Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. Nothing more easy, my Lord.

  Lord Anophel Achthar. Plummet fashion, I suppose?

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. Why, as your Lordship seems to hint, that certainly is the most expeditious method; but not, I think, in all points of view, the most advisable. On this side of the rock is a dumetum: we can descend, I think, by the help of the roots and shoots. O dear! I shall be like Virgil’s goat: I shall be seen from far to hang from the bushy rock dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbor!

  Lord Anophel Achthar. — Confound your Greek and Latin! you know there is nothing I hate so much; and I thought you did so too, or you have finished your education to no purpose at college.

  The Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub. I do, my Lord; I hate them mortally, more than anything except philosophy and the dumb Baronet.

  Lord Anophel Achthar proceeded to examine the side of the rock to which the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub had called his attention; and as it seemed the most practicable mode of descent, it was resolved to submit to necessity, and make a valorous effort to regain the valley; Lord Anophel, however, insisting on the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub leading the way. The reverend gentleman seized with one hand the stem of a hazel, with the other the branch of an ash; set one foot on the root of an oak, and deliberately lowered the other in search of a resting-place; which having found on a projecting point of stone, he cautiously disengaged one hand and the upper foot, for which in turn he sought and found a firm appui and thus by little and little he vanished among the boughs from the sight of Lord Anophel, who proceeded with great circumspection to follow his example.

  Lord Anophel had descended about one third of the elevation, comforting his ear with the rustling of the boughs below, that announced the safe progress of his reverend precursor; when suddenly, as he was shifting his right hand, a treacherous twig in his left gave way, and he fell with fearful lapse from bush to bush, till, striking violently on a bough to which the unfortunate divine was appended, it broke beneath the shock, and down they went, crashing through the bushes together. Lord Anophel was soon wedged into the middle of a large holly, from which he heard the intermitted sound of the boughs as they broke and were broken by the fall of his companion; till at length they ceased, and fearful silence succeeded. He then extricated himself from the holly as well as he could, at the expense of a scratched face, and lowered himself down without further accident. On reaching the bottom, he had the pleasure to find the reverend gentleman in safety, sitting on a fragment of stone, and rubbing his shin. ‘Come, Grovelgrub,’ said Lord Anophel, ‘let us make the best of our way to the nearest inn.’— ‘And pour oil and wine into our wounds,’ pursued the reverend gentleman, ‘and over our Madeira and walnuts lay a more hopeful scheme for our next campaign.’

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE BAROUCHE

  THE MORNING AFTER the election Sir Oran Haut-ton and his party took leave of Mr. Sarcastic, Mr. Forester having previously obtained from him a promise to be present at the anti-saccharine fête. The barouche left the city of Novote, decorated with ribands; Sir Oran Haut-ton was loudly cheered by the populace, and not least by those whom he had most severely beaten; the secret of which was, that a double allowance of ale had been distributed over-night, to wash away the effects of his indiscretion; it having been ascertained by political economists, that a practical appeal either to the palm or the palate will induce the friends of things as they are to submit to anything.

  Autumn was now touching on the confines of winter, but the day was mild and sunny. Sir Telegraph asked Mr. Forester if he did not think the mode of locomotion very agreeable.

  Mr. Forester. That I never denied; all I question is, the right of any individual to indulge himself in it.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Surely a man has a right to do what he pleases with his own money.

  Mr. Forester. A legal right, certainly, not a moral one. The possession of power does not justify its abuse. The quantity of money in a nation, the quantity of food, and the number of animals that consume that food, maintain a triangular harmony, of which, in all the fluctuations of time and circumstance, the proportions are always the same. You must consider, therefore, that for every horse you keep for pleasure, you pass sentence of non-existence on two human beings.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Really, Forester, you are a very singular fellow. I should not much mind what you say, if you had not such a strange habit of practising what you preach; a thing quite unprecedented, and, egad, preposterous. I cannot think where you got it: I am sure you did not learn it at college.

  Mr. Fax. In a political light, every object of perception may be resolved into one of these three heads: the food consumed — the consumers — and money. In this point of view all convertible property that does not eat and drink is money. Diamonds are money. When a man changes a bank-note for a diamond, he merely changes one sort of money for another, differing only in the facility of circulation and the stability of value. None of the produce of the earth is wasted by the permutation.

  Mr. Forester. The most pernicious species of luxury, therefore, is that which applies the fruits of the earth to any other purposes than those of human subsistence. All luxury is indeed pernicious, because its infallible tendency is to enervate the few and enslave the many; but luxury, which, in addition to this evil tendency, destroys the fruits of the earth in the wantonness of idle ostentation, and thereby prevents the existence of so many human beings as the quantity of food so destroyed would maintain, is marked by criminality of a much deeper dye.

  Mr. Fax. At the same time you must consider that, in respect of population, the great desideratum is not number, but quality. If the whole surface of this country were divided into gardens, and in every garden were a cottage, and in every cottage a family living entirely on potatoes, the number of its human inhabitants would be much greater than at present; but where would be the spirit of commercial enterprise, the researches of science, the exalted pursuits of philosophical leisure, the communication with distant lands, and all that variety of human life and intercourse, which is now so beautiful and interesting? Above all, where would be the refuge of such a population in times of the slightest defalcation? Now, the waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity. The canal that does not overflow in the season of rain will not be navigable in the season of drought. The rich have been often ready, in days of emergency, to lay their superfluities aside; but when the fruits of the earth are applied in plentiful or even ordinary seasons, to the utmost possibility of human subsistence, the days of deficiency in their produce must be days of inevitable famine.

  Mr. Forester. What then will you say of those who in times of actual famine persevere in their old course, in the wanton waste of luxury?

  Mr. Fax. Truly I have nothing to say for them but that they know not what they do.

  Mr. Forester. If, in any form of human society, any one human being dies of hunger, while another wastes or consumes in the wantonness of vanity as much as would have preserved his existence, I hold that second man guilty of the death of the first.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Surely, Forester, you are not serious.

  Mr. Forester. Indeed I am. What would you think of a family of four persons, two of whom should not be contented with consuming their own share of diurnal provision but, having adventitiously the pre-eminence of physical power, should either throw the share of the two others into the fire, or stew it down into a condiment for their own?

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. I should think it very abominable, certainly.

  Mr. Forester. Yet what is human society but one great family? What is moral duty, but that precise line of conduct which tends to promote the greatest degree of general happiness? And is not this duty most flagrantly violated, when one man appropriates to himself the subsistence of twelve; while, perhaps in his immediate neighbourhood, eleven of his fellow-beings are dying with hunger? I have seen such a man walk with a demure face into church, as regularly as if the Sunday bell had been a portion of his corporeal mechan
ism, to hear a bloated and beneficed sensualist hold forth on the text of Do as ye would be done by, or Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me: whereas, if he had wished his theory to coincide with his practice he would have chosen for his text, Behold a man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners; and when the duty of words was over, the auditor and his ghostly adviser, issuing forth together, have committed poor Lazarus to the care of Providence, and proceeded to feast in the lordly mansion, like Dives that lived in purple.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Well, Forester, there I escape your shaft; for I have ‘forgotten what the inside of a church is made of,’ since they made me go to chapel twice a day at college. But go on, and don’t spare me.

  Mr. Fax. Let us suppose that ten thousand quarters of wheat will maintain ten thousand persons during any given portion of time: if the ten thousand quarters be reduced to five, or if the ten thousand persons be increased to twenty, the consequence will be immediate and general distress: yet if the proportions be equally distributed, as in a ship on short allowance, the general perception of necessity and justice will preserve general patience and mutual goodwill; but let the first supposition remain unaltered, let there be ten thousand quarters of wheat, which shall be full allowance for ten thousand people; then, if four thousand persons take to themselves the portion of eight thousand, and leave to the remaining six thousand the portion of two (and this I fear is even an inadequate picture of the common practice of the world), these latter will be in a much worse condition on the last than on the first supposition; while the habit of selfish prodigality deadening all good feelings and extinguishing all sympathy on the one hand, and the habit of debasement and suffering combining with the inevitable sense of oppression and injustice on the other, will produce an action and reaction of open, unblushing, cold-hearted pride, and servile, inefficient, ill-disguised resentment, which no philanthropist can contemplate without dismay.

  Mr. Forester. What then will be the case if the same disproportionate division continues by regular gradations through the remaining six thousand, till the lowest thousand receive such a fractional pittance as will scarcely keep life together? If any of these perish with hunger, what are they but the victims of the first four thousand, who appropriated more to themselves than either nature required or justice allowed? This, whatever the temporisers with the world may say of it, I have no hesitation in pronouncing to be wickedness of the most atrocious kind; and this I make no doubt was the sense of the founder of the Christian religion when he said, It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

  Mr. Fax. You must beware of the chimaera of an agrarian law, the revolutionary doctrine of an equality of possession; which can never be possible in practice, till the whole constitution of human nature be changed.

  Mr. Forester. I am no revolutionist. I am no advocate for violent and arbitrary changes in the state of society. I care not in what proportions property is divided (though I think there are certain limits which it ought never to pass, and approve the wisdom of the American laws in restricting the fortune of a private citizen to twenty thousand a year), provided the rich can be made to know that they are but the stewards of the poor, that they are not to be the monopolisers of solitary spoil, but the distributors of general possession; that they are responsible for that distribution to every principle of general justice, to every tie of moral obligation, to every feeling of human sympathy; that they are bound to cultivate simple habits in themselves, and to encourage most such arts of industry and peace as are most compatible with the health and liberty of others.

  Mr. Fax. On this principle, then, any species of luxury in the artificial adornment of persons and dwellings, which condemns the artificer to a life of pain and sickness in the alternations of the furnace and the cellar, is more baleful and more criminal than even that which, consuming in idle prodigality the fruits of the earth, destroys altogether, in the proportion of its waste, so much of the possibility of human existence: since it is better not to be than to be in misery.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. That is some consolation for me, as it shows me that there are others worse than myself; for I really thought you were going between you to prove me one of the greatest rogues in England. But seriously, Forester, you think the keeping of pleasure-horses, for the reasons you have given, a selfish and criminal species of luxury?

  Mr. Forester. I am so far persuaded of it, that I keep none myself.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. But are not these four very beautiful creatures? Would you wish not to see them in existence, living as they do a very happy and easy kind of life?

  Mr. Forester. That I am disposed to question, when I compare the wild horse, in his native deserts, in the full enjoyment of health and liberty, and all the energies of his nature, with those docked, cropped, curtailed, mutilated animals, pent more than half their lives in the close confinement of a stable, never let out but to run in trammels, subject, like their tyrant man, to an infinite variety of diseases, the produce of civilisation and unnatural life, and tortured every now and then by some villain of a farrier, who has no more feeling for them than a West Indian planter has for his slaves; and when you consider, too, the fate of the most cherished of the species, racers and hunters, instruments and often victims of sports equally foolish and cruel, you will acknowledge that the life of the civilised horse is not an enviable destiny.

  Mr. Fax. Horses are noble and useful animals; but as they must necessarily exist in great numbers for almost every purpose of human intercourse and business, it is desirable that none should be kept for purposes of mere idleness and ostentation. A pleasure-horse is a sort of four-footed sinecurist.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Not quite so mischievous as a two-footed one.

  Mr. Forester. Perhaps not: but the latter has always a large retinue of the former, and therefore the evil is doubled.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Upon my word, Forester, you will almost talk me out of my barouche, and then what will become of me? What shall I do to kill time?

  Mr. Forester. Read ancient books, the only source of permanent happiness left in this degenerate world.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Read ancient books! That may be very good advice to some people: but you forget that I have been at college, and finished my education. By the bye I have one inside, a portable advocate for my proceedings, no less a personage than old Pindar.

  Mr. Forester. Pindar has written very fine odes on driving, as Anacreon has done on drinking; but the first can no more be adduced to prove the morality of the whip, than the second to demonstrate the virtue of intemperance. Besides, as to the mental tendency and emulative associations of the pursuit itself, no comparison can be instituted between the charioteers of the Olympic games and those of our turnpike roads; for the former were the emulators of heroes and demigods, and the latter of grooms and mail coachmen.

  Sir Telegraph Paxarett. Well, Forester, as I recall to mind the various subjects against which I have heard you declaim, I will make you a promise. When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and flourish: when the man in place acts on the principles which he professed while he was out: when borough electors will not sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes: when poets are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion: when learned divines can afford to have a conscience: when universities are not a hundred years in knowledge behind all the rest of the world: when young ladies speak as they think, and when those who shudder at a tale of the horrors of slavery will deprive their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose of contributing all in their power to its extinction: — why then, Forester, I will lay down my barouche.

  CHAPTER XXV

  THE WALK

  THEY WERE TO pass, in their return, through an estate belonging to Mr. Forester, for the purpose of taking up his aunt Miss Evergre
en, who was to accompany them to Redrose Abbey. On arriving at an inn on the nearest point of the great road, Mr. Forester told Sir Telegraph that, from the arrangements he had made, it was impossible for any carriage to enter his estate, as he had taken every precaution for preserving the simplicity of his tenants from the contagious exhibitions and examples of luxury. ‘This road,’ said he, ’is only accessible to pedestrians and equestrians: I have no wish to exclude the visits of laudable curiosity, but there is nothing I so much dread and deprecate as the intrusion of those heartless fops, who take their fashionable autumnal tour, to gape at rocks and waterfalls, for which they have neither eyes nor ears, and to pervert the feelings and habits of the once simple dwellers of the mountains. Nature seems to have raised her mountain-barriers for the purpose of rescuing a few favoured mortals from the vortex of that torrent of physical and moral degeneracy which seems to threaten nothing less than the extermination of the human species: but in vain, while the annual opening of its sluices lets out a side stream of the worst specimens of what is called refined society, to inundate the mountain valleys with the corruptions of metropolitan folly. Thus innocence, and health, and simplicity of life and manners, are banished from their last retirement, and nowhere more lamentably so than in the romantic scenery of the northern lakes, where every wonder of nature is made an article of trade, where the cataracts are locked up, and the echoes are sold: so that even the rustic character of that ill-fated region is condemned to participate in the moral stigma which must dwell indelibly on its poetical name.’

  The party alighted, and a consultation being held, it was resolved to walk to the village in a body, the Honourable Mrs. Pinmoney lifting her hands and eyes in profound astonishment at Mr. Forester’s old-fashioned notions.

  They followed a narrow winding path through rocky and sylvan hills. They walked in straggling parties of ones, twos, and threes. Mr. Forester and Anthelia went first. Sir Oran Haut-ton followed alone, playing a pensive tune on his flute. Sir Telegraph Paxarett walked between his aunt and cousin, the Honourable Mrs. Pinmoney and Miss Danaretta. Mr. Hippy, in a melancholy vein, brought up the rear with Mr. Fax. A very beautiful child which had sat on the old gentleman’s knee, at the inn where they breakfasted, had thrown him, not for the first time on a similar occasion, into a fit of dismal repentance that he had not one of his own: he stalked along accordingly, with a most ruefully lengthened aspect, uttering every now and then a deep-drawn sigh. Mr. Fax in philosophic sympathy determined to console him, by pointing out to him the true nature and tendency of the principle of population, and the enormous evils resulting from the multiplication of the human species: observing that the only true criterion of the happiness of a nation was to be found in the number of its old maids and bachelors, whom he venerated as the sources and symbols of prosperity and peace. Poor Mr. Hippy walked on sighing and groaning, deaf as the adder to the voice of the charmer: for, in spite of all the eloquence of the antipopulationist, the image of the beautiful child which he had danced on his knee continued to haunt his imagination, and threatened him with the blue devils for the rest of the day.