Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  A clerk sweet Blanchflor’s heart had gain’d;

  Fair Florence loved a knight:

  And each with ardent voice maintained

  She loved the worthiest wight.

  Sweet Blanchflor praised her scholar dear,

  As courteous, kind, and true!

  Fair Florence said her chevalier

  Could every foe subdue.

  And Florence scorned the bookworm vain,

  Who sword nor spear could raise;

  And Blanchflor scorned the unlettered brain

  Could sing no lady’s praise.

  From dearest love, the maidens bright

  To deadly hatred fell,

  Each turned to shun the other’s sight,

  And neither said farewell.

  The king of birds, who held his court

  Within that flowery grove,

  Sang loudly: “‘Twill be rare disport

  To judge this suit of love.”

  Before him came the maidens bright,

  With all his birds around,

  To judge the cause, if clerk or knight

  In love be worthiest found.

  The falcon and the sparrow-hawk

  Stood forward for the fight:

  Ready to do, and not to talk,

  They voted for the knight.

  And Blanchflor’s heart began to fail,

  Till rose the strong-voiced lark,

  And, after him, the nightingale,

  And pleaded for the clerk.

  The nightingale prevailed at length,

  Her pleading had such charms;

  So eloquence can conquer strength,

  And arts can conquer arms.

  The lovely Florence tore her hair,

  And died upon the place;

  And all the birds assembled there

  Bewailed the mournful case.

  They piled up leaves and flowerets rare

  Above the maiden bright,

  And sang: “Farewell to Florence fair,

  Who too well loved her knight.”

  Several others of the party sang in the intervals of the dances. Mr. Chainmail handed to Mr. Trillo another ballad of the twelfth century, of a merrier character than the former. Mr. Trillo readily accommodated it with an air, and sang:

  THE PRIEST AND THE MULBERRY TREE.

  Did you hear of the curate who mounted his mare,

  And merrily trotted along to the fair?

  Of creature more tractable none ever heard;

  In the height of her speed she would stop at a word,

  And again with a word, when the curate said Hey,

  She put forth her mettle, and galloped away.

  As near to the gates of the city he rode,

  While the sun of September all brilliantly glowed,

  The good priest discovered, with eyes of desire,

  A mulberry tree in a hedge of wild briar,

  On boughs long and lofty, in many a green shoot,

  Hung large, black, and glossy, the beautiful fruit.

  The curate was hungry, and thirsty to boot;

  He shrunk from the thorns, though he longed for the fruit;

  With a word he arrested his courser’s keen speed,

  And he stood up erect on the back of his steed;

  On the saddle he stood, while the creature stood still,

  And he gathered the fruit, till he took his good fill.

  “Sure never,” he thought, “was a creature so rare,

  So docile, so true, as my excellent mare.

  Lo, here, how I stand” (and he gazed all around),

  “As safe and as steady as if on the ground,

  Yet how had it been, if some traveller this way,

  Had, dreaming no mischief, but chanced to cry Hey?”

  He stood with his head in the mulberry tree,

  And he spoke out aloud in his fond reverie.

  At the sound of the word, the good mare made a push,

  And down went the priest in the wild-briar bush.

  He remembered too late, on his thorny green bed,

  Much that well may be thought cannot wisely be said.

  Lady Clarinda, being prevailed on to take the harp in her turn, sang the following stanzas.

  In the days of old,

  Lovers felt true passion,

  Deeming years of sorrow

  By a smile repaid.

  Now the charms of gold,

  Spells of pride and fashion,

  Bid them say good morrow

  To the best-loved maid.

  Through the forests wild,

  O’er the mountains lonely,

  They were never weary

  Honour to pursue.

  If the damsel smiled

  Once in seven years only,

  All their wanderings dreary

  Ample guerdon knew.

  Now one day’s caprice

  Weighs down years of smiling,

  Youthful hearts are rovers,

  Love is bought and sold:

  Fortune’s gifts may cease,

  Love is less beguiling;

  Wisest were the lovers

  In the days of old.

  The glance which she threw at the captain, as she sang the last verse, awakened his dormant hopes. Looking round for his rival, he saw that he was not in the hall; and, approaching the lady of his heart, he received one of the sweetest smiles of their earlier days.

  After a time, the ladies, and all the females of the party, retired. The males remained on duty with punch and wassail, and dropped off one by one into sweet forgetfulness; so that when the rising sun of December looked through the painted windows on mouldering embers and flickering lamps, the vaulted roof was echoing to a mellifluous concert of noses, from the clarionet of the waiting-boy at one end of the hall, to the double bass of the Reverend Doctor, ringing over the empty punch-bowl, at the other.

  CONCLUSION.

  FROM THIS EVENTFUL night, young Crotchet was seen no more on English mould. Whither he had vanished was a question that could no more be answered in his case than in that of King Arthur after the battle of Camlan. The great firm of Catchflat and Company figured in the Gazette, and paid sixpence in the pound; and it was clear that he had shrunk from exhibiting himself on the scene of his former greatness, shorn of the beams of his paper prosperity. Some supposed him to be sleeping among the undiscoverable secrets of some barbel-pool in the Thames; but those who knew him best were more inclined to the opinion that he had gone across the Atlantic, with his pockets full of surplus capital, to join his old acquaintance, Mr. Touchandgo, in the bank of Dotandcarryonetown.

  Lady Clarinda was more sorry for her father’s disappointment than her own; but she had too much pride to allow herself to be put up a second time in the money-market; and when the Captain renewed his assiduities, her old partiality for him, combining with a sense of gratitude for a degree of constancy which she knew she scarcely deserved, induced her, with Lord Foolincourt’s hard-wrung consent, to share with him a more humble, but less precarious fortune, than that to which she had been destined as the price of a rotten borough.

  Gryll Grange

  Peacock’s final novel was first published as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine during 1860. He had retired from his longstanding position in the East India Company and this novel is the work of an older author, suspicious of modern innovations. The book’s protagonist is Gregory Gryll, who, ‘though he found it difficult to trace the pedigree,’ believes himself to be ‘lineally descended from the ancient and illustrious Gryllus, who maintained against Ulysses the superior happiness of the life of other animals to that of the life of man.’ As told by Homer, Gryllus was one of the men turned into pigs by Circe – and liked that state so much that he resisted being changed back. Gryll’s ‘family line’ has lasted some three thousand years, but, not having married, he lacks an heir to prolong the family. Though he has adopted his niece as heir instead, she has turned down innumerable suitors — and the main plot of the novel re
lates how she at last comes to find a man to her taste.

  Title page of the first book edition

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CHAPTER XXXV

  An illustration from the original serialisation in Fraser’s Magazine

  INTRODUCTION

  Gryll Grange, the last and mellowest fruit from Peacock’s tree, was, like most mellow fruit, not matured hastily. In saying this I do not refer to the long period — exactly a generation in the conventional sense — which intervened between Crotchet Castle of 1831 and this of 1861. For we know as a matter of fact, from the preface to the 1856 edition of Melincourt, that Peacock was planning Gryll Grange at a time considerably nearer to, but still some years from, its actual publication.

  There might perhaps have been room for fear lest such a proceeding, on the part of a man of seventy-five who was living in retirement, should result in an ill-digested mass of detail, tempered or rather distempered by the grumbling of old age, and exhibiting the marks of failing powers. No anticipation could have been more happily falsified. The advance in good temper of Gryll Grange, even upon Crotchet Castle itself, is denied by no one. The book, though long for its author, is not in the least overloaded; and no signs of failure have ever been detected in it except by those who upbraid the still further severance between the line of Peacock’s thought and the line of what is vulgarly accounted ‘progress,’ and who almost openly impute decay to powers no longer used on their side but against them. The only plausible pretext for this insinuation is that very advance in mildness and mellowness which has been noted — that comparative absence of the sharper and cruder strokes of the earlier work. But since the wit is as bright as ever, though less hard, it seems unreasonable to impute as a defect what, but for very obvious reasons, would be admitted as an improvement.

  Except Brougham, who still comes in for some severe language, no one of Peacock’s old favourite abominations undergoes personal chastisement. On the contrary, indirect but pretty distinct apology is tendered to Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge by appreciative citation of their work. Even among the general victims, Scotchmen and political economists have a still more direct olive-branch extended to them by the introduction of the personage of Mr. MacBorrowdale: there is no more blasphemy of Scott: and I do not at the present moment remember any very distinct slaps at paper money. Peace had been made long ago with the Church of England, through the powerful medium of Dr. Folliott; but it is ratified and cemented anew here not merely by the presentation of Dr. Opimian, but (in rather an odd fashion perhaps) by the trait of Falconer’s devotion to St. Catharine. So also, as the fair hand of Lady Clarinda, despite some hard knocks administered to her father and brother, had beckoned Peacock away from his cut-and-dried satire of the aristocracy, so now Lord Curryfin exhibits a further stage of reconciliation. In short, all those elements of society to which very young men, not wanting either in brains or heart, often take crude and fanciful objection, had by this time approved themselves (as they always do, with the rarest exceptions, to les âmes bien nées) at worst graceful if unnecessary ornaments to life, at best valuable to the social fabric as solid and all but indispensable buttresses of it.

  In all these ‘reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries,’ however, it is very important to observe that there is no mawkishness; and, whatever may have been sometimes thought and said, there is no ‘ratting* in the real sense. As must be obvious to any attentive reader of the novels, and as has been pointed out once or twice before in these introductions, Peacock had at no time been anything like an enrolled, much less a convinced, member of the Radical or any party. He may have been a Republican in his youth, though for my part I should like more trustworthy evidence for it than that of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a very clever but a distinctly unscrupulous person. If he was — and it is not at all improbable that he had the Republican measles, a very common disease of youth, pretty early — he certainly had never been a democrat. Even his earlier satire is double-edged; and, as must be constantly repeated and remembered, it was always his taste and his endeavour to shoot folly as it flew, to attack existent and not extinct forms of popular or fashionable delusion. Such follies, whether in 1860 or since, have certainly not as a rule been of the aristocratic, monarchical, or Tory order generally.

  He found plenty of these follies, however, in the other kind — the kind which he had begun to satirise smartly in Crotchet Castle — and he showed pretty decisively that his hand had not lost its cunning, nor his sword its sharpness. The satire, though partly, is not mainly political; and it is an interesting detail (though it only refreshes the memory of those who knew the facts then or have studied them since) that barely she years before a far more sweeping reform than that of 1832, a very acute judge who disliked and resisted it spoke of ‘another reform lunacy’ as ‘not likely to arise in his time.’ And these words, it must be remembered, are put in the mouth of Mr. MacBorrowdale, who is represented as merely middle-aged.

  It is fortunate, however, for the interest of Gryll Grange that politics, in the strict sense, occupy so small a part of it; for of all subjects they lose interest first to all but a very select number of readers. The bulk of the satiric comment of the book is devoted either to purely social matters, or to the debateable land between these and politics proper. A little but not very much of this is obsolete or obsolescent. American slavery is no more; and the ‘Pantopragmatic Society’ (in official language the Social Science Congress) has ceased to exist as a single recognised institution. But there is not much about slavery here, and if pantopragmatics have lost their special Society they flourish more than ever as a general and fashionable subject of human attention. You shall not open a number of the Times twice, perhaps not once in a week, without finding columns of debate, harangue, or letter-writing purely pantopragmatical.

  Still more is this the case with another subject which has even more attention, and on which what some think the central and golden sentence of the book is laid down by Dr. Opimian in the often-quoted words, ‘If all the nonsense which in the last quarter of a century [it is appalling to think that this quarter is getting on for three-quarters now] has been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of Education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate.’ Indeed it cannot be said that after nearly five-and-thirty years, up to and including the present moment, during which Competitive Examination has been a field of battle, much has been added to Peacock’s attack on it, or anything said on the other side to weaken the cogency of that attack. No doubt he was to some extent a prejudiced judge; for, though few people would at any time of his youth have had less to fear from competitive examination, his own fortune had been made by the opposite system, and the competitive scheme must infallibly tend rather to exclude than to admit persons like him. But a wise criticism does not ask cut bone in cases of argument, it simply looks to see whether the advocacy is sound, not whether the advocate has received or expects his fee. And Peacock’s advoc
acy is here not merely sound; it is, in so far as it goes, inexpugnable. It is true there is a still more irrefragable rejoinder to it which has kept competition safe hitherto, though for obvious reasons it will very rarely be found openly expressed by the defenders of the system; and that is, that, under the popular jealousy resulting from wide or universal suffrage, there is no alternative but competitive examination, or else the American system of alternating spoils to the victors, which is demonstrably worse for the public, and not demonstrably much better for private interests.

  As for table-turning, and lectures, and the ‘excess of hurrying about,’ and ‘Siberian’ dinners and so forth, they are certainly not dead. Table-turning may have changed its name; the others have not even adopted the well-known expedient of the alias, but appear just as they were thirty years ago in the social and satiric dictionaries of to-day.

  It would be odd if this comparative freshness and actuality of subject did not make Gryll Grange one of the lightest and brightest of Peacock’s novels; and I think it fully deserves that description. But it would be doing it extremely scant justice to allow any one to suppose that its attractions consist solely, or even mainly, in ‘valuable thoughts’ and expressions of sense, satire, and scholarship (to combine Wordsworth with Warrington). In lighter respects, in respects of form and movement, and it is absolutely impossible that he should have been an Evangelical.

  We must not dismiss without some special mention the episode — though it is not properly an episode, inasmuch as it has throughout an important connection with the working of the story — of ‘Aristophanes in London.’ This has sometimes been adversely criticised as not sufficiently antique — which seems to overlook the obvious retort that if it had been more so it could not by any possibility have been sufficiently modern. Those who know something of Aristophanes and something of London may doubt whether it could have established the nexus much better. I have elsewhere pointed out the curious connection with Mansel’s Phrontisterion, which was considerably earlier in date, and with the sentiments of which Peacock would have been in the heartiest agreement. But it is extremely unlikely that he ever saw it. His antipathy to the English universities appears to have been one of the most enduring of his crazes, probably because it was always the most unreasonable; and though there is no active renewal of hostilities in this novel (or none of importance), it is noticeable there is also no direct or indirect palinode as there is in most other cases. As for the play itself, it seems to me very good. Miss Gryll must have looked delightful as Circe (we get a more distinct description of her personality here than anywhere else), Gryllus has an excellent standpoint, and the dialogue, though unequal, is quite admirable at the best. Indeed there is a Gilbertian tone about the whole piece which I should be rather more surprised at being the first to note, so far as I know, if I were not pretty well prepared to find that the study of the average dramatic critic is not much in Peacock. The choric trochees (which by the way is a tautology) are of the highest excellence, especially the piece beginning —