JOHN GAY

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA

JOHN GAY, the author of The Beggar's Opera and many things beside, holds a place all his own among English men of letters. Pope, who knew and loved him well-to know Gay was to love him-summed up the man's whole story in one antithetic phrase, “In wit a man, simplicity a child;" for it is true that Gay never grew up. To the day of his death in his middle forties he was as irresponsible, as lazy and slovenly, as immoderate in his meat and drink, and altogether as helplessly dependent upon the guidance and care of others as any grammar-school urchin. All life and work were his playground, and his many friends guarded and encouraged him in his clever play, just as protecting grown-ups watch over careless childhood at sport. Gay's alternate buoyancy and depression, delight and despair, are the happiness and sorrow of a child plunging from dizzy heights to depths. But fortunately for us, whatever wails may have risen to heaven, when Gay deemed himself neglected, little of this juvenile lamentation creeps into his work. In his best poetry he is unalloyed joy.

Of Gay's early years there is little to tell. Born in 1685 of a Devonshire family of longer pedigree than purses, he received his only education at the school of his native town of Barnstaple, from which he bore away some knowledge of the classics. Then there were days of idle apprenticeship to a London silk mercer, followed by a long period leisurely given by the youth to seeking in taverns and coffee-houses the company of the great, so easily accessible in that age, and to merrily inviting whatever of soul was in him. By the time he was thirty he had found both his fellows and himself. Bolingbroke, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Pope were now his loyal friends, and the Duchess of Monmouth had taken him into her service. He had wandered unintelligently enough within the circle of Chaucer's magic in his unsuccessful comedy of 1713, The Wife of Bath. He had caught and held the ear of the town with two poems of country life, Rural Sports, which Dr. Johnson deemed "never contemptible and never excellent," and that delightful burlesque, The Shepherd's Week, a culminating contribution to Pope's pastoral war with Ambrose Philips. He had won, too, the favor of the great, and accompanied as secretary Lord Clarendon on a diplomatic mission to the Court of Hanover in 1714. Then with the death of Queen Anne, while Gay was still abroad, seemed to come the end of all his hopes. But our disappointed poet,—

unlike his friend, Swift, eating out his heart in exile-does not attain to the dignity of a tragic figure. Indeed, Gay's description of his dramatic burlesque of the year 1715, The What d'ye Call It-in which, by the way, he had his laugh at Cato and Venice Preserved-as a "tragi-comi-pastoral farce" applies pretty well to his own life at this time. His distress over his lack of employment and his empty pockets affects us like the passing grief of childhood, for we know that friends will be kind and that skies will clear. Pope, who has aided him in his satire, cordially bids him to Binfield or to Twickenham, Burlington plays the host in Piccadilly and at English watering places, Pulteney carries him off for a season to Aix-la-Chapelle, Harcourt lends him a house in Oxfordshire. His loudly bewailed martyrdom assumes the form of an agreeable dependence.

Though over-easy in his life, Gay seems, as a writer, always quick enough to catch the moment with play, tale, eclogue, epistle, or song. Trivia: or The Art of Walking the Streets of London, published early in 1716, brings to bear upon the metropolis the same humorous observation that he earlier cast upon his Devonshire countryside. Three Hours after Marriage, written with Pope in 1717, may have deservedly failed with audience and critics, but it lined Gay's purse. And in 1720 his collected poems pranced forth with a dazzling subscription list of all the noblesse. The thousand pounds, thus easily won, were as easily lost with the pricking of the South Sea bubble. Still what does it all matter? Providence kindly interposes with the sinecure of a lottery commissionship and with a dispensation, of far more value to the improvident poet than a salary of £150, the friendship of the Duke of Queensberry and his brilliant Duchess. His tragedy of indifferent merit, The Captives (1724), with Wilks, Booth, Mrs. Porter, and Mrs. Oldfield in the chief rôles, was applauded not only by all London, but by royalty itself. The next year finds Gay writing for young Prince William, afterwards the bloody Duke of Cumberland, a series of Fables, which did more for the poet's fame than all his other works combined. And deservedly so, for the charming simplicity and graceful verse of these little productions, which are so much more than mere imitations of Lafontaine and Lamotte, make a natural appeal to the world of childhood and their social applications interest many older readers. It was doubtless as a fabulist that Gay was offered in 1727 the position of gentleman-usher to little Princess Louisa, which he, playing the grown man for the nonce, loftily declined as undignified. This disappointment must have been speedily forgotten in the tremendous vogue of the very work that it provoked, Gay's delightful satire against courts and ministers, The Beggar's Opera (1728). Its sequel of the same year, Polly, though denied the stage by the Lord Chancellor, prospered mightily in print. Duchesses rallied about him in his luxurious role of political martyr and the Queensberrys deserted the court for the sake of their protégé. He became, as Arbuthnot tells us, "the darling of the city."

The rest of Gay's story is but anticlimax; for during the four years

remaining to him he produced nothing of great note. An opera, Achilles, a pastoral drama, Acis and Galatea, and a few fables prove that he was not altogether idle. The end came suddenly at the Queensberry town house on December 5, 1732. Upon the splendid monument which marks Gay's restingplace in the Poets' Corner of Westminster appear Pope's epitaph and his own flippant couplet:

"Life is a jest, and all things show it.

I thought so once, and now I know it."

Our concern is with but a single work of Gay, The Beggar's Opera. No other account of the conception and presentation of this great popular success can compare with that of Pope in Spence's Anecdotes: "Dr. Swift had been observing once to Mr. Gay, what an odd pretty sort of thing a Newgate Pastoral might make. Gay was inclined to try at such a thing for some time; but afterwards thought it would be better to write a comedy on the same plan. This was what gave rise to The Beggar's Opera. He began on it; and when he first mentioned it to Swift, the Doctor did not much like the project. As he carried it on, he showed what he wrote to both of us, and we now and then gave a correction, or a word or two of advice; but it was wholly of his own writing. When it was done, neither of us thought that it would succeed. We showed it to Congreve, who, after reading it over, said: 'It would either take greatly or be damned confoundedly.' We were all, at the first night of it, in great uncertainty of the event; till we heard the Duke of Argyll, who sat in the next box to us, say: 'It will do, it must do! I see it in the eyes of them.' This was a good while before the first act was over, and gave us ease soon; for the Duke (besides his own good taste) has a particular knack, as any one now living, in discovering the taste of the public. He was quite right in this, as usual; the good nature of audience appeared stronger and stronger every act, and ended in a clamor of applause." Never was a triumph more complete. The play, as wags declared, "made Gay rich and Rich (the theatre manager) gay." A run of sixty-three days in the metropolis was followed by a brilliant progress through the provinces. The best of its many songs appeared on screens and fans. Macheath, wavering between Polly and Lucy, was painted several times by Hogarth. Lavinia Fenton, who played the rôle of Polly, now reigned as universal favorite and later married her duke. "Furthermore "-Pope is speaking" the piece drove out of England (for that season) the Italian Opera, which had carried all before it for ten years."

That it was Gay's deliberate purpose to burlesque the Italian Opera, which had dominated the musical stage of England not for a decade, but for a generation (see The Spectator, Nos. 5, 13, 18), seems most unlikely, for his production bears no relation to this exotic in subject, style, or form. But that the success of the innovation temporarily impaired the vogue of such

composers as Handel and Buononcini cannot be questioned. Gay created, or rather, derived from the masque through the "heroic" opera a popular form of drama, the ballad opera, which seemed to Johnson fifty years later "likely to keep long possession of the stage" and which found its high-water mark in The Duenna of Sheridan. The chief contrast between the eighteenthcentury ballad opera and the comic opera, let us say, of Gilbert and Sullivan lies in this, that in Gay's invention the music holds a so much less important place than the prose dialogue that the numerous songs, which are set to popular airs, are introduced into the middle of the scenes and could all be omitted without spoiling the plot. Indeed, Walker, the first impersonator of Macheath, "knew no more of music than barely singing in tune; but then his singing was supported by inimitable action, by his speaking to the eye and charming the ear." Lavinia Fenton's acknowledged position as “Queen of English Song" must, however, have contributed greatly to the success of the opera.

That Gay derived either the characters or plot of The Beggar's Opera from any earlier drama is not demonstrated by any evidence yet presented. The charge of contemporaries that he stole from The Dutch Courtezan of John Marston through The Woman's Revenge (1715) of Christopher Bullock is as unsupported as the assertion of modern scholarship that he was deeply indebted to Richard Brome's Merry Beggars (1641). Here or there we meet a seeming reminiscence of these forerunners, but the borrowing, if such it be, is probably unconscious. And the occasional parallels with famous comedies of both sides of the Channel, pointed out by German source-hunters, are sheer coincidences. The inspiration of Gay's dramatic burlesque lay not in books but in life. He found the prototypes of his chief figures in the "underworld" of his time. The original of Peachum was the great Napoleon of the realms of crime in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Wilde, afterwards Fielding's hero-spy, fence, and thief-who, but three years before, had been hanged at Tyburn. And probably Macheath's model was the equally notorious Jack Sheppard, burglar and highwayman, who, since his very recent death, had become dramatic material at both Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields,-a full century before Harrison Ainsworth celebrated his exploits.

Gay was, however, striking at loftier game than wretched footpads and runagates. The corruption that everywhere flaunted in high places is the real object of his attack and the chief apostle of bribery, the prime minister himself, is constantly the butt of thinly veiled satire. Every one, of course, instantly recognized in Robin of Bagshot, alias Bluff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty, the allusions to Sir Robert Walpole's rough manners, roaring conviviality, and unblushing incursions upon the public purse, and all construed the quarrel between Peachum and Lockit as a picture of the strife between Walpole and Townshend. But those who went farther and sought to interpret Macheath's shameless career as a complete allegory of the private

life and public service of the unscrupulous but efficient premier, or who tried to read into the unsavory records of the other rogues of the piece the stories of certain noble lords, surely exaggerated the dramatist's design. Through slashing side-strokes at "Bob, the poet's foe," Gay doubtless aimed to settle scores for his long neglect at the hands of government. Walpole displayed sufficient presence of mind to lead the applause at these sallies, as Bolingbroke had done during the performance of Cato; but he evidently had small relish for the rôle of stage highwayman, if we are right in assuming that the suppression of Gay's sequel, Polly, was achieved through his powerful influence.

The charge brought against The Beggar's Opera by Dr. Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury, and echoed by a man so different as Daniel Defoe, that the play "taught thieves to value themselves on their profession rather than be ashamed of it by making a highwayman the hero and dismissing him at last unpunished" was repeated in a later age by Justice Fielding, who feared its tendency "to increase the number of thieves." To us the accusation seems as absurd as the commendation of the piece by Swift on the ground that it "placed all kinds of vice in the strongest and most odious light." After these extremes one welcomes the sound judgment of Johnson that "the play was not likely to do either good or evil, as it was written solely to divert." And divert it does still. The modern reader, undisturbed by any fear of highwaymen, untroubled by any old-fashioned sense of poetic justice, and heedless of political allusion, can afford to laugh at old scruples.

Yet no play in this volume suffers more through transference from stage to closet than The Beggar's Opera. Macheath in the glow of action, especially when impersonated by a vigorous actor, might easily delight audiences -as indeed he did for over a century and a half (until 1886)—with his riotous gaiety and ready song; but Macheath in cold print seems so mean a liar and so cruel a rake, so utterly devoid of any sign of grace or generosity, that we feel little sympathy with his knavery. Lucy, "bamboozled and bit," must ever give more pain than pleasure. And Polly, convincing though she may have been in Lavinia Fenton's charming portrayal, and in the skilful interpretation of many generations of great actresses, is morally as impossible in her Newgate environment as on the tropical island of the sequel that bears her name. And the other women of Macheath's troop are not the mere "filles de joie" that their names and songs suggest, but sordid monsters. The Peachums, father and mother, and Lockit are the real triumphs of the piece. They are of the eternal fellowship of Defoe's thieves and of Dickens's dodgers in professional skill and grim humor. Nothing in the play equals in circumstantiality or outdoes in zest the enumeration of the gang and the inventory of their thefts. All this is delightfully, flagrantly realistic.

The merits of the plot are as obvious as its defects. Lively situations and unflagging movement sweep us on with a rush, and the repeated captures