response to chivalrous and humanitarian ideals. It has become a commonplace to say that the Spaniards are a decaying nation. A country, however, which is noted for the number of its centenarians scarce ly seems to be suffering from physical decadence; a nation which has learned to gain strength out of defeat can scarcely be held to be in a state of moral decadence. THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK BY H. W. BOYNTON PEOPLE of a practical and staving disposition have a right to ignore, and even to resent, the advances of your casual literary enthusiast. There is no reason why a private hobby should be allowed to get to be a public nuisance. Let the man dog's-ear his minor poets, by all means; that is a harmless form of amusement, like playing the flute or collecting postagestamps. But in the name of common sense let him keep his little games to himself. We have "troubles of our own;" we know, perhaps, the difference between stocks and bonds, and are more or less applauded by the neighbors for our local applications to the pianola of evenings. What do we owe to the writing person? Why should we be expected to be interested in his interest in an always obscure book or a long-forgotten author? No good excuse can be offered for the following observations on Peacock. No accident of the calendar affords that momentary reanimation of interest which our conventionality yields even to a minor memory. There is certainly no question of presenting Peacock as a great man, even a great literary man; or as a small literary person who is in any sense a find. But Peacock is less generally known than he deserves to be, so that a finger-post here and there by the high-road may not be quite an impertinence. Peacock does not appear to have been really popular in his own day; and we should judge from his frequent raps at the Edinburgh Review, that there was at least one quarter in which he failed to win a success of esteem. His modern readers could not well be many He never even imagined that he was to have a perennial “audience fit though few." Yet the fact remains of his real, if limited and somewhat antiquating, charm. It is a charm which could not possibly belong to any product of our own bustling literary mode, and which is for that very reason worth reverting to for modern readers who are not satisfied with enjoying one kind of thing. The external facts of Peacock's life do not go very far toward explaining the peculiar character of his work. He was born in 1788, the son of a London merchant; was self-taught after the age of thirteen; entered the service of the East India Company, and at twenty-eight secured a responsible post as Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence. This office he held for forty years, to be succeeded on his retirement by no less a person than John Stuart Mill. Yet a mellow classical scholarship, and an air of humorous detachment from practical affairs, are the Peacockian qualities which are likely to impress modern readers most forcibly. How did he find time and opportunity to acquire this mood of bland leisure? Headlong Hall was published in 1815, Crotchet Castle in 1830, and Gryll Grange in 1860; they might all of them have been the work of some conservative and witty don of Cam or Isis, serenely satirical over his second bottle, and somewhat garrulous in his skepticism as to new modes of government, of thought, and of cookery. The affairs of the East India Company were not, it seems, conducted upon the American plan; we have reason to know that those famous London offices contained more than one quiet corner where it was possible for a man to deal in other commodities than those of Ind; to grow ripe, say, in the humanities, and courteously to entertain a reputable Muse. might have served Bunyan perfectly, and confesses the official character of the persons named. To endow them with personality seems to have been beyond the aim as well as beyond the powers of our humorist, whose classical bias doubtless led him to regard that kind of invention with indifference if not disdain. He was 2 mot) a poet, or we might draw a pretty close analogy between him and Landor in this respect; though Landor, as it happened, made use of well-known historical names where Peacock employed didactic tags. It matters little whether, to point your study of a human type, you say Cromwell or Lord Hackemdown: if you make Cromwell alive, you have transcended your office. Peacock did, to be sure, produce several recognizable portraits; but if they are sketches from the life, they are still, pretty clearly, sketches from the living type. The most important of them, to modern readers, are the Scythrop and Cypress of Nightmare Abbey, acknowledged to be after Shelley and Byron. Shelley is known to have been delighted with the decided squint toward caricature as it Peacock is commonly classed among the novelists, and the word novel does not mean enough to make it worth while to challenge the classification. It may be said, however, that he found his models in the eighteenth century, and in the work, not of the English novelists, but of the French satirical romancers. They used a discursive form bearing some such relation to fiction as the morality play bears to the drama. Now and then we come upon a bit of true action, or of lively characterization; but for the most part the talk's the thing, and the talk is of types of men and modes of human behavior. If Pea-portrait, perhaps because he saw that, cock had been born fifty years earlier, he would as like as not have made creditable place for himself among the Spectators and Guardians, the Ramblers and Idlers of that leisurely ruminating century to which, rather than to his own, he belonged. He could not, as essayist, have produced a Sir Roger, or, as novelist, an Uncle Toby. His characters lack the human, or rather personal, touch. There is no getting at them apart from the qualities for which they stand. With one or two exceptions they are as distinctly lay figures as Ben Jonson's; and Peacock uses the pictorial proper name quite as frankly to announce the fact. Often his label is some more or less fantastic Latin or Greek derivative, but quite as often he is contented with the simplest English forms. Mr. Toobad, Mr. Crotchet, Mr. Listless, the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub, the Earl of Foolincourt, the borough of Rogueingrain; such a nomenclature "When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head; having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and the fellows of his college. . . . At the house of Mr. Hilary, Scythrop first saw the beautiful Miss Emily Girouette. He fell in love: which is nothing new. He was favourably received; which is nothing strange. Mr. Glowry and Mr. Girouette had a meeting on the occasion, and quarrelled about the terms of the bargain; which is neither new nor strange. The lovers were torn asunder, weeping and vowing everlast ing constancy; and in three weeks after the tragical event, the lady was led a smiling bride to the altar, by the honourable Mr. Lackwit; which is neither strange nor new." The blighted Scythrop succunibs first to Wertherisin and next to a passion for reforming the world. "He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions. in subterranean caves. . . . To get a clear view of his own ideas, and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote and published a treatise in which his meanings were carefully wrapped up in the monk's hood of transcendental technology, but filled with hints of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful expectation, as a miner who has fired a train awaits the explosion of a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing; for the explosion, if any ensued, was not sufficiently loud to shake a single leaf of the ivy on the towers of Nightmare Abbey; and some months afterwards he received a letter from his bookseller, informing him that only seven copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request for the balance. Scythrop did not despair. 'Seven copies,' he thought, 'have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world."" Much of this we recognize as pretty directly transcribed from Shelley's youthful experience; but, as we have suggested, it is still more clearly a presentation of the typical boyish visionary and enthu siast. Just so Cypress is a portrait of the Byronic type; though there is no difficulty in tracing many of his thoughts and even phrases to their source in Childe Harold and elsewhere: "I have no hope for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature: it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas, whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison-dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms love, fame, ambition, avarice - all idle, all ill one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death." To reduce such stuff to prose is to make it absurd indeed. This was written just after the publication of the later cantos of Childe Harold. Byron had been in exile but a year or two, and the howl of popular execration which had attended his departure was hardly yet subsiding. Under the circumstances it is remarkable that, sharply as he ridicules the Byronic philosophy, Peacock casts no slur upon the Byronic character. What could be more perfect than Mr. Cypress's dismissal from the scene? "Mr. Cypress, having his ballast on board, stepped, the same evening, into his bowl, or travelling chariot, and departed to rake seas and rivers, lakes and canals, for the moon of ideal beauty." Peacock and Byron, be it noted in passing, were to be joint executors of Shelley, who left his satirist a substantial legacy as a further token of the value he had set upon their longstanding friendship. Peacock evidently recognized his kinship to Jonson and the didactic humorists. A passage from Every Man in his Humour is used as motto to Nightmare Abbey, and verses from Hudibras, to Crotchet Castle and Gryll Grange. The types which he portrays are not very numerous, but he rightly takes them to be representative not only of the English society of his own day, but, beneath their temporary trappings, of all human so ciety. In the Preface to a collection of his work, published in 1837, he remarks, "The classes of tastes, feelings, and opinions which were successively brought into play in these little tales, remain substantially the same. Perfectabilians, deteriorationists, statu-quoites, phrenologists, logists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march forever, pari passu, with the march of mechanics, which some facetiously call the march of intellect." In the opening chapter of the first of his satirical fantasias, four of these typical characters are introduced: "Foster, quasi Φωστηρ, from φαos and τηρεω, lucem servo, conservo, observo, custodio one who watches over and guards the light. . . . Escot, quasi es σKOTOV, in tenebras, scilicet, intuens; one who is always looking into the dark side of the question. . . . 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 apheresis of the a, an elision of the second €, and an easy and natural mutation of into κ, the derivation proceeds according to the strictest principles of etymology: αιεν εξ ισων - Τεν εξ ισων Πεν εκ ισων Πεν 'κ ισων — Πενκισων Ienkison-Jenkison. ... Gaster: scilicet Γαστηρ — venter, - et præterea ni hil." All this belongs to a variety of erudite facetiousness which is not especially grateful to the modern ear. Etymology is no longer an admired topic for the conversation of gentlemen. Not even Peacock's obvious consciousness of extrava gance i. likely to make his amiable pedantry palatable to the offspring of a modern scientific education. In his fondness for verbal archæology and invention he rivals the mighty Browne himself: witness such words as "philotheoparoptesism," and "jeremitaylorically," not to speak of the monstrous double-birth of sound which he puts into the mouth of his phrenologist, Mr. Cranium: the word "osteosarchæmatosplanchnochondroneuromuelous," being supplemented with the "more intelligible" Latin derivative, "osseocarnisanguineoviscericarti laginonervomedullary." But a scientific mind would discern, beyond this amorous and whimsical classicism of manner, a more serious cause of offense in Peacock's unconcealed distrust of the importance to human life of the additions to knowledge, and to material efficiency, which were then beginning to be so loudly celebrated. Peacock was three parts statu-quoite, one part deteriorationist. "The march of mechanics, which some facetiously call the march of intellect," is a phrase which might serve as motto for much of his discourse. "I conceive,' said Mr. Foster, 'that men are virtuous in proportion as they are enlightened; and that, as every generation increases in knowledge, it also increases in virtue.' 'I wish it were so,' said Mr. Escot, 'but to me the very reverse appears to be the fact. . . . The sciences advance. True. A few years of study puts a modern mathematician in possession of more than Newton knew, and leaves him at leisure to add new discoveries of his own. Agreed. But does this make him a Newton? Does it put him in possession of that range of intellect, that grasp of mind, from which the discoveries of Newton sprang? It is mental power that I look for: if you can demonstrate the increase of that, I will give up the field. Energy- independence - individuality - disinterested virtue - active benevolence — self-oblivion -universal philanthropy -- these are the qualities I desire to find, and of which I contend that every succeeding age produces fewer examples."" "I admit,' says Mr. Foster on a later occasion, after a spirited sally by Mr. Escot, 'I admit there are many things that may, and therefore will, be changed for the better.' "Not on the present system,' said Mr. Escot, 'in which every change is for the worse.' "In matters of taste I am sure it is,' said Mr. Gall; 'there is, in fact, no such thing as good taste left in the world.' “Oh, Mr. Gall!' said Miss Philomela Poppyseed, 'I thought my novel-' "My paintings,' said Sir Patrick O'Prism, "My ode,' said Mr. MacLaurel "My ballad,' said Mr. Nightshade"My plan for Lord Littlebrain's park,' said Marmaduke Milestone, Esquire "My essay,' said Mr. Treacle "My sonata,' said Mr. Chromatic "My claret,' said Squire Headlong"My lectures,' said Mr. Cranium "Vanity of vanities,' said the Reverend Dr. Gaster, turning down an empty egg-shell: 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit."" Dr. Gaster is the first of a considerable line of learned and convivial parsons: the Reverend Doctors Larynx, Folliott, Portpipe, and Opimian. Dr. Folliott, really the central figure in the best of these effusions, is the richest and most delightful embodiment of the favorite type. Indubitably a product of the eighteenth century, he is neither a Parson Adams nor a Vicar of Wakefield. His palate is no more eager than his mind, and his stomach no more retentive than his memory. Over a well-filled table he grows mellow in spirit as well as in body. He has no patience with the "march of mind," and takes it hard that his cook should have nearly burned the house down by falling asleep over “hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract. published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing VOL. 98-NO. 6 all the world's business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge." He has a cheerful contempt for reform, progress, and Scotchmen. The modern watchword, he complains, is "everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all, rhetoric for all, physic for all, words for all, and sense for none." He distrusts the human usefulness of the man who does not know who was Jupiter's greatgrandfather, and "what metres will successively remain, if you take off, one by one, the three first syllables from a pure antispastic catalectic tetrameter." Withal, he has an endearing touch of irascibility; there are moments when the tone of controversy grows warm: THE REVEREND DR. FOLLIOTT. Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quæ vehat Argo Delectos Heroas. I will be of the party, though I must hire an officiating curate, and deprive poor Mrs. Folliott, for several weeks, of the pleasure of combing my wig. |