Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock
Page 69
Mr. Skionar. No, sir, build sacella for transcendental oracles to teach the world how to see through a glass darkly. (Producing a scroll.)
Mr. Trillo. See through an opera-glass brightly.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. See through a wine-glass full of claret; then you see both darkly and brightly. But, gentlemen, if you are all in the humour for reading papers, I will read you the first half of my next Sunday’s sermon. (Producing a paper.)
Omnes. No sermon! No sermon!
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Then I move that our respective papers be committed to our respective pockets.
Mr. Mac Quedy. Political economy is divided into two great branches, production and consumption.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Yes, sir; there are two great classes of men: those who produce much and consume little; and those who consume much and produce nothing. The fruges consumere nati have the best of it. Eh, Captain! You remember the characteristics of a great man according to Aristophanes: ὅστις γε πίνειν οἶδε καὶ βίνειν μόνον. Ha! ha! ha! Well, Captain, even in these tight-laced days, the obscurity of a learned language allows a little pleasantry.
Captain Fitzchrome. Very true, sir; the pleasantry and the obscurity go together; they are all one, as it were — to me at any rate (aside).
Mr. Mac Quedy. Now, sir —
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Pray, sir, let your science alone, or you will put me under the painful necessity of demolishing it bit by bit, as I have done your exordium. I will undertake it any morning; but it is too hard exercise after dinner.
Mr. Mac Quedy. Well, sir, in the meantime I hold my science established.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. And I hold it demolished.
Mr. Crotchet, jun. Pray, gentlemen, pocket your manuscripts, fill your glasses, and consider what we shall do with our money.
Mr. Mac Quedy. Build lecture-rooms, and schools for all.
Mr. Trillo. Revive the Athenian theatre; regenerate the lyrical drama.
Mr. Toogood. Build a grand co-operative parallelogram, with a steam-engine in the middle for a maid of all work.
Mr. Firedamp. Drain the country, and get rid of malaria, by abolishing duck-ponds.
Dr. Morbific. Found a philanthropic college of anticontagionists, where all the members shall be inoculated with the virus of all known diseases. Try the experiment on a grand scale.
Mr. Chainmail. Build a great dining-hall; endow it with beef and ale, and hang the hall round with arms to defend the provisions.
Mr. Henbane. Found a toxicological institution for trying all poisons and antidotes. I myself have killed a frog twelve times, and brought him to life eleven; but the twelfth time he died. I have a phial of the drug, which killed him, in my pocket, and shall not rest till I have discovered its antidote.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. I move that the last speaker be dispossessed of his phial, and that it be forthwith thrown into the Thames.
Mr. Henbane. How, sir? my invaluable, and, in the present state of human knowledge, infallible poison?
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Let the frogs have all the advantage of it.
Mr. Crotchet. Consider, Doctor, the fish might participate. Think of the salmon.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Then let the owner’s right-hand neighbour swallow it.
Mr. Eavesdrop. Me, sir! What have I done, sir, that I am to be poisoned, sir?
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Sir, you have published a character of your facetious friend, the Reverend Doctor F., wherein you have sketched off me; me, sir, even to my nose and wig. What business have the public with my nose and wig?
Mr. Eavesdrop. Sir, it is all good-humoured; all in bonhomie: all friendly and complimentary.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Sir, the bottle, la Dive Bouteille, is a recondite oracle, which makes an Eleusinian temple of the circle in which it moves. He who reveals its mysteries must die. Therefore, let the dose be administered. Fiat experimentum in animâ vili.
Mr. Eavesdrop. Sir, you are very facetious at my expense.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Sir, you have been very unfacetious, very inficete at mine. You have dished me up, like a savoury omelette, to gratify the appetite of the reading rabble for gossip. The next time, sir, I will respond with the argumentum baculinum. Print that, sir: put it on record as a promise of the Reverend Doctor F., which shall be most faithfully kept, with an exemplary bamboo.
Mr. Eavesdrop. Your cloth protects you, sir.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. My bamboo shall protect me, sir.
Mr. Crotchet. Doctor, Doctor, you are growing too polemical.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Sir, my blood boils. What business have the public with my nose and wig?
Mr. Crotchet. Doctor! Doctor!
Mr. Crotchet, jun. Pray, gentlemen, return to the point. How shall we employ our fund?
Mr. Philpot. Surely in no way so beneficially as in exploring rivers. Send a fleet of steamboats down the Niger, and another up the Nile. So shall you civilise Africa, and establish stocking factories in Abyssinia and Bambo.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. With all submission, breeches and petticoats must precede stockings. Send out a crew of tailors. Try if the King of Bambo will invest in inexpressibles.
Mr. Crotchet, jun. Gentlemen, it is not for partial, but for general benefit, that this fund is proposed: a grand and universally applicable scheme for the amelioration of the condition of man.
Several Voices. That is my scheme. I have not heard a scheme but my own that has a grain of common sense.
Mr. Trillo. Gentlemen, you inspire me. Your last exclamation runs itself into a chorus, and sets itself to music. Allow me to lead, and to hope for your voices in harmony.
After careful meditation,
And profound deliberation,
On the various pretty projects which have just been shown,
Not a scheme in agitation,
For the world’s amelioration,
Has a grain of common sense in it, except my own.
Several Voices. We are not disposed to join in any such chorus.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Well, of all these schemes, I am for Mr. Trillo’s. Regenerate the Athenian theatre. My classical friend here, the Captain, will vote with, me.
Captain Fitzchrome. I, sir? oh! of course, sir.
Mr. Mac Quedy. Surely, Captain, I rely on you to uphold political economy.
Captain Fitzchrome. Me, sir! oh, to be sure, sir.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Pray, sir, will political economy uphold the Athenian theatre?
Mr. Mac Quedy. Surely not. It would be a very unproductive investment.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Then the Captain votes against you. What, sir, did not the Athenians, the wisest of nations, appropriate to their theatre their most sacred and intangible fund? Did not they give to melopoeia, choregraphy, and the sundry forms of didascalics, the precedence of all other matters, civil and military? Was it not their law, that even the proposal to divert this fund to any other purpose should be punished with death? But, sir, I further propose that the Athenian theatre being resuscitated, the admission shall be free to all who can expound the Greek choruses, constructively, mythologically, and metrically, and to none others. So shall all the world learn Greek: Greek, the Alpha and Omega of all knowledge. At him who sits not in the theatre shall be pointed the finger of scorn: he shall be called in the highway of the city, “a fellow without Greek.”
Mr. Trillo. But the ladies, sir, the ladies.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Every man may take in a lady: and she who can construe and metricise a chorus, shall, if she so please, pass in by herself.
Mr. Trillo. But, sir, you will shut me out of my own theatre. Let there at least be a double passport, Greek and Italian.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. No, sir; I am inexorable. No Greek, no theatre.
Mr. Trillo. Sir, I cannot consent to be shut out from my own theatre.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. You see how it is, Squire Crotchet the younger; you can scarcely find two to agree on a scheme
, and no two of those can agree on the details. Keep your money in your pocket. And so ends the fund for regenerating the world.
Mr. Mac Quedy. Nay, by no means. We are all agreed on deliberative dinners.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Very true; we will dine and discuss. We will sing with Robin Hood, “If I drink water while this doth last;” and while it lasts we will have no adjournment, if not to the Athenian theatre.
Mr. Trillo. Well, gentlemen, I hope this chorus at least will please you: —
If I drink water while this doth last,
May I never again drink wine:
For how can a man, in his life of a span,
Do anything better than dine?
We’ll dine and drink, and say if we think
That anything better can be,
And when we have dined, wish all mankind
May dine as well as we.
And though a good wish will fill no dish
And brim no cup with sack,
Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring,
To illume our studious track.
On the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes
The light of the flask shall shine;
And we’ll sit till day, but we’ll find the way
To drench the world with wine.
The schemes for the world’s regeneration evaporated in a tumult of voices.
CHAPTER VII. THE SLEEPING VENUS.
Quoth he: In all my life till now,
I ne’er saw so profane a show. Butler.
The library of Crotchet Castle was a large and well-furnished apartment, opening on one side into an ante-room, on the other into a music-room. It had several tables stationed at convenient distances; one consecrated to the novelties of literature, another to the novelties of embellishment; others unoccupied, and at the disposal of the company. The walls were covered with a copious collection of ancient and modern books; the ancient having been selected and arranged by the Reverend Doctor Folliott. In the ante-room were card-tables; in the music-room were various instruments, all popular operas, and all fashionable music. In this suite of apartments, and not in the drawing-room, were the evenings of Crotchet Castle usually passed.
The young ladies were in the music-room; Miss Crotchet at the piano, Lady Clarinda at the harp, playing and occasionally singing, at the suggestion of Mr. Trillo, portions of Matilde di Shabran. Lord Bossnowl was turning over the leaves for Miss Crotchet; the Captain was performing the same office for Lady Clarinda, but with so much more attention to the lady than the book, that he often made sad work with the harmony, by turnover of two leaves together. On these occasions Miss Crotchet paused, Lady Clarinda laughed, Mr. Trillo scolded, Lord Bossnowl yawned, the Captain apologised, and the performance proceeded.
In the library Mr. Mac Quedy was expounding political economy to the Reverend Doctor Folliott, who was pro more demolishing its doctrines seriatim.
Mr. Chainmail was in hot dispute with Mr. Skionar, touching the physical and moral well-being of man. Mr. Skionar was enforcing his friend Mr. Shantsee’s views of moral discipline; maintaining that the sole thing needful for man in this world was loyal and pious education; the giving men good books to read, and enough of the hornbook to read them; with a judicious interspersion of the lessons of Old Restraint, which was his poetic name for the parish stocks. Mr. Chainmail, on the other hand, stood up for the exclusive necessity of beef and ale, lodging and raiment, wife and children, courage to fight for them all, and armour wherewith to do so.
Mr. Henbane had got his face scratched, and his finger bitten, by the cat, in trying to catch her for a second experiment in killing and bringing to life; and Doctor Morbific was comforting him with a disquisition to prove that there were only four animals having the power to communicate hydrophobia, of which the cat was one; and that it was not necessary that the animal should be in a rabid state, the nature of the wound being everything, and the idea of contagion a delusion. Mr. Henbane was listening very lugubriously to this dissertation.
Mr. Philpot had seized on Mr. Firedamp, and pinned him down to a map of Africa, on which he was tracing imaginary courses of mighty inland rivers, terminating in lakes and marshes, where they were finally evaporated by the heat of the sun; and Mr. Firedamp’s hair was standing on end at the bare imagination of the mass of malaria that must be engendered by the operation. Mr. Toogood had begun explaining his diagrams to Sir Simon Steeltrap; but Sir Simon grew testy, and told Mr. Toogood that the promulgators of such doctrines ought to be consigned to the treadmill. The philanthropist walked off from the country gentleman, and proceeded to hold forth to young Crotchet, who stood silent, as one who listens, but in reality without hearing a syllable. Mr. Crotchet, senior, as the master of the house, was left to entertain himself with his own meditations, till the Reverend Doctor Folliott tore himself from Mr. Mac Quedy, and proceeded to expostulate with Mr. Crotchet on a delicate topic.
There was an Italian painter, who obtained the name of Il Bragatore, by the superinduction of inexpressibles on the naked Apollos and Bacchuses of his betters. The fame of this worthy remained one and indivisible, till a set of heads, which had been, by a too common mistake of Nature’s journeymen, stuck upon magisterial shoulders, as the Corinthian capitals of “fair round bellies with fat capon lined,” but which Nature herself had intended for the noddles of porcelain mandarins, promulgated simultaneously from the east and the west of London, an order that no plaster-of-Paris Venus should appear in the streets without petticoats. Mr. Crotchet, on reading this order in the evening paper, which, by the postman’s early arrival, was always laid on his breakfast-table, determined to fill his house with Venuses of all sizes and kinds. In pursuance of this resolution, came packages by water-carriage, containing an infinite variety of Venuses. There were the Medicean Venus, and the Bathing Venus; the Uranian Venus, and the Pandemian Venus; the Crouching Venus, and the Sleeping Venus; the Venus rising from the sea, the Venus with the apple of Paris, and the Venus with the armour of Mars.
The Reverend Doctor Folliott had been very much astonished at this unexpected display. Disposed, as he was, to hold, that whatever had been in Greece, was right; he was more than doubtful of the propriety of throwing open the classical adytum to the illiterate profane. Whether, in his interior mind, he was at all influenced, either by the consideration that it would be for the credit of his cloth, with some of his vice-suppressing neighbours, to be able to say that he had expostulated; or by curiosity, to try what sort of defence his city-bred friend, who knew the classics only by translations, and whose reason was always a little ahead of his knowledge, would make for his somewhat ostentatious display of liberality in matters of taste; is a question on which the learned may differ: but, after having duly deliberated on two full-sized casts of the Uranian and Pandemian Venus, in niches on each side of the chimney, and on three alabaster figures, in glass cases, on the mantelpiece, he proceeded, peirastically, to open his fire.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. These little alabaster figures on the mantelpiece, Mr. Crotchet, and those large figures in the niches — may I take the liberty to ask you what they are intended to represent?
Mr. Crotchet. Venus, sir; nothing more, sir; just Venus.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. May I ask you, sir, why they are there?
Mr. Crotchet. To be looked at, sir; just to be looked at: the reasons for most things in a gentleman’s house being in it at all; from the paper on the walls, and the drapery of the curtains, even to the books in the library, of which the most essential part is the appearance of the back.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Very true, sir. As great philosophers hold that the esse of things is percipi, so a gentleman’s furniture exists to be looked at. Nevertheless, sir, there are some things more fit to be looked at than others; for instance, there is nothing more fit to be looked at than the outside of a book. It is, as I may say, from repeated experience, a pure and unmixed pleasure to have a goodly volume lying before you, and to know that you may open it if y
ou please, and need not open it unless you please. It is a resource against ennui, if ennui should come upon you. To have the resource and not to feel the ennui, to enjoy your bottle in the present, and your book in the indefinite future, is a delightful condition of human existence. There is no place, in which a man can move or sit, in which the outside of a book can be otherwise than an innocent and becoming spectacle. Touching this matter, there cannot, I think, be two opinions. But with respect to your Venuses there can be, and indeed there are, two very distinct opinions. Now, Sir, that little figure in the centre of the mantelpiece — as a grave paterfamilias, Mr. Crotchet, with a fair nubile daughter, whose eyes are like the fish-pools of Heshbon — I would ask you if you hold that figure to be altogether delicate?
Mr. Crotchet. The sleeping Venus, sir? Nothing can be more delicate than the entire contour of the figure, the flow of the hair on the shoulders and neck, the form of the feet and fingers. It is altogether a most delicate morsel.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Why, in that sense, perhaps, it is as delicate as whitebait in July. But the attitude, sir, the attitude.
Mr. Crotchet. Nothing can be more natural, sir.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. That is the very thing, sir. It is too natural: too natural, sir: it lies for all the world like — I make no doubt, the pious cheesemonger, who recently broke its plaster facsimile over the head of the itinerant vendor, was struck by a certain similitude to the position of his own sleeping beauty, and felt his noble wrath thereby justly aroused.
Mr. Crotchet. Very likely, sir. In my opinion, the cheesemonger was a fool, and the justice who sided with him was a greater.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Fool, sir, is a harsh term: call not thy brother a fool.
Mr. Crotchet. Sir, neither the cheesemonger nor the justice is a brother of mine.
The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Sir, we are all brethren.
Mr. Crotchet. Yes, sir, as the hangman is of the thief; the squire of the poacher; the judge of the libeller; the lawyer of his client; the statesman of his colleague; the bubble-blower of the bubble-buyer; the slave-driver of the negro; as these are brethren, so am I and the worthies in question.