by Gore Vidal
Peacock began as a poet in the didactic Augustan style. He was much interested in politics, as were most of the English writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Butler is particularly good in setting Peacock firmly in a world of political faction and theorizing. By the time Peacock was of age, the American and French revolutions had happened. The ideas of Rousseau and Paine were everywhere talked of, and writers wrote in order to change society. As a result, what was written was considered more important than who wrote it—or even read it. The writer as his own text was unknown because it was unthinkable, while the writer as sacred monster was not to emerge until mid-century. Ironically, Peacock’s idealistic friend Shelley was to be Sacred Monster Number Two. Number One was Byron (who figures as Mr. Cypress in Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey).
In the first quarter of the century, British intellectual life was mostly Scottish. The Edinburgh Review‘s chief critic was Francis Jeffrey, a liberal Whig who tended to utilitarianism: to what social end does the work in question contribute? Will it or won’t it do? This was Jeffrey’s narrow but, obviously, useful approach to literature. Peacock was also a utilitarian; and subscribed to his friend Bentham’s dictum: “the greatest good of the greatest number.” But Peacock regarded the Edinburgh Review (“that shallow and dishonest publication”) as much too Whiggish and class-bound. Peacock seems always to have known that in England the Whig-versus-Tory debate was essentially hollow because “though there is no censorship of the press, there is an influence widely diffused and mighty in its operation that is almost equivalent to it. The whole scheme of our government is based on influence, and the immense number of genteel persons, who are maintained by the taxes, gives this influence an extent and complication from which few persons are free. They shrink from truth, for it shews those dangers which they dare not face.” Thus, in our own day, The New York Times reflects the will of the administration at Washington which in turn reflects the will of the moneyed interests. Should a contemporary American writer point out this connection, he will either be ignored or, worse, found guilty of Bad Taste, something that middle-class people are taught at birth forever to eschew.
The debate that helped to shape Peacock (and the century) was between Shelley’s father-in-law William Godwin and the Reverend Thomas Malthus. The anarchist Godwin believed in progress; thought human nature perfectible. He believed society could be so ordered that the need for any man to work might be reduced to an hour or two a day. Godwin’s Political Justice and The Enquirer inspired Malthus to write An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Everyone knows Malthus’ great proposition: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.” This proposition is still being argued, as it was for at least two millennia before Malthus. At the time of Confucius, China was underpopulated; yet all ills were ascribed to overpopulation: “When men were few and things were many,” went an already ancient saying, “there was a golden age; but now men are many and things are few and misery is man’s lot.”
In a series of dialogue-novels, Peacock enlarged upon the debate. Headlong Hall appeared in 1816. As Butler notes: “Peacock’s satires are all centered on a recent controversy large in its ideological implications but also amusingly rich in personality and detail. For its full effect, the satire requires the reader to be in the know.” This explains why the form is not apt to be very popular. At any given moment too few people are in the know about much of anything. As time passes, the urgencies of how best to landscape a park—a debate in Headlong Hall—quite fades even though the various points of view from romantic to utilitarian are eternal.
Aristophanes made jokes about people who were sitting in the audience at the theatre of Dionysos. When we do know what’s being sent up—Socrates’ style, say—the bright savagery is exciting. But who is Glaucon? And what did he steal? Happily, most of Peacock’s characters (based on Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Malthus, et al.) are still well enough known to some readers for the jokes to work. More important, the tone of Peacock’s sentences is highly pleasing. He writes a stately, balanced prose that moves, always, toward unexpected judgment or revelation.
Peacock begins a review of Thomas Moore’s novel The Epicurean with: “This volume will, no doubt, be infinitely acceptable to the ladies ‘who make the fortune of new books.’ Love, very intense; mystery, somewhat recondite; piety, very profound; and philosophy, sufficiently shallow….In the reign of the emperor Valerian, a young Epicurean philosopher is elected chief of that school in the beginning of his twenty-fourth year, a circumstance, the author says, without precedent, and we conceive without probability.”
Melincourt was published in 1817, starring a truly noble savage, a monkey called Sir Oran Haut-ton. Malthus makes an appearance as Mr. Fax. Sir Oran, though he cannot speak, is elected to Parliament. Nightmare Abbey (1818) is a take-off on the cult of melancholy affected, in one way, by Byron (Mr. Cypress) and, in another, by Coleridge (Mr. Flosky). Shelley appears as Scythrop, though Butler makes the point that neither Shelley nor Peacock ever admitted to the likeness. Mr. Cypress has quarreled with his wife; he sees only darkness and misery as man’s estate. Peacock works in actual lines from Childe Harold to mock if not Byron Byronism, while Mr. Flosky’s dialogue is filled with metaphysical conceits that even he cannot unravel. Scythrop is not practical.
Peacock’s next two works, Maid Marian (1818) and The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), are set, respectively, in the late twelfth century and the sixth century. But Robin Hood’s England is used to illuminate Peacock’s dim view of the Holy Alliance of his own day while sixth-century Wales is used to savage Wellington’s current Tory administration. Crotchet Castle (1831) is like the early books in form: culture is the theme. One of the characters is Dr. Folliott, a philistine Tory who mocks those who would improve man’s lot. Since Dr. Folliott has been thought to be a voice for his creator, serious critics have tended to dismiss Peacock as a crotchety, unserious hedonist whose tastes are antiquarian and whose political views are irrelevant. Butler takes exception to this; she thinks that Folliott’s likeness to his creator “cannot in fact survive a close reading.” On education, Folliott advances opinions that were not Peacock’s:
I hold that there is every variety of natural capacity from the idiot to Newton and Shakespeare; the mass of mankind, midway between these extremes, being blockheads of different degrees; education leaving them pretty nearly as it found them, with this single difference, that it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, a sort of incurable wry neck to the thing they call their understanding.
I rather suspect that Peacock, in a certain mood, felt exactly as Dr. Folliott did. He also possessed negative capability to a high degree. In this instance, he may well be saying what he thinks at the moment, perfectly aware that he will think its opposite in relation to a different formulation on the order, say, of certain observations in Jefferson’s memoirs which he reviewed in 1830. Peacock was absolutely bowled over by the mellifluous old faker’s announcement that between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government” he would choose the latter. This is, surely, one of the silliest statements ever made by a politician; yet it is perennially attractive to—yes, journalists. In any case, Jefferson was sufficiently sly to add, immediately, a line that is seldom quoted by those who love the sentiment: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.” The last phrase nicely cancels all that has gone before. Jefferson was no leveler.
In any case, the endlessly interesting controversy of who should be taught what and how and why is joined in this bright set of dialogues and every position is advanced. We get the Tory view, as published by the Rev. E. W. Grinfield; he thought that the masses need nothing more than to have religion and morals instilled in them: “We inculcate
a strong attachment to the constitution, such as it now is; we teach them to love and revere our establishments in Church and State, even with all their real or supposed imperfections; and we are far more anxious to make them good and contented citizens, than to fit them for noisy patriots, who would perhaps destroy the constitution whilst pretending to correct it.” There, in one sentence, is the principle on which American public education is based (vide Frances Fitzgerald’s America Revised). In opposition to Grinfield is John Stuart Mill:
I thought, that while the higher and richer classes held the power of government, the instruction and improvement of the mass of the people were contrary to the self-interest of those classes, because tending to render the people more powerful for throwing off the yoke; but if the democracy obtained a large, and perhaps the principal share, in the governing power, it would become the interest of the opulent classes to promote their education, in order to ward off really mischievous errors, and especially those which would lead to unjust violations of property.
This has proven to be idealistic. Neither Washington nor Moscow thinks it worthwhile to teach their citizens to address themselves to “real or supposed imperfections” in the system. Rather, to keep the citizens “good and contented” is the perennial aim of powerful governing classes or, as one of Peacock’s Tory characters puts it: “Discontent increases with the increase of information.”
Five years before Peacock’s death at eighty-one, he published the most satisfying of his works (I still don’t know what to call them: they are not novels as novels were written then or now, and they are not theatre pieces even though many pages are set up like a play-script), Gryll Grange. The subject is everything in general, the uses of the classics in particular. The form is resolutely Pavonian. Each character represents a viewpoint; each makes his argument.
Here is an example of Peacock when he slips into dialogue.
LORD CURRYFIN: Well, then, what say you to the electric telegraph, by which you converse at the distance of thousands of miles? Even across the Atlantic, as no doubt we shall do yet.
MR. GRYLL: Some of us have already heard the Doctor’s opinion on the subject.
THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN: I have no wish to expedite communication with the Americans. If we could apply the power of electrical repulsion to preserve us from ever hearing anything more of them, I should think that we had for once derived a benefit from science.
MR. GRYLL: Your love for the Americans, Doctor, seems something like that of Cicero’s friend Marius for the Greeks. He would not take the nearest road to his villa, because it was called the Greek-road. Perhaps if your nearest way home were called the American-road, you would make a circuit to avoid it.
THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN: I am happy to say that I am not put to the test. Magnetism, galvanism, electricity, are “one form of many names.” Without magnetism, we should never have discovered America; to which we are indebted for nothing but evil; diseases in the worst form that can afflict humanity, and slavery in the worst form in which slavery can exist. The Old World had the sugarcane and the cotton-plant, though it did not so misuse them. Then, what good have we got from America? What good of any kind, from the whole continent and its islands, from the Esquimaux to Patagonia?
MR. GRYLL: Newfoundland salt fish, Doctor.
THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN: That is something, but it does not turn the scale.
MR. GRYLL: If they have given us no good, we have given them none.
THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN: We have given them wine and classical literature; but I am afraid Bacchus and Minerva have equally “Scattered their bounty upon barren ground.” On the other hand, we have given the red men rum, which has been the chief instrument of their perdition. On the whole, our intercourse with America has been little else than interchange of vices and diseases.
LORD CURRYFIN: Do you count it nothing to have substituted civilized for savage men?
THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN: Civilized. The word requires definition. But looking into futurity, it seems to me that the ultimate tendency of the change is to substitute the worse for the better race; the Negro for the Red Indian. The Red Indian will not work for a master. No ill-usage will make him. Herein, he is the noblest specimen of humanity that ever walked the earth. Therefore, the white men exterminate his race. But the time will come, when, by mere force of numbers, the black race will predominate, and exterminate the white.
Mr. Falconer remonstrates that “the white slavery of our [English] factories is not worse than the black slavery of America. We have done so much to amend it, and shall do more. Still much remains to be done.” Opimian responds: “And will be done, I hope and believe. The Americans do nothing to amend their system.” When Lord Curryfin remarks that he has met many good Americans who think as Doctor Opimian does, the response is serene: “Of that I have no doubt. But I look to public acts and public men.”
In the half century between Peacock’s first work and his last, the novel was transformed by Dickens and the comedy of character replaced the comedy of ideas. In fact, character—the more prodigious the better—was the novel. In the year of Gryll Grange (1860), the novel was about to undergo yet another change with the publication of The Mill on the Floss. In the everyday world of George Eliot’s characters the play of intelligence is quite unlike that of Peacock, since the only vivid intelligence in an Eliot novel is that the author or, as Mary McCarthy writes: “…the kind of questions her characters put to themselves and to each other, though sometimes lofty, never question basic principles such as the notion of betterment or the inviolability of the moral law.”
Elsewhere in Ideas and the Novel, McCarthy contrasts Peacock with James. Where James managed to exclude almost everything in the way of ideas from the novel in order to concentrate on getting all the way ’round, as it were (oh, as it were!), his made-up characters, “consider Thomas Love Peacock,” she writes. “There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke….In hearty, plain-man style (which is partly a simulation), Peacock treats the brain’s sickly products as the end-result of the general disease of modishness for which the remedy would be prolonged exposure to common, garden reality.” But that was written of Nightmare Abbey: common, garden reality flourishes during the debates in Gryll Grange, a book which Butler believes “occupies the same position in Peacock’s oeuvre as The Clouds in that of Aristophanes: both seem less directly political than usual because the author’s approach is oblique and fantastic, almost surreal.”
It is fitting that in Gryll Grange the characters are composing a comedy in the Aristophanic manner while the book itself is a variation on Old Comedy. Although the tone of this old man’s work is highly genial, he still strikes with youthful vigor the negative. He still says no to Romanticism which had, by then, entirely triumphed, and which, not much changed, continues to dominate our own culture.
In a review of C. O. Müller’s A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, Peacock explains the value of the negative: “there is much justice in the comparison of Lucian and Voltaire. The view is not only just, it is also eminently liberal. That ‘the results of the efforts of both against false religion and false philosophy were merely negative’; that they had ‘nothing tangible to substitute for what they destroyed,’ is open to observation.” Indeed it is. After all, this is the constant complaint of those who support the crimes and injustices of the status quo. Peacock proceeds to observe, “To clear the ground of falsehood is to leave room for the introduction of truth. Lucian decidedly held that moral certainty, a complete code of duty founded on reason, existed in the writings of Epicurus; and Voltaire’s theism, the belief in a pervading spirit of good, was clear and consistent throughout. The main object of both was, by sweeping away false dogmas, to teach toleration. Voltaire warred against opinions which sustained themselves by persecution.”
Needles
s to say, there is no more certain way of achieving perfect unpopularity in any society than to speak against the reigning pieties and agreed-upon mendacities. The official line never varies: To be negative is to be bad; to be positive is to be good. In fact, that is even more the rule in our society than it was in Peacock’s smaller world where the means to destroy dissent through censorship or ridicule or silence were not as institutionalized as they are now.
Even so, Peacock himself was forced to play a very sly game when he dealt with the Christian dictatorship of England. After giving an admiring account of Epicurus’ “favorite dogma of the mortality of the soul,” he remarks, “In England, we all believe in the immortality of the soul” because “the truth of the Christian Religion is too clearly established amongst us to admit of dispute.” In his novels, he treated Christianity with great caution. What he really thought of a religion that was the negation of all that he held positive only came to light posthumously.