Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  Ο sovereign Sleep! in whose papaverous glen

  Dwell the dark Muses of Cimmerian men!

  O Power of Dreams! whose dusky pinions shed

  Primaeval chaos on the slumberer’s head!

  Ye misty Clouds! amid whose folds sublime Blind Faith invokes the Ghost of Feudal Time!

  And thou, thick night! beneath whose mantle rove

  The Phantom Powers of Subterranean Jove!

  Arise, propitious to the mystic strain,

  From Lethe’s flood, and Zeal’s Tartarian fane;

  Where Freedom’s Shade, ‘mid Stygian vapours damp,

  Sits, cold and pale, by Truth’s extinguished lamp;

  While Cowls and Crowns portentous orgies hold,

  And tuneful Proteus seals his eyes with gold!

  They had scarcely left the shore when they were involved in a fog of unprecedented density, so that they could not see one another; but they heard the dash of Mr. Mystic’s oars, and were consoled by his assurances that he could not miss his way in a state of the atmosphere so consentaneous to his peculiar mode of vision; for that, though, in navigating his little skiff on the Ocean of Deceitful Form, he had very often wandered wide and far from the Island of Pure Intelligence, yet this had always happened when he went with his eyes open, in broad daylight; but that he had soon found the means of obviating this little inconvenience, by always keeping his eyes close shut whenever the sun had the impertinence to shine upon him.

  He immediately added that he would take the opportunity of making a remark perfectly in point: ‘that Experience was a Cyclops, with his eye in the back of his head’; and when Mr. Fax remarked that he did not see the connection, Mr. Mystic said he was very glad to hear it; for he should be sorry if any one but himself could see the connection of his ideas, as he arranged his thoughts on a new principle.

  They went steadily on through the dense and heavy air, over waters that slumbered like the Stygian pool; a chorus of frogs, that seemed as much delighted with their own melody as if they had been an oligarchy of poetical critics, regaling them all the way with the Aristophanic symphony of BREK-EK- EK-EX! KO-AX! KO-AX! till the boat fixed its keel in the Island of Pure Intelligence j and Mr. Mystic landed his party, as Charon did Aeneas and the Sibyl, in a bed of weeds and mud: after floundering in which for some time, from losing their guide in the fog, they were cheered by the sound of his voice from above, and scrambling up the bank, found themselves on a hard and barren rock; and, still following the sound of Mr. Mystic’s voice, arrived at Cimmerian Lodge.

  The fog had penetrated into all the apartments: there was fog in the hall, fog in the parlour, fog on the staircases, fog in the bedrooms;

  The fog was here, the fog was there,

  The fog was all around.

  It was a little rarefied in the kitchen, by virtue of the enormous fire; so far, at least, that the red face of the cook shone through it, as they passed the kitchen door, like the disk of the rising moon through the vapours of an autumnal river: but to make amends for this, it was condensed almost into solidity in the library, where the voice of their invisible guide bade them welcome to the adytum of the LUMINOUS OBSCURE.

  Mr. Mystic now produced what he called his synthetical torch, and requested them to follow him, and look over his grounds. Mr. Fax said it was perfectly useless to attempt it in such a state of the atmosphere; but Mr. Mystic protested that it was the only state of the atmosphere in which they could be seen to advantage; as daylight and sunshine utterly destroyed their beauty.

  They followed the ‘darkness visible’ of the synthetical torch, which, according to Mr. Mystic, shed around it the rays of transcendental illumination; and he continued to march before them, walking, and talking, and pointing out innumerable images of singularly nubilous beauty, though Mr. Forester and Mr. Fax both declared they could see nothing but the fog and ‘lapale lueur du magique flambeau’: till Mr. Mystic observing that they were now in a Spontaneity free from Time or Space, and at the point of Absolute Limitation, Mr. Fax said he was very glad to hear it; for in that case they could go no farther.

  Mr. Mystic observed that they must go farther; for they were entangled in a maze, from which they would never be able to extricate themselves without his assistance; and he must take the liberty to tell them that the categories of modality were connected into the idea of absolute necessity. As this was spoken in a high tone, they took it to be meant for a reprimand; which carried the more weight as it was the less understood. At length, after floundering on another half-hour, the fog still thicker and thicker, and the torch still dimmer and dimmer, they found themselves once more in Cimmerian Lodge.

  Mr. Mystic asked them how they liked his grounds, and they both repeated they had seen nothing of them: on which he flew into a rage and called them empirical psychologists, and slaves of definition, induction, and analysis, which he intended for terms of abuse, but which were not taken for such by the persons to whom he addressed them.

  Recovering his temper, he observed that it was nearly the hour of dinner: and as they did not think it worth while to be angry with him, they contented themselves with requesting that they might dine in the kitchen, which seemed to be the only spot on the Island of Pure Intelligence in which there was a glimmer of light.

  Mr. Mystic remarked that he thought this very bad taste, but that he should have no objection if the cook would consent; who, he observed, had paramount dominion over that important division of the Island of Pure Intelligence. The cook, with a little murmuring, consented for once to evacuate her citadel as soon as the dinner was on table; entering, however, a protest, that this infringement on her privileges should not be pleaded as a precedent.

  Mr. Fax was afraid that Mr. Mystic would treat them as Lord Peter treated his brothers; that he would put nothing on the table, and regale them with a dissertation on the pure idea of absolute substance; but in this he was agreeably disappointed; for the anticipated cognition of a good dinner very soon smoked before them, in the relation of determinate coexistence; and the objective phaenomenon of some superexcellent Madeira quickly put the whole party in perfect good-humour. It appeared, indeed, to have a diffusive quality of occult and mysterious virtue; for, with every glass they drank, the fog grew thin, till by the time they had taken off four bottles among them, it had totally disappeared.

  Mr. Mystic now prevailed on them to follow him to the library, where they found a blazing fire and a four-branched gas-lamp, shedding a much brighter radiance than that of the synthetical torch. He said he had been obliged to light this lamp, as it seemed they could not see by the usual illumination of Cimmerian Lodge. The brilliancy of the gas-lights he much disapproved; but he thought it would be very unbecoming in a transcendental philosopher to employ any other material for a purpose to which smoke was applicable. Mr. Fax said he should have thought, on the contrary, that ex fumo dare lucent would have been, of all things, the most repugnant to his principles; and Mr. Mystic replied that it had not struck him so before, but that Mr. Fax’s view of the subject ‘was exquisitely dusky and fuliginous’: this being his usual mode of expressing approbation, instead of the common phraseology of bright thoughts and luminous ideas, which were equally abhorrent to him both in theory and practice. However, he said, there the light was, for their benefit, and not for his: and as other men’s light was his darkness, he should put on a pair of spectacles of smoked glass, which no one could see through but himself. Having put on his spectacles, he undrew a black curtain, discovered a cylindrical mirror, and placed a sphere before it with great solemnity. ‘This sphere,’ said he, ’is an oblong spheroid in the perception of the cylindrical mirror: as long as the mirror thought that the object of his perception was the real external oblong spheroid, he was a mere empirical philosopher; but he has grown wiser since he has been in my library; and by reflecting very deeply on the degree in which the manner of his construction might influence the forms of his perception, has taken a very opaque and tenebricose view of how much of th
e spheroidical perception belongs to the object, which is the sphere, and how much to the subject, which is himself, in his quality of cylindrical mirror. He has thus discovered the difference between objective and subjective reality: and this point of view is transcendentalism.’

  ‘A very dusky and fuliginous speculation, indeed,’ said Mr. Fax, complimenting Mr. Mystic in his own phrase.

  Tea and coffee were brought in. ‘I divide my day,’ said Mr. Mystic, ‘on a new principle: I am always poetical at breakfast, moral at luncheon, metaphysical at dinner, and political at tea. Now you shall know my opinion of the hopes of the world. — General discontent shall be the basis of public resignation! The materials of political gloom will build the steadfast frame of hope. The main point is to get rid of analytical reason, which is experimental and practical, and live only by faith, which is synthetical and oracular. The contradictory interests of ten millions may neutralise each other. But the spirit of Antichrist is abroad: — the people read! — nay, they think!! The people read and think!!! The public, the public in general, the swinish multitude, the many-headed monster, actually reads and thinks!!!! Horrible in thought, but in fact most horrible! Science classifies flowers. Can it make them bloom where it has placed them in its classification! No. Therefore flowers ought not to be classified. This is transcendental logic. Ha! in that cylindrical mirror I see three shadowy forms: — dimly I see them through the smoked glass of my spectacles. Who art thou? — MYSTERY! — I hail thee! Who art thou? — JARGON — I love thee! Who art thou? — SUPERSTITION! — I worship thee! Hail, transcendental TRIAD!’

  Mr. Fax cut short the thread of his eloquence by saying he would trouble him for the cream-jug.

  Mr. Mystic began again, and talked for three hours without intermission, except that he paused a moment on the entrance of sandwiches and Madeira. His visitors sipped his wine in silence till he had fairly talked himself hoarse. Neither Mr. Fax nor Mr. Forester replied to his paradoxes; for to what end, they thought, should they attempt to answer what few would hear and none would understand?

  It was now time to retire, and Mr. Mystic showed his guests to the doors of their respective apartments, in each of which a gas-light was burning, and ascended another flight of stairs to his own dormitory, with a little twinkling taper in his hand. Mr. Forester and Mr. Fax stayed a few minutes on the landing-place, to have a word of consultation before they parted for the night. Mr. Mystic gained the door of his apartment — turned the handle of the lock — and had just advanced one step — when the whole interior of the chamber became suddenly sheeted with fire: a tremendous explosion followed; and he was precipitated to the foot of the stairs in the smallest conceivable fraction of the infinite divisibility of time.

  Mr. Forester picked him up, and found him not much hurt; only a little singed, and very much frightened. But the whole interior of the apartment continued to blaze. Mr. Forester and Sir Oran Haut-ton ran for water: Mr. Fax rang the nearest bell: Mr. Mystic vociferated ‘Fire!’ with singular energy: the servants ran about half-undressed: pails, buckets, and pitchers, were in active requisition; till Sir Oran Haut-ton ascending the stairs with the great rain-water tub, containing one hundred and eight gallons of water, threw the whole contents on the flames with one sweep of his powerful arm.

  The fire being extinguished, it remained to ascertain its cause. It appeared that the gas-tube in Mr. Mystic’s chamber had been left unstopped, and the gas evolving without combustion (the apartment being perfectly air-tight), had condensed into a mass, which, on the approach of Mr. Mystic’s taper, instantly ignited, blowing the transcendentalist downstairs, and setting fire to his curtains and furniture.

  Mr. Mystic, as soon as he recovered from his panic, began to bewail the catastrophe: not so much, he said, for itself, as because such an event in Cimmerian Lodge was an infallible omen of evil — a type and symbol of an approaching period of public light — when the smoke of metaphysical mystery, and the vapours of ancient superstition, which he had done all that in him lay to consolidate in the spirit of man, would explode at the touch of analytical reason, leaving nothing but the plain common sense matter-of-fact of moral and political truth — a day that he earnestly hoped he might never live to see.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Forester, ‘it is a very bad omen for all who make it their study to darken the human understanding, when one of the pillars of their party is blown up by his own smoke; but the symbol, as you call it, may operate as a warning to the apostles of superstitious chimaera and political fraud, that it is very possible for smoke to be too thick; and that, in condensing in the human mind the vapours of ignorance and delusion, they are only compressing a body of inflammable gas, of which the explosion will be fatal in precise proportion to its density.’

  CHAPTER XXXII

  THE DESERTED MANSION

  THEY ROSE, AS usual, before daylight, that they might pursue their perlustration; and, on descending, found Mr. Mystic awaiting them at a table covered with a sumptuous apparatus of tea and coffee, a pyramid of hot rolls, and a variety of cold provision. Cimmerian Lodge, he said, was famous for its breed of tame geese, and he could recommend the cold one on the table as one of his own training. The breakfast being despatched, he rowed them over the Ocean of Deceitful Form before the sun rose to disturb his navigation.

  After walking some miles, a ruined mansion at the end of an ancient avenue of elms attracted their attention. As they made a point of leaving no place unexamined, they walked up to it. There was an air of melancholy grandeur in its loneliness and desolation which interested them to know its history. The briers that choked the court, the weeds that grew from the fissures of the walls and on the ledges of the windows, the fractured glass, the half-fallen door, the silent and motionless clock, the steps worn by the tread of other years, the total silence of the scene of ancient hospitality, broken only by the voices of the rooks whose nests were in the elms, all carried back the mind to the years that were gone. There was a sundial in the centre of the court: the sun shone on the brazen plate, and the shadow of the index fell on the line of noon.

  ‘Nothing impresses me more,’ said Mr. Forester, ‘in a ruin of this kind, than the contrast between the sun-dial and the clock, which I have frequently observed. This contrast I once made the basis of a little poem, which the similarity of circumstances induces me to repeat to you though you are no votary of the spirit of rhyme.’

  THE SUN-DIAL

  The ivy o’er the mouldering wall

  Spreads like a tree, the growth of years:

  The wild wind through the doorless hall

  A melancholy music rears,

  A solitary voice, that sighs,

  O’er man’s forgotten pageantries.

  Above the central gate, the clock,

  Through clustering ivy dimly seen,

  Seems, like the ghost of Time, to mock

  The wrecks of power that once has been.

  The hands are rusted on its face;

  Even where they ceased, in years gone by,

  To keep the flying moments’ pace:

  Fixing, in Fancy’s thoughtful eye,

  A point of ages passed away,

  A speck of time, that owns no tie

  With aught that lives and breathes to-day.

  But ‘mid the rank and towering grass,

  Where breezes wave, in mournful sport,

  The weeds that choke the ruined court,

  The careless hours, that circling pass,

  Still trace upon the dialled brass

  The shade of their unvarying way:

  And evermore, with every ray

  That breaks the clouds and gilds the air,

  Time’s stealthy steps are imaged there:

  Even as the long-revolving years

  In self-reflecting circles flow,

  From the first bud the hedgerow bears,

  To wintry nature’s robe of snow.

  The changeful forms of mortal things

  Decay and pass; and art and
power

  Oppose in vain the doom that flings

  Oblivion on their closing hour;

  While still, to every woodland vale,

  New blooms, new fruits, the seasons bring,

  For other eyes and lips to hail

  With looks and sounds of welcoming:

  As where some stream light-eddying roves

  By sunny meads and shadowy groves,

  Wave following wave departs for ever,

  But still flows on the eternal river.

  An old man approached them, in whom they observed that look of healthy and cheerful antiquity which showed that time only, and neither pain nor sickness, had traced wrinkles on his cheek. Mr. Forester made inquiries of him on the object he had most at heart: but the old man could give no gleam of light to guide his steps. Mr. Fax then asked some questions concerning the mansion before them.

  ‘ Ah, zur!’ said the old man, ‘this be the zeat o’ Squire Openhand: but he doan’t live here now; the house be growed too large vor’n, as one may zay. I remember un playing about here on the grass-plot, when he was half as high as the sun-dial poast, as if it was but yesterday. The days that I ha’ zeed here! Rare doings there used to be wi’ the house vull o’ gentlevolks zometimes to be zure: but what he loiked best was, to zee a merry-making of all his tenants, round the great oak that stands there in the large vield by himzelf. He used to zay if there was anything he could not abide it was the zight of a zorrowful feace; and he was always prying about to voind one: and if he did voind one, Lord bless you! it was not a zorrowful feace long, if it was anything that he could mend. Zo he lived to the length of his line, as the zaying is; and when times grew worse, it was a hard matter to draw in; howsomdever he did; and when the tax-gatherers came every year vor more and more, and the peaper-money flew about, buying up everything in the neighbourhood; and every vifty pounds he got in peaper wasn’t worth, as he toald me, vorty pounds o’ real money, why there was every year fewer horses in his steable, and less wine on his board: and every now and then came a queer zort o’ chap dropped out o’ the sky like — a vundholder he called un — and bought a bit of ground vor a handvul o’ peaper, and built a cottage homy, as they call it — there be one there on the hill-zide — and had nothing to do wi’ the country people, nor the country people wi’ he: nothing in the world to do, as we could zee, but to eat and drink, and make little bits o’ shrubberies, o’ quashies, and brutuses, and zelies, and cubies, and filigrees, and ruddydunderums, instead o’ the oak plantations the old landlords used to plant; and the Squire could never abide the zight o’ one o’ they gimcrack boxes; and all the while he was nailing up a window or two every year, and his horses were going one way, and his dogs another, and his old zervants were zent away, one by one, wi’ heavy hearts, poor souls, and at last it came that he could not get half his rents, and zome o’ his tenants went to the work-house, and others ran away, because o’ the poor-rates, and everything went to zixes and zevens, and I used to meet the Squire in his walks, and think to myzelf it was very hard that he who could not bear to zee a zorrowful feace should have zuch a zorrowful one of his own; and he used to zay to me whenever I met un: “All this comes o’ peaper-money, Measter Hawthorn.” Zo the upshot was, he could not afford any longer to live in his own great house, where his vorevathers had lived out o’ memory of man, and went to zome outlandish place wi’ his vamily to live, as he said, in much zuch a box as that gimcrack thing on the hill.’