BOOKS
Peacock's Private Eye
BY OLIVIA MANNING
His paperback* is a reissue of the excellent I edition of Peacock's seven novels that Rupert Hart-Davis put out fifteen years ago. It retains the perceptive introductions and detailed notes by which Mr. David Garnett brought these 'period' works close to our own time.
Today they seem even closer, perhaps,' because 'satire' has become big business, be- cause the irrational crank, the scientific humbug and the anti-scientific nostrum loom larger in our daily lives. Even the Robin Hood mock-epic Maid Marian (which just antedates Ivanhoe in composition), takes its place with tongue-in-cheek Wardour Street epics and soap operas. (TV drama script editors, please note.) Peacock's talent, which combined unyield- ing common sense like Dr. Johnson's, a radical loathing of cant like Cobbett's, and a flair for epigram like Disraeli's and Wilde's, is as peren- nial as the themes he satirises. If the ancestors of his grotesque enthusiasts include Sipsop, the Pythagorean Tilly Lally, the Siptippidist, and Inflammable Gas, the Wind-finder, from Blake's An Island in the 'Moon, their descendants in- clude Charlie Suet, the Filthistan Trio and Dr. Strabismus of Utrecht, Whom God Preserve, from Beachcomber's daily piece.
In reading the novels and the poems with which they are decorated, one is made aware, apart from the satire, of his passion for mountain scenery, his love of music (he was an opera critic for some time), his enjoyment of good food and wine, his neatness as a versifier, and his liking and respect for women. Indeed, his young independent women, especially Lady Clarinda in Crotchet Castle, combine wit, reason and charm in a way rare for his, or any, time: He had a long life, which stretched from 1785 to 1866. An independent radical, he wrote before his death that he had lived to see 'the Tories completely extinct as the mam- moth.' Their successors, the Conservatives, he thought were like 'Falstaff's otter—neither fish nor flesh.' He was too young to experience the first romantic rush of enthusiasm for the French Revolution. He grew up under the oppression and censorship which followed the victory over Napoleon. Like that dwindling body of people today who still will not visit Spain and lament the falling-away of the revolutionaries of the Thirties, he attacked Wordsworth and Coleridge as apostates when they deserted the French cause after the revolution had established itself. With Hazlitt. he thought they had 'turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side.' Southey, man and works, he abominated, and when talking of these three his usual urbane good-natured banter puts on a cutting edge. In Crotchet Castle, Lady Clarinda says: 'Why, they say that even Mr. Skionar [Coleridge], though he is a great dreamer, always dreams with his eyes open, or IN ith one * THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK: COLLECTED Novra.s.
Two volumes. (Harvest Books: Hart-Davis, los. each.)
eye at any rate, which is an eye to his gain: but I believe that in this respect the poor man has got an ill name by keeping bad company. He has two dear friends, Mr. Wilful Wontsee [Wordsworth], and Mr. Rumblesack Shantsee [Southey], poets of some note, who used to see visions of Utopia, and pure republics be- yond the Western deep: but finding that these El Dorados biought them no revenue, they turned their vision-seeing faculty into the more profitable channel of espying all sorts of virtues in the high and the mighty, who were able and willing to pay for the discovery.'
In all the novels proper, guests stay at a house to eat heartily, drink copiously, walk vigorously, woo wittily, dispute prodigiously, sing paren- thetically and finally marry so that the book can end. It is hard to say whether hearty eating and drinking are a means to lively conversation or ends in themselves. 'I hate lecturers over the bottle,' says one bon viveur, but adds, Tray, sir, what is political economy?'—and we are off. In any case, breakfast, luncheon, dinner, or a long exercise in pedestrianism are accompanied by conversational set-pieces, Socratic dialogues with acrid or mellow overtones of exposition and debunking.
Ridicule by means of detached logic and un- failing courtesy is his weapon. Time has vindi- cated his opinions, for the most part. His philosophers, his utilitarians, his landscape gar- deners (interior decorators they would be today), his businessmen and estate agents, his phrenolo- gists, his lovers of the antique, his politicians, seem to have been observed by our con- temporary Private Eye. Out of their own mouths they convict themselves, and are dis- missed with an uncompromising, no-nonsense refutation. Only with Mr. Firedamp does he come unstuck. Mr. Firedamp, in the midst of an absurd bevy of cranky Utopians, desiderates that the one thing of all he would do if he had un- limited money, would be to 'drain the country, and get rid of malaria by abolishing duck- ponds.' Peacock, more or less in the character off the Reverend Doctor Folliott, replies, 'Punch, sir, punch—there is no antidote like punch.'
It has been generally agreed that there is little development in his work, but that is not alto- gether true. The first three works, written before his marriage, Headlong Hall, Melincourt and Nightmare Abbey, are drawn directly from his friends, and from foibles with which he was in daily contact. Shelley can be seen plain in all of them, regretting the vanished golden age and advocating vegetarianism. With his habitual generosity, Shelley appreciated the satire, which he described as 'admirably conceived and executed.' More surprising, perhaps, was Byron's approval, for, as Mr. Cypress in Nightmare Abbey, he was trenchantly attacked for his histrionic gloom: 'We wither from our youth, we gasp away—sick—sick—'; Byron sent Pea- cock congratulations and a rosebud. Coleridge with his polysyllabic German transcendentalism is never far from the scene. Melincourt lacks the tautness of the other novels. It meanders on without shape, but is immensely amusing. The idea of the orang-utang who becomes an MP for a rotten borough has recently been borrowed by Mr. Frow in his play Mr. Burke, MP.
At the beginning of 1819, when he was thirty- three, Peacock obtained by examination a regu- lar post at the India House. It is said that his test papers were marked by the examiners: `Nothing superfluous and nothing wanting.' He therefore decided to woo and marry Jane Gryffydh, who had been fond of him years before, but whom he had not seen for eight years. After some hesitation about her own worthiness, she accepted him. Unfortunately, Mrs. Peacock soon became an invalid, but it is probably through her that he acquired the greater part of his Welsh. Two years after his marriage. Maid Marian appeared, and as it was very much to the popular taste for mediaeval period fiction, it became the best liked of his works. He then left Sherwood Forest for wild Wales, and some years later published The Misfortunes of Elphin, based on stories from the Mabinogion, which Peacock must have acquired in Welsh, as it wasn't trans- lated until the late 1830s. They both make good reading and in Elphin, apart from the familiar `War Song of Dinas Vawr,' we meet the gar- gantuan figure of Prince Seithenyn ap Seithyn Saidi, who could drink the ocean dry.
After some years more of married life, Pea- cock published Crotchet Castle, and here the personal inspiration of the earlier novels has been broadened by more general targets. It is perhaps not quite as well-plotted as Nightmare Abbey, but the dialogue in the discussions reaches perfection. For epigrammatic cogency, there is nothing in English to beat it, and Lady Clarinda and the Reverend Doctor Folliott are among the finest characters in our literature.
Twenty-nine years later, when he was over seventy, Peacock published Gryll Grange. Forty- four years had passed since his first symposium in Headlong Hall. The world of the stage-coach was as dead as the dodo; the eccentricities and humours of the young Romantic poets belonged to another age. The modern world had arrived, and though Peacock didn't like much of it, he had not hardened into an unfeeling laudator temporis acti. He still shot down folly and cant, and for the first time perhaps we hear the now familiar suspicion of science itself, not simply of its more lunatic manifestations: ,`Science is one thing and wisdom is another—I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exter- minate the human race.' The virtue of Peacock was that when he said it he stood alone. New readers may approch him best through Crotchet Castle. and Gryll Grange. Each novel carries some remarkable prediction, and all are written with an unflinching honesty that might well be emulated today. At a time when literature is more and more invaded by public relations and log-rollers, we reflect on the Reverend Doctor Folliott's opinion of certain literary practitioners: `Well, sir, these gentlemen . . . in politics have run with the hare and hunted with the hound. In criticism they have, knowingly and un- blushingly, given false characters, both for good and for evil: sticking at no art of misrepresen- tation, to clear out of the field of literature all who stood in the way of the interests of their own clique. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never com- mitted it, or were entitled to a monopoly of it. The latter, I rather think, was what they wanted.'
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