Laugh When You Can
BY KINGSLEY AMIS UNTIL about twenty years ago, Peacock was still getting his fair share of literary attention, in quantity at any rate: the big scholarly Halliford edition was still com- ing out in the 1930s, and at that time the belletristic belt was kept rolling merrily along with stuff about his connections with Wales and his friendship with Shelley. More recently there has been a recession in this line, while no modern critic tilt I know of has thrown more than a passing glance towards Peacock's work. It may be that the obvious joviality of most of that work, coupled with an absence of complexity and of the dark night of the soul, has put off some possible investiga- tors; others may have decided, with some show of reason, that any friend of Shelley's could be no friend of theirs. However this may be, when we pick up the nice new Macmillan reprint of Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle,* we find old George Saintsbury still occupying the Introduction, just as he did in the printing of sixty years ago.
Now there is clearly much to be said for this arrangement and for Saintsbury himself, who was debarred by nature from writing anything not worth reading, and is typically judicious here in his account of Peacockian ingredients and formulas. He goes as far and as amiably as most university students, and many general readers, will probably require. Talents far more extraordinary than his, on the other hand, would have been needed to prevent much of what he says from dating, in particular a mysterious remark about Peacock's letters to Lord Broughton being inaccessible 'for another half-dozen years,' which time has robbed of topicality. And talking of dating, was it really necessary to reproduce here F. H. Townsend's truly horrible illustrations to the old edition, with their olio of Rossetti and 1890s Punch? If book-illustration is coming back, as some signs indicate, surely someone on the pay-roll of the Radio Times or of some hot-drink manufacturer could have been called in to replace Townsend? It wouldn't have been much trouble, any more than it would have been much trouble to announce the identity of the 'G.' who indefatigably footnotes the anachronisms of Maid Marian.
It may reasonably be objected that this doesn't really matter, that this reprint has made two of the novels more easily avail- able (in a pleasant binding) and that's what counts. I agree in a way. At the same time, if criticism is any use at all, I do feel that the expense of printing a new Introduction, at any rate, could reasonably have been borne and that a small cheque could have coaxed somebody a bit younger than Saintsbury into turning out a few thousand words which might have done something towards re-examining Peacock, towards seeing how he stands up to recent changes in taste and critical approach. Such an effort, such a revival of interest, would be worth while. I think, if onl) because its subject is almost the only nineteenth- century novelist free of what one might call the puffing and blowing so sadly common in the fiction of his age—and of our own.
The first thing, of course, would be,to throw out the notion. popular with Saintsburyite devotees of the printed word, that all Peacock's novels are good, that although Maid Marian may not be everybody's cup of ted and Melincourt drags here and there, the whole thing is much of a muchness. It would be more reasonable to argue that what we really have is a wild —
* Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle. By Thomas Lovc Peacock. ( M acmillan, 6s.)
disparity between different books and sometimes between parts of the same book, and an uncertainty on Peacock's part, never resolved or else resolved in the wrong way, about what he was trying for and what he was good at. There is no point, at this date, in glossing over the tedium of a great part of his work, in failing to recognise straightaway, for example. that The Misfortunes of Elphin is not superior enough to Maid Marian to make much odds and that both are fatally injured by whimsy and quaintness, by cumbersome ironising on modern life and, especially in Elplzin, by those erudition-exercises which will wring a repeated groan from any but the most addicted reader. This last defect, no doubt the result of Peacock's being what we have been taught to call an autodidact, comes near to ruining whole areas of nearly all the novels, not only through the mouths of those awful old gasbags the Reverend Doctors Folliott and Opimian, but in the author's personal commentary as well. It could be suggested, though, that none of this is really radical, and that the real trouble is to be found somewhere in Peacock's very conception of his own talents. He was never at his best, I think, as a pure satirist, or anyway not as the sort of satirist he spent most time on trying to be: the persecutor. of learned fools who condemn themselves by their own utterances.
A line must be drawn somewhere between the living and the faded parts of his work, but merely to draw that line between living and faded targets of ridicule—between, say, the Shelley bits in Nightmare Abbey and Mr. MacQuedy's political economy in Crotchet Castle—would not be quite adequate. To throw in a reflection on Peacock's inordinate capacity for simple diffuseness and repetition would have the advantage of helping to get MelMcourt and Gryll Grange out of the way (where they belong), but would be little use on the harder questions. What can we turn to next, then? To plot versus no plot? No : the answer that appeals to me is that Peacock was only at his best in farcical-sentimental comedy with a satiric background. The moment the satirist holds the stage he makes a dive for the lectern, and the reader, unfortified with cold fowl and Madeira, spreads a handkerchief over his face.
With Headlong Hall, accordingly, the obvious point to make is not that there is something intrinsically absurd about pic- turesque gardening which helps on the satire, but that the whole business leads up to, and is justified by, the demolition which blows Mr. Cranium into the lake; similarly, Mr. Escot is not just a deteriorationist, but a deteriorationist comically in love. And in Nightmare A bbey,.again, although all the raillery about romanticism has the advantage of bearing on something fairly durable in ideas and conduct—and Mr. Hilary's objec- tions to the ideology which 'quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph' are much more penetrating than most raillery—yet we can all agree that it would have little force if it were not made to focus upon Scythrop, whose antics are constantly being pulled across the border into farce, the domain where the amatory and moral themes of the book, remaining recognisable and indeed perfectly serious, are finally clinched. And in Crotchet Castle—who wouldn't consent to liquidating that whole tribe of after-dinner lecturers for the sake of a few more pages of the Matchless Clarinda taking the stuffing out of Captain Fitzchrome? Those scenes show Pea- cock in possession of something he never quite found again : a delightful airy felicity which looks back to Congreve and forward to Wilde:
samo love be a great deal safer in a castle, even if Mammon furnished the fortification? . . . A dun is a horridly vulgar creature; it is a creature I cannot endure the thought of : and a cottage lets him in so easily. Now a castle keeps him at bay. You are a half-pay officer, and are at leisureto command the garrison : but where is the castle? and who is to furnish the commissariat?
Passages like that, together with almost the whole of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, entitle Peacock to his place as a minor master—and as somebody far more energetically original than the chorus of drowsy Victorian and Edwardian eulogy would imply. That enchanting urbanity, which gave him command of a whole range between witty seriousness and demented knockabout, was something which disappeared from the English novel almost before it had properly arrived.
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