nearly thirty years later, and which contains a sort of promise of
_Gryll Grange_, there is no sign of any dissatisfaction on the author's
part with the plan of the earlier book; but in his next, which came
quickly, he changed that plan very decidedly. _Nightmare Abbey_ is the
shortest, as _Melincourt_ is the longest, of his tales; and as
_Melincourt_ is the most unequal and the most clogged with heavy matter,
so _Nightmare Abbey_ contains the most unbroken tissue of farcical,
though not in the least coarsely farcical, incidents and conversations.
The misanthropic Scythrop (whose habit of Madeira-drinking has made some
exceedingly literal people sure that he really could not be intended for
the water-drinking Shelley); his yet gloomier father, Mr. Glowry; his
intricate entanglements with the lovely Marionetta and the still more
beautiful Celinda; his fall between the two stools; his resolve to
commit suicide; the solution of that awkward resolve--are all simply
delightful. Extravagant as the thing is, its brevity and the throng of
incidents and jokes prevent it from becoming in the least tedious. The
pessimist-fatalist Mr. Toobad, with his "innumerable proofs of the
temporary supremacy of the devil," and his catchword "the devil has come
among us, having great wrath," appears just enough, and not too much.
The introduced sketch of Byron as Mr. Cypress would be the least happy
thing of the piece if it did not give occasion for a capital serious
burlesque of Byronic verse, the lines, "There is a fever of the spirit,"
which, as better known than most of Peacock's verse, need not be quoted.
Mr. Flosky, a fresh caricature of Coleridge, is even less like the
original than Mr. Mystic, but he is much more like a human being, and in
himself is great fun. An approach to a more charitable view of the
clergy is discoverable in the curate Mr. Larynx, who, if not extremely
ghostly, is neither a sot nor a sloven. But the quarrels and
reconciliations between Scythrop and Marionetta, his invincible
inability to make up his mind, the mysterious advent of Marionetta's
rival, and her residence in hidden chambers, the alternate sympathy and
repulsion between Scythrop and those elder disciples of pessimism, his
father and Mr. Toobad--all the contradictions of Shelley's character, in
short, with a suspicion of the incidents of his life brought into the
most ludicrous relief, must always form the great charm of the book. A
tolerably rapid reader may get through it in an hour or so, and there is
hardly a more delightful hour's reading of anything like the same kind
in the English language, either for the incidental strokes of wit and
humour, or for the easy mastery with which the whole is hit off. It
contains, moreover, another drinking-catch, "Seamen Three," which,
though it is, like its companion, better known than most of Peacock's
songs, may perhaps find a place:--
Seamen three! What men be ye?
Gotham's three wise men we be.
Whither in your bowl so free?
To rake the moon from out the sea.
The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.
Who art thou so fast adrift?
I am he they call Old Care.
Here on board we will thee lift.
No: I may not enter there.
Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree
In a bowl Care may not be;
In a bowl Care may not be.
Fear ye not the waves that roll?
No: in charmèd bowl we swim.
What the charm that floats the bowl?
Water may not pass the brim.
The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.
A third song sung by Marionetta, "Why are thy looks so blank, Grey
Friar?" is as good in another way; nor should it be forgotten that the
said Marionetta, who has been thought to have some features of the
luckless Harriet Shelley, is Peacock's first lifelike study of a girl,
and one of his pleasantest.
The book which came out four years after, _Maid Marian_, has, I believe,
been much the most popular and the best known of Peacock's short
romances. It owed this popularity, in great part, doubtless, to the fact
that the author has altered little in the well-known and delightful old
story, and has not added very much to its facts, contenting himself with
illustrating the whole in his own satirical fashion. But there is also
no doubt that the dramatisation of _Maid Marian_ by Planché and Bishop
as an operetta helped, if it did not make, its fame. The snatches of
song through the novel are more frequent than in any other of the books,
so that Mr. Planché must have had but little trouble with it. Some of
these snatches are among Peacock's best verse, such as the famous
"Bramble Song," the great hit of the operetta, the equally well-known
"Oh, bold Robin Hood," and the charming snatch:--
For the tender beech and the sapling oak,
That grow by the shadowy rill,
You may cut down both at a single stroke,
You may cut down which you will;
But this you must know, that as long as they grow,
Whatever change may be,
You never can teach either oak or beech
To be aught but a greenwood tree.
This snatch, which, in its mixture of sentiment, truth, and what may be
excusably called "rollick," is very characteristic of its author, and
is put in the mouth of Brother Michael, practically the hero of the
piece, and the happiest of the various workings up of Friar Tuck,
despite his considerable indebtedness to a certain older friar, whom we
must not call "of the funnels." That Peacock was a Pantagruelist to the
heart's core is evident in all his work; but his following of Master
Francis is nowhere clearer than in _Maid Marian_, and it no doubt helps
us to understand why those who cannot relish Rabelais should look
askance at Peacock. For the rest, no book of Peacock's requires such
brief comment as this charming pastoral, which was probably little less
in Thackeray's mind than _Ivanhoe_ itself when he wrote _Rebecca and
Rowena_. The author draws in (it would be hardly fair to say drags in)
some of his stock satire on courts, the clergy, the landed gentry, and
so forth; but the very nature of the subject excludes the somewhat
tedious digressions which mar _Melincourt_, and which once or twice
menace, though they never actually succeed in spoiling, the unbroken fun
of _Nightmare Abbey_.
_The Misfortunes of Elphin_, which followed after an interval of seven
years, is, I believe, the least generally popular of Peacock's works,
though (not at all for that reason) it happens to be my own favourite.
The most curious instance of this general unpopularity is the entire
omission, as far as I am aware, of any reference to it in any of the
popular guide-books to Wales. One piece of verse, indeed, the "War-song
of Dinas Vawr," a triumph of easy verse and covert sarcasm, has had some
vogue, but the rest is only known to Peacockians. The abundance of Welsh
lore which, at any rate in appearance, it contains, may have had
something to do with this; though the translations or adaptations,
whether faithful or not, are the best literary renderings of Welsh known
to me. Something also, and probably more, is due to the saturation of
the whole from beginning to end with Peacock's driest humour. Not only
is the account of the sapping and destruction of the embankment of
Gwaelod an open and continuous satire on the opposition to Reform, but
the whole book is written in the spirit and manner of _Candide_--a
spirit and manner which Englishmen have generally been readier to
relish, when they relish them at all, in another language than in their
own. The respectable domestic virtues of Elphin and his wife Angharad,
the blameless loves of Taliesin and the Princess Melanghel, hardly serve
even as a foil to the satiric treatment of the other characters. The
careless incompetence of the poetical King Gwythno, the coarser vices of
other Welsh princes, the marital toleration or blindness of Arthur, the
cynical frankness of the robber King Melvas, above all, the drunkenness
of the immortal Seithenyn, give the humorist themes which he caresses
with inexhaustible affection, but in a manner no doubt very puzzling,
if not shocking, to matter-of-fact readers. Seithenyn, the drunken
prince and dyke-warden, whose carelessness lets in the inundation, is by
far Peacock's most original creation (for Scythrop, as has been said, is
rather a humorous distortion of the actual than a creation). His
complete self-satisfaction, his utter fearlessness of consequences, his
ready adaptation to whatever part, be it prince or butler, presents
itself to him, and above all, the splendid topsy-turviness of his
fashion of argument, make Seithenyn one of the happiest, if not one of
the greatest, results of whimsical imagination and study of human
nature. "They have not"--says the somewhile prince, now King Melvas's
butler, when Taliesin discovers him twenty years after his supposed
death--"they have not made it [his death] known to me, for the best of
all reasons, that one can only know the truth. For if that which we
think we know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man
cannot know his own death. For while he knows anything he is alive; at
least, I never heard of a dead man who knew anything, or pretended to
know anything: if he had so pretended I should have told him to his face
that he was no dead man." How nobly consistent is this with his other
argument in the days of his princedom and his neglect of the embankment!
Elphin has just reproached him with the proverb, "Wine speaks in the
silence of reason." "I am very sorry," said Seithenyn, "that you see
things in a wrong light. But we will not quarrel, for three reasons:
first, because you are the son of the king, and may do and say what you
please without any one having a right to be displeased; second, because
I never quarrel with a guest, even if he grows riotous in his cups;
third, because there is nothing to quarrel about. And perhaps that is
the best reason of the three; or rather the first is the best, because
you are the son of the king; and the third is the second, that is the
second best, because there is nothing to quarrel about; and the second
is nothing to the purpose, because, though guests will grow riotous in
their cups in spite of my good orderly example, God forbid that I should
say that is the case with you. And I completely agree in the truth of
your remark that reason speaks in the silence of wine."
_Crotchet Castle_, the last but one of the series, which was published
two years after _Elphin_ and nearly thirty before _Gryll Grange_, has
been already called the best; and the statement is not inconsistent with
the description already given of _Nightmare Abbey_ and of _Elphin_. For
_Nightmare Abbey_ is chiefly farce, and _The Misfortunes of Elphin_ is
chiefly sardonic persiflage. _Crotchet Castle_ is comedy of a high and
varied kind. Peacock has returned in it to the machinery of a country
house with its visitors, each of whom is more or less of a crotcheteer;
and has thrown in a little romantic interest in the suit of a certain
unmoneyed Captain Fitzchrome to a noble damsel who is expected to marry
money, as well as in the desertion and subsequent rescue of Susannah
Touchandgo, daughter of a levanting financier. The charm of the book,
however, which distinguishes it from all its predecessors, is the
introduction of characters neither ridiculous nor simply good in the
persons of the Rev. Dr. Folliott and Lady Clarinda Bossnowl,
Fitzchrome's beloved. "Lady Clarinda," says the captain, when the said
Lady Clarinda has been playing off a certain not unladylike practical
joke on him, "is a very pleasant young lady;" and most assuredly she is,
a young lady (in the nineteenth century and in prose) of the tribe of
Beatrice, if not even of Rosalind. As for Dr. Folliott, the author is
said to have described him as his amends for his earlier clerical
sketches, and the amends are ample. A stout Tory, a fellow of infinite
jest, a lover of good living, an inveterate paradoxer, a pitiless
exposer of current cants and fallacies, and, lastly, a tall man of his
hands, Dr. Folliott is always delightful, whether he is knocking down
thieves, or annihilating, in a rather Johnsonian manner, the economist,
Mr. McQuedy, and the journalist, Mr. Eavesdrop, or laying down the law
as to the composition of breakfast and supper, or using strong language
as to "the learned friend" (Brougham), or bringing out, partly by
opposition and partly by irony, the follies of the transcendentalists,
the fops, the doctrinaires, and the mediævalists of the party. The
book, moreover, contains the last and not the least of Peacock's
admirable drinking-songs:--
If I drink water while this doth last,
May I never again drink wine;
For how can a man, in his life of a span,
Do anything better than dine?
We'll dine and drink, and say if we think
That anything better can be;
And when we have dined, wish all mankind
May dine as well as we.
And though a good wish will fill no dish,
And brim no cup with sack,
Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring
To illumine our studious track.
O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes
The light of the flask shall shine;
And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way
To drench the world with wine.
The song is good in itself, but it is even more interesting as being the
last product of Peacock's Anacreontic vein. Almost a generation passed
before the appearance of his next and last novel, and though there is
plenty of good eating and drinking in _Gryll Grange_, the old fine
rapture had disappeared in society meanwhile, and Peacock obediently
took note of the disappearance. It is considered, I believe, a mark of
barbarian tastes to lament the change. But I am not certain that the Age
of Apollinaris and lectures has yet produced anything that can vie as
literature with the products of the ages of Wine and Song.
_Gryll Grange_, however, in no way deserves the name of a dry stick. It
is, next to _Melincourt_, the longest of Peacock's novels, and it is
entirely free from the drawbacks of the forty-years-older book. Mr.
Falconer, the hero, who lives in a tower alone with seven lovely and
discreet foster-sisters, has some resemblances to Mr. Forester, but he
is much less of a prig. The life and the conversation bear, instead of
the marks of a young man's writing, the marks of the writing of one who
has seen the manners and cities of many other men, and the personages
throughout are singularly lifelike. The loves of the second hero and
heroine, Lord Curryfin and Miss Niphet, are much more interesting than
their names would suggest. And the most loquacious person of the book,
the Rev. Dr. Opimian, if he is somewhat less racy than Dr. Folliott, is
not less agreeable. One main charm of the novel lies in its vigorous
criticism of modern society in phases which have not yet passed away.
"Progress" is attacked with curious ardour; and the battle between
literature and science, which in our days even Mr. Matthew Arnold waged
but as one _cauponans bellum_, is fought with a vigour that is a joy to
see. It would be rather interesting to know whether Peacock, in planning
the central incident of the play (an "Aristophanic comedy," satirising
modern ways), was aware of the existence of Mansel's delightful parody
of the "Clouds." But "Phrontisterion" has never been widely known out
of Oxford, and the bearing of Peacock's own performance is rather social
than political. Not the least noteworthy thing in the book is the
practical apology which is made in it to Scotchmen and political
economists (two classes whom Peacock had earlier persecuted) in the
personage of Mr. McBorrowdale, a candid friend of Liberalism, who is
extremely refreshing. And besides the Aristophanic comedy, _Gryll
Grange_ contains some of Peacock's most delightful verse, notably the
really exquisite stanzas on "Love and Age."
The book is the more valuable because of the material it supplies, in
this and other places, for rebutting the charges that Peacock was a mere
Epicurean, or a mere carper. Independently of the verses just named, and
the hardly less perfect "Death of Philemon," the prose conversation
shows how delicately and with how much feeling he could think on those
points of life where satire and jollification are out of place. For the
purely modern man, indeed, it might be well to begin the reading of
Peacock with _Gryll Grange_, in order that he may not be set out of
harmony with his author by the robuster but less familiar tones, as well
as by the rawer though not less vigorous workmanship, of _Headlong Hall_
and its immediate successors. The happy mean between the heart on the
sleeve and the absence of heart has scarcely been better shown than in
this latest novel.
I have no space here to go through the miscellaneous work which
completes Peacock's literary baggage. His regular poems, all early, are
very much better than the work of many men who have won a place among
British poets. His criticism, though not great in amount, is good; and
he is especially happy in the kind of miscellaneous trifle (such as his
trilingual poem on a whitebait dinner), which is generally thought
appropriate to "university wits." But the characteristics of these
miscellanies are not very different from the characteristics of his
prose fiction, and, for purposes of discussion, may be included with
them.
Lord Houghton has defined and explained Peacock's literary idiosyncrasy
as that of a man of the eighteenth century belated and strayed in the
nineteenth. It is always easy to improve on a given pattern, but I
certainly think that this definition of Lord Houghton's (which, it
should be said, is not given in his own words) needs a little
improvement. For the differences which strike us in Peacock--the easy
joviality, the satirical view of life, the contempt of formulas and of
science--though they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of
the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth,
are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They
are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical
antiquity--wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life
have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock is a
differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among men of
letters who are accustomed to society, who take no sacerdotal or
singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which
literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no
means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian,
Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary
ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in
addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian
more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple _pococurante_. Rabelais
may have had a little inclination to science itself (he would soon have
found it out if he had lived a little later), Montaigne may have been
more of a pure egotist, Saint-Evremond more of a man of society, and of
the verse and prose of society. But they all had the same _ethos_, the
same love of letters as letters, the same contempt of mere progress as
progress, the same relish for the simpler and more human pleasures, the
same good fellowship, the same tendency to escape from the labyrinth of
life's riddles by what has been called the humour-gate, the same
irreconcilable hatred of stupidity and vulgarity and cant. The
eighteenth century has, no doubt, had its claim to be regarded as the
special flourishing time of this mental state urged by many others
besides Lord Houghton; but I doubt whether the claim can be sustained,
at any rate to the detriment of other times, and the men of other
times. That century took itself too seriously--a fault fatal to the
claim at once. Indeed, the truth is that while this attitude has in some
periods been very rare, it cannot be said to be the peculiar, still less
the universal, characteristic of any period. It is a personal not a
periodic distinction; and there are persons who might make out a fair
claim to it even in the depths of the Middle Ages or of the nineteenth
century.
However this may be, Peacock certainly held the theory of those who take
life easily, who do not love anything very much except old books, old
wine, and a few other things, not all of which perhaps need be old, who
are rather inclined to see the folly of it than the pity of it, and who
have an invincible tendency, if they tilt at anything at all, to tilt at
the prevailing cants and arrogances of the time. These cants and
arrogances of course vary. The position occupied by monkery at one time
may be occupied by physical science at another; and a belief in graven
images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by
a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the
general principles--the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own
sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the
day--appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they
certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not
to say shocking, to some excellent people. It is impossible to avoid a
slight chuckle when one thinks of the horror with which some such people
must read Peacock's calm statement, repeated I think more than once,
that one of his most perfect heroes "found, as he had often found
before, that the more his mind was troubled, the more madeira he could
drink without disordering his head." I have no doubt that the United
Kingdom Alliance, if it knew this dreadful sentence (but probably the
study of the United Kingdom Alliance is not much in Peacock), would like
to burn all the copies of _Gryll Grange_ by the hands of Mr. Berry, and
make the reprinting of it a misdemeanour, if not a felony. But it is not
necessary to follow Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or to be a believer in
education, or in telegraphs, or in majorities, in order to feel the
repulsion which some people evidently feel for the manner of Peacock.
With one sense absent and another strongly present it is impossible for
any one to like him. The present sense is that which has been rather
grandiosely called the sense of moral responsibility in literature. The
absent sense is that sixth, seventh, or eighth sense, called a sense of
humour, and about this there is no arguing. Those who have it, instead
of being quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to
celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not;
the afflicted ones, who have it not, only follow a general law in
protesting that the sense of humour is a very worthless thing, if not a
complete humbug. But there are others of whom it would be absurd to say
that they have no sense of humour, and yet who cannot place themselves
at the Peacockian point of view, or at the point of view of those who
like Peacock. His humour is not their humour; his wit not their wit.
Like one of his own characters (who did not show his usual wisdom in the
remark), they "must take pleasure in the thing represented before they
can take pleasure in the representation." And in the things that Peacock
represents they do not take pleasure. That gentlemen should drink a
great deal of burgundy and sing songs during the process, appears to
them at the best childish, at the worst horribly wrong. The
prince-butler Seithenyn is a reprobate old man, who was unfaithful to
his trust and shamelessly given to sensual indulgence. Dr. Folliott, as
a parish priest, should not have drunk so much wine; and it would have
been much more satisfactory to hear more of Dr. Opimian's sermons and
district visiting, and less of his dinners with Squire Gryll and Mr.
Falconer. Peacock's irony on social and political arrangements is all
sterile, all destructive, and the sentiment that "most opinions that
have anything to be said for them are about two thousand years old" is a
libel on mankind. They feel, in short, for Peacock the animosity,
mingled with contempt, which the late M. Amiel felt for "clever
mockers."
It is probably useless to argue with any such. It might, indeed, be
urged in all seriousness that the Peacockian attitude is not in the
least identical with the Mephistophelian; that it is based simply on the
very sober and arguable ground that human nature is always very much the
same, liable to the same delusions and the same weaknesses; and that the
oldest things are likely to be best, not for any intrinsic or mystical
virtue of antiquity, but because they have had most time to be found out
in, and have not been found out. It may further be argued, as it has
often been argued before, that the use of ridicule as a general
criterion can do no harm, and may do much good. If the thing ridiculed
be of God, it will stand; if it be not, the sooner it is laughed off the
face of the earth the better. But there is probably little good in
urging all this. Just as a lover of the greatest of Greek dramatists
must recognise at once that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to
argue Lord Coleridge out of the idea that Aristophanes, though a genius,
was vulgar and base of soul, so to go a good deal lower in the scale of
years, and somewhat lower in the scale of genius, everybody who rejoices
in the author of "Aristophanes in London" must see that he has no chance
of converting Mrs. Oliphant, or any other person who does not like
Peacock. The middle term is not present, the disputants do not in fact
use the same language. The only thing to do is to recommend this
particular pleasure to those who are capable of being pleased by it, and
to whom, as no doubt it is to a great number, it is pleasure yet
untried.