Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  The drawing-room and the chambers for visitors were between the Tower and the gynoceum, or female apartments, which were as completely separated from the rest of the house as they could have been in Athens.

  After some anxious inquiries, it was reported that the young lady was sleeping, and that one or other of the sisters would keep constant watch by her. It was therefore arranged that Mr. Gryll should dine and pass the night where he was. Before dinner he had the satisfaction of hearing from medical authority that all would be well after a little time.

  Harry Hedgerow had bethought him of a retired physician, who lived with a maiden sister in a cottage at no great distance from the Tower, and who often gave gratuitous advice to his poorer neighbours. If he prescribed anything beyond their means, himself or his sister was always ready to supply it. Though their own means were limited, they were the good angels of a small circumference.

  The old physician confirmed the opinion already given by the sisters, that the young lady for the present only required repose; but he accepted the invitation to remain till the morning, in the event of his advice being needed.

  So Miss Gryll remained with the elder sisters. Mr. Gryll and the two doctors, spiritual and temporal, sat down to dinner with Mr. Falconer, and were waited on, as usual, by the younger handmaids.

  CHAPTER XI

  ELECTRICAL SCIENCE — THE DEATH OF PHILEMON

  Where wine is not, no mirth the banquet knows:

  Where wine is not, the dance all joyless goes.

  The man, oppressed with cares, who tastes the bowl,

  Shall shake the weight of sorrow from his soul.

  Bacchus, on the birth of the vine, predicting its benefits:

  in the twelfth book of the Dionysiaca of Nonnus.

  The conversation at dinner turned on the occurrences of the morning and the phenomena of electricity. The physician, who had been a traveller, related many anecdotes from his own observation: especially such as tended to show by similarity that the injury to Miss Gryll would not be of long duration. He had known, in similar cases, instances of apparent total paralysis; but he had always found it temporary. Perhaps in a day or two, but at most in a very few days, it would certainly pass away. In the meantime, he recommended absolute repose. Mr. Falconer entreated Mr. Gryll to consider the house as his own. Matters were arranged accordingly; and it was determined that the next morning a messenger should be despatched to Gryll Grange for a supply of apparel. The Rev. Dr. Opimian, who was as fond as the Squire himself of the young lady, had been grievously discomposed by the accident of the morning, and felt that he should not thoroughly recover his serenity till he could again see her in her proper character, the light and life of her society. He quoted Homer, Æschylus, Aristotle, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Horace, Persius, and Pliny, to show that all which is practically worth knowing on the subject of electricity had been known to the ancients. The electric telegraph he held to be a nuisance, as disarranging chronology, and giving only the heads of a chapter, of which the details lost their interest before they arrived, the heads of another chapter having intervened to destroy it. Then, what an amount of misery it inflicted, when, merely saying that there had been a great battle, and that thousands had been wounded or killed, it maintained an agony of suspense in all who had friends on the field, till the ordinary channels of intelligence brought the names of the suflferers. No Sicilian tyrant had invented such an engine of cruelty. This declamation against a supposed triumph of modern science, which was listened to with some surprise by the physician, and with great respect by his other auditors, having somewhat soothed his troubled spirit, in conjunction with the physician’s assurance, he propitiated his Genius by copious libations of claret, pronouncing high panegyrics on the specimen before him, and interspersing quotations in praise of wine as the one great panacea for the cares of this world.

  A week passed away, and the convalescent had made good progress. Mr. Falconer had not yet seen his fair guest. Six of the sisters, one remaining with Miss Gryll, performed every evening, at the earnest request of Mr. Gryll, a great variety of music, but always ending with the hymn to their master’s saint. The old physician came once or twice, and stayed the night. The Reverend Doctor Opimian went home for his Sunday duties, but took too much interest in the fair Morgana not to return as soon as he could to the Tower. Arriving one morning in the first division of the day, and ascending to the library, he found his young friend writing. He asked him if he were working on the Aristophanic comedy. Mr. Falconer said he got on best with that in the doctor’s company. ‘But I have been writing,’ he said, ‘on something connected with the Athenian drama. I have been writing a ballad on the death of Philemon, as told by Suidas and Apuleius.’ The doctor expressed a wish to hear it, and Mr. Falconer read it to him.

  THE DEATH OF PHILEMON

  1 Suidas: sub voce (Greek), Apuleius: Florid, 16.

  Closed was Philemon’s hundredth year:

  The theatre was thronged to hear

  His last completed play:

  In the mid scene, a sudden rain

  Dispersed the crowd — to meet again

  On the succeeding day.

  He sought his home, and slept, and dreamed.

  Nine maidens through his door, it seemed,

  Passed to the public street.

  He asked them, ‘Why they left his home?’

  They said, ‘A guest will hither come

  We must not stay to meet.’

  He called his boy with morning light,

  Told him the vision of the night,

  And bade his play be brought.

  His finished page again he scanned,

  Resting his head upon his hand,

  Absorbed in studious thought

  He knew not what the dream foreshowed:

  That nought divine may hold abode

  Where death’s dark shade is felt:

  And therefore were the Muses nine

  Leaving the old poetic shrine,

  Where they so long had dwelt.

  II

  The theatre was thronged once more,

  More thickly than the day before,

  To hear the half-heard song.

  The day wore on. Impatience came.

  They called upon Philemon’s name,

  With murmurs loud and long.

  Some sought at length his studious cell,

  And to the stage returned, to tell

  What thousands strove to ask.

  ‘The poet we have been to seek

  Sate with his hand upon his cheek,

  As pondering o’er his task.

  ‘We spoke. He made us no reply.

  We reverentially drew nigh,

  And twice our errand told.

  He answered not We drew more near

  The awful mystery then was clear:

  We found him stiff and cold.

  ‘Struck by so fair a death, we stood

  Awhile in sad admiring mood:

  Then hastened back, to say

  That he, the praised and loved of all,

  Is deaf for ever to your call:

  That on this self-same day,

  ‘When here presented should have been

  The close of his fictitious scene,

  His life’s true scene was o’er:

  We seemed, in solemn silence awed,

  To hear the “Farewell and applaud,”

  Which he may speak no more.

  ‘Of tears the rain gave prophecy:

  The nuptial dance of comedy

  Yields to the funeral train.

  Assemble where his pyre must burn:

  Honour his ashes in their urn:

  And on another day return

  To hear his songs again.’

  The Rev. Dr. Opimian. A beautiful fiction.

  Mr. Falconer. If it be a fiction. The supernatural is confined to the dream. All the rest is probable; and I am willing to think it true, dream and all.

  The Rev. Dr. Opimian. You are determined to
connect the immaterial with the material world, as far as you can.

  Mr. Falconer. I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.

  The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Certainly, there is much in the material world to displease sensitive and imaginative minds; but I do not know any one who has less cause to complain of it than you have. You are surrounded with all possible comforts, and with all the elements of beauty, and of intellectual enjoyment.

  Mr. Falconer. It is not my own world that I complain of.

  It is the world on which I look ‘from the loopholes of retreat.’ I cannot sit here, like one of the Gods of Epicurus, who, as Cicero says, was satisfied with thinking, through all eternity, ‘how comfortable he was.’ I look with feelings of intense pain on the mass of poverty and crime; of unhealthy, unavailing, unremunerated toil, blighting childhood in its blossom, and womanhood in its prime; of ‘all the oppressions that are done under the sun.’

  1 Comprehende igitur animo, et propone ante oculos, deura

  nihil aliud in omni aeternitate, nisi, Mihi pulchre est, et,

  Ego beatus sum, cogitant em. Cicero: De natura deorum,

  1. i. c. 41.

  The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I feel with you on all these points; but there is much good in the world; more good than evil, I have always maintained.

  They would have gone off in a discussion on this point, but the French cook warned them to luncheon.

  In the evening the young lady was sufficiently recovered to join the little party in the drawing-room, which consisted, as before, of Mr. Falconer, Mr. Gryll, Doctor Anodyne, and the Reverend Doctor Opimian. Miss Gryll was introduced to Mr. Falconer. She was full of grateful encomium for the kind attention of the sisters, and expressed an earnest desire to hear their music. The wish was readily complied with. She heard them with great pleasure, and, though not yet equal to much exertion, she could not yet refrain from joining in with them in their hymn to Saint Catharine.

  She accompanied them when they retired.

  The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I presume those Latin words are genuine old monastic verses: they have all the air of it.

  Mr. Falconer. They are so, and they are adapted to old music.

  Dr. Anodyne. There is something in this hymn very solemn and impressive. In an age like ours, in which music and pictures are the predominant tastes, I do not wonder that the forms of the old Catholic worship are received with increasing favour. There is a sort of adhesion to the old religion, which results less from faith than from a certain feeling of poetry; it finds its disciples; but it is of modern growth; and has very essential differences from what it outwardly resembles.

  The Rev. Dr. Opimian. It is, as I have frequently had occasion to remark, and as my young friend here will readily admit, one of the many forms of the love of ideal beauty, which, without being in itself religion, exerts on vivid imaginations an influence that is very often like it.

  Mr. Falconer. An orthodox English Churchman was the poet who sang to the Virgin:

  ‘Thy image fells to earth. Yet some, I ween,

  Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,

  As to a visible Power, in which did blend

  All that was mixed and reconciled in thee,

  Of mother’s love with maiden purity,

  Of high with low, celestial with terrene.’

  1 Wordsworth: Ecclesiastical Sonnets, i 21.

  The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Well, my young friend, the love of ideal beauty has exercised none but a benignant influence on you, whatever degree of orthodoxy there may be in your view of it.

  The little party separated for the night.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE FOREST DELL — THE POWER OF LOVE — THE LOTTERY OF MARRIAGE

  (Greek passage) Philetaerus: Cynagis.

  I pray you, what can mortal man do better

  Than live his daily life as pleasantly

  As daily means avail him? Life’s frail tenure

  Warns not to trust to-morrow.

  The next day Mr. Falconer was perfectly certain that Miss Gryll was not yet well enough to be removed. No one was anxious to refute the proposition; they were all so well satisfied with,»the place and the company they were in, that they felt, the young lady included, a decided unwillingness to go. That day Miss Gryll came to dinner, and the next day she came to breakfast, and in the evening she joined in the music, and, in short, she was once more altogether herself; but Mr. Falconer continued to insist that the journey home would be too much for her. When this excuse failed, he still entreated his new friends to remain; and so passed several days. At length Mr. Gryll found he must resolve on departing, especially as the time had arrived when he expected some visitors. He urgently invited Mr. Falconer to visit him in return. The invitation was cordially accepted, and in the meantime considerable progress had been made in the Aristophanic comedy. Mr. Falconer, after the departure of his visitors, went up into his library. He took down one book after another, but they did not fix his attention as they used to do; he turned over the leaves of Homer, and read some passages about Circe; then took down Bojardo, and read of Morgana and Falerina and Dragontina; then took down Tasso and read of Armida. He would not look at Ariosto’s Alcina, because her change into an old woman destroyed all the charm of the previous picture. He dwelt on the enchantress who remained in unaltered beauty. But even this he did only by fits and starts, and found himself continually wandering away towards a more enchanting reality.

  He descended to his bedroom, and meditated on ideal beauty in the portraits of Saint Catharine. But he could not help thinking that the ideal might be real, at least in one instance, and he wandered down into his drawing-room. There he sat absorbed in thought, till his two young handmaids appeared with his luncheon. He smiled when he saw them, and sat down to the table as if nothing had disturbed him. Then, taking his stick and his dog, he walked out into the forest.

  There was within moderate distance a deep dell, in the bottom of which ran a rivulet, very small in dry weather, but in heavy rains becoming a torrent, which had worn itself a high-banked channel, winding in fantastic curves from side to side of its narrow boundaries. Above this channel old forest trees rose to a great height on both sides of the dell The slope every here and there was broken by promontories which during centuries the fall of the softer portions of the soil had formed; and on these promontories were natural platforms, covered, as they were more or less accessible to the sun, with grass and moss and fern and foxglove, and every variety of forest vegetation. These platforms were favourite resorts of deer, which imparted to the wild scene its own peculiar life.

  This was a scene in which, but for the deeper and deeper wear of the floods and the bolder falls of the promontories, time had made little change. The eyes of the twelfth century had seen it much as it appeared to those of the nineteenth. The ghosts of departed ages might seem to pass through it in succession, with all their changes of faith and purpose and manners and costume. To a man who loved to dwell in the past, there could not be a more congenial scene. One old oak stood in the centre of one of the green platforms, and a portion of its gnarled roots presented a convenient seat. Mr. Falconer had frequently passed a day here when alone. The deer had become too accustomed to him to fly at his approach, and the dog had been too well disciplined to molest them. There he had sat for hours at a time, reading his favourite poets.

  There was no great poet with some of whose scenes this scenery did not harmonise. The deep woods that surrounded the dwelling of Circe, the obscure sylvan valley in which Dante met Virgil, the forest depths through which Angelica fled, the enchanted wood in which Rinaldo met the semblance of Armida, the forest-brook by which Jaques moralised over the wounded deer, were all reproduced in this single spot, and fancy peopled it at pleasure with nymphs and genii, fauns and satyrs, knights and ladies, friars, foresters, hunters, and huntress maids, till the whole diurnal world seemed to pass away like a vision. T
here, for him, Matilda had gathered flowers on the opposite bank; Laura had risen from one of the little pools — resting-places of the stream — to seat herself in the shade; Rosalind and Maid Marian had peeped forth from their alleys green; all different in form, in feature, and in apparel; but now they were all one; each, as she rose in imagination, presented herself under the aspect of the newly-known Morgana.

  1 Dante: Purgatorio, c. 28.

  2 Or in forma di Ninfa o d’ altra Diva,

  Che del più chiaro fondo di Sorga esca,

  E pongasi a seder in sulla riva.

  PETRARCA: Sonetto 240.

  Finding his old imaginations thus disturbed, he arose and walked home. He dined alone, drank a bottle of Madeira, as if it had been so much water, summoned the seven sisters to the drawing-room earlier and detained them later than usual, till their music and its old associations had restored him to something like tranquillity. He had always placed the summum bonum of life in tranquillity, and not in excitement. He felt that his path was now crossed by a disturbing force, and determined to use his utmost exertions to avoid exposing himself again to its influence.

  In this mood the Reverend Doctor Opimian found him one morning in the library reading. He sprang up to meet the Divine, exclaiming, ‘Ah, dear doctor, I am very glad to see you. Have you any special favourite among the Odes of Pindar?’