HEADLONG HALL
by
Thomas Love Peacock
Contents
Preface
I. The Mail
II. The Squire--The Breakfast
III. The Arrivals
IV. The Grounds
V. The Dinner
VI. The Evening
VII. The Walk
VIII. The Tower
IX. The Sexton
X. The Skull
XI. The Anniversary
XII. The Lecture
XIII. The Ball
XIV. The Proposals
XV. The Conclusion
All philosophers, who find
Some favourite system to their mind,
In every point to make it fit,
Will force all nature to submit.
P R E F A C E
to
"Headlong Hall" and the three novels
published along with it in 1837.
--------
All these little publications appeared originally without prefaces. I
left them to speak for themselves; and I thought I might very fitly
preserve my own impersonality, having never intruded on the
personality of others, nor taken any liberties but with public conduct
and public opinions. But an old friend assures me, that to publish a
book without a preface is like entering a drawing-room without making
a bow. In deference to this opinion, though I am not quite clear of
its soundness, I make my prefatory bow at this eleventh hour.
"Headlong Hall" was written in 1815; "Nightmare Abbey" in 1817; "Maid
Marian", with the exception of the last three chapters, in 1818;
"Crotchet Castle" in 1830. I am desirous to note the intervals,
because, at each of those periods, things were true, in great matters
and in small, which are true no longer. "Headlong Hall" begins with
the Holyhead Mail, and "Crotchet Castle" ends with a rotten borough.
The Holyhead mail no longer keeps the same hours, nor stops at the
Capel Cerig Inn, which the progress of improvement has thrown out of
the road; and the rotten boroughs of 1830 have ceased to exist, though
there are some very pretty pocket properties, which are their worthy
successors. But the classes of tastes, feelings, and opinions, which
were successively brought into play in these little tales, remain
substantially the same. Perfectibilians, deteriorationists,
statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political
economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid
visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the
picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march for
ever, _pari passu_ with the march of mechanics, which some facetiously
call the march of the intellect. The fastidious in old wine are a race
that does not decay. Literary violators of the confidences of private
life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an unenviable notoriety.
Match-makers from interest, and the disappointed in love and in
friendship, are varieties of which specimens are extant. The great
principle of the Right of Might is as flourishing now as in the days
of Maid Marian: the array of false pretensions, moral, political, and
literary, is as imposing as ever: the rulers of the world still feel
things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes: and
political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums
and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude: following,
like the "learned friend" of Crotchet Castle, a course as tortuous as
that of a river, but in a reverse process; beginning by being dark and
deep, and ending by being transparent.
The Author of "Headlong Hall".
_March_ 4, 1837.
H E A D L O N G H A L L
---*---
CHAPTER I
The Mail
The ambiguous light of a December morning, peeping through the windows
of the Holyhead mail, dispelled the soft visions of the four insides,
who had slept, or seemed to sleep, through the first seventy miles of
the road, with as much comfort as may be supposed consistent with the
jolting of the vehicle, and an occasional admonition to _remember the
coachman_, thundered through the open door, accompanied by the gentle
breath of Boreas, into the ears of the drowsy traveller.
A lively remark, that _the day was none of the finest_, having
elicited a repartee of _quite the contrary_, the various knotty points
of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an English
conversation, were successively discussed and exhausted; and, the ice
being thus broken, the colloquy rambled to other topics, in the course
of which it appeared, to the surprise of every one, that all four,
though perfect strangers to each other, were actually bound to the
same point, namely, Headlong Hall, the seat of the ancient and
honourable family of the Headlongs, of the vale of Llanberris, in
Caernarvonshire. This name may appear at first sight not to be truly
Cambrian, like those of the Rices, and Prices, and Morgans, and Owens,
and Williamses, and Evanses, and Parrys, and Joneses; but,
nevertheless, the Headlongs claim to be not less genuine derivatives
from the antique branch of Cadwallader than any of the last named
multiramified families. They claim, indeed, by one account, superior
antiquity to all of them, and even to Cadwallader himself, a tradition
having been handed down in Headlong Hall for some few thousand years,
that the founder of the family was preserved in the deluge on the
summit of Snowdon, and took the name of Rhaiader, which signifies a
_waterfall_, in consequence of his having accompanied the water in its
descent or diminution, till he found himself comfortably seated on the
rocks of Llanberris. But, in later days, when commercial bagmen began
to scour the country, the ambiguity of the sound induced his
descendants to drop the suspicious denomination of _Riders_, and
translate the word into English; when, not being well pleased with the
sound of the _thing_, they substituted that of the _quality_, and
accordingly adopted the name _Headlong_, the appropriate epithet of
waterfall.
I cannot tell how the truth may be:
I say the tale as 'twas said to me.
The present representative of this ancient and dignified house, Harry
Headlong, Esquire, was, like all other Welsh squires, fond of
shooting, hunting, racing, drinking, and other such innocent
amusements, _meizonos d' allou tinos_, as Menander expresses it. But,
unlike other Welsh squires, he had actually suffered certain
phenomena, called books, to find their way into his house; and, by
dint of lounging over them after dinner, on those occasions when he
was compelled to take his bottle alone, he became seized with a
violent passion to be thought a philosopher and a man of taste; and
accordingly set off on an expedition to Oxford, to inquire for other
varieties of the same genera, namely, men of taste and philosophers;
but, being assured by a learned professor that there were no such
things in the University, he proceeded to London, where, after beating
up in several booksellers' shops, theatres, exhibition-rooms, and
other resorts of literature and taste, he formed as extensive an
acquaintance with philosophers and dilettanti as his utmost ambition
could desire: and it now became his chief wish to have them all
together in Headlong Hall, arguing, over his old Port and Burgundy,
the various knotty points which had puzzled his pericranium. He had,
therefore, sent them invitations in due form to pass their Christmas
at Headlong Hall; which invitations the extensive fame of his kitchen
fire had induced the greater part of them to accept; and four of the
chosen guests had, from different parts of the metropolis, ensconced
themselves in the four corners of the Holyhead mail.
These four persons were, Mr Foster[1.1], the perfectibilian; Mr
Escot[1.2], the deteriorationist; Mr Jenkison[1.3], the statu-quo-ite;
and the Reverend Doctor Gaster[1.4], who, though of course neither a
philosopher nor a man of taste, had so won on the Squire's fancy, by a
learned dissertation on the art of stuffing a turkey, that he
concluded no Christmas party would be complete without him.
The conversation among these illuminati soon became animated; and Mr
Foster, who, we must observe, was a thin gentleman, about thirty years
of age, with an aquiline nose, black eyes, white teeth, and black
hair--took occasion to panegyrize the vehicle in which they were then
travelling, and observed what remarkable improvements had been made in
the means of facilitating intercourse between distant parts of the
kingdom: he held forth with great energy on the subject of roads and
railways, canals and tunnels, manufactures and machinery: "In short,"
said he, "every thing we look on attests the progress of mankind in
all the arts of life, and demonstrates their gradual advancement
towards a state of unlimited perfection."
Mr Escot, who was somewhat younger than Mr Foster, but rather more
pale and saturnine in his aspect, here took up the thread of the
discourse, observing, that the proposition just advanced seemed to him
perfectly contrary to the true state of the case: "for," said he,
"these improvements, as you call them, appear to me only so many links
in the great chain of corruption, which will soon fetter the whole
human race in irreparable slavery and incurable wretchedness: your
improvements proceed in a simple ratio, while the factitious wants and
unnatural appetites they engender proceed in a compound one; and thus
one generation acquires fifty wants, and fifty means of supplying them
are invented, which each in its turn engenders two new ones; so that
the next generation has a hundred, the next two hundred, the next four
hundred, till every human being becomes such a helpless compound of
perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external
circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and
degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan
origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other
expectation, than that the whole species must at length be
exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness."
"Your opinions," said Mr Jenkison, a round-faced little gentleman of
about forty-five, "seem to differ _toto coelo_. I have often debated
the matter in my own mind, _pro_ and _con_, and have at length arrived
at this conclusion,--that there is not in the human race a tendency
either to moral perfectibility or deterioration; but that the
quantities of each are so exactly balanced by their reciprocal
results, that the species, with respect to the sum of good and evil,
knowledge and ignorance, happiness and misery, remains exactly and
perpetually _in statu quo_."
"Surely," said Mr Foster, "you cannot maintain such a proposition in
the face of evidence so luminous. Look at the progress of all the arts
and sciences,--see chemistry, botany, astronomy----"
"Surely," said Mr Escot, "experience deposes against you. Look at the
rapid growth of corruption, luxury, selfishness----"
"Really, gentlemen," said the Reverend Doctor Gaster, after clearing
the husk in his throat with two or three hems, "this is a very
sceptical, and, I must say, atheistical conversation, and I should
have thought, out of respect to my cloth----"
Here the coach stopped, and the coachman, opening the door,
vociferated--"Breakfast, gentlemen;" a sound which so gladdened the
ears of the divine, that the alacrity with which he sprang from the
vehicle superinduced a distortion of his ankle, and he was obliged to
limp into the inn between Mr Escot and Mr Jenkison; the former
observing, that he ought to look for nothing but evil, and, therefore,
should not be surprised at this little accident; the latter remarking,
that the comfort of a good breakfast, and the pain of a sprained
ankle, pretty exactly balanced each other.