As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking,
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.

I sit at my table en grand seigneur,
And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;
Not only the pleasure, one’s self, of good living,
But also the pleasure of now and then giving.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

It was but last winter I came up to town,
But already I’m getting a little renown;
I make new acquaintance where’er I appear;
I am not too shy, and have nothing to fear.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

I drive through the streets, and I care not a d—n;
The people they stare, and they ask who I am;
And if I should chance to run over a cad,
I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

We stroll to our box and look down on the pit,
And if it weren’t low should be tempted to spit;
We loll and we talk until people look up,
And when it’s half over we go out to sup.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

The best of the tables and the best of the fare—
And as for the others, the devil may care;
It isn’t our fault if they dare not afford
To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

We sit at our tables and tipple champagne;
Ere one bottle goes, comes another again;
The waiters they skip and they scuttle about,
And the landlord attends us so civilly out.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

This comes from Clough’s ‘Dipsychus and the Spirit’, an unfinished verse-play-dialogue sort of thingie (that’s the literary-critical term) which uses the structure of a long exchange between those two characters to dramatise (amongst other things) the conflicts between faith and doubt, worldliness and idealism, human sexuality and (then-)contemporary social mores, rich and poor, individual satisfaction and social conscience… There’s a lot going on in it, and it’s extraordinary.

Suffice it to know that here, though the speaker is the Spirit, a sort of Tempter figure, Dipsychus himself is at the Faustian end of the hero scale and also well aware of ‘how pleasant it is to have money’. Neither of the two speakers/minds is totally likeable or entirely alien. In other words, Clough doesn’t make any facile points about right and wrong: he acknowledges how hard it is to be a “good” person, doing “right” in the world which privileges the haves beyond the privilege they already enjoy (ie, the having itself). His openness about this is both reassuring and disquieting.