Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  The Bridegroom. General Reason! I be’s no soger man, and bean’t countable to no General whatzomecomedever. We bean’t under martial law, be we? Voine times indeed if General Reason be to interpose between a poor man and his sweetheart.

  Mr. Fax. That is precisely the case which calls most loudly for such an interposition.

  The Bridegroom. If General Reason waits till I or Zukey calls loudly vorin, he’ll wait long enough. Woan’t he, Zukey?

  The Bride. Ees, zure, Robin.

  Mr. Fax. General reason, my friend, I assure you, has nothing to do with martial law, nor with any other mode of arbitrary power, but with authority that has truth for its foundation, benevolence for its end, and the whole universe for its sphere of action.

  The Bridegroom {scratching his head). There be a mort o’ voine words, but I zuppose you means to zay as how this General Reason be a Methody preacher; but I be’s true earthy-ducks church, and zo be Zukey: bean’t you, Zukey?

  The Bride. Ees, zure, Robin.

  The Bridegroom. And we has nothing to do wi’ General Reason neither on us. Has we, Zukey?

  The Bride. No, zure, Robin.

  Mr. Fax. Well, my friend, be that as it may, you are going to be married?

  The Bridegroom. Why, I think zo, zur, wi’ General Reason’s leave. Bean’t we, Zukey?

  The Bride. Ees, zure, Robin.

  Mr. Fax. And are you fully aware, my honest friend, what marriage is?

  The Bridegroom. Vor zartin I be: Zukey and I ha’ got it by heart out o’ t’ Book o’ Common Prayer. Ha’n’t we, Zukey? (This time Susan did not think proper to answer.)

  It be ordained that zuch persons as hav’n’t the gift of —

  (Susan gave him such a sudden and violent pinch on the arm, that his speech ended in a roar). Od rabbit me! that wur a twinger! I’ll have my revenge, howzomecomedever. (And he imprinted a very emphatical kiss on the lips of his blushing bride that greatly scandalised Mr. Fax)

  Mr. Fax. Do you know, that in all likelihood, in the course of six years, you will have as many children?

  The Bridegroom. The more the merrier, zur. Bean’t it, Zukey? (Susan was mute again)

  Mr. Fax. I hope it may prove so, my friend; but I fear you will find the more the sadder. What are your occupations?

  The Bridegroom. Anan, zur?

  Mr. Fax. What do you do to get your living?

  The Bridegroom. Works vor Varmer Brownstout: zows and reaps, threshes, and goes to market wi’ corn and cattle, turns to plough-tail when hap chances, cleans and feeds horses, hedges and ditches, fells timber, gathers in t’ orchard, brews ale, and drinks it, and gets vourteen shill’n’s a week for my trouble. And Zukey here ha’ laid up a mint o’ money: she wur dairymaid at Varmer Cheesecurd’s, and ha’ gotten vour pounds zeventeen shill’n’s and ninepence in t’ old chest wi’ three vlat locks and a padlock. Ha’n’t you, Zukey?

  The Bride. Ees, zure, Robin.

  Mr. Fax. It does not appear to me, my worthy friend, that your fourteen shillings a week, even with Mrs. Susan’s consolidated fund of four pounds seventeen shillings and nine-pence, will be altogether adequate to the maintenance of such a family as you seem likely to have.

  The Bridegroom. Why, sir, in t’ virst pleace I doan’t know what be Zukey’s intentions in that respect — Od rabbit it, Zukey! doan’t pinch zo — and in t’ next pleace, wi’ all due submission to you and General Reason the Methody preacher, I takes it to be our look-out, and none o’ nobody’s else.

  Mr. Fax. But it is somebody’s else, for this reason; that if you cannot maintain your own children, the parish must do it for you.

  The Bridegroom. Vor zartin — in a zort o’ way; and bad enough at best. But I wants no more to do wi’t’ parish than parish wi’ me.

  Mr. Fax. I dare say you do not, at present. But, my good friend, when the cares of a family come upon you, your independence of spirit will give way to necessity; and if, by any accident, you are thrown out of work, as in the present times many honest fellows are, what will you do then?

  The Bridegroom. Do the best I can, measter, az I always does, and nobody can’t do no better.

  Mr. Fax. Do you suppose, then, you are doing the best you can now, in marrying, with such a doubtful prospect before you? How will you bring up your children?

  The Bridegroom. Why, in the vear o’ the Lord, to be zure.

  Mr. Fax. Of course: but how will you bring them up to get their living?

  The Bridegroom. That’s as thereafter may happen.

  They woan’t starve, I’se warrant ’em, if they teakes after their veyther. But I zees now who General Reason be. He be one o’ your sinecure vundholder peaper-money taxing men, as isn’t satisfied wi’ takin’t’ bread out o’ t’ poor man’s mouth, and zending his chilern to army and navy, and vactories, and suchlike, but wants to take away his wife into t’ bargain.

  Mr. Fax. There, my honest friend, you have fallen into a radical mistake, which I shall try to elucidate for your benefit. It is owing to poor people having more children than they can maintain, that those children are obliged to go to the army and navy, and consequently that statesmen and conquerors find so many ready instruments for the oppression and destruction of the human species: it follows, therefore, that if people would not marry till they could be certain of maintaining all their children comfortably at home —

  The Bridegroom. Lord love you, that be all mighty voine rigmarol; but the short and the long be this: I can’t live without Zukey, nor Zukey without I, can you, Zukey?

  The Bride. No, zure, Robin.

  The Bridegroom. Now there be a plain downright honest-hearted old English girl; none o’ your quality madams, as zays one thing and means another; and zo you may tell General Reason he may teake away chair and teable, salt-box and trencher, bed and bedding, pig and pig-stye, but neither he nor all his peaper-men together shall take away his own Zukey vrom Robin Ruddyfeace; if they shall I’m doomed.

  ‘What profane wretch,’ said the Reverend Mr. Portpipe, emerging from the church, ‘what profane wretch is swearing in the very gate of the temple?’ and seeing by the bridegroom’s confusion that he was the culprit, he reprimanded him severely, and declared he would not marry him that day. The very thought of such a disappointment was too much for poor Robin to bear, and, after one or two ineffectual efforts to speak, he distorted his face into a most rueful expression, and struck up such a roar of crying as completely electrified the Rev. Mr. Portpipe, whose wrath, nevertheless, was not to be mollified by Robin’s grief and contrition, but yielded at length to the intercessions of Mr. Forester. Robin’s face cleared up in an instant, and the natural broad grin of his ruddy countenance shone forth through his tears like the sun through a shower.

  ‘You are such an honest and warm-hearted fellow,’ said Mr.

  Forester, putting a bank-note into Robin’s hand, ‘ that you must not refuse me the pleasure of making this little addition to Mistress Susan’s consolidated fund.’—’ Od rabbit me!’ said the bridegroom, overcome with joy and surprise, ‘I doan’t know who thee beest, but thee beesn’t General Reason, that’s vor zartin.’ The rustic party then followed the Reverend Mr. Portpipe into the church. Robin, when he reached the porch, looked round over his shoulder to Mr. Fax, and said with a very arch look, ‘My dutiful sarvice to General Reason.’ And looking round a second time before he entered the door, added: ‘ and Zukey’s too.’

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  THE VICARAGE

  WHEN THE REV. Mr. Portpipe had despatched his ‘press of business,’ he set before his guests in the old oak parlour of the vicarage a cold turkey and ham, a capacious jug of ‘incomparable ale,’ and a bottle of his London Particular; all which, on trial, were approved to be excellent, and a second bottle of the latter was very soon required, and produced with great alacrity. The reverend gentleman expressed much anxiety in relation to the mysterious circumstance of the disappearance of Anthelia, on whom he pronounced a very warm eulogium, saying she was the flower
of the mountains, the type of ideal beauty, the daughter of music, the rosebud of sweetness, and the handmaid of charity. He professed himself unable to throw the least light on the transaction, but supposed she had been spirited away for some nefarious purpose. He said that the mountain road had been explored without success in all its ramifications, not only by Mr. Hippy and the visitors and domestics of Melincourt, but by all the peasants and mountaineers of the vicinity — that it led through a most desolate and inhospitable tract of country, and he would advise them, if they persisted in their intention of following it themselves, to partake of his poor hospitality till morning, and set forward with the first dawn of daylight. Mr. Fax seconded this proposal, and Mr. Forester complied.

  They spent the evening in the old oak parlour, and conversed on various subjects, during which a knotty point opposing itself to the solution of an historical question, Mr. Forester expressed a wish to be allowed access to the reverend gentleman’s library. The reverend gentleman hummed awhile with great gravity and deliberation: then slowly rising from his large arm-chair, he walked across the room to the farther corner, where throwing open the door of a little closet, he said with extreme complacency, ‘There is my library: Homer, Virgil, and Horace, for old acquaintance sake, and the credit of my cloth: Tillotson, Atterbury, and Jeremy Taylor, for materials of exhortation and ingredients of sound doctrine: and for my own private amusement in an occasional half-hour between my dinner and my nap, a translation of Rabelais and The Tale of a Tub.’

  Mr. Fax. A well-chosen collection.

  The Rev. Mr. Portpipe. — Multum in parvo. But there is something that may amuse you: a little drawer of mineral specimens that have been picked up in this vicinity, and a fossil or two. Among the latter is a curious bone that was found in a hill just by, invested with stalactite.

  Mr. Forester. The bone of a human thumb, unquestionably.

  The Rev. Mr. Portpipe. Very probably.

  Mr. Forester. Which, by its comparative proportion, must have belonged to an individual about eleven feet six or seven inches in height: there are no such men now.

  Mr. Fax. Except, perhaps, among the Patagonians, whose existence is, however, disputed.

  Mr. Forester. It is disputed on no tenable ground, but that of the narrow and bigoted vanity of civilised men, who, pent in the unhealthy limits of towns and cities, where they dwindle from generation to generation in a fearful rapidity of declension towards the abyss of the infinitely little, in which they will finally vanish from the system of nature, will not admit that there ever were, or are, or can be, better, stronger, and healthier men than themselves. The Patagonians are a vagrant nation, without house or home, and are, therefore, only occasionally seen on the coast: but because some voyagers have not seen them, I know not why we should impeach the evidence of those who have. The testimony of a man of honour, like Mr. Byron, would alone have been sufficient: but all his officers and men gave the same account. And there are other testimonies: that, for instance, of M. de Guyot, who brought from the coast of Patagonia a skeleton of one of these great men, which measured between twelve and thirteen feet. This skeleton he was bringing to Europe, but happening to be caught in a great storm, and having on board a Spanish Bishop (the Archbishop of Lima), who was of opinion that the storm was caused by the bones of this Pagan which they had on board; and having persuaded the crew that this was the case, the captain was obliged to throw the skeleton overboard. The Bishop died soon after, and was thrown overboard in his turn. I could have wished that he had been thrown overboard sooner, and then the bones of the Patagonian would have arrived in Europe.

  The Rev. Mr. Portpipe. Your wish is orthodox, inasmuch as the Bishop was himself a Pagan, and moreover an Inquisitor. And your doctrine of large men is also orthodox, for the sons of Anak and the family of Goliath did once exist, though now their race is extinct.

  Mr. Forester. The multiplication of diseases, the diminu tion’ of strength, and the contraction of the term of existence, keep pace with the diminution of the stature of men. The mortality of a manufacturing town, compared with that of a mountain village, is more than three to one, which clearly shows the evil effects of the departure from natural life, and of the coacervation of multitudes within the narrow precincts of cities, where the breath of so many animals, and the exhalations from the dead, the dying, and corrupted things of all kinds, make the air little better than a slow poison, and so offensive as to be perceptible to the sense of those who are not accustomed to it; for the wandering Arabs will smell a town at the distance of several leagues. And in this country the cottagers who are driven by the avarice of landlords and great tenants to seek a subsistence in towns, are very soon destroyed by the change. And this hiving of human beings is not the only evil effect of commerce, which tends also to keep up a constant circulation of the elements of destruction, and to make the vices and diseases of one country the vices and diseases of all. Thus, with every extension of our intercourse with distant lands, we bring home some new seed of death; and how many we leave as vestiges of our visitation, let the South Sea Islanders testify. Consider, too, the frightful consequences of the consumption of spirituous liquors: a practice so destructive, that if all the devils were again to be assembled in Pandemonium to contrive the ruin of the human species, nothing so mischievous could be devised by them; but which it is considered politic to encourage, according to our method of raising money on the vices of the people. When these and many other causes of destruction are considered, it would be wonderful indeed if every new generation were not, as all experience proves that it is, smaller, weaker, more diseased, and more miserable than the preceding.

  Mr. Fax. Do-you find, in the progress of science and the rapid diffusion of intellectual light, no counterpoise to this mass of physical calamity, even admitting it to exist in the extent you suppose?

  Mr. Forester. Without such a counterpoise the condition of human nature would be desperate indeed. The intellectual, as I have often observed to you, are nourished at the expense of the animal faculties.

  Mr. Fax. You cannot, then, conceive the existence of mens sana in corpore sano?

  Mr. Forester. Scarcely in the present state of human degeneracy: at best in a very limited sense.

  Mr. Fax. Nevertheless you do, nay, you must acknowledge that the intellectual, which is the better part of human nature, is in a progress of rapid improvement, continually enlarging its views and multiplying its acquisitions.

  Mr. Forester. The collective stock of knowledge which is the common property of scientific men necessarily increases, and will increase from the circumstance of admitting the cooperation of numbers: but collective knowledge is as distinct from individual mental power as it is confessedly unconnected with wisdom and moral virtue, and independent of political liberty. A man of modern times, with machines of complicated powers, will lift a heavier mass than that which Hector hurled from his unassisted arm against the Grecian gates; but take away his mechanism, and what comparison is there between him and Hector? In the same way a modern man of science knows more than Pythagoras knew: but consider them with relation only to mental power, and what comparison remains between them? No more than between a modern poet and Homer — a comparison which the most strenuous partisan of modern improvement will scarcely venture to institute.

  Mr. Fax. I will venture to oppose Shakespeare to him nevertheless.

  Mr. Forester. That is, however, going back two centuries, to a state of society very peculiar, and very fertile in genius. Shakespeare is the great phenomenon of the modern world, but his men and women are beings like ourselves; whereas those of Homer are of a nobler and mightier race; and his poetry is worthy of his characters: it is the language of the gods.

  Mr. Forester rose, and approached the little closet, with the avowed intention of taking down Homer. Take care how you touch him,’ said the Reverend Mr. Portpipe: ‘he is in a very dusty condition, for he has not been disturbed these thirty years.’

  CHAPTER XXXVI

&n
bsp; THE MOUNTAINS

  THEY FOLLOWED THE mountain-road till they arrived at the spot where it divided into several branches, one of which they selected on some principle of preference, which we are not sagacious enough to penetrate. They now proceeded by a gradual ascent of several miles along a rugged passage of the hills, where the now flowerless heath was the only vestige of vegetation; and the sound of the little streams that everywhere gleamed beside their way, the only manifestation of the life and motion of nature.

  ‘It is a subject worthy of consideration,’ said Mr. Fax, ‘how far scenes like these are connected with the genius of liberty: how far the dweller of the mountains, who is certainly surrounded by more sublime excitements, has more loftiness of thought, and more freedom of spirit, than the cultivator of the plains.’

  Mr. Forester. A modern poet has observed, that the voices of the sea and the mountains are the two voices of liberty: the words mountain liberty have, indeed, become so intimately associated, that I never yet found any one who even thought of questioning their necessary and natural connection.

  Mr. Fax. And yet I question it much; and in the present state of human society I hold the universal inculcation of such a sentiment, in poetry and romance, to be not only a most gross delusion, but an error replete with the most pernicious practical consequences. For I have often seen a young man of high and aspiring genius, full of noble enthusiasm for the diffusion of truth and the general happiness of mankind, withdrawn from all intercourse with polished and intellectual society, by the distempered idea that he would nowhere find fit aliment for his high cogitations, but among heaths, and rocks, and torrents.