Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock
Page 10
“Your theory,” said Mr Jenkison, “forms an admirable counterpoise to your example. As far as I am attracted by the one, I am repelled by the other. Thus, the scales of my philosophical balance remain eternally equiponderant, and I see no reason to say of either of them, ΟΙΧΕΤΑΙ ΕΙΣ ΑΙΔΑΟ.”
ENDNOTES
1 Foster, quasi Φωστηρ, — from φαος and τηρεω, lucem servo, conservo, observo, custodio, — one who watches over and guards the light; a sense in which the word is often used amongst us, when we speak of fostering a flame.
2 Escot, quasi ες σκοτον, in tenebras, scilicet, intuens; one who is always looking into the dark side of the question.
3 Jenkison: This name may be derived from αιεν εξ ισων, semper ex æqualibus — scilicet, mensuris omnia metiens: one who from equal measures divides and distributes all things: one who from equal measures can always produce arguments on both sides of a question, with so much nicety and exactness, as to keep the said question eternally pending, and the balance of the controversy perpetually in statu quo. By an aphæresis of the α, an elision of the second ε, and an easy and natural mutation of ξ into κ, the derivation of this name proceeds according to the strictest principles of etymology: αιεν εξ ισων — Ιεν εξ ισων — Ιεν εκ ισων — Ιεν ‘κ ισων — Ιενκισων — Ienkison — Jenkison.
4 Gaster: scilicet Γαστηρ — Venter, et præterea nihil.
5 See Emmerton on the Auricula.
6 Mr Knight, in a note to the Landscape, having taken the liberty of laughing at a notable device of a celebrated improver, for giving greatness of character to a place, and showing an undivided extent of property, by placing the family arms on the neighbouring milestones, the improver retorted on him with a charge of misquotation, misrepresentation, and malice prepense. Mr Knight, in the preface to the second edition of his poem, quotes the improver’s words:— “The market-house, or other public edifice, or even a mere stone with distances, may bear the arms of the family:” and adds:— “By a mere stone with distances, the author of the Landscape certainly thought he meant a milestone; but, if he did not, any other interpretation which he may think more advantageous to himself shall readily be adopted, as it will equally answer the purpose of the quotation.” The improver, however, did not condescend to explain what he really meant by a mere stone with distances, though he strenuously maintained that he did not mean a milestone. His idea, therefore, stands on record, invested with all the sublimity that obscurity can confer.
7 “Il est constant qu’elles se baisent de meilleur cœur, et se caressent avec plus de grace devant les hommes, fières d’aiguiser impunément leur convoitise par l’image des faveurs qu’elles savent leur faire envier.” — Rousseau, Emile, liv. 5.
8 See Price on the Picturesque.
9 See Knight on Taste, and the Edinburgh Review, No. XIV.
10 Protracted banquets have been copious sources of evil.
Melincourt
Peacock’s second novel was published in three volumes in 1817 and takes as its inspiration the philosopher James Burnett’s idea that the orang-utang (at that time a generic term for all apes) was a form of man. Foreshadowing Darwin’s idea that mankind had evolved from apes, Burnett’s notion was widely discussed and Burnett was responsible for changing the classical definition of man as a creature of reason to a creature capable of achieving reason – although he viewed this process as slow and difficult to achieve.
In Melincourt, Peacock uses the story of an orang-utan, who is put forward as a candidate for parliament — a vehicle through which Peacock is able to exploit Burnett’s ideas about the relationship between man and monkey to satirical effect.
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
CHAPTER XLII
A caricature of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, whose ideas on human evolution influenced the novel
An early frontispiece
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 d
irectness 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 wàrfare 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!