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.

You may as well dine first, and be miserable afterwards.

The last fifteen pages or so of Nightmare Abbey – that title is from Chapter XIV (Peacock’s chapters, like his books, are short) – move away from the dinner table and wine cellar to turn into something rare in the Peacock I have read, a meaningful story, complete with complications and plot twists and a genuine resolution, a comic one, of course, a parody of Gothic and Romantic nonsense.  Much of it involves an argument about an overheard noise (the father believes his son is concealing a woman, while his son is, in fact, concealing a woman) that would not be out of place in Young Frankenstein or an episode of Frasier (“But, sir,” said Scythrop, “a key-hole may be so constructed as to act like an acoustic tube, and an acoustic tube, sir, will modify sound in a very remarkable manner” etc. etc.).

Otherwise, novelistic conventions of plot and story are playthings for Peacock.  In Crotchet Castle, the conventional romantic leads are simply abandoned for an entirely different story.  The characters are all sufficiently unreal that I doubt many readers ever cared – why would I prefer to watch the courtship of these puppets rather than those?  Peacock is not exactly Jane Austen.  Crotchet Castle ends with dancing and the singing of ballads and “[a]n immense bowl of spiced wine, with roasted apples hissing on its surface,…  borne into the hall by four men, followed by an empty bowl of the same dimensions, with all the materials of arrack punch” (Ch. XVIII)  The party, and the novel, too, only ends when the punch bowl is empty.

A true satirist, Peacock has his prejudices and hatreds, but his novels are in the end jolly, friendly places.  He is suspicious of progress, but defends knowledge.  He laughs at manias, but respects ideas.  He prefers over-indulged pleasure to healthy but dry abstention.  He is a happy satirist.  The plashy fens and furry broods of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1937) are spiritual children of the Peacock spirit.

Nightmare Abbey is actually an argument against unhappiness of the Gothic and Romantic variety, against the pose of unhappiness, whether it is found in Wetherism, Byronism, or transcendentalism.  “Let us all be unhappy together,” declares a character, just before he and his companions roar through a drunken rendition of Seamen Three: “And our ballast is old wine; \ And your ballast is old wine.”  I begin to doubt that the misery of these characters is genuine.

Peacock's unusual collocation of words and the vulgar error of the reading public

It might be easier, I suppose, to write about Peacock’s novels if I had some sort of point, but I am just aimlessly Appreciating.  I have not really described his books.  That might be useful.

The titles provide a clue.  Headlong Hall (1816), Nightmare Abbey (1818), Crotchet Castle (1831), Gryll Grange (1860).  Peacock uses another title when he wants it, but these tell the tale.  To create a novel, Peacock needs to construct not a story, but a dining room. There he can assemble his cast of humours and crotchets and monomaniacs, ply them with Madeira, and transcribe their pleasant “pseudo-philosophical dialogues about nothing much in particular,” to quote obooki.  Peacock even dispenses, wisely, with the usual novelistic apparatti for speech:

MR. MAC QUEDY.  Metaphysics, sir; metaphysics.  Logic and moral philosophy.  There we are at home.  The Athenians only sought the way, and we have found it; and to all this we have added political economy, the science of sciences.

REV. DR. FOLLIOTT.  A hyperbarbarous technology, that no Athenian ear could have borne.  Premises assumed without evidence, or in spite of it; and conclusions drawn from them so logically, that they must necessarily be erroneous.

MR. SKIONAR.  I cannot agree with you, Mr. Mac Quedy, that you have found the true road of metaphysics, which the Athenians only sought.  The Germans have found it, sir:  the sublime Kant and his disciples.

MR. MAC QUEDY.  I have read the sublime Kant, sir, with an anxious desire to understand him, and I confess I have not succeeded.

REV. DR. FOLLIOTT.  He wants the two great requisites of head and tail. (Crotchet Castle, II)

Different editions use different orthography; I have just pasted in the Gutenberg text.  This is hardly a serious attempt understand or explain Kant or political economy (thus, pseudo-philosophical), but Peacock can set up his jokes and score his points.  As a practitioner of political economy, for example, I refuse to grant the truth of more than 90% of the Reverend Doctor Folliott’s jibes.  No, not more than 95%.

All of the novels I have read contain an equivalent of Rev. Dr. Folliott, the epicurean clergyman, a common-sense classicist.  Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle share Mr. Skionar (aka Mr. Flosky), the transcendental philosopher, poet, and utter fool, a great source of fun.  In Nightmare Abbey he is dragged, much against his will, into the romantic plot:

MR FLOSKY.  Subtleties, my dear Miss O'Carroll!  I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public, to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology.

MARIONETTA.  Indeed, Mr Flosky, it suggests no such notion to me.  I have sought you for the purpose of obtaining information.

MR FLOSKY.  (shaking his head).  No one ever sought me for such a purpose before.

[more nonsense]

MR FLOSKY.  My dear Miss O'Carroll, it would have given me great pleasure to have said any thing that would have given you pleasure; but if any person living could make report of having obtained any information on any subject from Ferdinando Flosky, my transcendental reputation would be ruined for ever. (Nightmare Abbey, VIII)

Everything will work out fine for Marionetta, and for Flosky \ Skionar, too.  She will marry a wealthy, pliable idiot and he will never be understood by a soul.

What have I done here?  I have hardly written a thing, but just mortared in some of Peacock’s gibberish.  Ah, well, I enjoyed reading it again.

He was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes - Peacock's cogibundity of cogitation

Thomas Love Peacock’s novels are, I am told, packed with satirical versions of the celebrities of his day.  If Gryll Grange  has any at all, I failed to recognize them, but Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle have a number that are obvious enough.  My challenge this week, then, is to completely ignore Peacock’s caricatures, which have nothing to do with the quality of his writing.  It would be a shame if Peacock’s reputation were reduced to gossip.  He is one of the great English humorists:

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonised Latin. (Nightmare Abbey, Ch. I)

The reader who detects a hint or two of Bertie Wooster is reading well.  Much of Peacock’s humor is Wodehousian, or perhaps the order should be reversed.  Since Peacock brought up beating, perhaps I could beat the joke to death?  The word that makes the joke work, the first joke, I mean, must be “carefully,” unexpected, exactly wrong, after “beaten.”   Then the ludicrous simile evokes not just the ear of corn but an entire process of threshing, from the beating to the hand-picking, all with an entirely pointless result.  Comparing Scythrop's graduation award to a fish-slice has perhaps lost its savor – the fish-slice seems to have receded from American cutlery, at least  - but the mockery of Oxford Latin has a sting.

The first joke, the education joke, must be pretty well universal.  The Latin joke requires more investment by the reader in Peacock’s ethos, or so I suspect.  But would it look so out of place in Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett?  Or would this, continuing the theme of Scythrop’s education (he is now recovering from a broken heart):

He wandered about the ample pile, or along the garden-terrace, with 'his cogitative faculties immersed in cogibundity of cogitation.'  The terrace terminated at the south-western tower, which, as we have said, was ruinous and full of owls.  Here would Scythrop take his evening seat, on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting against the ruined wall, a thick canopy of ivy, with an owl in it, over his head, and the Sorrows of Werther in his hand.  He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse. (Ch. II)

Now, “in justice to his college” – that’s good stuff.  Owls are inherently humorous; it is almost lazy of Peacock to employ them here.  As for the piece in quotation marks, your guess is as good as mine.  I don’t see how this would be any funnier knowing who this character “is.”  He is an invention, and a type, a type I have met myself in what I sometimes call "real" life, although they have replaced Werther with - with - what do the emo kids read?

A semi-barbarian in a civilized community - Thomas Love Peacock mocks what he loves

Another bad to terrible idea* from Wuthering Expectations:  a week or so writing about Thomas Love Peacock, friend of Percy Shelley, author of satirical novels, poems, and whatsits.  Not a forgotten author – I have evidence to the contrary – but one who is sliding in that direction.  I read three of his novels recently, Nightmare Abbey (1818), Crotchet Castle (1831), and Gryll Grange (1860) and enjoyed them all quite a lot, but I have some doubts about the, what shall I call it, universality of their appeal.

Fortunately, I can point to a brief exception, a well-prepared, clove-encrusted taste of Peacock, his 1829 poem “The War Song of Dinas Vawr”:

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

“The War Song” continues for four more stanzas; Peacock wisely wrote short.  In some sense, the poem is topically satirical, parodying the crude but sanitized blood-thirstiness of the flood of fake Border ballads and “historical” poems inspired by the success of Walter Scott and Thomas Moore and so on.  Peacock’s satire has outlived the poems it mocks, and I hope the reason is clear enough.  Contemporary writers and readers have switched to prose, but we have plenty of equivalents.

Anna Saikin, a PhD student specializing in British Romanticism, has kindly posted her Comprehensive Exam reading list.  Among a long list of books and I have read and books I hope I never read, Peacock is present, not under Fiction or Poetry, but rather as the author of “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), another sly piece of mockery, this time hitting the Romantic poets right where they live, which is not in the Golden or Silver or even the Bronze Age of poetry, but in the Age of Brass, a time of cheap knockoffs, tinny sentiments, and muddled thinking:

A poet in our time is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community.  He lives in the days that are past.  His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions.  The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.

Peacock, I should point out, loved Romantic poetry and was a Romantic poet himself.  Mockery can be an expression of love.

Why, I wonder, is Nightmare Abbey not on Anna’s list?  It is a short little thing, just ninety pages.  Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge are actually characters in the novel, not even thinly disguised.  It features Shelley communing with owls and drinking Madeira from a human skull.  My doubt about much of Peacock’s work is that its virtues might be too obscure for a reader not immersed in Peacock’s time.  For the reader who is immersed, the reader who has prowled around that British Romanticism reading list, Peacock is a relief, and a reward.

The entirety of “The War Song of Dinas Vawr” and “The Four Ages of Poetry,” as well as a fine little introduction to Peacock can be found here (PDF).  That’s Peacock’s section of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2; I will bet you eight dollars that the intro is written by the great Robert M. Adams.

*  In the sense that obscure writer = skimmed and skipped posts.  Maybe I am wrong about that.

Best Books of the Year - 1818

1818 was one of the greatest literary years of the 19th century. It saw the publication of two Jane Austen novels, Persuasion and, sadly, Northanger Abbey (sad, of course, because it was only published as a result of Austen's death). Walter Scott published The Heart of Midlothian, one of his best books. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel so rich in ideas that I forgive its infelicities. Finally, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey, which is not what it sounds like.

Meanwhile, Byron, Keats, and P. Shelley were all in peak form. Byron published the Venetian adultery comedy Beppo, not a favorite of mine but enjoyable for its light touch. Keats published the long, mythical Endymion, very far from a favorite. For P. Shelley, it was a highly productive year, but for most of us only one poem will really matter: "Ozymandias."

It's funny how central Percy Shelley is here. Besides his wife's book, Byron and Keats and Peacock were close friends, and Shelley is even the central character of Nightmare Abbey, a tiny little novel-like thing that should be read more:

"When Scythrop [that's Shelley] grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonized Latin." (Ch. 1)

So that's five novels with some life today. Two (Persuasion and Frankenstein) are among the best of the century. Two, by coincidence, are Gothic parodies with "Abbey" in the title; one of these is sadly neglected. And major work by three great poets. This did not happen most years. Note that if magazines back then published "Best Books of the Year" lists, the only one I'm sure would make the lists is Walter Scott's.

This has all been awfully British. What else was going on? In America and pre-Romantic France I will go ahead and say, confidently, nothing. In the German principalities, there was quite a lot, although Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann seem to be between books this year. Either one may have been, and probably was, publishing in journals. Giacomo Leopardi was writing his Cantos and essays at this time, I am sure, but I have never sorted out his confusing chronology.

Still, there aren't that many years in the 19th century which contain five still-read novels from all of Europe, so I don't fell too bad about ending my researches here.

Nevertheless, I put an engraving of Francisco Goya's 1818 The Giant up top, just to make the year a little less British.