"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 ravishing 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.

Is there ought else on Earth desirous?"

Macheath comes in and announces to the gang that he must go into hiding for a week or two and is left alone to ruminate upon life:

"A Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I with one Woman ..." and is immediately joined by a gang of lovely ladies, by far the most attractive of whom is Jenny Diver.

"As prim and demure as ever! There is not any Prude, though ever so high bred, hath a more sanctify'd Look, with a more mischievous Heart. Ah!

thou art a dear artful Hypocrite...." Jenny, who never drinks "Strong-Waters" but when she has "the Cholic," who never goes "to the Tavern with a Man, but in the View of Business." "I have other Hours, and other sort of Men for my Pleasure." It is Jenny who sings one of the sweetest songs in the play:

"Before the Barn-door crowing, The c.o.c.k by Hens attended, His Eyes around him throwing, Stands for a while suspended.

Then One he singles from the Crew, And cheers the happy Hen; With how do you do, and how do you do, And how do you do again."

It is Jenny who then blindfolds him and betrays him to Peachum and the constables.

We accompany, loath as Macheath to part company with Jenny, the Captain to Newgate, where Lucy Lockit appears to add to his discomfiture by wishing to "be made an honest woman of."

The two jailers then come in and fight over a point of honour and depart. Meanwhile Macheath endeavours to make Lucy free him and is on the point of succeeding when Polly appears and the fat is properly in the fire. The situation gives rise to the most famous song in the play:

"How happy I could be with either, Were t'other dear charmer away!

But while you thus teaze me together, To neither a word will I say: But tol de rol...."

As a result of which the two girls turn on each other and Peachum enters, giving Macheath a chance to rea.s.sure Lucy of his love for her, so she gets the keys and lets him escape.

We then have an exquisite pa.s.sage between Peachum and Mrs Trapes, beginning in an inimitable vein:

_Peachum._ One may know by your Kiss, that your Ginn is excellent.

_Trapes._ I was always very curious in my Liquors.... Fill it up--I take as large Draughts of Liquor, as I did of Love.... I hate a Flincher in either.

Lucy, finding that she has released Macheath, only to let him fly to Polly, resolves to poison her with rat's-bane mixed in her gin, which Polly refuses: "Brandy and men (though women love them ever so well) are always taken by us with some Reluctance--unless 'tis in private."

Macheath is again captured, this time in a gaming-house, and sings a great number of songs (one to the tune of _Sally in our Alley_) in the "Condemn'd Hold" while he drowns his sorrows in drink. To send the audience away in a good humour he is reprieved at the last moment and rejoins his doxie in a dance.

Such is the substance of a play which few people took the trouble to read before they were unexpectedly given the chance of seeing it acted at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.

But whether we read it or see it, there are certain points about it which make it perennially worth reading and worth seeing.

It is free from sentimentality, it is full of robust sense, and clears the air once and for all from the taint of prurience that has fallen upon us. The irony of it is mirth-provoking and delicious. It is a racy and true picture of human nature stripped naked. There is no savagery, only rascally good humour, true gaiety and buoyant vitality. As an antidote to depression or bad temper it would be hard to think of any quicker cut back to the joy of life.

And the best of it is that there are dozens of other plays equally enjoyable hidden away in the treasure-house of old English plays, waiting for you to unearth and rediscover them.

PART II

SOME CONTEMPORARIES

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