Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
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CROTCHET CASTLE
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BY
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK.
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1887.
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INTRODUCTION.
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK was born at Weymouth in 1785. His first poem, “The
Genius of the Thames,” was in its second edition when he became one of
the friends of Shelley. That was in 1812, when Shelley’s age was twenty,
Peacock’s twenty-seven. The acquaintance strengthened, until Peacock
became the friend in whose judgment Shelley put especial trust. There
were many points of agreement. Peacock, at that time, shared, in a more
practical way, Shelley’s desire for root and branch reform; both wore
poets, although not equally gifted, and both loved Plato and the Greek
tragedians. In “Crotchet Castle” Peacock has expressed his own delight
in Greek literature through the talk of the Reverend Dr. Folliott.
But Shelley’s friendship for Peacock included a trust in him that was
maintained by points of unlikeness. Peacock was shrewd and witty. He
delighted in extravagance of a satire which usually said more than it
meant, but always rested upon a foundation of good sense. Then also
there was a touch of the poet to give grace to the utterances of a
clear-headed man of the world. It was Peacock who gave its name to
Shelley’s poem of “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,” published in
1816. The “Spirit of Solitude” being treated as a spirit of evil,
Peacock suggested calling it “Alastor,” since the Greek ἀλάστωρ means an
evil genius.
Peacock’s novels are unlike those of other men: they are the genuine
expressions of an original and independent mind. His reading and his
thinking ran together; there is free quotation, free play of wit and
satire, grace of invention too, but always unconventional. The story is
always pleasant, although always secondary to the play of thought for
which it gives occasion. He quarrelled with verse, whimsically but in
all seriousness, in an article on “The Four Ages of Poetry,” contributed
in 1820 to a short-lived journal, “Ollier’s Literary Miscellany.” The
four ages were, he said, the iron age, the Bardic; the golden, the
Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, in which he himself
lived. “A poet in our time,” he said, “is a semi-barbarian in a
civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are
resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the
whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and
can, therefore, serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a
puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth.” In
another part of this essay he says: “While the historian and the
philosopher are advancing in and accelerating the progress of knowledge,
the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up
the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown
babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poacher and cattle-stealers of
the ancient Border. Lord Byron cruises for thieves and pirates on the
shores of the Morea and among the Greek islands. Mr. Southey wades
through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he
carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being
essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of
monstrosities, strings them into an epic.” And so forth; Peacock going
on to characterise, in further illustration of his argument, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Moore, and Campbell. He did not refer to Shelley; and Shelley
read his friend’s whimsical attack on poetry with all good humour,
proceeding to reply to it with a “Defence of Poetry,” which would have
appeared in the same journal, if the journal had survived. In this novel
of “Crotchet Castle” there is the same good-humoured exaggeration in the
treatment of “our learned friend”—Lord Brougham—to whom and to whose
labours for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge there are repeated
allusions. In one case Peacock associates the labours of “our learned
friend” for the general instruction of the masses with encouragement of
robbery (page 172), and in another with body-snatching, or, worse,—murder
for dissection (page 99). “The Lord deliver me from the learned friend!”
says Dr. Folliott. Brougham’s elevation to a peerage in November, 1830,
as Lord Brougham and Vaux, is referred to on page 177, where he is called
Sir Guy do Vaux. It is not to be forgotten, in the reading, that this
story was written in 1831, the year before the passing of the Reform
Bill. It ends with a scene suggested by the agricultural riots of that
time. In the ninth chapter, again, there is a passage dealing with Sir
Walter Scott after the fashion of the criticisms in the “Four Ages of
Poetry.” But this critical satire gave nobody pain. Always there was a
ground-work of good sense, and the broad sweep of the satire was utterly
unlike the nibbling censure of the men whose wit is tainted with
ill-humour. We may see also that the poet’s nature cannot be expelled.
In this volume we should find the touch of a poet’s hand in the tale
itself when dealing with the adventures of Mr. Chainmail, while he stays
at the Welsh mountain inn, if the story did not again and again break out
into actual song, for it includes half-a-dozen little poems.
When Peacock wrote his attack on Poetry, he had, only two years before,
produced a poem of his own—“Rhododaphne”—with a Greek fancy of the true
and the false love daintily worked out. It was his chief work in verse,
and gave much pleasure to a few, among them his friend Shelley. But he
felt that, as the world went, he was not strong enough to help it by his
singing, so he confined his writing to the novels, in which he could
speak his mind in his own way, while doing his duty by his country in the
East India House, where he obtained a post in 1818. From 1836 to 1856,
when he retired on a pension, he was Examiner of India Correspondence.
Peacock died in 1866, aged eighty-one.
H. M.
NOTE that in this tale Mac Quedy is Mac Q. E. D., son of a demonstration;
Mr. Skionar, the transcendentalist, is named from Ski(as) onar, the dream
of a shadow; and Mr. Philpot,—who loves rivers, is Phil(o)pot(amos).
CHAPTER I.
THE VILLA.
_Captain Jamy_. I wad full fain hear some question ’tween you tway.
HENRY V.
IN one of those beautiful valleys, through which the Thames (not yet
polluted by the tide, the scouring of cities, or even the minor
defilement of the sandy streams of Surrey) rolls a clear flood through
flowery meadows, under the shade of old beech woods, and the smooth mossy
greensward of the chalk hills (which pour into it their tributary
rivulets, as pure and pellucid as the fountain of Bandusium, or the wells
of Scamander, by which the wives and daughters of the Trojans washed
their splendid garments in the days of peace, before the coming of the
Greeks); in one of those beautiful valleys, on a bold round-surfaced
lawn, spotted with juniper, that opened itself in the bosom of an old
wood, which rose with a steep, but not precipitous ascent, from the river
to the summit of the hill, stood the castellated villa of a retired
citizen. Ebenezer Mac Crotchet, Esquire, was the London-born offspring
of a worthy native of the “north countrie,” who had walked up to London
on a commercial adventure, with all his surplus capital, not very neatly
tied up in a not very clean handkerchief, suspended over his shoulder
from the end of a hooked stick, extracted from the first hedge on his
pilgrimage; and who, after having worked himself a step or two up the
ladder of life, had won the virgin heart of the only daughter of a highly
respectable merchant of Duke’s Place, with whom he inherited the honest
fruits of a long series of ingenuous dealings.
Mr. Mac Crotchet had derived from his mother the instinct, and from his
father the rational principle, of enriching himself at the expense of the
rest of mankind, by all the recognised modes of accumulation on the windy
side of the law. After passing many years in the Alley, watching the
turn of the market, and playing many games almost as desperate as that of
the soldier of Lucullus, the fear of losing what he had so righteously
gained predominated over the sacred thirst of paper-money; his caution
got the better of his instinct, or rather transferred it from the
department of acquisition to that of conservation. His friend, Mr.
Ramsbottom, the zodiacal mythologist, told him that he had done well to
withdraw from the region of Uranus or Brahma, the Maker, to that of
Saturn or Veeshnu, the Preserver, before he fell under the eye of Jupiter
or Seva, the Destroyer, who might have struck him down at a blow.
It is said that a Scotchman, returning home after some years’ residence
in England, being asked what he thought of the English, answered: “They
hanna ower muckle sense, but they are an unco braw people to live amang;”
which would be a very good story, if it were not rendered apocryphal by
the incredible circumstance of the Scotchman going back.
Mr. Mac Crotchet’s experience had given him a just title to make, in his
own person, the last-quoted observation, but he would have known better
than to go back, even if himself, and not his father, had been the first
comer of his line from the north. He had married an English Christian,
and, having none of the Scotch accent, was ungracious enough to be
ashamed of his blood. He was desirous to obliterate alike the Hebrew and
Caledonian vestiges in his name, and signed himself E. M. Crotchet, which
by degrees induced the majority of his neighbours to think that his name
was Edward Matthew. The more effectually to sink the Mac, he christened
his villa “Crotchet Castle,” and determined to hand down to posterity the
honours of Crotchet of Crotchet. He found it essential to his dignity to
furnish himself with a coat of arms, which, after the proper ceremonies
(payment being the principal), he obtained, videlicet: Crest, a crotchet
rampant, in A sharp; Arms, three empty bladders, turgescent, to show how
opinions are formed; three bags of gold, pendent, to show why they are
maintained; three naked swords, tranchant, to show how they are
administered; and three barbers’ blocks, gaspant, to show how they are
swallowed.
Mr. Crotchet was left a widower, with two children; and, after the death
of his wife, so strong was his sense of the blessed comfort she had been
to him, that he determined never to give any other woman an opportunity
of obliterating the happy recollection.
He was not without a plausible pretence for styling his villa a castle,
for, in its immediate vicinity, and within his own enclosed domain, were
the manifest traces, on the brow of the hill, of a Roman station, or
_castellum_, which was still called the “Castle” by the country people.
The primitive mounds and trenches, merely overgrown with greensward, with
a few patches of juniper and box on the vallum, and a solitary ancient
beech surmounting the place of the prætorium, presented nearly the same
depths, heights, slopes, and forms, which the Roman soldiers had
originally given them. From this castellum Mr. Crotchet christened his
villa. With his rustic neighbours he was, of course, immediately and
necessarily a squire: Squire Crotchet of the Castle; and he seemed to
himself to settle down as naturally into an English country gentleman, as
if his parentage had been as innocent of both Scotland and Jerusalem, as
his education was of Rome and Athens.
But as, though you expel nature with a pitch-fork, she will yet always
come back; he could not become, like a true-born English squire, part and
parcel of the barley-giving earth; he could not find in game-bagging,
poacher-shooting, trespasser-pounding, footpath-stopping,
common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all the other liberal pursuits and
pastimes which make a country gentleman an ornament to the world and a
blessing to the poor: he could not find in these valuable and amiable
occupations, and in a corresponding range of ideas, nearly commensurate
with that of the great King Nebuchadnezzar when he was turned out to
grass; he could not find in this great variety of useful action, and vast
field of comprehensive thought, modes of filling up his time that
accorded with his Caledonian instinct. The inborn love of disputation,
which the excitements and engagements of a life of business had
smothered, burst forth through the calmer surface of a rural life. He
grew as fain as Captain Jamy, “to hear some argument betwixt ony tway,”
and being very hospitable in his establishment, and liberal in his
invitations, a numerous detachment from the advanced guard of the “march
of intellect,” often marched down to Crotchet Castle.
When the fashionable season filled London with exhibitors of all
descriptions, lecturers and else, Mr. Crotchet was in his glory; for, in
addition to the perennial literati of the metropolis, he had the
advantage of the visits of a number of hardy annuals, chiefly from the
north, who, as the interval of their metropolitan flowering allowed,
occasionally accompanied their London brethren in excursions to Crotchet
Castle.
Amongst other things, he took very naturally to political economy, read
all the books on the subject which were put forth by his own countrymen,
attended all lectures thereon, and boxed the technology of the sublime
science as expertly as an able seaman boxes the compass.
With this agreeable mania he had the satisfaction of biting his son, the
hope of his name and race, who had borne off from Oxford the highest
academical honours; and who, treading in his father’s footsteps to honour
and fortune, had, by means of a portion of the old gentleman’s surplus
capital, made himself a junior partner in the eminent loan-jobbing firm
of Catchflat and Company. Here, in the days of paper prosperity, he
applied his science-illumined genius to the blowing of bubbles, the
bursting of which sent many a poor devil to the gaol, the workhouse, or
the bottom of the river, but left young Crotchet rolling in riches.
These riches he had been on the point of doubling, by a marriage with the
daughter of Mr. Touchandgo, the great banker, when, one foggy morning,
Mr. Touchandgo and the contents of his till were suddenly reported
absent; and as the fortune which the young gentleman had intended to
marry was not forthcoming, this tender affair of the heart was nipped in
the bud.
Miss Touchandgo did not meet the shock of separation quite so
complacently as the young gentleman: for he lost only the lady, whereas
she lost a fortune as well as a lover. Some jewels, which had glittered
on her beautiful person as brilliantly as the bubble of her father’s
wealth had done in the eyes of his gudgeons, furnished her with a small
portion of paper-currency; and this, added to the contents of a fairy
purse of gold, which she found in her shoe on the eventful morning when
Mr. Touchandgo melted into thin air, enabled her to retreat into North
Wales, where she took up her lodging in a farm-house in Merionethshire,
and boarded very comfortably for a trifling payment, and the additional
consideration of teaching English, French, and music, to the little
Ap-Llymrys. In the course of this occupation she acquired sufficient
knowledge of Welsh to converse with the country people.
She climbed the mountains, and descended the dingles, with a foot which
daily habit made by degrees almost as steady as a native’s. She became
the nymph of the scene; and if she sometimes pined in thought for her
faithless Strephon, her melancholy was anything but green and yellow: it
was as genuine white and red as occupation, mountain air, thyme-fed
mutton, thick cream, and fat bacon could make it: to say nothing of an
occasional glass of double X, which Ap-Llymry, who yielded to no man west
of the Wrekin in brewage, never failed to press upon her at dinner and
supper. He was also earnest, and sometimes successful, in the
recommendation of his mead, and most pertinacious on winter nights in
enforcing a trial of the virtues of his elder wine. The young lady’s
personal appearance, consequently, formed a very advantageous contrast to
that of her quondam lover, whose physiognomy the intense anxieties of his
bubble-blowing days, notwithstanding their triumphant result, had left
blighted, sallowed, and crow’s-footed, to a degree not far below that of
the fallen spirit who, in the expressive language of German romance, is
described as “scathed by the ineradicable traces of the thunderbolts of
Heaven;” so that, contemplating their relative geological positions, the
poor deserted damsel was flourishing on slate, while her rich and false
young knight was pining on chalk.
Squire Crotchet had also one daughter, whom he had christened Lemma, and
who, as likely to be endowed with a very ample fortune was, of course, an
object very tempting to many young soldiers of fortune, who were marching
with the march of mind, in a good condition for taking castles, as far as
not having a groat is a qualification for such exploits. She was also a
glittering bait to divers young squires expectant (whose fathers were too
well acquainted with the occult signification of mortgage), and even to
one or two sprigs of nobility, who thought that the lining of a civic
purse would superinduce a very passable factitious nap upon a thread-bare
title. The young lady had received an expensive and complicated
education, complete in all the elements of superficial display. She was
thus eminently qualified to be the companion of any masculine luminary
who had kept due pace with the “astounding progress” of intelligence. It
must be confessed, that a man who has not kept due pace with it, is not
very easily found: this march being one of that “astounding” character in
which it seems impossible that the rear can be behind the van. The young
lady was also tolerably good looking: north of Tweed, or in Palestine,
she would probable have been a beauty; but for the valleys of the Thames
she was perhaps a little too much to the taste of Solomon, and had a nose
which rather too prominently suggested the idea of the tower of Lebanon,
which looked towards Damascus.
In a village in the vicinity of the Castle was the vicarage of the
Reverend Doctor Folliott, a gentleman endowed with a tolerable stock of
learning, an interminable swallow, and an indefatigable pair of lungs.
His pre-eminence in the latter faculty gave occasion to some etymologists
to ring changes on his name, and to decide that it was derived from
Follis Optimus, softened through an Italian medium into Folle Ottimo,
contracted poetically into Folleotto, and elided Anglicé into Folliott,
signifying a first-rate pair of bellows. He claimed to be descended
lineally from the illustrious Gilbert Folliott, the eminent theologian,
who was a Bishop of London in the twelfth century, whose studies were
interrupted in the dead of night by the Devil, when a couple of epigrams
passed between them, and the Devil, of course, proved the smaller wit of
the two.
This reverend gentleman, being both learned and jolly, became by degrees
an indispensable ornament to the new squire’s table. Mr. Crotchet
himself was eminently jolly, though by no means eminently learned. In
the latter respect he took after the great majority of the sons of his
father’s land; had a smattering of many things, and a knowledge of none;
but possessed the true northern art of making the most of his
intellectual harlequin’s jacket, by keeping the best patches always
bright and prominent.