollify, and whose natural ferocity our gentle-hearted Satirist perhaps proposed to restrain. But the six pastorals called the Shepherd's Week, and the burlesque poem of Trivia any man fond of lazy literature will find delightful, at the present day, and must read from beginning to end with pleasure. They are to poetry what charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture: graceful, minikin, fantastic; with a certain beauty always accompanying them. The pretty little personages of the pastoral, with gold clocks to their stockings, and fresh satin ribbons to their crooks and waistcoats and bodices, dance their loves to a minuet-tune played on a bird-organ, approach the charmer, or rush from the false one daintily on their red-heeled tiptoes, and die of despair or rapture, with the most pathetic little grins and ogles; or repose, simpering at each other, under an arbour of pea-green crockery; or piping to pretty flocks that have just been washed with the best Naples in a stream of Bergamot. Gay's gay plan seems to me far pleasanter than that of Philips—his rival and Pope's—a serious and dreary idyllic Cockney; not that Gay's “Bumkinets and Hobnelias” are a whit more natural than the would-be serious characters of the other posture-master; but the quality of this true humourist was to laugh and make laugh, though always with a secret kindness and tenderness, to perform the drollest little antics and capers, but always with a certain grace, and to sweet music—as you may have seen a Savoyard boy abroad, with a hurdy-gurdy and a monkey, turning over head and heels, or clattering and piroueting in a pair of wooden shoes, yet always with a look of love and appeal in his bright eyes, and a smile that asks and wins affection and protection. Happy they who have that sweet gift of nature! It was this which made the great folks and Court ladies free and friendly with John Gay—which made Pope and Arbuthnot love him—which melted the savage heart of Swift when he thought of him—and drove away, for a moment or two, the dark frenzies which obscured the [pg 592] lonely tyrant's brain, as he heard Gay's voice with its simple melody and artless ringing laughter.
What used to be said about Rubini, qu'il avait des larmes dans la voix, may be said of Gay,[120] and of one other humourist of whom we shall have to speak. In almost every ballad of his, however slight,[121] in the Beggar's [pg 593] Opera[122] and in its wearisome continuation (where the verses are to the full as pretty as in the first piece, however), there is a peculiar, hinted, pathetic sweetness and melody. It charms and melts you. It's indefinable, but it exists; and is the property of John Gay's and Oliver Goldsmith's best verse, as fragrance is of a violet, or freshness of a rose.
Let me read a piece from one of his letters, which is so famous that most people here are no doubt familiar with it, but so delightful that it is always pleasant to hear:—
“I have just passed part of this summer at an old romantic seat of my Lord Harcourt's, which he lent me. It overlooks a common hayfield, where, under the shade of a haycock, sat two lovers—as constant as ever were found in romance—beneath a spreading bush. The name of the one (let it sound as it will) was [pg 594] John Hewet; of the other Sarah Drew. John was a well-set man, about five-and-twenty; Sarah, a brave woman of eighteen. John had for several months borne the labour of the day in the same field with Sarah; when she milked, it was his morning and evening charge to bring the cows to her pails. Their love was the talk, but not the scandal, of the whole neighbourhood, for all they aimed at was the blameless possession of each other in marriage. It was but this very morning that he had obtained her parents' consent, and it was but till the next week that they were to wait to be happy. Perhaps this very day, in the intervals of their work, they were talking of their wedding clothes; and John was now matching several kinds of poppies and field-flowers, to make her a present of knots for the day. While they were thus employed (it was on the last of July), a terrible storm of thunder and lightning arose, that drove the labourers to what shelter the trees or hedges afforded. Sarah, frightened and out of breath, sunk on a hay-cock; and John (who never separated from her) sat by her side, having raked two or three heaps together, to secure her. Immediately, there was heard so loud a crash, as if heaven had burst asunder. The labourers, all solicitous for each other's safety, called to one another: those that were nearest our lovers, hearing no answer, stepped to the place where they lay: they first saw a little smoke, and after, this faithful pair—John, with one arm about his Sarah's neck, and the other held over her face, as if to screen her from the lightning. They were struck dead, and already grown stiff and cold in this tender posture. There was no mark or discolouring on their bodies—only that Sarah's eyebrow was a little singed, and a small spot between her breasts. They were buried the next day in one grave!”