Peacock's joyful elegy for literature, Gryll Grange

Thomas Love Peacock has a few champions, readers of exquisite taste and refined sensibility blahbity blah blah.  Michael Dirda, of The Washington Post, is one of them, as Jenny of Shelf Love tells me.  He pointed me to another, the “minor prose stylist” Guy Davenport, who, Dirda says, “spent his last days rereading Peacock” – too good to check, that bit.

Why would Davenport do such a peculiar thing?  I found the answer in Peacock's final novel, Gryll Grange (1860), published when the author was seventy-five years old.  The world of Romanticism, Byronism, and Gothic foofaraw depicted in Nightmare Abbey, forty-two years earlier, must have looked so distant.

Gryll Grange is an elegy for culture and learning, for literature, but also a celebration of the renewal of literature.  Peacock had me worried, for a while, that his curmudgeonliness, a necessary trait in a decent satirist, had swallowed him whole, that the novel would be nothing but a complaint, that Peacock’s critique of progress had become desiccated.  The old, though, continues in the new in Peacock’s fantasy.  Gryll Grange is a variation of The Tempest.  Peacock breaks his staff with the knowledge that life will go on without him.

A young aesthete has established a shrine to Beauty, devoted to music, art, literature, elegance, and chastity.  He has chosen to live in an allegory.  A wise, happy clergyman, sharing his love of Greek learning and English elegance, introduces him to an elegant, beautiful, learned etc. etc. woman.  Another couple is dropped in to create a love rectangle, which works out the way it must.  Should the aesthete preserve his arid but beautiful fantasy world or live in the complex and imperfect real world?  This also works out the way it must.  Peacock is actually arguing against himself, against his own narrowness, and mine.

The keystones of the novel are literary.  The climax is the performance of an Aristophanic play.  Chapter headings are packed with Greek, Italian, and French quotations, translated by Peacock, and there are plenty more in the text of the novel.  Rabelais is a presiding spirit, as is the Shakespeare of forest fantasies like As You Like It.  Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato plays a central role in the romantic plot – shy lovers communicate by leaving Boiardo open to meaningful passages.  The choice of Boiardo is doubly meaningful – it does not matter that Boiardo was not able to finish his epic of Orlando.  Someone else, someone better, even, will take care of it later.

What is valuable will survive.  The novel ends with songs, and ghost stories (Gryll Grange is actually a Christmas novel), and weddings, and champagne.  Peacock, an old man, looks backs, but also forward.

I fear I have made a hash of this one.  Gryll Grange looks a lot like Peacock’s earlier novels, and passage by passage sounds like them.  Its mood is different, though, and its argument has shifted.  When I reread it during my last days, or perhaps before, I will try again.