For Gay, no less than Pater, art was necessary because life was deficient in form. This is the essential point, not only about the manner of Gay's verse—that "delicate and sophisticated craftsmanship," as Professor Sutherland has remarked, producing objets as precious and frail as Chelsea china¹—but about Gay's meaning as well. His best known poems—the Fables, The Shepherd's Week, Rural Sports, Trivia—are characteristically witty and finely wrought, apparently frivolous and fragile. It is perhaps not surprising that Dr. Johnson should dismiss their author as lacking the "mens divinior, the dignity of genius,"² or that this estimate should have survived through nearly two centuries. One of the very best of modern critics, though delighting in what he calls Gay's "artistic coquetry," regrets that he wanted "the moral earnestness" of his friends Swift and Pope, that his goodness is that of "a witty child … who has read about or even seen the world, the flesh, and the devil, without ever experiencing their desperate allure."³ Since Professor Armens' more recent study,⁴ however, it is no longer possible to dismiss Gay quite so easily on these grounds—to see him, as we had grown accustomed to seeing him, as an affable dabbler in verse, in life as a sort of ineffectual and improbably indolent Puck. If life was a jest to Gay (as his epitaph assures us it was), the joke was too often grim and disconcerting, cracked in a "biting" spirit akin to that of Swift's Jove.

Form and artifice are the distinguishing features of Gay's verse, as they are of the Augustan mode in general. These poets prized the virtues of elegance and proportion, the virtues of a highly mannered art, not because of any easy complacency about the eventual triumph of sanity and decorum, but because they everywhere saw the forces of Chaos and Dark Night threatening to overwhelm them. Such is Pope's meaning in the grotesque apocalypse of The Dunciad, where, in parody of classical and Christian poems that celebrate the establishment of Order, Dulness and her legions undo the work of creation. Though Pope is the greater poet (perhaps even because he is), Gay's verse is more clearly representative of this basic assumption both of the Augustan aesthetic and of the Augustan world view. In Trivia, especially, we will find embodied the controlling paradox of this mode: the idea—seldom openly expressed but nearly always implied in the poetry itself—that in the poem, as indeed in life, Nature must be made to imitate Art.

Of all the poetic kinds, the one most suited to this theme—and the one in which Gay worked most comfortably—is that of the pastoral. "The first Rule of Pastoral," as Pope more than once insisted, is that "its Idea should be taken from the Manners of the Golden Age, and the Moral form'd upon the Representation of Innocence."⁵ Fundamental here is the contrast between an Age of Gold nostalgically evoked and an Age of Iron all too present, between a bright, ideal world—ordered, healthy, virtuous—and a world fallen, sick, depraved. A variation on this theme is the constant motif of Gay's poetry: the contrast between the country and the town. Under Gay's hand, however, this conventional thematic polarity of the pastoral (and of the related mode of the georgic) takes on a further significance—one already perhaps implicit in this most stylized, most self-consciously formal of the genres. The art of the pastoral poet, like that of Virgil's husbandman, does not imitate Nature as she actually appears in this degenerate world, but rather subdues and improves her, restoring her as far as possible to her original perfection. In that ideal state, to adapt a remark of Sir Thomas Browne's, Nature was not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature, "they being both servants of his Providence."⁶ In Eden, the perfect handiwork of God, Art and Nature were one; the extreme artfulness of the pastoral style is, in effect, an attempt to express this fact. In Gay's idiom the familiar antitheses of this mode—the country versus the town, the ideal versus the real—are constantly being rendered, not in the conventional terms of the natural as opposed to the civilized worlds, as is commonly asserted, but rather in terms symbolizing the basic opposition in this fallen world between Art and Actuality.

By reading the pastoral motif too literally, by seeing Gay's poetry as a celebration of the Natural as opposed to the Artificial and Civilized, the accepted critical view has prevented an appreciation of the peculiar quality and true significance of Gay as a poet. It has committed the ultimate violence upon the poetry by proposing, in effect, a separation between its manner and meaning which is absolute. One reason for this confusion is that we have regarded only what the poem (in certain conventional passages) says, and not at all attended to what it is. A further problem is the ambiguity of the terms natural and artificial, which may have both positive and pejorative connotations in Gay. As they are typically used in the pastoral, these words suggest, respectively, the simplicity, purity, and innocence of the Golden Age as opposed to the duplicity and affectation introduced after the Fall in the service of human greed and vanity: these are the "subtil arts"⁷ of city whores and pickpockets and politicians, or the "art" of the painted belle, Sylvia, which repairs "her roses and her charms."⁸ Alternatively, and more essentially in Gay, art is the sum of every human virtue: it is the affirmation of civilization in the face of vulgarity and savagery; it is the hard-earned means by which the man of reason and sensibility—the poet and the gentleman—disciplines the wilderness in nature and in himself. With the triumph of art the human situation, however grim in actuality (one thinks, for example, of Trivia and The Beggar's Opera), is seen as ultimately comic, because the human mind has learned to cope with it, to transcend it. This is not to say that the poet, like the meretricious painter of Fable XVIII, enacts a lie by showing deformity in the likeness of beauty; it is rather that in imitating the actual, he asserts by his manner the redeeming values of form and harmony.

The country in Gay's poetry is important, then, primarily as a symbol of an ideal order irrevocably lost in actuality, but attainable through art. Gay's Age of Gold is not to be sought after in time or in space, or in any easy retreat into rural or primitive regions; the Devonshire of his youth was no Eden, and it is likely to have been dull. The ideal in Gay's poetry is found rather in that curious discrepancy between his subject matter, which can be gross and sordid enough, and his elegant, witty manner. It is an ideal achieved, aesthetically, in the poem itself, in which all the devices of artifice—the polished, balanced couplet, the music and symmetry of the line, the circumlocution of the diction, the allusion to myth and to the classics—conspire to triumph over the messy and intractable and too often tragic stuff of life. It is achieved, ethically and socially, in what he refers to as the strict payment of "due civilities,"⁹ in those polite rituals of courtesy and charity which enable us not to exalt, but to vanquish, the natural man. It is achieved, in other words, by attaining the condition of art. Form, decorum are everything; they are the ultimate values, for they enable us to survive and function in a world too often hostile and unmanageable.

Variations on this theme occur throughout Gay's poetry. Consider, for instance, the functional art of the "skilful angler" in Rural Sports (1720), a poem usually said (I think mistakenly) to celebrate the Natural as opposed to the Artificial. The angler, who is also Gay the poet, has left the noisy, noxious city behind, if only temporarily. Now in "a calm retreat" (I, 23) in the country, he must with care and judgment select the "proper bait" (I, 160), and then "Cleanse them from filth, to give a tempting gloss" (I, 167); with his eye on Nature to improve upon her, he fashions his lure with such patient dexterity "That nature seems to live again in art" (I, 208; italics mine). There is a correct procedure for casting, for playing the fish, and for drawing him to shore "with artful care" (I, 249). Perhaps the closest modern analogue to Gay's meaning in this poem occurs in Hemingway's story, "Big Two-Hearted River." Having crossed the burned-over land and "left everything behind," Nick Adams found his own "good place" to fish in the woods.¹⁰ In both the poem and the story, the art of fishing and the purity of the style serve the same function, affording a means of controlling experience, of imposing on life an order and a discipline that it does not naturally have. There are rules to be observed, limits to be self-imposed, a ritual to be performed. One does not stray into the swamp, where, as Nick Adams observes, "fishing was a tragic adventure" (p. 231); nor does one, in Gay's words,

     wander where the bord'ring reeds
O'erlook the muddy stream, whose tangling weeds
Perplex the fisher. …
(I, 259-61)

It is not Nature that Gay (or Hemingway) celebrates, but nature controlled and subdued, set in order by art and artifice.

Despite the burlesque tone, and despite the coy assurances that he means "to set before thee … a picture, or rather lively landschape of thy own country, just as thou mightest see it" (Proeme, p. 29), Gay in the "trim" eclogues of The Shepherd's Week (1714) is not primarily interested in mocking Ambrose Philips or in depicting the authentic life of the English countryside—the twin purposes critics usually attribute to these poems. His shepherds and shepherdesses do fill their songs with homely references to the business of their daily lives, but Gay's highly mannered verse has refined away every crudeness, every trace of actuality; his English swains remain the conventional, idealized figures of the pastoral. Arcadia has been translated into Devon. Like Gay's own polished couplets, his rural lasses are "tidy" and "clean," dressed in "kerchief starch'd" and sporting straw-hats "trimly lin'd with green."¹¹

Again conventionally, these shepherds are poets—poets, moreover, who understand the lesson that Gay's own verse imparts: "Numbers, like Musick, can ev'n Grief controul."¹² In "Friday; or, The Dirge," Gay involves his shepherd-poets in situations that are emblematic of the relationship between the artist and the rude, recalcitrant material of life. In the first of these, Bumkinet and Grubbinol retire to a sheltered vantage point from which, having gained the necessary detachment from the business of life, they may mourn the death of Blouzelinda, and "with trim sonnets cast away our care" (1. 16). In the second, Grubbinol recalls the ceremonies of her burial:

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.
(II. 145-48)

In like manner, the artifice of the verses to follow fences us off from the incursions of nature, by a refining process removing us from its rough force and coarseness, turning bulls into fragile china figments:

  While bulls bear homs upon their curled brow,
Or lasses with soft stroakings milk the cow;
While padling ducks the standing lake desire,
Or batt'ning hogs roll in the sinking mire;
While moles the crumbled earth in hillocks raise,
So long shall swains tell Blouzelinda's praise.
(II. 153-58)

The meaning of art and artifice in Gay, however, is more clearly represented in the preceding poem, which may be seen as a comic dramatization of the poet's function. In "Thursday; or, The Spell" Hobnelia uses magic to lure her errant lover "from the faithless town" (1. 88). The verse itself—with its frequent alliteration, its repetitions and antitheses—imitates the formal, circular movement of her dance and incantatory refrain:

Hobnelia, seated in a dreary vale,
In pensive mood rehears'd her piteous tale,

Her piteous tale the winds in signs bemoan,
And pining eccho answers groan for groan.
 I rue the day, a rueful day, I trow,
The woful day, a day indeed of woe!
When Lubberkin to town his cattle drove,
A maiden fine bedight he hapt to love;
The maiden fine bedight his love retains,
And for the village he forsakes the plains.
Return my Lubberkin, these ditties hear;
Spells will I try, and spells shall ease my care.
  With my sharp heel I three times mark the ground,
And turn me thrice around, around, around.
(II. 1-14)

Like his comic shepherdess, Gay employs his own potent forms and incantations to discipline the wayward circumstances of life.

In proposing the identity of form and meaning in Gay, I do not at all wish to imply that he was the advocate and exponent of any empty aestheticism. The meaning is that art, of a highly conscious and deliberate sort, is necessary not only to the making of the poem, but also to the shaping of Gay's hero, who is not the natural, but rather the truly civilized, man. The artist, in life as in poetry, is supremely skilful, for he has learned to control, even to transform, his material; he is not the victim of life, but its master. An awareness of this fact will help to reveal that Gay's verse has precisely that "third dimension," that "prismatic depth," which it has been said to lack.¹³ The superficiality of Gay's verse is illusory; it exists because the poetry itself is the substantiation of Gay's belief that art must order, refine, simplify—that the poem must not (as T. S. Eliot has averred that it must) itself reflect the dominion of Chaos and Dark Night in this fallen world, but that it must redeem this world, introducing elegance and form, harmony and humor, in the very absence of these things. According to Addison, Virgil in the Georgics "breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness."¹⁴ The image applies equally well to Gay in his mock-georgic, Trivia, a poem that stands as a kind of extended parable of the relation between actuality and art.

Despite Professor Sutherland's insistence that "if we want the actual movement and stench and uproar of the London streets" we must go to Ned Ward, not to Gay,¹⁵ the notion still prevails that Gay's motive in Trivia is "mild satire" of London life, and that his method is a detailed and photographic "realism."¹⁶ The usual comparison is with Hogarth in such works as Gin Lane. Gay's purpose, however, is not at all to photograph the squalor and the crowded alleys of midwinter London; he has no desire to make us feel the crush of the mob or the biting chill of the weather; he does not wish us to smell the stench of Fleet-ditch or to witness the filth of the kennels. His subject matter, his material, may be the same as that of Hogarth; but thrust deliberately between us and the reality, removing us from it, insulating us against it, are Gay's tone and his style—with his music and elevated diction, the correctness of his numbers, and those neat couplets patting everything into place, smoothing things over, rendering them, as it were, harmless.

The point can be clearly seen, I think, if we place side by side passages from Trivia and from Swift's own burlesque georgic, A Description of a City Shower; the subjects are identical, but the treatment and effect are entirely opposite. Here is Swift:

  NOW from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell
What Street they sail'd from, by their Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force
From Smithfield, or St. Pulchre's shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join at Snow-Hill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit prone to Holborn-Bridge.
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.¹⁷

This is realism. The grossness of the imagery, the cacophony of the closing triplet with its final, ponderous alexandrine, function pitilessly to make the reader confront the muck and horror of actuality—almost, indeed, to overwhelm him with it. Listen now to Gay:

  But when the swinging signs your ears offend
With creaking noise, then rainy floods impend;
Soon shall the kennels swell with rapid streams,
And rush in muddy torrents to the Thames…

Then Niobe dissolves into a tear
And sweats with secret grief: you'll hear the sounds
Of whistling winds, e'er kennels break their bounds;
Ungrateful odours common-shores diffuse,
And dropping vaults distill unwholesome dews,
E'er the tiles rattle with the smoaking show'r,
And spouts on heedless men their torrents pour.
(I, 157-60, 168-74)

A crucial difference here is Gay's tone, which departs radically from Swift's and reflects a very different attitude toward the material. The sense of outrage is gone. Instead, the extravagance of Gay's method implies a certain wry detachment; the poet is aloof, arch if not exactly comic, as if he were sure of his ability to dispel the curse of the scene's noisome reality. Gay's lines—with their predominantly ordered rhythm of regular iambics and with their ostentatious use of the devices of allusion, alliteration, and assonance—call attention to themselves: not to what is being described, but to how it is being described. They call attention, in other words, to the conscious art of the poet. With respect to the principle that in a successful poem "The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense," Swift's treatment looks to be superior; certainly if Gay were trying for an Hogarthian effect, for "realism," one can say only that he bungled the job egregiously. Gay's manner in this passage is, however, precisely the embodiment of his meaning in this poem: which is that, though life can be hideous, art offers us a way of coping with it.

Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) will of course remain interesting and useful as one of our chief documents of London life in the days of Anne and George I; however, as far as Gay's thematic intention is concerned, the symbolic meaning of the city is paramount. Together with the title and the Virgilian epigraph (which I shall discuss later), the exordium of the poem provides the necessary clues. Gay begins by declaring his subject and his very practical purpose; he then proceeds to celebrate the votaries of the Muse:

Through winter streets to steer your course aright,
How to walk clean by day, and safe by night,
How jostling crouds, with prudence to decline,
When to assert the wall, and when resign,
I sing: Thou, Trivia, Goddess, aid my song,
Thro' spacious streets conduct thy bard along;
By thee transported, I securely stray
Where winding alleys lead the doubtful way,
The silent court, and op'ning square explore,
And long perplexing lanes untrod before.
To pave thy realm, and smooth the broken ways,
Earth from her womb a flinty tribute pays;
For thee, the sturdy paver thumps the ground,
Whilst ev'ry stroke his lab'ring lungs resound;
For thee the scavinger bids kennels glide
Within their bounds, and heaps of dirt subside.
My youthful bosom burns with thirst of fame,
From the great theme to build a glorious name,
To tread in paths to ancient bards unknown,
And bind my temples with a Civic crown;
But more, my country's love demands the lays,
My country's be the profit, mine the praise.

These lines suggest Gay's broadly allegorical intention. As in an overture, the dominant motifs of "the great theme" are sounded, to be developed in the body of the poem. The season is winter; the streets of London are the setting: together they will come to represent the inimical conditions of life itself, the natural and man-made forces opposing the wayfarer who seeks to pass without injury or stain through the City of this World. As the subtitle and the four lines of the proposition imply, there is an art of life to be mastered before the pilgrim can thread the labyrinth; so, like those other practical artists who "smooth the broken ways" and keep filth within bounds, the poet includes himself among the followers of the Muse.

The poem takes its title from the Roman name for Diana or Hecate, whose shrine was situated at the meeting of three roads; it is Trivia, goddess both of virgin forests and of the underworld, whom Gay invokes to conduct him safely through "the muddy dangers of the street" (I, 194), just as Aeneas had been guided by her priestess through the infernal regions of Dis. Gay's characterization of London transforms the brawling town into something analogous to Virgil's underworld—into another Babylon, the City of this World, corrupt, treacherous, contaminating, where on every side "smutty dangers" (II, 36) threaten to besmirch the traveler who has not mastered "the Art of Walking the Streets." London is Gay's emblem for actuality, for Life itself. Patterns of recurring images function cooperatively to give the town this symbolic character. The poem opens, as we have seen, with a metaphor comparing the "winding alleys" and "perplexing lanes" of the city to a maze, through which the muse must safely conduct the poet. In Book II (11. 77-90) the figure is resumed and its implications extended: the "doubtful maze" that bewilders the innocent peasant who has strayed into London from a better country, is now associated with "the dang'rous labyrinth of Crete," the story of which, etched on the walls of the temple of Phoebus by Daedalus himself, Aeneas had read at the entrance to the underworld.

The quality of life that waits within these streets is as predatory and violent, as monstrous, as that which Theseus found. Coaches clash in a snarl of traffic, provoking "the sturdy war" (III, 36); the drivers lash each other and grapple in the mud of the street. Chaos and brutality prevail:

Forth issuing from steep lanes, the collier's steeds
Drag the black load; another cart succeeds,
Team follows team, crouds heap'd on crouds appear,

And wait impatient, 'till the road grow clear.
Now all the pavement sounds with trampling feet,
And the mixt hurry barricades the street.
Entangled here, the waggon's lengthen'd team
Cracks the tough harness; here a pond'rous beam
Lies over-turn'd athwart; for slaughter fed
Here lowing bullocks raise their homed head.
Now oaths grow loud, with coaches coaches jar,
And the smart blow provokes the sturdy war;
From the high box they whirl the thong around,
And with the twining lash their shins resound:
Their rage ferments, more dang'rous wounds they try,
And the blood gushes down their painful eye.
And now on foot the frowning warriors light,
And with their pond'rous fists renew the fight;
Blow-answers blow, their cheeks are smear'd with blood,
'Till down they fall, and grappling roll in mud.
So when two boars, in wild Ytene bred,
Or on Westphalia's fatt'ning chest-nuts fed,
Gnash their sharp tusks, and rous'd with equal fire,
Dispute the reign of some luxurious mire;
In the black flood they wallow o'er and o'er,
'Till their arm'd jaws distil with foam and gore.
(III, 25-50)

The utter capitulation to rage and swinish brutality characterizes the spiritual condition of the citizens.

Equally significant are the recurrent references in the poem to filth of all kinds—mud, offal, soot, ashes, grease, blood. It is not merely that this filth exists in the town, but that it threatens constantly to bespatter and befoul the wayfarer, just as the moral corruption in which the city wallows threatens to soil and stain his spirit:

        oft in the mingling press
The barber's apron soils the sable dress;
Shun the perfumer's touch with cautious eye,
Nor let the baker's step advance too nigh.…
The little chimney-sweeper skulks along,
And marks with sooty stains the heedless throng;
When small-coal murmurs in the hoarser throat,
From smutty dangers guard thy threaten'd coat:
The dust-man's cart offends thy cloaths and eyes,
When through the street a cloud of ashes flies;
But whether black or lighter dyes are worn,
The chandler's basket, on his shoulder born,
With tallow spots thy coat; resign the way,
To shun the surly butcher's greasy tray,
Butchers, whose hands are dy'd with blood's foul stain,
And always foremost in the hangman's train.
  Let due civilities be strictly paid.
(II, 27-30, 33-45)

Considering the character of the world that Gay describes, that last exclamation is a more than perfunctory appeal. In this world deceit and duplicity, sham and gaudy surfaces prevail. Very little is what it appears to be. The lost, looking for a guide, have their pockets picked; ballad-singers like "Syrens stand / To aid the labours of the diving hand" (III, 79-80); the link-man's torch, meant as a beacon, serves as a lure to trap the unwary; beggars turned thieves use their crutches to fell their victims; whores, promising love, spread infection. In contrast to the honest walker are the riders, rich by rapine and fraud, who loll in coaches, their gaudy insignia belying the rottenness within: "The tricking gamester insolently rides, / With Loves and Graces on his chariot's sides" (I, 115-16). Civility and charity are the moral virtues that the poem recommends in the face of pride and inhumanity so widespread as to suggest the ignoble savagery of Hobbes's natural man. Amidst the weak and the poor, the walker practices benevolence while "Proud coaches pass, regardless of the moan / Of infant orphans, and the widow's groan" (II, 451-52). The piling up of such scenes and images is relentless, and the ultimate effect is to present the city as the very type and habitation of moral disorder, depravity, and disease.

In Book III the horror of the spectacle darkens with nightfall, and there is less relief from Gay's levity of tone. Threatened from above by falling shop windows and "dashing torrents" (III, 205) from gutters, and from below by the filth of the streets, the wayfarer finds himself like Ulysses "Pent round with perils" (III, 178), calling for aid in vain. He is cautioned to avoid the fate of Oedipus, archetypal victim of the tri-via, who came to grief "Where three roads join'd" (III, 217): "Hence wert thou doom'd in endless night to stray / Through Theban streets, and cheerless groap thy way" (III, 223-24). The scenes that follow recapitulate the themes that have characterized the city throughout—the corruption of innocence and the triumph of deceit and misrule: whores use their "subtil arts" to despoil the Devonshire yeoman of his money, his health, and his virtue; the cause of justice and order finds its hopeless champions in the ineffectual watchman and the mercenary constable, who attends only to "the rhet'rick of a silver fee" (III, 318). Rakes kindle riots, beacons are extinguished—the city is given over completely to disorder and darkness.

The grim tableau culminates, however, in a scene that places this spectacle of worldly folly and vice within the larger contexts of history and eternity, asserting the ultimate victory of divine justice. As with Gay's method throughout, the local and particular image is given universal significance by the use of analogy and allusion. The total darkness—in which the chariots of the town's proud riders have been broken, to sink in the gulph of common-shores—is interrupted by the outbreak of fire in the city. Here Gay's allusive technique serves to relate this conflagration both to those which signalled the destruction of Sodom and Troy, and to the lurid prodigies that presaged the fall of Caesar. The "blazing deluge," the tiles descending "in rattling show'rs" (III, 359-60), recall God's judgment against the iniquitous cities of the plain (Genesis 19:24). As the burning building "sinks on the smoaky ground" (III, 386), Gay's final simile (shifting the frame of reference from past to future time) envisions the fiery collapse of still another city, this time Naples:

So when the years shall have revolv'd the date,
Th'inevitable hour of Naples' fate,
Her sapp'd foundations shall with thunders shake,
And heave and toss upon the sulph'rous lake;
Earth's womb at once the fiery flood shall rend,
And in th'abyss her plunging tow'rs descend.
(III, 387-92)

The imagery brings to mind the infernal fires and the holocaust that will signal the world's final hour. Gay's reassuring burlesque tone is subdued by these vivid reminders of the precarious grandeur of empires and the certain doom of the cities of this world.

To render the meaning of the city clear, the penultimate paragraph universalizes Gay's depiction of "the perils of the wintry town" (III, 394), likening his own experience and didactic intent to those of other bold travelers, from the deserts of Arabia to the frozen wastes of Greenland, who have witnessed the savagery of man and the hostility of nature:

Thus the bold traveller, (inur'd to toil,
Whose steps have printed Asia's desert soil,
The barb'rous Arabs haunt; or shiv'ring crost
Dark Greenland's mountains of eternal frost;
Whom providence in length of years restores
To the wish'd harbour of his native shores;)
Sets forth his journals to the publick view,
To caution, by his woes, the wandring crew.
(III, 399-406)

Barbarism and bitter weather are the conditions of life in this world. The winter streets of London are Gay's symbol for this fact.

It is conventional to say that Gay's answer to the corruption and artificiality of the town is the purity and naturalness of the country. This contrast, which certainly appears elsewhere in his poetry, is found in Trivia as well: "On doors the sallow milk-maid chalks her gains; / Ah! how unlike the milk-maid of the plains!" (II, 11-12). As we have already seen, however, references to the country in Gay do not function as they do in a primitivist or romantic work (in Smollett's Humphry Clinker, let us say, or in Wordsworth's "Michael"), to recommend a return to rural regions. They serve rather to establish a symbolic antithesis to the meanings of the city that we have previously discussed, keeping just at the back of our minds—as of the thoughts of Gay's wayfarer through life—the memory of a better country left behind, a distant Eden forever lost. In the same way, the fact that Trivia is a mock-georgic establishes a continually implicit comparison between Virgil's happy husbandmen and the sordid denizens of the town. If the pastoral is a symbolic mode, an artful imitation of the Golden Age, Trivia reflects its opposite, the Age of Iron—the Age, more specifically, of Georgian England. To read Trivia as an assertion of natural values as against the values of art and civilization is to miss the point. These are winter streets; Gay's choice of the harshest, darkest season was quite deliberate. Nature, as she appears in Trivia, affords no refuge from the grim conditions of life; she is rather part of them and very nearly as pitiless as the town itself—drenching the traveler with winter rain, making him wince with the biting cold. The imprudent walker who has not learned "to know the skies" (I, 122) runs the danger of succumbing to the malevolence of the weather—of being "Surpriz'd in dreary fogs or driving rain" (I, 124), of having to gasp for breath in "suffocating mists" (I, 125) that blot out the sun, of being threatened by "the piercing frost … the bursting clouds … the drenching show'r" (I, 130-32). Significantly, the Mall lies "in leafy ruin" (I, 27), and the Thames, frozen over, reflects the death of every vital force.

Gay's answer to the "smutty dangers" and bitter climates of life is, then, not an escape into rural regions, not a return to Nature. More constructively, it is rather an assertion of the redeeming value of art and artifice in enabling us to cope with the shock of experience, to wrest from the dominion of Chaos and Dark Night a measure of grace, a private terrain where order and joy prevail. In this sense the art of the poem is not merely decorative, but completely functional: it is as useful in helping us to survive as the "art" referred to in Gay's subtitle, or as those practical artifacts which, following Virgil, he celebrates at length in Book I—shoes, surtouts, umbrellas—implements devised by men as protection against a hostile environment. Something like this is the meaning of the Georgics, I, where the invention of every art is said to have been occasioned by the fall of Saturn and the end of the Golden Age: before the Fall, as Virgil asserts, Nature and Man were in complete harmony; now art is necessary to enable us to control a harsh and inimical world. It is our one way of reclaiming a part at least of our former relationship to an ideal order. It is the Muse who enables Gay, through winter streets, "to walk clean by day, and safe by night," who conducts him "securely" through the labyrinth. Gay includes himself among the other votaries of Trivia, because—like the paver, whose "art / Renews the ways" (II, 309-10), and the scavenger, who "bids kennels glide / Within their bounds"—the poet smooths and disciplines the crude material of life.

Gay's redaction of the Georgics includes the burlesque of Virgil's account of the invention of implements for subduing and cultivating the earth; the travesty is not the less appropriate to his theme for being comic. The mock-myth of Vulcan's invention of pattens, for example, symbolizes precisely Gay's conception of the function of art. Spying Patty, the country girl in whom he saw for the first time "Sweet innocence and beauty meet in one" (I, 244), Vulcan, the artificer god, descends to earth in the guise of a blacksmith to woo her. Winter weather threatens to despoil the mortal girl of her health and beauty, until the god, who once fashioned the invulnerable shield of Achilles, forges another practical artifact designed to ease her way along muddy country lanes that prove as treacherous in their way as the streets of London:

Yet winter chill'd her feet, with cold she pines,
And on her cheek the fading rose declines;
No more her humid eyes their lustre boast,
And in hoarse sounds her melting voice is lost.
 This Vulcan saw, and in his heav'nly thought,
A new machine mechanick fancy wrought,
Above the mire her shelter'd steps to raise,
And bear her safely through the wintry ways.
Strait the new engine on his anvil glows,
And the pale virgin on the patten rose.
No more her lungs are shook with drooping rheums,
And on her cheek reviving beauty blooms.
(I, 267-78)

As functional as the "mechanick fancy" of Vulcan, the art of Gay's poet lifts us, so to speak, out of the mire that threatens to overwhelm us, and restores the bloom of the fading rose on the cheek of innocence. Equally relevant is the burlesque myth depicting the genesis of the bootblack's "beneficial art" (II, 152), whom the gods make

    useful to the walking croud,
To cleanse the miry feet, and o'er the shoe
With nimble skill the glossy black renew.
(II, 154-56)

Trivia and her fellow deities aid "the new japanning art" (II, 166)—"The foot grows black that was with dirt imbrown'd" (II, 209). The bootblack joins Gay's paver and crossing-sweep, as well as the poet himself, in the company of those whose function it is to introduce a measure at least of order and beauty in the face of squalor.

A crucial passage in the development of this theme occurs in Book II, where Gay and his friend William Fortescue stroll along the Strand passing sites formerly inhabited by men of taste, but now claimed by the forces of vulgarity. Only the name Arundel, famed connoisseur and collector of art, remains to mark the street where once his mansion stood as a monument to an aesthetic ideal:

Where Titian's glowing paint the canvas warm'd,
And Raphael's fair design, with judgment, charm'd,
Now hangs the bell'man's song, and pasted here
The colour'd prints of Overton appear.
Where statues breath'd, the work of Phidias' hands,
A wooden pump, or lonely watch-house stands.
There Essex' stately pile adom'd the shore,
There Cecil's, Bedford's, Viller's, now no more.
(II, 485-92)

In a world thus given over to barbarism and depravity, one sanctuary alone remains, one bastion against the ugly and the vulgar: the Palladian house of Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, whose good taste Pope would later compliment in his Moral Essays (IV). This is Gay's Palace of Art, embodying in the correctness of its outward form and in the works of art cherished within its walls, the aesthetic ideal which the poem itself asserts:

Yet Burlington's fair palace still remains;
Beauty within, without proportion reigns.
Beneath his eye declining art revives,
The wall with animated picture lives;
There Hendel strikes the strings, the melting strain

Transports the soul, and thrills through ev'ry vein;
There oft' I enter (but with cleaner shoes)
For Burlington's belov'd by ev'ry Muse.
(II, 493-500)

Here alone, where Beauty and Proportion reign, can the wayfarer find a refuge from the mud of winter streets.

While Gay in such passages "often [as Addison said of Virgil in the Georgics] conceals the precept in a description, and represents his Countryman performing the action in which he would instruct his reader,"¹⁸ the poem is itself the substantiation of the theme. Gay's tone and that ostentatious artificiality of style that we have remarked, never permit the actual world to intrude, even though that world—grim, unpredictable, violent—is his subject. A splendid illustration of this triumph of manner and artifice is the story of Doll, the ill-fated apple-woman. In itself the situation Gay describes is horrid: one day, as Doll is hawking pippins on the frozen Thames, the ice opens and swallows her, cutting off her head. (One can imagine what Hardy would have done with this!) But Gay's treatment cancels out the horror, transforming a grotesque and potentially tragic accident into a formal object of comic harmony and grace:

    'Twas here the matron found a doleful fate:
Let elegiac lay the woe relate,
Soft as the breath of distant flutes, at hours
When silent evening closes up the flow'rs;
Lulling as falling water's hollow noise;
Indulging grief, like Philomela's voice.
   Doll ev'ry day had walk'd these treach'rous roads;
Her neck grew warpt beneath autumnal loads
Of various fruit; she now a basket bore,
That head, alas! shall basket bear no more.
Each booth she frequent past, in quest of gain,
And boys with pleasure heard her shrilling strain.
Ah Doll! all mortals must resign their breath,
And industry it self submit to death!
The cracking crystal yields, she sinks, she dyes,
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.
So when the Thracian furies Orpheus tore,
And left his bleeding trunk deform'd with gore,
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 banks Eurydice return'd.
(II, 375-98)

The mock formality of Gay's "elegiac lay"; the too delicious repetition of the liquid I sounds in "Lulling as falling water's hollow noise"; the forced exclamation of grief ("That head, alas!") and the strained platitudes on mortality; Doll's ludicrously abbreviated cry resounding across the ice; the absurdly incongruous allusions to Philomela and to Orpheus—every touch conspires to turn pathos into laughter, to remove us from any involvement in the scene. By his skill as a craftsman and rhetorician, Gay has transformed the grotesque into the exquisite, imposing on the chaos of life a certain form and comic grace. In such passages, having managed to make life conform to the principles of art, he holds it up at arm's length, as it were, for our admiration and diversion. Like the magic of Hobnelia or the art of the paver, Gay's style, his manner, continually controls or remakes the crude material of experience, no matter how terrifying and intractable. What occurs in Gay's best poems is not the imitation of Nature or reality, but its metamorphosis, leaving the object still recognizable—witness Doll's fate or the city shower or the bull in the "Friday" eclogue—but harmless; and not merely harmless, but aesthetically pleasing. Gay's characteristic tone of impish laughter has cost him the serious attention of more than one reader in our time, as it appears to have done in his own, because we have not seen that, far from being frivolous or irrelevant, the note he strikes is that of a hard-won affirmation: the poet's assertion of the redeeming value of his art. Gay does not imitate reality; because he is its master, he mocks it.

For his epigraph to Trivia Gay chose the opening line of Virgil's Ninth Eclogue: "Quo te Meri pedes? An, quo via ducit, in Urbem?" (which Dryden renders: "Ho Mceris! wh[i]ther on thy way so fast? / This leads to Town"¹⁹). The theme and the situation in Virgil's poem help, I think, to illuminate Gay's own meaning. The shepherd Mceris and his friend, the poet Menalcas, have been dispossessed of their pastures, and very nearly deprived of their lives, by the soldiers of the emperor. Mceris is journeying toward the town, bearing forced tribute to his oppressors. Lycidas, who hails him, is at first surprised:

  Your Country Friends were told another Tale;
That from the sloaping Mountain to the Vale,
And dodder'd Oak, and all the Banks along,
Menalcas sav'd his Fortune with a Song.
(II. 11-14)

Like the song of Menalcas, the poetry of John Gay makes, so to speak, this same attempt to redeem the land. Menalcas, "in these hard Iron Times" (1. 16), failed; in Trivia at least—and in those other poems we have been considering—Gay succeeded.

Notes

¹ James R. Sutherland, "John Gay," in Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (Oxford, 1949), pp. 201-14. This excellent essay is of fundamental importance to a critical appreciation of Gay's poetry.

² Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (London, 1781), III, 136.

³ Maynard Mack, "Gay Augustan," Yale University Library Gazette, XXI (1946), 6-10.

⁴ Seven M. Armens, John Gay: Social Critic (New York, 1954). Since the present essay was written and submitted for publication, welcome signs have appeared suggesting that Gay's poetry is at last beginning to receive the serious critical attention it deserves. Two recent studies are especially noteworthy: Adina Forsgren, John Gay, Poet "of a Lower Order": Comments on His Rural Poems and Other Early Writings (Stockholm, 1964); and Patricia Meyer Spacks, John Gay, Twayne's English Authors Series (New York, 1965).

⁵ Alexander Pope, The Guardian, No. 40 (27 April 1713); 1747 ed., I, 257. See also Pope's Discourse on Pastoral Poetry.

⁶ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Pt. I, sec. 16; Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1928), 1, 22.

⁷Trivia, III, 263. My quotations from Gay are from The Poetical Works of John Gay, ed. G. C. Faber (Oxford, 1926).

⁸The Tea-Table: A Town Eclogue, 1. 38.

⁹Trivia, II, 45.

¹⁰The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1953), pp. 210, 215.

¹¹ See "Friday; or, The Dirge," 11. 58, 76, 125, 126.

¹²An Epistle to Her Grace, Henrietta, Dutchess of Marlborough, 1. 3.

¹³ Mack, p. 8.

¹⁴ Joseph Addison, "An Essay on Virgil's Georgics," Works (London, 1761), 1, 244.

¹⁵ Sutherland, p. 205.

¹⁶ See, for example, Armens, pp. 4-5, 9-10, 74; and George Sherburn, "The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1789)," in Albert C. Baugh, ed., A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), p. 919.

¹⁷The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1937), 1, 139, 11. 53-63.

¹⁸ Addison, I, 238-39.

¹⁹The Works of Virgil, trans. Dryden (London, 1697), p. 41.