Gay is certainly not one of our most eminent poets. He is clever,
amiable, and displays much knowledge of life, both in town and country.
It is rare, however, that he rises into any thing like genuine poetry.
When he does that, it is when he elevates his theme by a spirit of
devotion, which, however, is not too often. The best instances of this
are to be found, perhaps, in his Lines on Night, in the first canto of
Rural Sports, in his Contemplation on Night, and in A Thought on
Eternity. It were to be wished that description as vivid had in Gay been
oftener united to sentiment as elevated, in such lines as these:
"To Neptune's bounds I stray
To take my farewell of the parting day;
For in the deep the sun his glory hides,
A streak of gold the sea and land divides,
The purple clouds their amber linings show,
And edged with flame rolls every wave below.
Here pensive I behold the fading light,
And o'er the distant billow lose my sight.
Now Night in silent state begins to rise,
And twinkling orbs bestrew th' uncloudy skies;
Her borrowed luster growing Cynthia lends,
And in the main a glittering path extends;
Millions of worlds hang in the spacious air,
Which round their suns their annual circles steer.
Sweet contemplation elevates my sense,
While I survey the works of Providence.
O could the Muse in loftier strains rehearse
The glorious Author of the universe,
Who reins the winds, gives the vast ocean bounds,
And circumscribes the flaming worlds their rounds;
My soul should overflow in songs of praise,
And my Creator's name inspire my lays!"
The Contemplation on Night is equally worthy of a true poet, and
concludes with the following lines, which properly follow, and seem to
continue, those just quoted.
"When the pure soul is from the body flown,
No more shall Night's alternate reign be known;
The sun no more shall rolling light bestow,
But from the Almighty streams of glory flow.
Oh! may some nobler thought my soul employ,
Than transient, empty, sublunary joy.
The stars shall drop, the sun shall lose his flame,
But thou, O God! forever shine the same."
Spite, however, of such occasional passages as these, and of much
graphic depicting of town and country life and scenery; spite of the
easy flow and the moral of his fables, John Gay can not claim to be
included here, except in the character of the close and life-long friend
of Pope and Swift. So intimately is he mixed up with _their_ homes and
haunts, that it seems requisite to say something of his own. But where
were these? His haunts may be traced, but home of his own he seems never
to have had. Gay was an easy, good-natured fellow, but he had no great
feeling of independence; and without being able or desirous to say that
he was a mean, far less a disgraceful, hanger-on of the great, he was
still a hanger-on. His home was at first in or near Barnstaple,
Devonshire, where he was born; then a mercer's shop in London; then
lodgings, and the literary coffee-houses of London; then the house of
the Duchess of Monmouth; and, finally, that of the Duke of Queensbury.
For several years before his death, the house of the Duke of Queensbury
was his home, wherever that was, at Burlington Gardens, in town, or at
Amesbury or Petersham, in the country. Gay was as regular a part of the
ducal family as any old court minstrel was of a palace of old. The duke
was his treasurer, and the duchess his warm and generous patroness and
friend.
All that we can require to know of Gay, Johnson, in a more good-humored
vein than was his wont, has summed up for us.
It was in 1688, the year of the Revolution, that he was born at
Barnstaple, where he received his education. In London, he soon quitted
the mercer's shop, and became the secretary of the Duchess of Monmouth,
in which capacity he found leisure enough to write and publish his Rural
Sports, which he inscribed to Pope, and thus won his friendship. So much
pleased was Pope with his manners and conversation, that he soon became
his fast and intimate friend, and introduced him to Swift. The three, as
we have seen, formed a bond of attachment and of familiar intercourse,
that Gay's death only put an end to. Of Gay's various publications it is
not necessary here to speak. They are chiefly his Rural Sports, already
mentioned; The Shepherd's Week; The Wife of Bath, a Play; What D'ye Call
it, a Mock Tragedy; Three Hours after Marriage, a Comedy; The Captives;
The Beggar's Opera; Polly; The Distressed Wife; his Fables; Trivia, or
the Art of Walking the Streets; The Fan; Tales; Epistles; Gondibert, a
Poem; and various small compositions.
His plays were seldom successful, with the exception of The Beggar's
Opera, which was extremely so, and still continues so with certain
classes. The origin of this singular production Pope has thus detailed:
"Dr. Swift had been observing once to Mr. Gay what an odd, pretty sort
of a thing a Newgate Pastoral might make. Gay was inclined to try at
such a thing for some time, but afterward thought it would be better to
write a comedy on the same plan. This was what gave rise to the Beggar's
Opera. He began on it; and when first he mentioned it to Swift, the
doctor did not much like the project. As he carried it on, he showed
what he wrote to both of us, and we now and then gave a correction, or a
word or two of advice; but it was wholly of his own writing. When it was
done, neither of us thought it would succeed. He showed it to Congreve,
who, after reading it over, said, 'It would either take greatly, or be
damned confoundedly.' We were all at the first night of it, in great
uncertainty of the event; till we were very much encouraged by
overhearing the Duke of Argyle, who sat in the next box to us, say, 'It
will do--it must do! I see it in the eyes of them!' This was a good
while before the first act was over, and so gave us ease soon; for that
duke, besides his own good taste, has a particular knack, as any one now
living, in discovering the taste of the public. He was quite right in
that, as usual: the good-nature of the audience appeared stronger and
stronger every act, and ended in a clamor of applause."
Pope has also recorded the following particulars of its popularity.
"This piece was received with greater applause than was ever known.
Besides being acted in London sixty-three days without interruption, and
received the next season with equal applause, it spread into all the
great towns of England; was played in many places to the thirtieth and
fortieth time; at Bath and Bristol, fifty, &c. It made its progress into
Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where it was performed twenty-four days
successively. The ladies carried about with them the favorite songs of
it in fans, and houses were furnished with it in screens. The fame of it
was not confined to the author only. The person who acted Polly, till
then obscure, became all at once the favorite of the town; her pictures
were engraved, and sold in great numbers; her life written; books of
letters and verses to her published, and pamphlets made even of her
sayings and jests. Furthermore, it drove out of England, for that
season, the Italian opera, which had carried all before it for ten
years."
From that time to the present, the effect has been, to a certain degree,
the same, in a certain class; the songs of The Beggar's Opera have begun
again to be sung, and a manifest tendency has been produced to exalt
into this admiration of the multitude, highwaymen and women of the
town. Neither can it be denied that it has given birth anew, in the
shape of novels, to Newgate literature. The oddity of it was, that in
opposition to the storm of reprehension which followed it from the
press, Swift defended it for the excellence of its morality, and because
"it placed all kinds of vice in the strongest and most odious light."
This was sufficiently contradicted by the public admiration of its
heroes, heroines, its songs, and its very slang. Yet we find Gay
representing himself, in a letter to Swift, as a martyr to morality.
"For writing in the cause of virtue, and against the fashionable vices,
I am looked upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in
England." If Gay's self-love could so far blind and persuade him, there
can be no reader of his collected poems at the present day who can agree
with him. There is a far too considerable quantity of his writings which
are utterly vile and filthy, and fit only to be bound up with Rochester,
or, rather, not to be bound up at all; and it may be questioned whether
the prudent lessons of his fables, and the better sentiments scattered
through his other poetry, could by any means even neutralize the effect
of his pages of defilement, were not the better more commonly read, and
the worse left to oblivion by the purer spirit of the age.
The origin of his Shepherd's Week, which, though coarse, has much nature
in it, is also curious. Steele, in some papers in the Guardian, had
praised Ambrose Philips as the Pastoral writer who was second only to
Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope, who had also published pastorals,
not pleased to be overlooked, drew up a comparison of his own
compositions with those of Philips's, in which he civilly gave himself
the preference, while he seemed to disown it. So enraged was Philips,
that he brought a sturdy cudgel to Button's coffee-house, and put it
over the mantel-piece, saying, "That was for Pope when he could catch
him there." Pope, on his part again, is supposed to have incited Gay to
write the Shepherd's Week, to show that, if it be necessary to copy
nature with minuteness, rural life must be exhibited such as grossness
and ignorance have made it. But intended only to burlesque Philips,
these pastorals became popular, and were eagerly read for their truth to
country life by those who took no interest in the literary squabble.
If we add to the places already mentioned the house of Dr. Arbuthnot, at
Hampstead, where Gay used occasionally to domicile himself, we have a
sufficient index to his homes and haunts.