MELINCOURT
[Illustration: [Logo]
[Illustration: _Sir Oran Haut-ton._]
MELINCOURT
OR
SIR ORAN HAUT-TON
BY
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY
=London=
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896
_All rights reserved_
INTRODUCTION
_Melincourt_ is usually considered the least interesting of Peacock’s
novels; and in the strictly comparative sense—that is to say that it is
the least interesting of a group, every one of which has peculiar and
exceptional interest—the statement is no doubt true. The defects of the
book are very obvious, and exceedingly easy to account for. _Headlong
Hall_ had been very popular; and it was only in the course of nature
that the author should repeat his successful experiment. But _Headlong
Hall_ had been by no means free from faults; and it certainly was not
out of the course of nature that they should reappear in the new
venture. In the very noteworthy introduction which the author wrote
nearly forty years later, and which contains the promise of _Gryll
Grange_ as supplement to complete the satire, it is not unimportant to
observe that he pays no attention to anything but the satirical purport.
A man of seventy, satiated with business and not specially hungering
after popularity, was not perhaps very likely to discuss his own novels
in detail, even to the extent to which Scott and other persons of
irreproachable taste have discussed theirs in separate or collected
editions. But it is not extravagant to take his silence as a kind of
indication of his point of view.
His practice, however, if not his expressed theory, testifies to a
consciousness that he had made a mistake in the scale of this novel.
_Nightmare Abbey_, the next, is only just a third of its length: no two
of the next three, even if added together, come up to it; and though
_Gryll Grange_ is not so very much shorter, _Gryll Grange_ contains the
accumulated irony of a lifetime, and is not open to any of the
objections to which _Melincourt_ is exposed.
These objections, put briefly, come to this, that the author has not yet
acquired the knack of telling a story, and that he has not discarded the
habit of inapposite dissertation. There is truth in this summary, sharp
and blunt at once as it is, and there is probably no reader who will not
sometimes put up a prayer for the excision, extinction, expulsion, and
general extermination of Mr. Fax. But political economy had always been
a favourite subject of Peacock’s French masters; it had acquired,
through Malthus (of whom Mr. Fax has sometimes been thought to be a
Peacockian portrait), considerable vogue in England; and we have seen it
reappear in our own time as a loading or padding to novels. Mr.
Forester’s anti-saccharine fervour was a real thing for many years after
_Melincourt_ was published—though I have never heard whether the amiable
anti-saccharists or their descendants have founded any association to
weep for the ruin of the West India planters first, and the West India
Islands afterwards.
Two other kinds of purpose appear in the novel, both of them distinctly
political. In _Headlong Hall_ the attack on the _Quarterly Review_ had
been tolerably obvious, but it had kept, if not entirely, yet mainly
free of personalities. The scenes at Cimmerian Lodge and Mainchance
Villa, with Mr. Feathernest’s sojourn at Melincourt, substitute for this
impersonality a directness of personal lampoon as to the taste of which
there cannot be very much question, while as to the justice and accuracy
of it there cannot be, and among rational people of both sides never has
been, any but one opinion. Mr. Vamp (Gifford), Mr. Anyside Antijack
(Canning), and Mr. Killthedead (believed to be Barrow, Secretary to the
Admiralty, and a well-known writer on naval subjects), were perhaps fair
game, for the two last were public men—in other words, public
targets—and Gifford had only himself to blame if, after playing all his
life at the roughest and most vicious of bowls, he got some rubbers. But
the animus, the injustice, and, above all, the ludicrous inaccuracy of
the attacks on Coleridge (Mr. Mystic), Southey (Mr. Feathernest), and
Wordsworth (Mr. Paperstamp), are still almost inconceivable. That there
was a certain superficial justification for accusing them all,
especially Coleridge and Southey, of rather remarkable changes of
opinion, that Coleridge was apt to be a little transcendental, and so
forth, may be granted. But the attempt to carry the satire on to their
moral and personal conduct is not only unjustifiable in itself, but
displays a quite ludicrous ignorance and recklessness. Coleridge, heaven
knows, was open enough to satire; and if Peacock had known anything
whatever about him, he might have made a rather terrible exposure. But
‘Mr. Mystic,’ with his elaborate establishment at Cimmerian Lodge, is so
unlike the fugitive philosopher who seldom had where to lay his head
except in other men’s houses, that even amusement is difficult. And when
we remember the style of living in which Wordsworth, even at his
wealthiest, indulged, and his tastes in all matters of art, coarse and
fine, the extensive dinner-party at Mainchance Villa and its ‘mighty
claret-shed’ become a very poor jest. The ‘sooth bourd’ may be ‘nae
bourd,’ but the bourd which is altogether and glaringly opposite to the
truth is a good deal worse. Most inexcusable of the three attacks,
however, is that on Southey, which, I am sorry to say, is renewed (as it
were, _sotto voce_) by the allusions to ‘Mr. Sackbut’ in _Nightmare
Abbey_. That Southey gave some provocation to the irregulars of the Whig
party by his slightly pharisaic airs of virtue, and some handle not
merely by his curious political history, but by his more voluminous than
impeccable poetical work, is undeniable. But to represent him as a
rascal, though it might be worthy of Byron, was not worthy of Peacock;
and to represent him as selling his soul for the pittance of the
laureateship was unpardonable. Southey, as Shelley himself and many
others of Peacock’s friends could have told the author of _Melincourt_,
‘feathered his nest’ with nothing but books, worked like a navvy (only
that the navvy works in bursts and Southey worked unceasingly), at the
least paying kinds of literature, in order to procure that lining, and
lived, though not sordidly, with the utmost simplicity. It would perhaps
be less difficult to forgive this unfairness if the result were more
amusing, but as it is Peacock is condemned by the laws of art no less
than by those of ethics.
He was quite infinitely more fortunate in his other political foray—the
satire on rotten boroughs in the history of the Onevote election. The
rotten-borough system may have had its advantages, but nobody ever
denied that it lent itself admirably to satire; and I am rather inclined
to fix on this as the first complete example of Peacock’s method of
sarcastic exposure. Indeed, ‘Mr. Sarcastic’ himself, unless my
imagination deceives me, comes nearer to Peacock’s own character than
almost any other of his personages. And the whole thing, in a bravura
style, is capital. It is indeed sad to notice that the constant
legislative curtailments of the picturesque and pleasing in politics
have quite recently done away with the last shred of actuality in the
Onevote episode. For it was recorded, during the first Parish Council
elections recently, that an actual Mr. Christopher Corporate was
practically disfranchised, because, though he proposed his candidate,
and might have voted for him, he was not allowed as a seconder, and no
other existed.
The not sarcastic or not purely sarcastic scenes and personages of the
novel have considerable merit, which would be more easily perceptible if
they were not kept apart from each other by so much of the
Fax-and-Forester business. Anthelia has excited interest and admiration
as a reminiscence of Peacock’s first love, and a first draft of the more
perfectly conceived Susannah Touchandgo in _Crotchet Castle_. They both
exhibit—with some modern touches, chiefly in the latter of the pair—the
sentimental but intelligent heroine of the last century. Mrs. Pinmoney
and her daughter are slight, but good, and the former’s list of tastes
is a capital passage, while Sir Telegraph Paxarett is an excellent
personage, showing something of Thackeray’s partiality for making a
young man of fashion not quite a coxcomb, such as the older novelists
had been prone to draw him. Mr. Derrydown, who is a sort of first sketch
of Mr. Chainmail in _Crotchet Castle_, is a very intelligent
mediaevalist; and the ‘supers,’ Mr. O’Scarum and the rest, play their
parts very well.
These compliments, however, will hardly extend to the hero or the
villains, though they apply with redoubled force to Sir Oran Haut-ton.
The quadrumanous baronet, indeed, is such an excellent fellow, that one
almost wishes he could have been discovered to be no Orang at all, but a
baby lost early in the woods, could have recovered his speech, improved
his good looks, and married Anthelia. For his patron, friend, rival, and
almost namesake, Sylvan Forester, is a terrible prig and bore. It is
difficult to believe that Peacock can have sympathised with him, and
impossible not to think that he simply followed the old theory of the
good young hero, as he did other old theories in the elopement and
recovery. But Mr. Forester is not much worse than the villains.
Grovelgrub indeed, though he is much worse than Portpipe (who is not
detestable), and is the sequel to Gaster in Peacock’s curious warfare
against the clergy, has a touch of wit now and then. But Lord Anophel
Achthar (how with that title he came to be heir-apparent to a marquis
Peacock does not explain) is an exceeding poor creature, not much more
valorous than Bob Acres, without any of Bob’s redeeming fun, and as dull
a dog as need or need not be.
One very curious feature in the book is the chess dance, which has been
sometimes carried out since in reality. It is one of not the least
interesting points in Peacock’s rather enigmatic character that he seems
to have had a liking for pageants and shows, whether in themselves, or
(in this particular instance) because of the example in his beloved
Rabelais, or as fashions of old time—for there never was such a lover of
old time as this Liberal free-lance. His grand-daughter tells us that he
used to hold Lady-of-the-May revels in his old age for the children at
Halliford, and the Aristophanic play in _Gryll Grange_ partakes at least
as much of this fancy as of the direct liking for theatrical performance
proper which Peacock had, and which made him for some years a regular
theatrical and operatic critic.
The songs of _Melincourt_ are, considering its length, not numerous, and
only one of them is, for Peacock, of the first class. Anthelia’s first
ballad, “The Tomb of Love,” is not very much above the strains of the
unhappy Della Crusca and his mates, whose bodies in her time still, to
speak figuratively, lay scattered on the critic mountains cold, where
they had been left by Gifford’s tomahawk. Nor is her second, “The Flower
of Love,” much better. The terzetto, which immediately follows this, is
not very strong, though “Hark o’er the Silent Waters Stealing” is
tolerable, and “The Morning of Love” is very fair imitation-Moore, and
the Antijacobin quintet very fair Hook. Of the two remaining serious
pieces “The Sun-Dial” is much better than “The Magic Bark.” But the
credit of the verse of this novel must rest upon “The Ghosts.” It faces
a page in which Southey is represented as saying of himself, “I knocked
myself down to the highest bidder,” and interrupts a discussion which,
putting aside this childish injustice, Mr. Hippy most properly describes
as “dry,” so that it must have been a considerable relief at the time.
The disputants, it is true, relapse; but probably few attended to them
originally, and now, through most of the rest of the novel, the reader
catches himself humming at intervals,
Let the Ocean be Port, and we’ll think it good sport
To be laid in that Red Sea!
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE TO THE EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1856 1
CHAPTER I
ANTHELIA 5