[In the following essay, Beckwith considers the classical antecedents of Gay's Trivia, including Virgil's Georgics, to explicate Gay's "mock" effects. Beckwith finds that despite its pointed satire, the poem's mock tone makes possible an overall sense of positivity about the dynamic nature of city life.]

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Johan Huizinga

In Gay's Trivia (1716; II, 99-220 added in Poems on Several Occasions, 1720) a number of possible "meanings"—mock georgic, satire, moral didacticism, straight reportage of journalism, pastoral yearnings, apocalyptic vision—have attracted one reader or another;' but I think it might better be read as a game of languages, that is a game with meaning itself. Such a way of reading has the initial advantage of equalizing the lines of the poem at one starting point, so that we will not be too readily seduced by heightened or apparently insistent statements, or those that seem to cluster around some theme, or the literal and predicative; and mock work is especially susceptible to such seduction toward atomistic treatment. We get the hang of the work right away, begin to ask what lies beyond the joke, and fix on what appear to be thematic lines, spots of density, or other pointers—ignoring their modifying context.

A characterizing remark about mock pastoral (by Martin Price in To the Palace of Wisdom) reminds us that

the mock form cuts both ways: if it protects the "pastoral vision" from a misguided literalism, it also convicts the pastoral forms of a high-minded vacuity by offering a world of robust energy.²

Each side in this face-off, each valid yet wanting, forces on the other a context the other would prefer to do without; each reveals some absurdity in the other. Yet in some larger view, or reality, they complete one another, though their absurdities remain absurdities. Their forced joining is at once significant and inescapably comic, all ragged and compromised as it is: a natural metaphor for experience or life itself.

The joining, and the metaphor, occur in the listener's mind; the joke itself is discursive, one side presenting its case, the other then undercutting it. But jokes are characteristically brief, economical, and above all strategic; even in their discursiveness they suggest simultaneity. This would suggest the pun as the ideal joke-structure; and if we can escape the trap of sound alone we can discover or invent what amounts to complex puns of situations, or values, or realities. The result, among other things, is to patch an inherent flaw in the joke-structure, its necessary discursiveness or chronology. The mind joins the first and second parts of a joke-pun and adjusts the incompleteness of each part in light of the other.

Mock work advances in such ways too. In "Friday" of The Shepherd's Week Gay provides an example which also shows his very great skill and tact in the management of tones so important to this kind of operation. He describes the death and obsequies of Blouzelinda the country wench with surprising leisure and attention to pathetic circumstance; it is only after some forty lines of a genuinely touching scene that he returns to the mock. And the return itself is not abrupt. He eases back with a few lines of graceful transition:

With wicker Rods we fenc'd her Tomb around,
To ward from Man and Beast the hallow'd Ground,
Lest her new Grave the Parson's Cattle raze,
For both his Horse and Cow the Church-yard graze.³
(II. 145-48)

This is charming and funny; and it is, if we will, an undercut. But it equally illustrates the blend of tones, and of realities, that mock work can effect beyond the typical joke structure. And through such devices as ambiguity, allusion, calculated word choice ("Beast"), ironic tone, reticence, insinuation, the mock work can achieve lines, passages, ultimately whole pieces, simultaneously mock and not-mock. In this way it moves on from the more mechanical two-part "similic" structure of the discursive joke form toward something like real metaphor in the text itself.

All this may be simply one way of redescribing that quality of double-saying so well known in Gay. Throughout Trivia he has a manner of regularly infusing into moods, tones, and references a light tinge of excess, deficiency, indecorum or other distortion, giving the whole a subdued running effect of the uncertain and the quizzical. Empson described one of his types of ambiguity as an outward sign that the mind of the poet was making itself up on the spot.⁴ This shifting, off-center touch of Gay's insinuates a sense of theme being questioned, variegated, and so continually re-created, on the spot. The constant slight modulation of tone induces a sense that something additional and tangential is being suggested. It is inconclusive and teasing, as such silex scintillans would naturally be. Indeed we could call it part of the mock-maneuver to play upon the reader's or (even more) the critic's susceptibilities, enticing him to try conclusions about the work that the whole work will not support, since it is likely to be subverting them somewhere else. The key, if there is one, to the "meaning" of Trivia, if it has one, lies rather, I think, in the relation of its other-saying levels to the more evident substantive—the literal and predicative—body of the poem.

For such a distinction we usually bring in terms like "style" and "rhetoric," "tone" and "gesture," "device." But in their effect they function as greater and lesser languages. If all stylistic elements affect meaning, they all make meaning; and the meaning they make is more often than not likely to be inconsistent in some way and degree with the literal meaning. This typically happens in all poetry, of course, but in poetic mock work it assumes a special importance. The initial face-off that mock is suggests right away the idea of mutual ironic scrutiny, which in turn suggests that all positions, points of view, assumptions of value might be up for scrutiny in the ensuing work. Then if a mind like Gay's falls upon such considerations, a range of variety in mock, mock upon mock, mock and not-mock intertwined and interchanged, can emerge. The Shepherd's Week and Rural Sports disclose some odd features of that interesting and undervalued mind: a fascination with the relation between literary forms and the realities they are presumed to represent (as in Rural Sports where we may be unsure whether he is looking at the scenery or periphrasing the Georgics—no doubt both, but he has taken pains to tell us that he is in the country and with a copy of the Georgics); a companion fascination with the relation between language and physical detail; at the same time a very great alertness, a4 hyper-alertness, to physical detail in itself, I think beyond that of any other Augustan poet; a cautionary awareness of the absolute difference between physical detail and language, language forms, literary forms; yet a sense of the pressure, the seductiveness, so to call it the gravitational pull, of physical detail. Add to this a sense of delicacy and featness, again beyond that of any other Augustan poet, this time excepting Pope; an attuned and attunable ear; and that so-humorous and quizzical imagination variously evident in Rural Sports and much more in The Shepherd's Week.

Such a mind is capable of turning everything into an array of languages, while withholding commitment from all of them. Gay was also heir to a social and cultural sense of language variability, as well as more specifically to several categories of language in the more traditional senses when he came to the writing of Trivia.

Not many studies have been made of the words in Trivia, however, either by themselves or in relation to their contexts; and those that have do not pursue the matter anyghing like as far as the poem will bear. One suggestive study, the best of its kind that I know ("Virgil, Dryden, Gay and Matters Trivial," by Arthur Sherbo, PMLA 85 [1970]: 1063-71), resurrects a useful figure: since a great many of Gay's words, it reminds us, derive meaning and shades of meaning from Latin, Virgil or other Roman poets, and from Dryden's translation, Trivia should be read like a palimpsest. And it rightly rebuked earlier critics who, eager to make a point, gave the work only a surface or a selected reading.⁵

Without quibbling over metaphors, I would prefer the figure of a series of overlays or transparencies, since those earlier layers, and the latest, should all be read at once, and all through each other. The exemplary word offered in Sherbo's article is the word "doubtful" in the line, "And in the doubtful Day the Woodcock flies" (I, 234). The phrase "doubtful Day" refers to daybreak, and is ratified by Virgil. Sherbo cites Ovid, but a related use is in Georgics I, 252—dubio caelo—though "dubio" there modifies not daybreak but weather. It is in Dryden too, but drawn from Milton where it means the uncertain outcome of a battle.⁶ These facts are then used to suggest that the opinion of Spacks (p. 44) who gives the word moral force (since this is the day on which the milkmaid Patty may be seduced), is thereby somehow cancelled or damped.

But surely our reading must accommodate all senses. The immediate context adds to the semantic interest of the detail, as does the traditional literary context. The woodcock's reputation for gullibility is proverbial, and appears often in literature: twice in Hamlet, where the first time it refers to a "green girl" in danger (so her father thinks) of seduction.⁷ Well enough, but this moral meaning should not cancel or damp the historical and literary. Each meaning qualifies the others, producing that kind of jointure and metaphor with its attendant complex of feeling that I have been describing. We do feel for poor Patty, though not without some censure (we may feel unqualified pity for a woodcock in a springe, but human beings have not the right to behave like woodcocks), which Gay reinforces: "Presents with female Virtue must prevail" (I, 280). But all that feeling is tempered and distanced, purged of sentimentalism, by our awareness of the verbal craft of the thing, which contrives with the simplest means a metaphor with so many levels of affiliation: uncertain weather, uncertain battle, moral vulnerability. It takes us right away from any literalizing of Patty's troubles by making us see them in the ironic light of artifice, made more ironic by the presence of so much artifice in so little room. At the same time it qualifies the artifice with a transient touch of pathos, achieved through the same means.

Below such specifics is what we might call a running pattern of the latinate, an undercurrent of distancing quasi-allusion, literary and historical. Before examining the effect of its latinate roots, let us examine an early line that describes the approach of winter, the often-noted "all the Mall in leafy Ruin lies" (I, 27). The word "ruin" just pricks the attention, partly because it has a touch of wrongness: the Mall is in ruin only with respect to the leaves, and even those will be replaced in the spring. It is at the least an arresting word in that context, which ties the two nouns, "ruin" and "Mall," together, and reduces the real object of ruin to an adjective, "leafy." If we then begin to think of the themes of revival, reparation, cyclicism, or, say, the high cost of preserving and continuing life, we may feel some embarrassment at loading such a freight of meaning on one word, even if its use and context are provocative. Yet as it happens the word recurs some four or five times in a range of deepening contexts. First comes a kind of preparation in the form of several comic ruins: the ruin of wigs by the rain, or a suit by chandler's wax, or stockings by a fall on the ice, and so on. Then near the end of Book II the word reappears: "The Sun's beamy Ruin gilds the Plains" (1. 538)—the reference is to the adventures of Phaeton. "Beamy" makes the word oddly ambiguous, as well as implying a ruin beyond the nature we know, a cosmic ruin. Gay remains reticent and non-commital—it is part of his game—and moves on to three other stages or kinds of ruin, mixing, in three kinds of proportion, the natural and unnatural or accidental: the "ruin'd Nose" of a victim of syphilis (III, 304), the "pitchy Ruines" of a shipwreck (III, 350), and the "smoky Ruin" of London itself (III, 372), together suggesting other kinds of ruin, cosmic or moral or whatever. He then draws in the threatened ruin of Naples, a feared recurrence of the historical ruin of Pompeii. Might the combination suggest the physical-moral disruption of nature, or perhaps the ruin of the world in an apocalypse both physical and moral? And if so, what does that make of this mock work?—a symbolic representation of the disruptive impact of urban culture on the human psyche? the eternal nature-nurture struggle? Heavy going for a mock work; but the little suggestive pattern is there, though suggestion may be all we get.

Yet there is one more meaning of "ruin," which Gay's first readers would have known and appreciated. It is (as John Chalker reminds us in The English Georgic, p. 163) the Latin ruina, a falling-down; and though it may also mean destruction, that secondary meaning need not, should not, be leaped at or read to the exclusion of the original, i.e., a mere falling-down with no necessary implication of destruction. Such an exclusive leap would distort the theme by leading our minds too soon away from the mere procession of the seasons, a mere operation of nature. The other examples are all examples of ruin in the derived sense: yet this neutral and "innocent" meaning helps stabilize overdramatic and over-thematic readings toward a more neutral and artificial effect. Still (pari passu), this literal meaning may generate, in its contexts, its own theme: those other "ruins" obey natural impulse (even Phaeton with his urge toward emulation, and his ambition to assume a functional part in the operations of nature). It is, of course, they all are, nature gone wrong: but nature still.

Does the word then emerge with a single (however complex) final or dominant "meaning"? Yes, in a way: but it is not what we usually mean by meaning. Rather it is a kind of dynamic, all these meanings in opposition, so that the whole makes up a withheld finality, meaning on the verge of resolution but remaining on the verge: mock meaning.

The general latinate base in Trivia is then "overlaid" with Virgil's Latin and the Georgics, a monument that Trivia decorates: sometimes with the usual reductive burlesque, sometimes with more subtle parody, sometimes with serious imitation, and sometimes with a form of adaptation or extrapolation of Virgil that extends an implicit theme or develops an explicit one further. One distinctive passage which shows how in his hands the scope of statement and significance grows is Gay's manipulation of Virgil's instructions (Georgics I, 351-460) in how to judge the weather by certis signis (I, 133-74). It is an important passage in Virgil, which in a cumulative series sets out the natural and cosmic signs so significant to farmers. In Trivia it opens up that specially effective attribute of the mock, the mock that is at the same time not mock, or that shifts back and forth, so that the determination of mock or not-mock at any given moment may be difficult or impossible. Gay begins with a straightforward imitation of Virgil in a comparable tone:

The changing Weather certain Signs reveal.
E'er Winter sheds her Snow, or Frosts congeal,
You'll see the Coals in brighter Flames aspire.
(I, 133-35)

This is a nearly literal rendition of Virgil; but as the passage unfolds, a sophisticated mock begins to insinuate itself. Like Virgil, Gay next shows frisking fawns as signs of spring, and imitates quite directly Virgil's haud equidem credo with "not that their Minds with greater Skill are fraught"; but where Virgil's point is that they do not have knowledge from on high (leaving implicit the comparison with humans), Gay draws the animal-human comparison more literally: "The Seasons operate on every Breast; / 'Tis hence that Fawns are brisk, and Ladies drest" (I, 151-52). This often-observed passage is a graceful maneuver, a blend of model and mock so finished as to produce a third level of expression, a comic meta-mock. The pairing of creatures of vanity with those of nature is also a serious comparison, or something like an equation, of nature and nurture; the animals and ladies are ultimately one. And far from being satiric, the lines are comic, mocking on the surface, and overmatch Virgil in scope and thematic suggestion.

The passage then continues the verbal game with a pun that is yet not quite a pun, overlaying model and mock: "But when the swinging Signs your Ears offend / With creaking Noise, then rainy Floods impend" (I, 157-58). This joke Gay likes so much that he returns to it in a later and more mimetic context, where, talking about finding one's way in the city, he says "Be sure observe the Signs, for Signs remain,/Like faithful Landmarks to the walking Train" (II, 67-68). Although this kind of trick is not so clearly repeated in Trivia, it can stand as a paradigm of Gay's shuttling between mock and not-mock, at moments blending them to produce what I have called meta-mock. By itself it is of course no pun; the context (i.e., the passage of certis signis in Book I) produces the pun-like effect. As to the weather, swinging shop signs do provide the city man with the most immediate sign of change. But their movement is natural too, since it is caused by the rising wind; or so to say, the natural and artifical are brought into harmony, which we are always reminded is one point of serious georgic. And like all good puns this one is not just a play of sound, but is both a res and a verbum play.

If we wish to load it with "interpretation," we may brashly say: the "signs" are now ours, not nature's; we have affiliated them wholly with the city, with the needs of city man. Signs, shop signs, do remain, they do serve as landmarks, they do indicate rising wind and so direct us to look for shelter, they do facilitate business. And business is to the city as agriculture to the country; so, handy-dandy, which now is the mocker, which the mocked? Or we may say that it all reminds us of our deeper affiliation with nature, which we sever, or attempt to sever, at high cost, perhaps a cost we cannot afford. Or, on the very edge of commitment, perhaps we remember what the work is. It is likely that many lines will resist our ironic gaze: the praise of Burlington, lament over the decay of noble houses, or dire warning against drink and whores. Surely all these are "meant." But even they might yield some mockery if we remember both the context within the poem and that provided by Virgil and other forebears. Praise of a patron, nostalgia for better times, blight of crops and murrain of cattle are stock features of the georgic; and of course every comparison implies a contrast, of what-ever kind and whatever degree. Burlington / Maecenas; noble houses / the whole long Empire of Rome; drink and whores / blight and murrain—these are perhaps contrasts as much as parallels.

Common sense might balk us here: Gay poured all kinds of observation and feeling into this often miscellaneous poem, and some must be genuine or "sincere." Besides, he seems nothing like the steel-nerved craftsman who would or could keep all his material at such distance, or play such a consistent game. But he is tough and tensile enough to deserve a fair test, especially if we note his way of parrying feeling with feeling, or backing away into a non sequitur, or devising little verbal tricks. Here is a small example of the sort of thing often taken to exhibit Gay as a "pastoralist" longing for the country and country virtues, health and all the rest:

On Doors the sallow Milk-maid chalks her Gains;
Ah! how unlike the Milk-maid of the Plains!
(II, 11-12)

Here, with a cri de coeur, speaks the real Gay? But surely this type of passage is obligatory in a mock georgic. Wherein, though, is it "mock"? Perhaps in its inversion and reduction of the famous line of the farmer's happiness (Georgics II, 458), 0 fortunatos nimium; perhaps in its sentimentalism, quite absent from Virgil; or in its casual, throwaway manner, again quite unlike Virgil, whose own passage is a set-piece; or its triteness; perhaps even in the lineup of "sallow," "milk," and "chalks," a little touch of characteristic absurdity.

Though Virgil of course provides the centerpiece of this poem, Gay extends his pattern of allusion to other Roman writers. Except for some rather obvious uses of Juvenal ("Here the brib'd Lawyer, sunk in Velvet, sleeps" II, 579), these have not been much commented on. The best brief notice I have seen (by Dianne S. Ames), not only usefully cites a number of allusions to Horace, Ovid, and Martial, but shows even more usefully how Gay renders them in "carefully bungled or splendidly mangled" form appropriate to the subversive decorum of mock work. One example will suggest all: for Horace's mea virtute me involve we have Gay's "perversely witty" "Wrapt in my Virtue, and a good Surtout!" (II, 590).

Ames makes another contribution to our awareness of what Gay is doing. She rigorously holds to the rhetorical view, skirting the moral or didactic or emotional content of the work as such, as well as the putative personal. So we learn of the aitia and epillia of the work, the numina of the Ovidian machinery, the varietas of the whole, in imitation of the inherently miscellaneous georgic genre: refreshing terms for Gay's work at so long last. Of course this kind of approach, like any approach, can be overdone, perhaps here is: but if we know or are reminded that, say, the seduction of Patty is both a burlesque of Jove's amours and of the origin myths in the Georgics, rather than (or in addition to) the bitter satire that "Presents with Female Virtue must prevail" may suggest (itself also a burlesque of the outcome of Jove's activities—as is, indeed, the very choice of Vulcan, the artificer for other gods but famous for his own ill success), or that the episode of Cloacina is a burlesque of the Aristaeus episode in the Georgics and not (or not only) a tasteless bit of scatology or sentimentalism or both, it will help us read a work so thoroughly and beautifully artificial.

A language that provides a different kind of overlay is that of Dryden's translation of the Georgics. More than the earlier influences, static and heritable, Dryden's language is for Gay alive, still part of a growing tradition. And it serves Gay in a language crisis of a special kind. He is not a new hand at mock work when he comes to Trivia: Rural Sports (not mainly a mock work, but with hints and touches), The Fan, and The Shepherd's Week—even that shaky achievement Wine—have been brought off with differing degrees of success, and of course The Shepherd's Week is a small masterpiece. But the genre of each of these handed him a certain prepared style, tone, and ambience, and point of view, and he could count on his readers' recognition of them. With Trivia he is on new ground; and also the victim of some bad luck. The city streets were only the city streets, with as yet no tradition, no genre, no appropriate tone or serious poetic ambience. The raw presence of the city, its nakedness, made it difficult to calculate an approach, and presented some real dangers. The gravitational pull of lived reality, the pressing "there-ness" of city detail, surely was felt by Gay as a new kind of problem for literary expression; yet the city had to be concretely and pervasively in the poem, or the point of the subject Gay had chosen was lost. Virgil's language, and his scenes and situations, imposed on the blunt factuality of the city, might be enough: but these might also produce a rather thin and mechanical, above all a too-obvious, mock effect.

There were also literary pressures, or pseudo-literary, toward thinness and mechanical effect, toward the gimmick—which was the bad luck. A "literature" of the city had begun, as early as Greene's cony-catching pamphlets. But it produced casual travelogue or crude journalism, whose effect lay in the mere tale or picture, with a salting of smart remarks: the likes of D'Urfey's Collin's Walk through London and Westminster or the effusions of Tom Brown and Ned Ward (with the last of whom Gay compares himself, ironically, at the end of Trivia). And from another direction came more bad luck, a prose example of gimmick-mock, the often revised but seldom improved Scarronides or Virgil Travesty of Charles Cotton. Thin stuff indeed, which runs one single low-burlesque joke ("A Trojan true as ever pist") doggedly through many lines. To a rising poet that kind of work opened a pit before his talent, or a literary death in the form of a one-shot poem.

Gay had to avoid both the gimmick-trap and the mimetic-trap, device-style or no-style. The first might bring him under the dead weight of georgic machinery: imitate this, next imitate that.… And the second might turn the poem into a piece of journalism, with the promise of a merely antiquarian survival if any. But a mock poem had to begin, at least, on the reductive level, which unelaborated easily becomes a gimmick; and a mock georgic had to be mimetic. Here Dryden's language came in, as a buffer between model and mock, and a tempering of mere circumstantiality and blunt fact.

It has been noticed (by Ames most recently) that Dryden applies a certain elegance to Virgil's text that goes beyond Virgil's comparatively plain style. Perhaps to fulfill, self-consciously, his role as inaugurator of the Augustan mode, perhaps in reflection of the modern disparity between Virgilian attitudes and contemporary rustic realities (the kind of disparity that raised issues between Pope and Ambrose Philips in the next generation), he takes it upon himself to "heighten" Virgil's language: for aerii mellis caelestia dona, for example, he has "aerial honey, and ambrosial dews"; for fetu nemus omne gravescit, "till with the ruddy freight the bending branches groan," and so on. He thus incorporates into the Georgics a style of his own, to suit the needs both of translation and of the growing poetic mode (it is not, or not wholly, a matter of his metaphraseperiphrase-imitation distinction). Though the core of literal meaning is there, the tone and gesture are Dryden's, and the aureate vocabulary. His aplomb (the late W.K. Wimsatt's word, perfect for Dryden) is evident in every line. He is among other things providing a saving ambience for the raw and the "low" in the English countryside, which would insistently press in, even if all the scenes and references were from the ancient and Italian model. That the language Gay applied to the city was prepared by Dryden for the country, and is therefore in a sense misapplied, fits of course the false decorum which is a feature of the mock. But it also supplies something more positive. Dryden's heightened, distanced, elegant but supple and responsive, ultimately a warm and beautifying language, retains that feel when Gay uses it to gild the cityside. Tracking its forebears this way makes us see Trivia more and more as a succession of allusive forms: and of course allusion is a natural enough impulse in mock work, which is all a kind of allusion. However, there are comparatively few of the typical Augustan obligatory allusions, such as clear echoes of Homer and Milton.

In Trivia, more subtly, there is a parade of small ambiguities, contradictions, confrontations in which the lines of force move in different directions, producing an aura of irony and reticence suffusing the whole poem. Lines like

Hands, that stretch'd forth invading Harms prevent (I, 52)
And the Streets flame with glaring Equipage (I, 114)
Hov'ring, upon her feeble Knees she bends (I, 141)
Turnips, and half-hatch'd Eggs, (a mingled Show'r) (II, 224)
Fair Recluse, who wanders Drury Lane (II, 282)
The Rabble part, in Shoals they backward run (III, 84)
That bruises oft' the Truant School-Boy's Heel (III, 118)
To shun the Hurries of the publick Way (III, 128)

form a network of sensitive and delicate, perhaps unconscious, touches upon feelings not appropriate to the mock but incorporating a sense of pathos and pity, yet comic too, and quite without sentimentality.

The accumulating effect is rich, but the risk is always there of foreshortening or failure of tone:

Her head, chopt off, from her lost Shoulders flies:
Pippins she cry'd, but Death her Voice confounds,
And pip-pip-pip along the Ice resounds.
(II, 390-92)

Perhaps the funniest passages in Trivia, but surely also the ugliest. Over-extended, the tone breaks. Yet the excesses of technique may themselves be thematic. These lines have valuable reverberations: the mingled comic and tragic, better still the absurd and the horrifying; the appearance of death in the triviality of events; the unnaturalness of events against a larger naturalness. Gay seems to have been rather taken with the experiment. He pursues the disjunction of feeling in a comparison of Doll, the killed apple-woman, with Orpheus:

His sever'd Head floats down the silver Tide,
His yet warm Tongue for his lost Consort cry'd;
Eurydice, with quiv'ring Voice, he mourn'd.
And Heber's Bank Eurydice return'd.
(II, 395-98)

A greater strain than the mock can possibly bear. Yet it illustrates that probing of the limits of mock that makes Gay so effective in his much more frequent successes. And the Doll-Orpheus passage is partly redeemed by the lines which follow, a cool and lyrical transition back to the once again distanced city streets:

But now the western Gale the Flood unbinds, And black'ning Clouds move on with warmer Winds

(II, 399-400)

—so nature moves on, and so does the city. Whether the excursus succeeded or not, it was a risk worth taking.

Another, that has seemed to many a failed risk, is the infamous Cloacina adventure (II, 99-220). This may appear a real lapse of taste, reflecting the "muddy mind" of Swift, as one critic put it, and a true excrescence on the poem; Johnson wished away both it and the Patty-Vulcan episode.⁸ That it appeared not in the first editions of Trivia but only in the version in Poems on Several Occasions four years later, may suggest that Gay had unworthy second thoughts or that he yielded too passively to Swift. (He had said of the whole poem at the beginning, "I owe several Hints of it to Dr. Swift.",)⁹

Yet the episode follows the mock logic of inversion; it inverts the classic theme of divine intervention in human affairs. Could there be a deity of sewage? Well, it would oversee an inexorable human function; and in Gay's time sewage happened to be a mounting urban concern. Gay's note tells us that a statue of an unknown goddess, found in a Roman sewer, was dubbed Cloacina. Perhaps a broad world-view, broader (even) than the Augustan, might hold that all human acts are at root divinely inspired or are divine functions; or, to turn it all around, what do the filth and crassness of the amours between Cloacina and her lover, a collector of excrement (which resulted in the birth of a lad who later became a smudge-faced shoeboy), tell us of the amours of the Greek pantheon, their brutality and unconcern, their disposition toward "heady riots, incest, rapes," as Marlowe describes the carvings in the crystal pavement of Venus' temple in Hero and Leander, his own mock undertaking? Gay's goddess shows tender feeling for her lover and for her offspring. And the offspring has a Dickensian claritas, learns to perform a wholly useful act to make a living, and is distinctly humanized. We are reminded again of a world of robust energy pitted against high-minded vacuity.

Such an episode, parodying both the georgic form and the convention of divine intervention, tests Gay's ability to balance tones, and comments on the restrictions of the georgic tone. Beyond all this, it explores through example the central georgic problem of how to achieve a balance of harmony between the expressive and the mimetic modes. The mock conception enables Gay to be more daring than Virgil, and for a moment more capacious; but if he is not to be merely reductive, he must derive from the game-playing something more on the side of the valid and the positive, with respect both to the theme and to artifice. The most effective mock work does not match positive with negative, but positive with positive (though usually disguised as negative). The Cloacina episode, a fantasy with a grotesque figure in its center, develops a series of oppositions or confrontations: between model and mock, between the conventional-expressive and the mimetic, between the raised version of the classical georgic and the humanistic revelations of life. It is as if to say that deities a modern age can produce and support are as removed from those of the classical pantheon as Cloacina from Aphrodite. Cloacina not only, however, has her own claim as goddess and mother to our serious attention, but she can cope with more (the modern city, forced by mere numbers to live daily with common shores and the fact of the brown lover's cart and its nightly sound, its "pleasing thunder" as Gay ironically calls it), and can produce, right through her ostensible disadvantages, an emotion both valid in itself and scoring over the rather tightly limited emotions appropriate to the decorum of classical georgic.

Appropriately, the episode mingles its tones. In the midst of its comic fantasticality—"With wither'd Turnip Tops her Temples crown'd" (II, 196) and "Around her Waste a circling Eel was twin'd" (199)—appear lines which arrest the emotion attending these with quite others. This goddess

                     sought no Midwife's Aid,
Nor midst her Anguish to Lucina pray'd;
No chearful Gossip wish'd the Mother Joy.
(II, 137-39)

And capping this Dickensian sympathy is a masterful, pathetic line: "Alone, beneath a Bulk she dropt the Boy" (140).

I have spoken of various minglings in Trivia: of tones, attitudes, themes, and languages. One last language, diffuse throughout the poem, is I think the key to the whole: a pervasive catachresis, that symbolizes both the inversion that mock necessarily is, and the distorted, confused and finally fragmented, constructions upon experience that the city may thrust upon us. At the beginning this language is unobtrusive, an occasional poetic fillip adding charm and freshness; but after a while it becomes clear that such off-center modification is forming another pattern. Out of dozens of possible examples I select a representative handful: "Dirty Show'rs" (I, 92) blacken the canals of Belgium—clean of course when they were rain from heaven, dirty as they fall off the pavement, though still called "showers." Blood "in purple torrents" (I, 96)—like rain or the effect of rain—flows in the streets of Rome, and "muddy torrents" (I, 160) flow from the kennels—clean, simple rain hardly exists in this poem, so much of it about rain.

But then the rain pelts the tiles with a "smoaking Show'r" (I, 173), an odd sort of conjunction of unlike or contrary elements that soon gets repeated more oddly, with Patty's milkpail that "smoaks upon her Head" (I, 238). Here is something new, distortions more wrenched: and we soon see that a game of such misapplied or slant-epithets has begun, which builds as the poem progresses. On the one hand, ever more fantastical "showers" occur: at a pillorying, "Turnips, and half-hatch'd Eggs, (a mingled Show'r) / Among the Rabble rain" (II, 223-24); from "on high" (II, 267) where masons are working, "Mortar and crumbled Lime in Show'rs descend" (II, 269); the fish market gives off "Spirts of scaly Rain" (III, 106). On the other, the showers blend with, in effect are confused with, and finally give over to, fire—and a foreshadowing of the triumph of fire ("Threat'ning with Deluge this Devoted Town" as in Swift's City Shower), also with misapplied epithets, comes along early with streets that "flame with glaring Equipage" (I, 114), and goes on through ribbons that "glow" (II, 263), a "bright Chariot" (II, 573), or one "that with [a] blazon'd Scutcheon glows" (II, 577), or still another, where "flames a Fool" (II, 581). It is but a slight distortion if any that the "Flambeau gilds the Sashes of Pell-Mell" (III, 158), but it keeps before us the idea of potential destruction in the figure of the whore whose "tawdry Ribbons glare" (III, 269), whose "artful Blushes glow" (III, 272), and who "darts" her leers from "Sarsnet Ambush" (III, 281). Even thunder in this deluge-threatened town comes on in distorted form, as from the charivari-drums with their "Vellom-Thunder" (II, 17-18), the rumbling of carts—particularly the "pleasing Thunder" of Cloacina's "brown Lover's Cart" (II, 125-26)—a door-knocker which (wrapped because of a funeral) "Forbids the Thunder of the Footman's Hand" (II, 468), and most grotesquely of all, the hogshead in which the "Mohocks" roll a matron for their sport, a "rolling Tomb" which "O'er the Stones thunders" (III, 331-33). When a real fire begins (III, 353), there comes a reversal of the "smoaking Show'r"; the fire flows and spreads like water, a "blazing Deluge" (III, 359), and a "fiery Tempest" that "pours along the Floors" (III, 373-74).

Such catachrestical shifts form a running pattern in this poem of disruption, a special move or series of moves in the game of substitution and inversion that mock work in general plays. So when we puzzle over the meanings of Trivia, we need to think of the alternating or standoff game. This is not to say that the poem does not harbor serious meanings; clearly there are serious emphases and accumulations, like the fire and water mixture, which pushes inexorably toward metaphor. And in talking about verbal games we ought not to forget the substantive root or base of the counters in such games; the words themselves in their references. The bulk of these in Trivia are references mimetically to the city; it is then a natural conclusion to see verbal distortions and misapplications as expressing—and in their juxtapositions and confrontations as symbolizing—the confusions of that new disoriented world, the world of the city and "modernity." The term was unknown to Gay, but not, apparently, the idea, inasmuch as he reflects on how the city's organization, activity, and concentration of poverty, crime, and all that kind of "infection" invade our psychology. That "infection" is the right evaluative term is verified in Gay's description of the fire: "From Beam to Beam, the fierce Contagion spreads" (III, 357), "contagion" not being a word applied to fire in Virgil, but which Gay derived from Dryden's description of the Great Fire in Annus Mirabilis.

It is also a more straightforward city georgic—mock with respect to Virgil's Georgics and its world of reference, but serious with respect to its own. Gay learned the impossibility of genuine modern country georgic from John Philips' Cyder; that is, the impossibility of transposing the verbal world of Virgil to the physical reality of our daily life. But a tone and style, inevitably mixed and full of contradictions, false starts, undercuttings and disappointments, might be devised which would fit lived reality. It would be, above all, a shifting and inconclusive tone: the tone of a serious joke. After the Miltonic climax of the fire—now elevated by Gay into the light that involved Rome at Caesar's fall, then into the fate of Naples when Vesuvius erupts for the last time—"Earth's Womb at once the fiery Flood shall rend, / And in the Abyss her plunging Tow'rs descend" (III, 391-92) (a couplet comparable in tone and reference to the last lines of The Splendid Shilling about the ship plunging into the vast abyss), Gay imperturbably continues (as Philips does not)—"Consider, Reader, what Fatigues I've known" (III, 393)—abruptly drawing back to the mimetic, thus enforcing the ambiguity and saving the mock. Gay's Wasteland "Falling towers"—Rome, Naples, London—are "Unreal."¹⁰

It is all there in Trivia—the satire, the moralizing, the pastoral longings, even the "apocalypse," along with the workaday reduction of Virgil—all there in a dynamic, in a sense an explosive, mixture. The "positive" tone is there too, the quality that matches our need for meanings that will save us from the apparent negativism or mere foolery of it all. Another possible or potential theme, a note struck quite forcefully, is that while something is now amiss—in the city and perhaps the world—order, perhaps not cosmic or natural, but an order which would serve our turn, may still be found. Handel's "melting Strain" (II, 497), Burlingston's "fair Palace" (II, 493), are also products of the city. The odds are still against order: the malaise of the modern world; the decline of tradition, expressed in the melancholy lines about the decay of great houses ("Cecil's, Bedford's, Villers, now no more" [II, 490]); the growth of vulgar and hedonistic taste. Strong odds. The poem ends with no great sense of revival or recovery, but with several positives nevertheless: for the city, "a world of robust energy" struggling to shape itself and everywhere expressive of life, a life more in tune, after all, with nature than with inherited forms ("'Tis hence that Fawns are brisk, and Ladies drest"); for the poem, a Chaucerian breadth of unassuming observation, tolerance, good humor, and above all an art and artifice that "fixes" and distances its vision (Battestin, chap. 4).

"Perspective," it has been said, "is almost the subject of the poem" (Spacks, p. 52). To me it is the subject, or as close to a subject as we shall ever get. We may shy away from commitment to such a word, seeming to represent a mere point of view rather than a position, or worse still a kind of total relativism. But everything seen in perspective is, after all, seen; all that is valued is valued, however many countervalues, also valued, supervene; all that is, is. To offer nothing as final is not to offer nothing. It is more like offering an opportunity, through observation, to see more, and to hope to see all; only the observer must be one on whom, as James prescribed, nothing is lost. It has been suggested that the theme of Chaucer's greatest mock work, the Nun's Priest's Tale, is "the virtue of seeing."¹¹ We could not do better than to take that as the theme of Trivia too.

I began by speaking of a "game" of languages. A similar point is made (by Professor Price in To the Palace of Wisdom):

The mock form is the most studied use of conflicting languages, and it becomes, with satire, the form in which Augustan writing finds its greatest range.

(p. 251)

He also puts the point more generally:

The Augustans maintain the iridescence of the image of man; they deliberately create perspectives that shimmer into each other and apart again.

(p. 250)

"Iridescence" is to me a striking and suggestive word, as is "shimmer," to describe the joke form that Trivia makes into a game, and that at bottom mock work itself is.

Notes

¹ Gay's work in general has until fairly recently been dealt with in rather literalistic or "unilevel" fashion: he writes city satire or country pastoral, or on occasion alternates between them in clearly noticeable divisions of emphasis (as in Rural Sports); mock pastoral (in The Shepherd's Week) that turns out to be "real" pastoral with a superficial, perhaps negligible, overlay of mock (Johnson's famous remark in his Life of Gay is that "the effect of reality and truth became conspicuous"); a mock georgic which is "really" a guide to the city of London; and so on.

Trivia, just because of its guide-book circumstantiality (which is indeed very "real"), has been held most firmly under the reducing lens. A characteristic treatment of this sort is that of W.H. Williams in the introduction to his ornate reprinting of the 1st edn. (London: Daniel O'Connor, 1922): "Trivia, which began as a burlesque of the 'Arts,' developed … into an original poem, containing a series of picturesque scenes, the harvest of a quiet eye, which had been fascinated by the panorama of the London streets" (pp. xiv-xv). And such a view persisted. Even as recently as 1953 the late brilliant critic and theoretician, W.K. Wimsatt, called the poem "mainly good advice on how to walk the streets of London" and adds, "I believe … Trivia is a poem highly prized by historians of the city" (ELH 20 [1953]; rpt. in Hateful Contraries [Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky, 1965], pp. 149-64; Wimsatt's remarks are on p. 156 of this rpt).

Of course the presence in the poem of two or more contributing elements—georgic burlesque, city description, pastoral asides—has been noted; but usually one has been taken as the main matter with the others functioning as vehicles or "decorations," as if Gay were, say, using Virgil to float his travelogue. There is a whole book on Gay which in effect does this; it deserves honorable notice as a serious inquiry, but takes almost exclusively a moralistic line, presenting Gay as a kind of apocalyptic revealer of the evils and ills, physical and moral of London, through whose sermons runs a thread of pastoral longing (Sven Armens, John Gay Social Critic [N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1954]; see chap. 3, "The Beggar's Milieu: Trivia"); in turn, the travelogue is used as a series of texts for lessons in sin and virtue, and the whole is a remarkable instance of over-emphasis on what is undoubtedly a valid element in the poem.

The idea of an ironic intermingling or blend of elements, producing a unique expressive effect, and the idea of the subtle craft involved in this interinanimation, were slow in coming. An early recognition, a rather general overview but emphasizing Gay's craftsmanship rather than his imputed moral or pastoral obsessions, is James Sutherland's "John Gay" (in Pope and His Contemporaries, Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. James A. Clifford and Louis A. Landa [Oxford: Clarendon, 1949], pp. 201-14). There followed no immediate rush to critical judgment; but the awareness of Gay as an artist, and one who strove, not for the kind of "atomism" that Trivia may appear to represent, but for a complex unity, was soon planted. A sense of Gay's pervasive irony, as an element of his craft, also appeared. A characteristic title is C. F. Burgess' "The Ambivalent Point of View in John Gay's Trivia" (Cithara 4 [1964]: 53-65), which shows satire, sympathy, burlesque and travelogue, as working together, not just existing side by side, or alternately. Alvin B. Kernan in "The Magnifying Tendency: Gay's Trivia" (pp. 36-50 of The Plot of Satire [New Haven: Yale Univ., 1965]), notes that the level of expression in Trivia is not realism or direct moralizing but "stylistic inflation and amplification" in order to achieve a heightened satire. Gay's wit and sense of ambiguity are discussed in Patricia Spacks' book for the Twayne series, John Gay (N.Y.: 1965), but she comes out rather heavily on the side of his moralizing. The general drift remained toward stylistic analysis, however. An important turn in the direction of Gay's active use (not just acknowledgment) of Virgil and other sources for allusion, including the latinate style that was a heritage of the seventeenth century, is represented by a few pages of Trivia in John Chalker's The English Georgic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 163-79. Chalker notes the force of individual words which inject a nuance of irony through the disparities between the Latin and English senses, or which emphasize the Latin over the English senses. This kind of language play was an element hardly noticed in Gay, the study of which was to turn out to be remarkably fruitful.

Perhaps the two most important critical contributions to the understanding of Gay's art—as distinguished from his assumed didactic or satiric positions—are "Virgil, Dryden, Gay, and Matters Trivial," by Arthur Sherbo (PMLA 85 [1970]: 1063-71), and "Gay: the Meanings of Art and Artifice," chap. 4 of Martin Battestin's The Providence of Wit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). In a magisterial argument, Sherbo demonstrates with convincing thoroughness that both Virgil's Latin and Dryden's latinate translations infuse Gay's words with complex meanings; and that Trivia must be read as a composite (his word is "palimpsest") of original Latin meanings, Virgil, Dryden, and Gay's own skillful strategic manipulation of these vocabularies. And Battestin with equal force and greater subtlety shows Gay as always a maker who distances assumed reality, non-verbal reality, and remakes it through style into the special and perdurable reality of art.

More circumscribed but significant studies, sharing the general position that Gay should be seen as a blender of sources, an ironist, a dealer in ambiguities, and an artist who always (Sherbo's words) knew what he was doing, have continued to appear. Christine Rees, in "Gay, Swift, and the Nymphs of Drury Lane" (Essays in Criticism 23 [1973]: 1-21) anticipates one of Battestin's main points when she says that Gay's "charm of manner insinuates the fiction rather than the truth." Dianne Ames' spirited and scholarly study of Gay's deliberately distorted allusions, as well as the special rhetorical structures she employs in Trivia, ("Gay's Trivia and the Art of Allusion," Studies in Philology 75 [19781: 199-22), is most important. The expressive function of allusion, this time stressing Gay's use of Horace, is discussed at some length in "Gay's 'Roving Muse': Problems of Genre and Intention in Trivia" (English Studies 62 [1981]: 259-70), by Eugene Kirk, which concerns itself chiefly with the deliberately "blurred boundaries" between source-genres, particularly those of georgic and formal verse satire. A final noteworthy piece is "The Wolf in the Fold: John Gay in The Shepherd's Week and Trivia" (Studies in English Literature 23 [1983]: 413-23, by Anne Mc Whir), who writes on the relation between "realism" and literary realism, notes Gay's repeated undercuttings of his own ostensibly sincere admonishments, and concludes with Gay's characteristic maneuvers that "trick us with benevolent webs of words."

The general direction of all such commentaries, combining scholarship and critical subtlety in equal measure, we may expect to see continued: it is that of discovering in Gay an artist of subtle awareness with a fund of usable learning who produced works more finished and complex than criticism for a long time was able to perceive, and that belie their apparent simplicity and blandness of surface.

² Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom (N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 254.

³The Shepherd's Week, "Friday," 11. 145-48. The edn. cited throughout is John Gay: Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).

⁴ "An ambiguity of the fifth type occurs when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it all in his mind at once, so that, for instance, there is a simile which applies to nothing exactly, but lies half-way between two things when the author is moving from one to another" (William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. [N.Y.: Meridian, 1955], p. 175). Though Empson is talking about a different kind of poetry, this is no bad way of describing, or beginning to describe, mock work.

⁵ Sherbo cites Armens; Alvin Kernan, who makes some extensive remarks on Trivia in chap. 2 of The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale Univ., 1965); and unnamed "others" (p. 1064).

⁶Paradise Lost 1, 104: "In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n." Dryden uses the term a half dozen or so times, usually in this sense of uncertain as to outcome (as in the example here from Virgil, which Dryden renders [Georgics I, 172] "dubious months uncertain weather bring"); but with only one exception (Britannia Rediviva, 1. 122: "Fain would the fiends have made a dubious birth"), they all occur in his translations of Ovid and Virgil. That he first got the word from Milton, however, is suggested by his using it at least twice when "dubious," in whatever grammatical form, does not occur in the original, e.g. in Ovid's Metamorphoses (I, 318-19), "hic [i.e., Mount Parnassus] ubi Deucalion … adhaesit" (Dryden [I, 421]: "High on the summit of this dubious cliff"), or in the Georgics (III, 291-92), "sed me Pamasi deserta … raptat amor" (Dryden [III, 457-58]: "the commanding Muse my chariot guides, / Which o'er the dubious cliff securely rides.")

⁷ Polonius to Ophelia in Hamlet, I, iii, 101: "Affection? Pooh, you speak like a green girl," and 115: "Ay, springes to catch woodcocks."

⁸ The phrase, "Swift's muddy mind," is W. H. Irving's in John Gay Favorite of the Wits (Durham: Duke Univ., 1940), p. 127. He is voicing an objection not merely of his own, however, but that of Joseph Warton, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 4th edn., 2 vols. (London, 1782) 2:251: "The fable of Cloacina is indelicate. I should think this is one of the hints given him by Swift.…" Johnson, in his Life of Gay, says, "some of his decorations might be wished away"; but his two objections are on different grounds, only one of them moralistic. The Patty-Vulcan episode (I, 223-82), in which the god seduces Patty the milkmaid with a gift of nail-shod shoes, then called "pattens" (a real type of 18th-c. shoe for wet weather), could have been a mere mortal event, and so was "useless and apparent falsehood." But the Cloacina episode is "nauseous and superfluous," as well as being subject to the same objection to "supernatural imposition." (Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1905], II:284.)

⁹ "Advertisement" following title and epigraph of Trivia.

¹⁰ Eliot's lines in "What the Thunder Said" (sec. V. of The Wasteland, 11. 374-77) are: "Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal."

¹¹ Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1957), p. 242.