Part 6 (1/2)

”Well, what about _The Beggar's Opera_?” answers A. B. so languidly that Nigel doesn't hear. He repeats it.

”The Beggar's what?” asks Nigel. ”Never heard of it.”

”I'll sing you some of the songs in it,” says Arnold, waking up.

”No, no, for G.o.d's sake, no. We'll take it as sung.”

That, I truly believe, is how plays get played. At any rate this is how plays get read.

There are dozens of things lying buried in your old library, but you won't take the trouble to unearth them. But now, well, you've only got to dine earlier and enter a detestable Tube and cross a more detestable Broadway and you can see _The Beggar's Opera_ most exquisitely done for you on the stage. You can read the more piquant bits of it during the interval in a truly Martin Seckerish edition if your companion goes to the bar; this is quite different from the play as one hears it. The eye is not so easily shocked as the ear. But I am wandering from my point, which is this: ”Why we should read Such a Book as _The Beggar's Opera_”

is my heavily weighted heading to this chapter.

Read _The Beggar's Opera_, yes, and then see if you can't find some of the scores of other neglected plays equally well worth playing, and make such a fuss about them that soon Nigel and Arnold or some other lover of the theatre is compelled to put them on.

There is no dearth of mirth-provoking material, which is still not quite intellectually futile---- But I'm wandering again. Let me begin.

We read _The Beggar's Opera_ for much the same reason that we read Fielding, because it is, as Maurice Baring says, English, as English as a landscape by Constable, or eggs and bacon. It has this added advantage to those who see it acted, that it is full of ravis.h.i.+ng English music.

Written in the first place in ridicule of the musical Italian opera, we now read it or see it to regain some of that atmosphere of London life, of brilliant wit, of racy coa.r.s.eness, of satiric richness, which marked the healthy century that gave it birth.

A bigger set of rogues than we here meet with it would be impossible to imagine, but _nos haec novimus esse nihil_ and we laugh undisturbed for once by any moral twinges. ”All Men are thieves in love, and like a woman the better for being another's property”: that is the sort of proverb we like to hear in such a play: the more we hear the merrier we grow.

How amazingly appropriate too are the songs: when Mrs Peachum learns that Polly is really married to Macheath one feels that there was no other way for her but to burst out into song:

”Our Polly is a sad s.l.u.t! nor heeds what we have taught her.

I wonder any Man alive will ever rear a Daughter!

For she must have both Hoods and Gowns, and Hoops to swell her Pride, With Scarfs and Stays, and Gloves and Lace; and she will have Men beside; And when she's drest with Care and Cost, all tempting, fine and gay, As Men should serve a Cowc.u.mber, she flings herself away.”

”Do you think your Mother and I should have liv'd comfortably so long together, if ever we had been married?” roars Peachum in a fine frenzy.

”Can you support the Expence of a Husband, Hussy, in Gaming, Drinking and Whoring? Have you Money enough to carry on the daily Quarrels of Man and Wife about who shall squander most?... Why, thou foolish Jade, thou wilt be as ill-us'd, and as much neglected, as if thou hadst married a Lord,” shrieks her mother.

Polly confesses that she loves her husband and Mrs Peachum faints at the awful news; revived by a double dose of cordial, she joins her daughter in one of the most delicious songs in the play.

”O Polly, you might have toy'd and kist.

By keeping Men off, you keep them on.

POLLY

But he so teaz'd me, And he so pleas'd me, What I did, you must have done.”

Her father then suggests that Polly has Macheath ”peach'd” at the next Sessions, so that she can become a rich widow, and leaves her to digest the unpalatable idea. Macheath comes in and Polly urges him to fly, which he does.

Act II. opens with one of the finest choruses imaginable, sung by a gang of pickpockets in a tavern near Newgate:

”Fill every gla.s.s, for wine inspires us, And fires us With Courage, Love and Joy.

Women and wine should Life employ.