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Crotchet Castle - Thomas Love Peacock
CROTCHET CASTLE
By
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
First published in 1831
This edition published by Read Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2018 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Contents
Thomas Love Peacock
The Satirists and Fantastics
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CONCLUSION.
Thomas Love Peacock
By Sir Walter Raleigh
from
On Writers and Writing
THERE is nothing misanthropical about Peacock. He admires, and loves. All that is simple and matter of affection, and private, is dear to him. He laughs at idealists, and makers of systems. Yet---here is the strange thing---he is not common sense against the idea. He has, deep down in him, a great love for ideas. How easy to make fun of Rousseau, Mme de Genlis, Thomas Day---all that world of theory which belongs to the French Revolution! Peacock does make fun of it, but he has been touched by it. The two most virtuous characters in Melincourt are Sir Oran Haut-ton and Sylvan Forester---separate embodiments of the natural man of the revolutionary philosophy. Life in the woods---life in a cottage with a garden---Peacock is almost passionate about these. Yet he praises them chiefly in conversations that take place round tables amply suppled with old silver and madeira.
He was a friend of Shelley, and a wine-drinker---perhaps that best describes him. His friendship for Shelley had in it some kinship of ideas, not a merely personal liking. Indeed, Peacock himself was something of a theorist. He loved the consistency of the Latin mind; he adored logic; he loved a rebel, if the rebel was in earnest, as Shelley was. His ridicule of the other poets of the time turns for the most part on a single point, that they have given up their youthful creeds and have settled down in comfort.
Talk gives the structure of his books. They are a world of talk. It's all very fine talking,
people say, but is it practical?
In Peacock the standard is reversed. It's all very practical, but is it fine talking?
The atmosphere of conviviality in the novels keeps the differences from bursting into drama. When the dispute waxes hot someone says, Buz the bottle.
Allow for the difference between a persecuted preacher of the gospel and a prosperous clerk in the Examiner's office of the East India Company, and Peacock's work is a kindly Pilgrim's Progress. He gives his characters the same kind of names. Bunyan would have said it was a Pilgrm's Progress by Mr Byends of the City of Fairspeech.
Type in Peacock hardly ever passes into character. His work continually borders on character drawing, but he values the play of wit and theory too well. The whole world is a salon to him.
If there are any of Peacock's persons who are felt to be living human characters, they are to be found among his young ladies and his drunkards. The first are real, perhaps because they are pleasant and sensible (which few of the men are), perhaps because the author takes fewer freedoms in the portraiture. It is difficult to say exactly how they make so pleasant an impression---probably by their freedom from censoriousness, and by the good will of the other characters towards them. A novelist may learn something from the wisdom of Lord Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter:
"The triumph of wit is to make your good nature subdue your censure, to be quick in seeing fults and slow in exposing them. You are to consider that the invisible thing called a Good Name is made up of the breth of numbers that speak well of you; so that if by a disobliging word you silence the meanest, the gale will be less strong which is to bear up your esteem. And though nothing is so vain as the eager pursuit of empty applause, yet to be well thought of and to be kindly used by the world is like a glory about a woman's head' 'tis a perfumeshe carrieth about with her and leaveth wherever she goeth; 'tis a charm against ill-will. Malice may empty her quiver, but cannot wound; the dirt will not stick, the jests will not take."
Something of this charm is to be found in Peacock's heroines, so to call them.
George Meredith was Peacock's son-in-law, and learned more from Peacock than from any other writer; in his characters of women especially, and his convivial scenes.
There is, it has often been remarked a certain Gallic quality in Peacock's wit. It is gay and polished, and usually subtle. Our satirists are commonly heavy-weight prize-fighters. Our irony is often as strong as cheese. He has the spirit of wise mischief, like M. Anatole France.
---from On Writing and Writers by Walter Raleigh, being extracts from his note-books, selected and edited by George Gordon, London. (1926), pp. 151-54.
The Satirists
and Fantastics
By Virginia Woolf
from
Phases of Fiction
in Granite and Rainbow
THE CONFUSED feelings which the psychologists have roused in us, the extraordinary intricacy which they have revealed to us, the network of fine and scarcely intelligible yet profoundly interesting emotions in which they have involved us, set up a craving for relief, at first so primitive that it is almost a physical sensation. The mind feels like a sponge saturated full with sympathy and understanding; it needs to dry itself, to contract upon something hard. Satire and the sense that the satirist gives us that he has the world well within his grasp, so that it is at the mercy of his pen, precisely fulfil our needs.
A further instinct will lead us to pass over such famous satirists as Voltaire and Anatole France in favour of someone writing in our own tongue, writing English. For without any disrespect to the translator we have grown intolerably weary in reading Dostoevsky, as if we were reading with the wrong spectacles or as if a mist had formed between us and the page. We come to feel that every idea is slipping about in a suit badly cut and many sizes too large for it. For a translation makes us understand more clearly than the lectures of any professor the difference between raw words and written words; the nature and importance of what we call style. Even an inferior writer, using his own tongue upon his own ideas, works a change at once which is agreeable and remarkable. Under his pen the sentence shrinks and wraps itself firmly round the meaning, if it be but a little one. The loose, the baggy, shrivels up. And while a writer of passable English will do this, a writer like Peacock does infinitely more.
When we open Crotchet Castle and read that first very long sentence which begins, 'In one of those beautiful valleys, through which the Thames (not yet polluted by the tide, the scouring of cities or even the minor defilement of the sandy streams of Surrey)', it would be difficult to describe the relief it gives us, except metaphorically. First there is the shape which recalls something visually delightful, like a flowing wave or the lash of a whip vigorously flung; then as phrase joins phrase and one parenthesis after another pours in its tributary, we have a sense of the whole swimming stream gliding beneath old walls with the shadows of ancient buildings and the glow of green lawns reflected in it. And what is even more delightful after the immensities and obscurities in which we have been living, we are in a world so manageable in scale that we can take its measure, tease it and ridicule it. It is like stepping out into the garden on a perfect September morning when every shadow is sharp and every colour bright after a night of storm and thunder. Nature has submitted to the direction of man. Man himself is dominated by his intelligence. Instead of being manysided, complicated, elusive, people possess one idiosyncrasy apiece, which crystallizes them into sharp separate characters, colliding briskly when they meet. They seem ridiculously and grotesquely simplified out of all knowledge. Dr. Folliott, Mr. Firedamp, Mr. Skionar, Mr. Chainmail, and the rest seem after the tremendous thickness and bulk of the Guermantes and the Stavrogins nothing but agreeable caricatures which a clever old scholar has cut out of a sheet of black paper with a pair of scissors. But on looking closer we find that though it would be absurd to credit Peacock with any desire or perhaps capacity to explore the depths of the soul, his reticence is not empty but suggestive. The character of Dr. Folliott is drawn in three strokes of the pen. What lies between is left out. But each stroke indicates the mass behind it, so that the reader can make it out for himself; while it has, because of this apparent simplicity, all the sharpness of a caricature. The world so happily constituted that theTe is always trout for breakfast, wine in the cellar, and some amusing contretemps, such as the cook setting herself alight and being put out by the footman, to make us laugh---a world where there is nothing more pressing to do than to 'glide over the face of the waters, discussing everything and settling nothing', is not the world of pure fantasy; -it is close enough to be a parody of our world and to make our own follies and the solemnities of our institutions look a little silly.
The satirist does not, like the psychologist, labour under the oppression of omniscience. He has leisure to play with his mind freely, ironically. His sympathies are not deeply engaged. His sense of humour is not submerged.
But the prime distinction lies in the changed attitude towards reality. In the psychologists the huge burden of facts is based upon a firm foundation of dinner, luncheon, bed and breakfast. It is with surprise, yet with relief and a start of pleasure, that we accept Peacock's version of the world, which ignores so much, simplifies so much, gives the old globe a spin and shows another face of it on the other side. It is unnecessary to be quite so painstaking, it seems. And, after all, is not this quite as real, as true as the other? And perhaps all this posher about 'reality' is overdone. The great gain is perhaps that our relation with things is more distant. We reap the benefit of a more poetic point of view. A line like the charming 'At Godstow, they gathered hazel on the grave of Rosamond' could be written only by a writer who was at a certain distance from his people, so that there need be no explanations. For certainly with Trollope's people explanations would have been necessary; we should have wanted to know what they had been doing, gathering hazel, and where they had gone for dinner afterwards and how the carriage had met them. 'They', however, being Chainmail, Skionar, and the rest, are at liberty to gather hazel on the grave of Rosamond if they like; as they are free to sing a song if it so pleases them or to debate the march of mind.
The romantic took the same liberty but for another purpose. In the satirist we get not a sense of wildness and the soul's adventures, but that the mind is free and therefore sees through and dispenses with much that