The Project Gutenberg eBook of Gryll Grange
Title: Gryll Grange
Author: Thomas Love Peacock
Commentator: George Saintsbury
Illustrator: F. H. Townsend
Release date: May 17, 2007 [eBook #21514]
Most recently updated: March 3, 2017
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger
GRYLL GRANGE
By Thomas Love Peacock
GRYLL GRANGE
BY THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE
SAINTSBURY
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
1896
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 advocacy 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—
'As before the pike will fly'
in which Coeur-de-Lion's discomfiture of the 'septemvirate of quacks' is hymned; and the finale is quite Attic. I do not know whether the thing has ever been attempted as an actual show. Though rather exacting in its machinery, it ought to have been.
The novel is rather full of other verse, but except 'Love and Age'—so often mentioned, but never to be mentioned enough for its strange and admirable commixture of sense and sentiment, of knowledge of the heart and knowledge of life—this is not of the first class for Peacock, certainly not worthy to be ranked with the play. 'The Death of Philemon' is indeed a beautiful piece in its first half; the second were better 'cut' 'The Dappled Palfrey,' a very charming fabliau in the original, chiefly suggests the superiority of Lochinvar to which it is a sort of counterpart and complement. 'The New Order of Chivalry' with a good deal of truth has also a good deal of illiberality; and, amusing as it is, is a relapse into Peacock's old vein of almost insolent personality. Sir Moses Montefiore and Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy did not deserve, though they might afford to despise, the sort of cheap rallying here applied to them; and might have retaliated, not without point, on persons who drew large salaries at the India House, with frequent additional gratifications, and stood up for 'chivalry' in their leisure moments. And 'The Legend of St Laura' is not first rate. But the Italian translations make us wish for more of the same.
On the whole, however, though we may like some things more and some less here, I cannot conceive the whole being otherwise than delightful to any person of knowledge, sense, and taste. And as we close Peacock's novels there is this interesting though rather melancholy thought that we 'close the book' in more senses than one. They have never been imitated save afar off; and even the far-off imitations have not been very satisfactory. The English Muse seems to have set, at the joining of the old and new ages, this one person with the learning and tastes of the ancestors, with the irreverent criticism of the moderns, to comment on the transition; and, having fashioned him, to have broken the mould.
George Saintsbury.
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
Was the Young Lady Too Fastidious. 043-12
The Rev. Doctor Opimian. 047-16
Seven Young Women in a Bachelor's Establishment. 056-24
Verifying the Question of Hair Of The Vestals. 063-33
Should Not Trust Myself to Be Your Aga—aga. 076-44
Perfect Ideality of Beauty. 091-61
The Other Horse Prancing in Terror. 095-65
Reading his Favourite Poets. 107-77
In Vain Was Pursuit, Though Some Followed Pell-mell 132-100
Mr. Pallet Devoted to the Scenery 141-108
Lord Curryfin Swinging over the Stage 144-108
Found his Lordship Scrambling up the Bank 148-119
That Sail Will Never Put You Under the Water Again 150-120
A Singularly Refractory Specimen 153-123
I Expected to Find You Killed 156-124
Trying if he Could Not Out-do Mr. Tait 187-157
She Was an Atalanta on Ice As On Turf 191-161
Mr. Falconer's Mercury 197-167
He Heard a Good Deal of the Family News 200-167
Six Partners for Six Sisters 204-171
Moths Fluttering in the Light of Her Beauty 214-182
Sinking up to his Shoulders in a Hollow 225-196
Encouraged his Six Allies to Carry on the Siege 243-203
Constant All My Life to a Single Idea 250-208
Miss Gryll Was Resplendent As Circe 268-226
Her Every Movement Developed Some New Grace 275-235
You Are in Love, and Do Not Choose to Confess It. 279-239
Live in Hope; But Live on Beef and Ale 294-252
Your Handmaids Always Move in Pairs 298-256
Discoursing of Many Things, But Chiefly Of Morgana 304-261
She Appeared Before Him, Blushing and Trembling. 308-265
You Must Have Plenty of Ghosts in Greek and Latin 312-270
DETAILED CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
Misnomers
CHAPTER II
The Squire and his Niece
CHAPTER III
The Duke's Folly
CHAPTER IV
The Forest—A Soliloquy on Hair
CHAPTER V.
The Seven Sisters
CHAPTER VI
The Rustic Lover
CHAPTER VII
The Vicar and his Wife—Families of Love:—
The Newspaper
CHAPTER VIII
Pantopragmatics
CHAPTER IX
Saint Catharine
CHAPTER X
The Thunderstorm
CHAPTER XI
Electrical Science—The Death of Philemon
CHAPTER XII
The Forest Dell—The Power of Love—The Lottery
of Marriage
CHAPTER XIII
Lord Curryfin—Siberian Dinners—Social Monotony
CHAPTER XIV
Music and Painting—Jack of Dover
CHAPTER XV
Expression in Music—The Dappled Palfrey—Love
and Age—Competitive Examination
CHAPTER XVI
Miss Niphet—The Theatre—The Lake—Divided Attraction
—Infallible Safety
CHAPTER XVII
Horse-Taming—Love in Dilemma—Injunctions—Sonorous Vases
CHAPTER XVIII
Lectures—The Power of Public Opinion—A New
Order of Chivalry
CHAPTER XIX
A Symposium—Transatlantic Tendencies
—After-Dinner Lectures—Education
CHAPTER XX
Algernon and Morgana—Opportunity and Repentance
—The Forest in Winter
CHAPTER XXI
Skating—Pas de deux on the Ice—Congeniality
—Flints among Bones
CHAPTER XXII
The Seven against Thebes—A Soliloquy on Christmas
CHAPTER XXIII
The two Quadrilles—Pope's Ombre—Poetical Truth to
Nature—Cleopatra
CHAPTER XXIV
Progress of Sympathy—Love's Injunctions—Orlando
Innamorato
CHAPTER XXV
Harry and Dorothy
CHAPTER XXVI
Doubts and Questions
CHAPTER XXVII
Love in Memory
CHAPTER XXVIII
Aristophanes in London
CHAPTER XXIX
The Bald Venus—Inez de Castro—The Unity of Love
CHAPTER XXX
A Captive Knight—Richard and Alice
CHAPTER XXXI
A Twelfth-Night Ball—Pantopragmatic Cookery
—Modern Vandalism—A Bowl of Punch
CHAPTER XXXII
Hopes and Fears—Compensations in Life—Athenian
Comedy—Madeira and Music—Confidences
CHAPTER XXXIII
The Conquest of Thebes
CHAPTER XXXIV
Christmas Tales—Classical Tales of Wonder—The
Host's Ghost—A Tale of a Shadow—A Tale of
a Bogle—The Legend of St. Laura
Rejected Suitors—Conclusion
GRYLL GRANGE
Like the blind leading of the blind:—
And like the world, men's jobbemoles
Turn round upon their ears the poles,
And what they're confidently told
By no sense else can be controll'd.
In the following pages the New Forest is always mentioned as if it were still unenclosed. This is the only state in which the Author has been acquainted with it. Since its enclosure, he has never seen it, and purposes never to do so.
The mottoes are sometimes specially apposite to the chapters to which they are prefixed; but more frequently to the general scope, or, to borrow a musical term, the motivo of the operetta.
CHAPTER I
MISNOMERS
taraquam non redituram, consumerem.—Petronius Arbiter.
Always and everywhere I have so lived, that I might consume
the passing light as if it were not to return.
'Palestine soup!' said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, dining with his friend Squire Gryll; 'a curiously complicated misnomer. We have an excellent old vegetable, the artichoke, of which we eat the head; we have another of subsequent introduction, of which we eat the root, and which we also call artichoke, because it resembles the first in flavour, although, me judice, a very inferior affair. This last is a species of the helianthus, or sunflower genus of the Syngenesia frustranea class of plants. It is therefore a girasol, or turn-to-the-sun. From this girasol we have made Jerusalem, and from the Jerusalem artichoke we make Palestine soup.'
Mr. Gryll. A very good thing, doctor.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. A very good thing; but a palpable misnomer.
Mr. Gryll. I am afraid we live in a world of misnomers, and of a worse kind than this. In my little experience I have found that a gang of swindling bankers is a respectable old firm; that men who sell their votes to the highest bidder, and want only 'the protection of the ballot' to sell the promise of them to both parties, are a free and independent constituency; that a man who successively betrays everybody that trusts him, and abandons every principle he ever professed, is a great statesman, and a Conservative, forsooth, a nil conservando; that schemes for breeding pestilence are sanitary improvements; that the test of intellectual capacity is in swallow, and not in digestion; that the art of teaching everything, except what will be of use to the recipient, is national education; and that a change for the worse is reform. Look across the Atlantic. A Sympathiser would seem to imply a certain degree of benevolent feeling. Nothing of the kind. It signifies a ready-made accomplice in any species of political villainy. A Know-Nothing would seem to imply a liberal self-diffidence—on the scriptural principle that the beginning of knowledge is to know that thou art ignorant. No such thing. It implies furious political dogmatism, enforced by bludgeons and revolvers. A Locofoco is the only intelligible term: a fellow that would set any place on fire to roast his own eggs. A Filibuster is a pirate under national colours; but I suppose the word in its origin implies something virtuous: perhaps a friend of humanity.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. More likely a friend of roaring-(Greek phrase)—in the sense in which roaring is used by our old dramatists; for which see Middleton's Roaring Girl, and the commentators thereon.
Mr. Gryll. While we are on the subject of misnomers, what say you to the wisdom of Parliament?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Why, sir, I do not call that a misnomer. The term wisdom is used in a parliamentary sense. The wisdom of Parliament is a wisdom sui generis. It is not like any other wisdom. It is not the wisdom of Socrates, nor the wisdom of Solomon. It is the wisdom of Parliament. It is not easily analysed or defined; but it is very easily understood. It has achieved wonderful things by itself, and still more when Science has come to its aid. Between them they have poisoned the Thames, and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks. It is pleasant that the precious effluvium has been brought so efficiently under the Wisdom's own wise nose. Thereat the nose, like Trinculo's, has been in great indignation. The Wisdom has ordered the Science to do something. The Wisdom does not know what, nor the Science either. But the Wisdom has empowered the Science to spend some millions of money; and this, no doubt, the Science will do. When the money has been spent, it will be found that the something has been worse than nothing. The Science will want more money to do some other something, and the Wisdom will grant it. Redit labor actus in orbem.{1} But you have got on moral and political ground. My remark was merely on a perversion of words, of which we have an inexhaustible catalogue.
__Mr. Gryll.__ Whatever ground we take, doctor, there is one point common to most of these cases: the word presents an idea which does not belong to the subject, critically considered. Palestine soup is not more remote from the true Jerusalem, than many an honourable friend from public honesty and honour. However, doctor, what say you to a glass of old Madeira, which I really believe is what it is called?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. In vino Veritas. I accept with pleasure.
Miss Gryll. You and my uncle, doctor, get up a discussion on everything that presents itself; dealing with your theme like a series of variations in music. You have run half round the world à propos of the soup.{1} What say you to the fish?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Premising that this is a remarkably fine slice of salmon, there is much to be said about fish: but not in the way of misnomers. Their names are single and simple. Perch, sole, cod, eel, carp, char, skate, tench, trout, brill, bream, pike, and many others, plain monosyllables: salmon, dory, turbot, gudgeon, lobster, whitebait, grayling, haddock, mullet, herring, oyster, sturgeon, flounder, turtle, plain dissyllables: only two trisyllables worth naming, anchovy and mackerel; unless any one should be disposed to stand up for halibut, which, for my part, I have excommunicated.
Mr. Gryll. I agree with you on that point; but I think you have named one or two that might as well keep it company.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I do not think I have named a single unpresentable fish.
Mr. Gryll. Bream, doctor: there is not much to be said for bream.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. On the contrary, sir, I think there is much to be said for him. In the first place, there is the authority of the monastic brotherhoods, who are universally admitted to have been connoisseurs in fish, and in the mode of preparing it; and you will find bream pie set down as a prominent item of luxurious living in the indictments prepared against them at the dissolution of the monasteries. The work of destruction was rather too rapid, and I fear the receipt is lost. But he can still be served up as an excellent stew, provided always that he is full-grown, and has swum all his life in clear running water. I call everything fish that seas, lakes, and rivers furnish to cookery; though, scientifically, a turtle is a reptile, and a lobster an insect. Fish, Miss Gryll—I could discourse to you on fish by the hour: but for the present I will forbear: as Lord Curryfin is coming down to Thornback Bay, to lecture the fishermen on fish and fisheries, and to astonish them all with the science of their art You will, no doubt, be curious to hear him. There will be some reserved seats.
Miss Gryll. I shall be very curious to hear him, indeed. I have never heard a lecturing lord. The fancy of lords and gentlemen to lecture everybody on everything, everywhere, seems to me something very comical; but perhaps it is something very serious, gracious in the lecturer, and instructive to the audience. I shall be glad to be cured of my unbecoming propensity to laugh whenever I hear of a lecturing lord.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I hope, Miss Gryll, you will not laugh at Lord Curryfin: for you may be assured nothing will be farther from his lordship's intention than to say anything in the slightest degree droll.
Mr. Gryll. Doctor Johnson was astonished at the mania for lectures, even in his day, when there were no lecturing lords. He thought little was to be learned from lectures, unless where, as in chemistry, the subject required illustration by experiment. Now, if your lord is going to exhibit experiments in the art of cooking fish, with specimens in sufficient number for all his audience to taste, I have no doubt his lecture will be well attended, and a repetition earnestly desired.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I am afraid the lecture will not have the aid of such pleasant adventitious attractions. It will be a pure scientific exposition, carefully classified, under the several divisions and subdivisions of Ichthyology, Entomology, Herpetology, and Conchology. But I agree with Doctor Johnson, that little is to be learned from lectures. For the most part those who do not already understand the subject will not understand the lecture, and those who do will learn nothing from it. The latter will hear many things they would like to contradict, which the bienséance of the lecture-room does not allow. I do not comprehend how people can find amusement in lectures. I should much prefer a tenson of the twelfth century, when two or three masters of the Gai Saber discussed questions of love and chivalry.
Miss Gryll. I am afraid, doctor, our age is too prosy for that sort of thing. We have neither wit enough, nor poetry enough, to furnish the disputants. I can conceive a state of society in which such tensons would form a pleasant winter evening amusement: but that state of society is not ours.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Well, Miss Gryll, I should like, some winter evening, to challenge you to a tenson, and your uncle should be umpire. I think you have wit enough by nature, and I have poetry enough by memory, to supply a fair portion of the requisite materials, without assuming an absolute mastery of the Gai Saber.
Miss Gryll. I shall accept the challenge, doctor. The wit on one side will, I am afraid, be very shortcoming; but the poetry on the other will no doubt be abundant.
Mr. Gryll. Suppose, doctor, you were to get up a tenson a little more relative to our own wise days. Spirit-rapping, for example, is a fine field. Nec pueri credunt... Sed tu vera puta.{1} You might go beyond the limits of a tenson. There is ample scope for an Aristophanic comedy. In the contest between the Just and the Unjust in the Clouds, and in other scenes of Aristophanes, you have ancient specimens of something very like tensons, except that love has not much share in them. Let us for a moment suppose this same spirit-rapping to be true—dramatically so, at least. Let us fit up a stage for the purpose: make the invoked spirits visible as well as audible: and calling before us some of the illustrious of former days, ask them what they think of us and our doings? Of our astounding progress of intellect? Our march of mind? Our higher tone of morality? Our vast diffusion of education? Our art of choosing the most unfit man by competitive examination?