his own definition of the pastoral—an accurate imitation of the nature and manners of rustic life. In other words, Gay needed to tell his readers what he had done before they actually read the poem.

Fables

Gay did not always have to apologize. In the fifty-one fables in verse composed for the five-year-old Prince William, duke of Cumberland, and published a year before The Beggar’s Opera, his performance was quite authentic and more than satisfactory. In fact, both for his own generation and for posterity, the Fables may well be Gay’s most important poetic work. True, he had an adequate number of predecessors whom he could (and did) imitate—particularly Jean de La Fontaine, whose Fables choisies, mises en vers (1668-1694; Fables Written in Verse, 1735) was first published in 1668. He managed, however, perhaps for the first time as a poet, to generate an air of worldly wisdom and to give it substance through expressions of wit and lively verse. Obviously, Gay knew the state of the polite world—the same world that he had seen and felt during his “trivial” tour throughout London; but he also envisioned a moral world that might someday overcome the triteness and false elegance of his own age. The fables are light, genial, and even gay—of the stuff that would both interest and instruct a five-year-old child. Such pieces as “The Elephant and the Bookseller,” “The Lion and the Cub,” “The Two Owls and the Sparrow,” “The Two Monkeys,” and “The Hare and Many Friends” continue to make sense for today’s young and old alike.

Trivia

The unfortunate aspect of Gay’s most characteristic poem, Trivia, and his most important poetic work, the Fables, is that they leave the impression of a gentle, good-natured, and lovable man whose spiritual age never exceeded twenty-two. In a sense, the titles of the two works established forever Gay’s reputation as the poet of the trivial and the fabled, sufficiently lacking in intellectual acumen to compete with his seriously motivated contemporaries. Such impressions are gleaned while reading Gay’s poems together with Samuel Johnson’s conclusion that Gay never went beyond the trivial; with Joseph Warton’s contention (in his 1782 essay on Pope) that Gay was merely neat and terse; and with the correspondence of Pope and Swift, implying that Gay was a dear friend who needed to be loved and advised but whose poetry had little effect upon anyone. Consequently, not until recently has Gay’s poetry been seen for what it is: a formal attack upon and a reshaping of the ideas, the values, and the very scenes of early eighteenth century England. In that sense, he stands pen-to-pen with his contemporaries, really no different in purpose from Prior, Pope, or Swift. Thus, in To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China, he joins ranks with those who lashed out at grave philosophers poring over spiders and butterflies in the name of human contemplation; like moles, they dig for information known to and appreciated only by themselves. In criticizing the outwardly absurd, however, Gay departed slightly from his fellows in that he rarely became upset or overly bitter at what he knew and saw. Instead, he adopted the language and the tone of a civilized man who is rarely open in his criticism, but prefers detachment and only sufficient mockery to hold the attention of his reader.

Moral condition

If Gay can stand beside his fellow satirists and Tory comrades, he can also, on occasion, rise above them as a poet seriously concerned with the moral state of the world—the universal world, rather than the limited sphere of Augustan London. For example, in “A Thought on Eternity,” he contrasts infinity to the pettiness of his own times, in which actions and events are measured in terms of specific chronological periods. The virtuous soul, he concludes, regards life as a fleeting dream whereby the soul longs for freedom from earth and a flight into the wider span of eternity. In “A Contemplation on Night,” published by Steele in his Miscellany of 1713, Gay looks to the heavens, a pure Newtonian sky, and enjoys the workings of an all-powerful Providence that nature has forced him to recognize. Even when the stars and the sun have passed from his view, he will, as a deeply moral man, understand the presence, the light, of the Creator. Even in the fairly early Rural Sports, in which Gay again takes advantage of the Augustans’ drift toward Newtonianism, he does more than introduce countryside recreation into the georgic framework. The strength of the piece lies in his ability to combine vivid nature description with pure religious feeling; but the religious aspects aside, he still manages to create a poem that gives moral credence to the beauty of nature. He contemplates the sunset while also contemplating God, thus allowing the poetic soul to overflow with praise and declaration.

The same elements and combinations appear again in “Panthea” (1713), when a disappointed lady turns from the hateful town toward what she terms “some melancholy cave,” a living grave in which she can cry and mourn forever. There she hopes to lose all sense of natural and human-contrived divisions of time. Another form of eternity emerges in “Araminta” (1713), a pastoral elegy set in a melancholy shade with such items as a croaking raven and an old ruin contributing to an atmosphere of human repentance.

Serious students of Gay’s poetry may wonder why he never developed with more realism or intensity his respect for the creative power of God. Had he done so, he might have managed to contribute something to the growth and development of English hymnody. Gay, however, had little interest in and even less commitment to congregational worship. He evidenced little of the religious conviction demonstrated, for example, by Joseph Addison in the five Spectator hymns published in 1712. The religious and moral elements that do appear in Gay’s poetry are always rather ambiguous. For example, in the fable of “The Ravens, the Sexton, and the Earth-Worm,” the ravens believe they smell a dead horse; however, the sexton informs them that the local squire has died and will be buried on this night. The sexton is obviously put out because of the ravens’ inability to distinguish human from beast, although the birds reply that a dead horse smells as good as a dead human being. Upon the scene crawls an earthworm, the expert on carrion, to mediate. The worm essentially sides with the birds, but he does offer the advice that the essence of a human is the soul, not the flesh. True virtue is seated in the immortal mind, the worm claims; thus, “Different tastes please different vermin.”

The ambiguity of Gay’s moral pronouncements takes the form of earnestness and cynicism combined. As an intellectual—or at least a member of an intellectual group of poets, dramatists, and aristocrats—he hid behind an intellectual hardness that he wanted very much to temper. Within his own moral composition, there was a struggle between the strong rustic and provincial elements to which he had originally belonged and the influence of those intellectuals whom he chose to join and whom he emulated in his art. Again, Gay could never be considered a religious person or a religious poet; nevertheless, he could not totally conceal the enjoyment and the legitimate spiritual uplift that came to him (as it certainly comes to all persons of sensitivity) when he saw the actual workings of a God-created and God-ordered nature.

Legacy

It is interesting to note that Gay’s reputation as a poet has held firm throughout almost two centuries of critical comment. Johnson, in 1781, could not rank Gay very high because he thought his subject failed to achieve a significant degree of genius. In 1959, Bonamy Dobrée thought that Gay lacked a “capacity for thought,” which prevented him from treating the substance of his poems with any depth. Perhaps both of those observers placed too much emphasis on the surface content of what still remains Gay’s most characteristic poem, Trivia. Certainly, the poem may be marred by the rapidity of a walking tour through too many disconnected (thematically as well as geographically) parts of town; and equally certain is Gay’s imperfect command of the mock-epic style. Nevertheless, Gay could pump life into the trivial, cramming his scenes with more facts than the naked eye could perceive at a single glance: thirty-five separate localities, at least sixty different ways of earning a living, the signs of the weather, the accoutrements necessary for walking the streets. Gay, indeed, lacked originality and depth, but no scholar can ever accuse him of lacking versatility; he applied his pen to anything that he thought might gain him a patron or a pound.

Gay the poet never quite achieved the intellectual power or the substance of the first-rate Augustan minds and artists. There is even some merit to the argument that, during his lifetime, his friends, not his published works, were actually responsible for the establishment of his literary reputation. His charming and witty songs certainly contained sufficient depth and unity to merit recognition, and the same may be said for the operas. The remainder of his verse is readable, but it is also too imitative to be distinctive. His interest as both poet and dramatist centered upon everyday life, and the novelists, dramatists, and poets of the late Hanoverian period surely benefited from the force and the action of his descriptions and characterizations. There will always be, no doubt, some challenge even to that contribution, for Gay has long been attacked for superficiality. Still, literary history will continue to provide a place for Gay’s poetry, for he contributed, if nothing else, a sharp engraving of his times. If readers cannot appreciate Gay as a poet, they can at least learn from him and envision the Augustan Age because of him.