(1685-1732)
[Illustration: JOHN GAY]
"In the great society of the wits," said Thackeray, "John Gay deserves
to be a favorite, and to have a good place." The wits loved him. Prior
was his faithful ally; Pope wrote him frequent letters of affectionate
good advice; Swift grew genial in his merry company; and when the
jester lapsed into gloom, as jesters will, all his friends hurried to
coddle and comfort him. His verse is not of the first order, but the
list of "English classics" contains far poorer; it is entertaining
enough to be a pleasure even to bright children of this generation,
and each succeeding one reads it with an inherited fondness not by any
means without help from its own merits. And the man who invented comic
opera, one of the most enduring molds in which English humor has been
cast, deserves the credit of all important literary pioneers.
Kind, lazy, clever John Gay came of a good, impoverished Devonshire
family, which seems to have done its best for the bright lad of twelve
when it apprenticed him to a London silk mercer. The boy hated this
employment, grew ill under its fret and confinement, went back to the
country, studied, possibly wrote poor verses, and presently drifted
back to London. The cleverest men of the time frequented the crowded
taverns and coffee-houses, and the talk that he heard at Will's and
Button's may have determined his profession. Thither came Pope and
Addison, Swift and Steele, Congreve, St. John, Prior, Arbuthnot,
Cibber, Hogarth, Walpole, and many a powerful patron who loved good
company.
Perhaps through some kind acquaintance made in this informal circle,
Gay obtained a private secretaryship, and began the flirtation with
the Muse which became serious only after some years of coldness on
that humorous lady's part. His first poem, 'Wine,' published when he
was twenty-three, is not included in his collected works: perhaps
because it is written in blank verse; perhaps because his maturer
taste condemned it. Three years later, in 1711, when the success of
the Spectator was yet new, and Pope had just completed his brilliant
'Art of Criticism,' and Swift was editing the Examiner and working on
that defense of a French peace, 'The Conduct of the Allies,' which was
to make him the talk of London,--Gay sent forth his second venture; a
curious, unimportant pamphlet, 'The Present State of Wit.' Late in
1713 he is contributing to Dicky Steele's Guardian, and sending
elegies to his 'Poetical Miscellanies'; and a little later, having
become a favorite with the powerful Mr. Pope, he is made to bring up
new reinforcements to the battle of that irascible gentleman with his
ancient enemy Ambrose Phillips. This he does in 'The Shepherd's Week,'
a sham pastoral, which is full of wit and easy versification, and
shows very considerable talents as a parodist. This skit the luckless
satirist dedicated to Bolingbroke, whose brilliant star was just
passing into eclipse. Swift thought this harmless courtesy the real
cause of the indifference of the Brunswick princes to the merits of
the poet; and in an age when every spark of literary genius was so
carefully nursed and utilized to sustain the weak dynasty, most likely
he was right.
For this reason or another, indifferent they were; and in a time when
court favor counted enormously, poor indolent luxury-loving Gay had to
earn his loaf by hard work, or go without it. He produced a
tragi-comi-pastoral farce called 'What D'ye Call It?' which was the
lineal ancestor of 'Pinafore' and the 'Pirates of Penzance' in its
method of treating farcical incidents in a grave manner. But the town
did not see the fun of this expedient, and the play failed, though it
contained, among other famous songs, ''Twas When the Seas Were
Roaring.' In 1716 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of
London,' put some money into the poet's empty pocket, thanks to Pope's
good offices. A year later a second comedy of his, 'Three Hours after
Marriage,' met with well-deserved failure. And now, as always, when
his spirits sank, his good friends showered kindnesses upon him. Mr.
Secretary Pulteney carried him off to Aix. Lord Bathurst and Lord
Burlington were his to command. Many fine gentlemen, and particularly
many fine ladies, pressed him to make indefinite country visits. In
1720 his friends managed the publication of his poems in two quarto
volumes, subscribing for ten, twenty, and even fifty copies apiece,
some of them, and securing to the poet, it is said, L1,000. The
younger Craggs, the bookseller, gave him some South-Sea stock which
rose rapidly, and at one time the improvident little gentleman found
himself in possession of L20,000. All his friends besought him to
sell, but Alnaschar Gay had visions of a splendid ease and opulence.
The bubble burst, and poor Alnaschar had not wherewithal to pay his
broker.
The Duchess of Queensborough (Prior's "Kitty, beautiful and young")
had already annexed the charmer, and now carried him off to
Petersham. "I wish you had a little villakin in Mr. Pope's
neighborhood," scolds Swift to him; "but you are yet too volatile, and
any lady with a coach and six horses might carry you to Japan;" and
again:--"I know your arts of patching up a journey between
stagecoaches and friend's 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." Gay went to Bath
with the Queensberrys, and to Oxford. Swift complained to Pope:--"I
suppose Mr. Gay will return from Bath with twenty pounds more flesh,
and two hundred pounds less money. Providence never designed him 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." And his dear Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk,
took him affectionately to task:--"Your head is your best friend: it
would clothe, lodge, and feed you; but you neglect it, and follow that
false friend your heart, which is such a foolish, tender thing that it
makes others despise your head, that have not half so good a one on
their own shoulders. In short, John, you may be a snail, or a
silkworm; but by my consent you shall never be a hare again."
He lived under other great roofs, if not contentedly, at least
gracefully and agreeably. If his dependent state irked him, his hosts
did not perceive it. To Swift he wrote, indeed, "They wonder at each
other for not providing for me, and _I_ wonder at them all." Yet, for
the nine years from 1722 to 1731 he had a small official salary, on
which a thriftier or more industrious mortal would have managed to
live respectably even in that expensive age; and for at least a part
of the time he had official lodgings at Whitehall.
In 1725 was published the first edition of his famous 'Fables,' which
had been written for the moral behoof of Prince William, afterward
Duke of Cumberland, of unblessed memory. The book did not make his
fortune with the court, as he had hoped, and in 1728 he produced his
best known work, 'The Beggar's Opera.' Nobody had much faith in this
"Newgate Pastoral," least of all Swift, who had first suggested it.
But it took the town by storm, running for sixty-three consecutive
nights. As the heroine, Polly Peachum, the lovely Lavinia Fenton
captured a duchess's coronet. The songs were heard alike in West End
drawing-rooms and East End slums. Swift praised it for its morality,
and the Archbishop of Canterbury scored it for its condonation of
vice. The breath of praise and blame filled equally its prosperous
sails, blew it all over the kingdom wherever a theatre could be found,
and finally wafted it to Minorca. So well did the opera pay him that
Gay wrote a sequel called 'Polly,' which, being prohibited through
some notion of Walpole's, sold enormously by subscription and earned
Gay L1,200.
After this the hospitable Queensberrys seem to have adopted him. He
produced a musical drama, 'Acis and Galatea,' written long before and
set to Handel's music; a few more 'Fables'; a thin opera called
'Achilles'; and then his work was done. He died in London of a swift
fever, in December 1732, before his kind Kitty and her husband could
reach him, or his other great friend, the Countess of Suffolk.
Arbuthnot watched over him; Pope was with him to the last; Swift
indorsed on the letter that brought him the tidings, "On my dear
friend Mr. Gay's death; received on December 15th, but not read till
the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune." So faithfully did
the "giants," as Thackeray calls them, cherish this gentle, friendly,
affectionate, humorous comrade. He seems indeed to have been almost
the only companion with whom Swift did not at some time fall out, and
of his steadfastness the gloomy great man in his 'Verses on my Own
Death' could write:--
"Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day."
The 'Trivia' and the 'Shepherd's Week,' the 'Acis and Galatea' and
even the 'Beggar's Opera,' gradually faded into the realm of "old,
forgotten, far-off things"; while the 'Fables' passed through many
editions, found their place in school reading-books, were committed to
memory by three generations of admiring pupils, and included in the
most orthodox libraries. Yet criticism now reverts to the earlier
standard; approves the songs, and the minute observation, the nice
phrasing, and the humorous swing of the pastorals and operas, and
finds the fables dull, commonplace, and monotonous. Pope said in his
affectionate epitaph that the poet had been laid in Westminster Abbey,
not for ambition, but--
"That the worthy and the good shall say,
Striking their pensive bosoms, '_Here_ lies Gay.'"
If to-day the worthy and the good do not know even where he lies, not
the less is he to be gratefully remembered whom the best and greatest
of his own time so much admired, and of whom Pope and Johnson and
Thackeray and Dobson have written with the warmth of friendship.