“The social and political satire has been removed, No comparison is drawn between the virtues of the black man and the white. Macheath is never even threatened with the fate that I had prepared for him, but is restored in health and charm and vigour to the eager embraces of his faithful Polly. A good two-thirds of the play is not mine at all, and though I am highly sensitive to the charms of its many bewitching lyrics, I can claim but a small share in their authorship. It is all, as I have previously remarked, perfectly delightful; but what has happened to my play?”
We like to think that Mr Gay must have, by now, realised how extremely bad his own edition was. We venture, whatever biographers may state, to discern in his work the presence of a genial unpretentious personality. By now, we say, he should have acquired a sufficient sense of detachment from the jealousies and rivalries and feuds of the early eighteenth century to realise that he himself had made a sad mess of it, that Clifford Bax is perfectly right, and that it would have been impossible for Macheath to die, or the divine Polly to be wedded to a black.
Doubtless they said much the same of Mr Tate two hundred years ago. To the dandy of 1720 it seemed as impossible that Lear should die as is to-day the execution of Macheath. And, as Clifford Bax has found in Polly’s misfortunes the single string on which might be threaded the characters and incidents that would have been otherwise irrelevant, so Mr Tate discovered in the love of Edgar for Cordelia the missing unity of Lear. Mr Gay’s Polly was as impossible to-day as Mr Shakespeare’s Lear was in 1720. In 2020 who knows but Mr Tate’s version will be upon the boards of the Lyric, Hammersmith, and His Majesty’s will be staging an unexpurgated Gay. Each age takes the food it needs. Like wine in bottles, some books deteriorate and others mature.
And, indeed, what is this posterity that we should so appeal to it? Are we not ourselves fallible and imperfect mortals, posterity to the Victorians? I can see Browning walking with Tennyson in the Elysian Fields. They discuss the literary journalism of their day. “It was bad,” Browning mumbles into his beard,--“very bad indeed. There was a silly fellow called John Stuart Mill--what was it he said about that first book of mine? ‘Most self-conscious thing he’d ever read.’ But I didn’t worry. I looked ahead. I was content to let posterity decide; and I have my reward. I read last week such a charming thing about me by, let me see now, a very vigorous young person I thought--ah, yes, Miss Rebecca West....”