Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  Mr. Fax. That the best prospects are often overshadowed, is most certainly true; but there are degrees and modes of well-grounded reliance on futurity, sufficient to justify the enterprises of prudence, and equally well-grounded prospiciencies of hopelessness and helplessness, that should check the steps of rashness and passion, in their headlong progress to perdition.

  Mr. Forester. You have little cause to complain of the present age. It is calculating enough to gratify the most determined votary of moral and political arithmetic. This certainly is not the time

  When unrevenged stalks Cocker’s injured ghost.

  What is friendship — except in some most rare and miraculous instances — but the fictitious bond of interest, or the heartless intercourse of idleness and vanity? What is love, but the most venal of all venal commodities? What is marriage, but the most sordid of bargains, the most cold and slavish of all the forms of commerce? We want no philosophical ice-rock, towed into the Dead Sea of modern society, to freeze that which is too cold already. We want rather the torch of Prometheus to revivify our frozen spirits. We are a degenerate race, half-reasoning developments of the principle of infinite littleness, ‘with hearts in our bodies no bigger than pins’ heads.’ We are in no danger of forgetting that two and two make four. There is no fear that the warm impulses of feeling will ever overpower, with us, the tangible eloquence of the pocket.

  Mr. Fax. With relation to the middle and higher classes, you are right in a great measure as to fact, but wrong, as I think, in the asperity of your censure. But among the lower orders the case is quite different. The baleful influence of the poor laws has utterly destroyed the principle of calculation in them. They marry by wholesale, without scruple or compunction, and commit the future care of their family to Providence and the overseer. They marry even in the workhouse, and convert the intended asylum of age and infirmity into a flourishing manufactory of young beggars and vagabonds.

  Sir Telegraph’s barouche rolled up gracefully to the door. Mr. Forester pressed him to stay another day, but Sir Telegraph’s plea of urgency was not to be overcome. He promised very shortly to revisit Redrose Abbey, shook hands with Mr. Forester and Sir Oran, bowed politely to Mr. Fax, mounted his box, and disappeared among the trees.

  ‘Those four horses,’ said Mr. Fax, as the carriage rolled away, ‘consume the subsistence of eight human beings, for the foolish amusement of one. As Solomon observes: “This is vanity, and a great evil.”‘

  ‘Sir Telegraph is thoughtless,’ said Mr. Forester, ‘but he has a good heart and a good natural capacity. I have great hopes of him. He had some learning, when he went to college; but he was cured of it before he came away. Great, indeed, must be the zeal for improvement which an academical education cannot extinguish.’

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY

  SIR TELEGRAPH WAS welcomed to Melincourt in due form by Mr. Hippy, and in a private interview with the Honourable Mrs. Pinmoney, was exhorted to persevere in his suit to Anthelia, though she could not flatter him with very strong hopes of immediate success, the young lady’s notions being, as she observed, extremely outré and fantastical, but such as she had no doubt time and experience would cure. She informed him at the same time, that he would shortly meet a formidable rival, no less a personage than Lord Anophel Achthar, son and heir of the Marquis of Agaric, who was somewhat in favour with Mr. Hippy, and seemed determined at all hazards to carry his point; ‘and with any other girl than Anthelia,’ said Mrs. Pinmoney, ‘considering his title and fortune, I should pronounce his success infallible, unless a duke were to make his appearance.’ She added, ‘The young lord would be accompanied by his tutor, the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub, and by a celebrated poet, Mr. Feathemest, to whom the Marquis had recently given a place in exchange for his conscience. It was thought by Mr. Feathernest’s friends that he had made a very good bargain. The poet had, in consequence, burned his old Odes to Truth and Liberty, and had published a volume of Panegyrical Addresses “to all the crowned heads in Europe,” with the motto, “Whatever is at court, is right.”’

  The dinner-party that day at Melincourt Castle consisted of Mr. Hippy, in the character of lord of the mansion; Anthelia, in that of his inmate; Mrs and Miss Pinmoney, as her visitors; and Sir Telegraph, as the visitor of Mrs. Pinmoney, seconded by Mr. Hippy’s invitation to stay. Nothing very luminous passed on this occasion.

  The fame of Mr. Hippy, and his hospitable office, was rapidly diffused by Dr. Killquick, the physician of the district; who thought a draught or pill could not possibly be efficacious, unless administered with an anecdote, and who was called in, in a very few hours after Mr. Hippy’s arrival, to cure the hypochondriacal old gentleman of an imaginary swelling in his elbow. The learned doctor, who had studied with peculiar care the symptoms, diagnostics, prognostics, sedatives, lenitives, and sanatives of hypochondriasis, had arrived at the sagacious conclusion that the most effectual method of curing an imaginary disease was to give the patient a real one; and he accordingly sent Mr. Hippy a pint bottle of mixture, to be taken by a tablespoonful every two hours, which would have infallibly accomplished the purpose, but that the bottle was cracked over the head of Harry Fell, for treading on his master’s toe, as he presented the composing potion, which would perhaps have composed him in the Roman sense.

  The fashionable attractions of Low Wood and Keswick afforded facilities to some of Anthelia’s lovers to effect a logement in her neighbourhood, from whence occasionally riding over to Melincourt Castle, they were hospitably received by the lord seneschal, Humphrey Hippy, Esquire, who often made them fixed stars in the circumference of that jovial system, of which the bottle and glasses are the sun and planets, till it was too late to dislodge for the night; by which means they sometimes contrived to pass several days together at the Castle.

  The gentlemen in question were Lord Anophel Achthar, with his two parasites, Mr. Feathernest and the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub; Harum O’Scarum, Esquire, the sole proprietor of a vast tract of undrained bog in the county of Kerry; and Mr. Derrydown, the only son of an old lady in London, who having in vain solicited a visit from Anthelia, had sent off her hopeful progeny to try his fortune in Westmoreland. Mr. Derrydown had received a laborious education, and had consumed a great quantity of midnight oil over ponderous tomes of ancient and modern learning, particularly of moral, political, and metaphysical philosophy, ancient and modern. His lucubrations in the latter branch of science having conducted him, as he conceived, into the central opacity of utter darkness, he formed a hasty conclusion ‘that all human learning is vanity’; and one day, in a listless mood, taking down a volume of the Religues of Ancient Poetry, he found, or fancied he found, in the plain language of the old English ballad, glimpses of the truth of things, which he had vainly sought in the vast volumes of philosophical disquisition. In consequence of this luminous discovery, he locked up his library, purchased a travelling chariot, with a shelf in the back, which he filled with collections of ballads and popular songs; and passed the greater part of every year in posting about the country, for the purpose, as he expressed it, of studying together poetry and the peasantry, unsophisticated nature and the truth of things.

  Mr. Hippy introduced Lord Anophel, and his two learned friends, to Sir Telegraph and Mrs and Miss Pinmoney. Mr. Feathernest whispered to the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub, ‘This Sir Telegraph Paxarett has some good livings in his gift; which bent the plump figure of the reverend gentleman into a very orthodox right angle.

  Anthelia, who felt no inclination to show particular favour to any one of her Strephons, was not sorry to escape the evil of a solitary persecutor, more especially as they so far resembled the suitors of Penelope, as to eat and drink together with great cordiality. She could have wished, when she left them to the congenial society of Bacchus, to have retired to company more congenial to her than that of Mrs. Pinmoney and Miss Danaretta; but she submitted to the course of necessity with the best possible grace.

  She explicitly made
known to all her suitors her ideas on the subject of marriage. She had never perverted the simplicity of her mind by indulging in the usual cant of young ladies, that she should prefer a single life: but she assured them that the spirit of the age of chivalry, manifested in the forms of modern life, would constitute the only character on which she could fix her affections.

  Lord Anophel was puzzled, and applied for information to his tutor. ‘Grovelgrub,’ said he, ‘what is the spirit of the age of chivalry?’

  ‘Really, my lord,’ said the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub, my studies never lay that way.’

  ‘True,’ said Lord Anophel; ‘it was not necessary to your degree.’

  His lordship’s next recourse was to Mr. Feathemest.

  ‘Feathernest, what is the spirit of the age of chivalry?’

  Mr. Feathernest was taken by surprise. Since his profitable metamorphosis into an ami du prince^ he had never dreamed of such a question. It burst upon him like the spectre of his youthful integrity, and he mumbled a half-intelligible reply about truth and liberty — disinterested benevolence — selfoblivion — heroic devotion to love and honour — protection of the feeble, and subversion of tyranny.

  ‘All the ingredients of a rank Jacobin, Feathernest, ‘pon honour!’ exclaimed his lordship.

  There was something in the word Jacobin very grating to the ears of Mr. Feathernest, and he feared he had thrown himself between the horns of a dilemma; but from all such predicament he was happily provided with an infallible means of extrication. His friend Mr. Mystic, of Cimmerian Lodge, had initiated him in some of the mysteries of the transcendental philosophy, which on this, as all similar occasions, he called in to his assistance; and overwhelmed his lordship with a volley of ponderous jargon, which left him in profound astonishment at the depth of Mr. Feathernest’s knowledge.

  ‘The spirit of the age of chivalry!’ soliloquised Mr. O’Scarum; ‘I think I know what that is: I’ll shoot all my rivals, one after another, as fast as I can find a decent pretext for picking a quarrel. I’ll write to my friend Major O’Dogskin to come to Low Wood Inn, and hold himself in readiness. He is the neatest hand in Ireland at delivering a challenge.’

  ‘The spirit of the age of chivalry!’ soliloquised Mr. Derrydown; ‘I think I am at home there. I will be a knight of the round table. I will be Sir Lancelot, or Sir Gawaine, or Sir Tristram. No: I will be a troubadour — a love-lorn minstrel. I will write the most irresistible ballads in praise of the beautiful Anthelia. She shall be my lady of the lake. We will sail about Ulleswater in our pinnace, and sing duets about Merlin, and King Arthur, and Fairyland. I will develop the idea to her in a ballad; it cannot fail to fascinate her romantic spirit.’ And he sat down to put his scheme in execution.

  Sir Telegraph’s head ran on tilts and tournaments, and trials of skill and courage. How could they be resolved into the forms of modern life? A four-in-hand race he thought would be a pretty substitute; Anthelia to be arbitress of the contest, and place the Olympic wreath on the head of the victor, which he had no doubt would be himself, though Harum O’Scarum, Esquire, would dash through neck or nothing, and Lord Anophel Achthar was reckoned one of the best coachmen in England.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF BALLADS

  THE VERY INDIFFERENT success of Lord Anophel did not escape the eye of his abject slave, the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub, whose vanity led him to misinterpret Anthelia’s general sweetness of manner into the manifestation of something like a predilection for himself. Having made this notable discovery, he sat down to calculate the probability of his chance of Miss Melincourt’s fortune on the one hand, and the certainty of church-preferment, through the patronage of che Marquis of Agaric, on the other. The sagacious reflection, that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, determined him not to risk the loss of the Marquis’s favour for the open pursuit of a doubtful success; but he resolved to carry on a secret attack on the affections of Anthelia, and not to throw off the mask to Lord Anophel till he could make sure of his prize.

  It would have totally disconcerted the schemes of the Honourable Mrs. Pinmoney, if Lord Anophel had made any progress in the favour of Anthelia — not only because she had made up her mind that her young friend should be her niece and Lady Paxarett, but because, from the moment of Lord Anophel’s appearance, she determined on drawing lines of circumvallation round him, to compel him to surrender at discretion to her dear Danaretta, who was very willing to second her views. That Lord Anophel was both a fool and a coxcomb, did not strike her at all as an objection; on the contrary, she considered them as very favourable circumstances for the facilitation of her design.

  As Anthelia usually passed the morning in the seclusion of her library Lord Anophel and the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub killed the time in shooting; Sir Telegraph, in driving Mrs and Miss Pinmoney in his barouche, to astonish the natives of the mountain-villages; Harum O’Scarum, Esquire, in riding full gallop along the best roads, looking every now and then at his watch, to see how time went; Mr. Derrydown, in composing his troubadour ballad; Mr. Feathernest, in writing odes to all the crowned heads in Europe; and Mr. Hippy, in getting very ill after breakfast every day of a new disease, which came to its climax at the intermediate point of time between breakfast and dinner, showed symptoms of great amendment at the ringing of the first dinner-bell, was very much alleviated at the butler’s summons, vanished entirely at the sight of Anthelia, and was consigned to utter oblivion after the ladies retired from table, when the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub lent his clerical assistance to lay its ghost in the Red Sea of a copious libation of claret.

  Music and conversation consumed the evenings. Mr. Feathernest and Mr. Derrydown were both zealous admirers of old English literature; but the former was chiefly enraptured with the ecclesiastical writers and the translation of the Bible; the latter admired nothing but ballads, which he maintained to be, whether ancient or modern, the only manifestations of feeling and thought containing any vestige of truth and nature.

  ‘Surely,’ said Mr. Feathernest one evening, ‘you will not maintain that Chevy Chase is a finer poem than Paradise Lost?’

  Mr. Derrydown. I do not know what you mean by a fine poem; but I will maintain that it gives a much deeper insight into the truth of things.

  Mr. Feathernest. I do not know what you mean by the truth of things.

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. Define, gentlemen, define; let the one explain what he means by a fine poem, and the other what he means by the truth of things.

  Mr. Feathernest. A fine poem is a luminous development of the complicated machinery of action and passion, exalted by sublimity, softened by pathos, irradiated with scenes of magnificence, figures of loveliness, and characters of energy, and harmonised with infinite variety of melodious combination.

  Lord Anophel Achthar. Admirable!

  Miss Danaretta Contantina Pinmoney. Admirable, indeed, my lord! ( With a sweet smile at his Lordships which unluckily missedfire.)

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. Now, sir, for the truth of things.

  Mr. O’Scarum. Troth, sir, that is the last point about which I should expect a gentleman of your cloth to be very solicitous.

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. I must say, sir, that is a very uncalled-for and very illiberal observation.

  Mr. O’Scarum. Your coat is your protection, sir.

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. I will appeal to his lordship if —

  Mr. O’Scarum. I shall be glad to know his lordship’s opinion.

  Lord Anophel Achthar. Really, sir, I have no opinion on the subject.

  Mr. O’Scarum. I am sorry for it, my lord.

  Mr. Derrydown. The truth of things is nothing more than an exact view of the necessary relations between object and subject, in all the modes of reflection and sentiment which constitute the reciprocities of human association.

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. I must confess I do not exactly comprehend —

  Mr. Derrydown. I will illustrate. You all know the ballad of Old Robin Gray.
>
  Young Jamie loved me well, and ask’d me for his bride; But saving a crown, he had nothing else beside.

  To make the crown a pound my Jamie went to sea, And the crown and the pound they were both for me.

  He had not been gone a twelvemonth and a day, When my father broke his arm, and our cow was stolen away; My mother she fell sick, and Jamie at the sea, And old Robin Gray came a-courting to me.

  In consequence whereof, as you all very well know, old Robin being rich, the damsel married the aforesaid old Robin.

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. In the heterodox kirk of the north?

  Mr berrydown. Precisely. Now, in this short space, you have a more profound view than the deepest metaphysical treatise or the most elaborate history can give you of the counteracting power of opposite affections, the conflict of duties and inclinations, the omnipotence of interest, tried by the test of extremity, and the supreme and irresistible dominion of universal moral necessity.

  Young Jamie loved me well, and ask’d me for his bride; and would have had her, it is clear, though she does not explicitly say so, if there had not been a necessary moral motive counteracting what would have been otherwise the plain free will of both. ‘Young Jamie loved me well.’ She does not say that she loved young Jamie; and here is a striking illustration of that female decorum which forbids young ladies to speak as they think on any subject whatever: an admirable political institution, which has been found by experience to be most happily conducive to that ingenuousness of mind and simplicity of manner which constitute so striking a charm in the generality of the fair sex.

  But saving a crown, he had nothing else beside.

  Here is the quintessence of all that has been said and written on the subject of love and prudence, a decisive refutation of the stoical doctrine that poverty is no evil, a very clear and deep insight into the nature of the preventive or prudential check to population, and a particularly luminous view of the respective conduct of the two sexes on similar occasions. The poor love-stricken swain, it seems, is ready to sacrifice all for love. He comes with a crown in his pocket, and asks for his bride. The damsel is a better arithmetician. She is fully impressed with the truth of the old proverb about poverty coming in at the door, and immediately stops him short with ‘What can you settle on me, Master Jamie?’ or, as Captain Bobadil would express it, ‘How much money ha’ you about you, Master Matthew?’ Poor Jamie looks very foolish — fumbles in his pocket — produces his crown-piece — and answers like Master Matthew with a remarkable elongation of visage, ‘‘Faith, I ha’n’t past a five shillings or so.’