“[John] Gay is represented as a man easily incited to hope, and deeply depressed when his hopes were disappointed. This is not the character of a hero; but it may naturally imply something more generally welcome, a soft and civil companion.”
An
unexpected characterization of a writer with a bent for satire. We expect
satirists to be difficult if not savage. Think of Swift and Waugh – especially Swift.
In her biography of him Victoria Glendinning writes:
“It is a
truism that those who make us laugh most are frequently prey to melancholy.
Turning everything to wit or humour is a strategy for survival and a redeeming
route to acceptance and popularity. Swift’s wit is often shocking. It has a
lash. He challenges the hypocrisies and received opinions which enable people
to rub along together.”
The passage
at the top is from Dr. Johnson’s “Life of Gay,” who is remembered, if at all,
for The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and for
his friendships with Pope and Swift. His poems tend to be diffuse and rambling,
with less elegance than Pope’s, less reveling in disgust than Swift’s. Reading “There and Back,” Nige’s Thursday post, with its lament for a once great city – “London
seems to get noisier, more crowded, more alien and confusing every time I see
it” – reminds me of Gay’s “Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London”:
“For ease
and for dispatch, the morning’s best;
No tides of
passengers the street molest.
You’ll see a
draggled damsel, here and there,
From
Billingsgate her fishy traffic bear;
On doors the
sallow milk-maid chalks her gains;
Ah! how
unlike the milk-maid of the plains!”
A sad final
verdict from Johnson: “As a poet he cannot be rated very high. He was, as I
once heard a female critick remark, ‘of a lower order.’ He had not in any great
degree the mens divinior, the dignity
of genius.”
Gay composed
his own epitaph: “Life is a jest; and all things show it, / I thought so once;
but now I know it.” He was born on this date, June 30, in 1685 and died in 1732
at age forty-seven.
I've also been struck by the restless crowds on my last two trips to London. Every street seems to be the same street: a treadmill packed with young faces hurrying toward you and past you. I asked the very same questions as Nige. What do they seek here? Where are they bound? Who's paying the bills? Yet for all the crowds, the beautiful, historic churches are empty, even in the busiest neighborhood. You can enter the very churches where Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot worshiped, in the middle of the day, an enjoy peaceful meditation.
ReplyDeleteThe strangeness of current London (like today's New York) comes from its having been optimized for tourism. There is nothing left that is culturally alive, real or growing. There are no secret societies of creators, outcasts, or young people. No hidden places or secrets to discover. It's all out in the open now, and available for purchase.
The young people thronging the streets don't represent a new movement in art, music, writing or film. They come into the city through its many beautiful train stations to walk the legendary streets and feed on the energy of the city and their own numbers.
Leaving London a few months ago, it occurred to me that the only honest spaces left in the city were the Thames, the churches, the train stations and the magnificent underground. Oh yes, and the house of Samuel Johnson, open only a few days of the week, with its statue of Hodge in the deserted courtyard, where if you wait long enough, you'll see the occasional pilgrim emerge from the alleyway, face aglow as if he or she has finally arrived home.