Thomas Love Peacock was born at
Weymouth in 1785. His first poem, “The Genius of the
Thames,” was in its second edition when he became one of
the friends of Shelley. That was in 1812, when
Shelley’s age was twenty, Peacock’s
twenty-seven. The acquaintance strengthened, until Peacock
became the friend in whose judgment Shelley put especial
trust. There were many points of agreement. Peacock,
at that time, shared, in a more practical way, Shelley’s
desire for root and branch reform; both wore poets, although not
equally gifted, and both loved Plato and the Greek
tragedians. In “Crotchet Castle” Peacock has
expressed his own delight in Greek literature through the talk of
the Reverend Dr. Folliott.
But Shelley’s friendship for Peacock included a trust in
him that was maintained by points of unlikeness. Peacock
was shrewd and witty. He delighted in extravagance of a
satire which usually said more than it meant, but always rested
upon a foundation of good sense. Then also there was a
touch of the poet to give grace to the utterances of a
clear-headed man of the world. It was Peacock who gave its
name to Shelley’s poem of “Alastor, or the Spirit of
Solitude,” published in 1816. The “Spirit of
Solitude” being treated as a spirit of evil, Peacock
suggested calling it “Alastor,” since the Greek
ἀλάστωρ means an evil
genius.
Peacock’s novels are unlike those of other men: they are
the genuine expressions of an original and independent
mind. His reading and his thinking ran together; there is
free quotation, free play of wit and satire, grace of invention
too, but always unconventional. The story is always
pleasant, although always secondary to the play of thought for
which it gives occasion. He quarrelled with verse,
whimsically but in all seriousness, in an article on “The
Four Ages of Poetry,” contributed in 1820 to a short-lived
journal, “Ollier’s Literary Miscellany.”
The four ages were, he said, the iron age, the Bardic; the
golden, the Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, in
which he himself lived. “A poet in our time,”
he said, “is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community . .
. The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three
ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of
exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and
can, therefore, serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like
Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer
like Wordsworth.” In another part of this essay he
says: “While the historian and the philosopher are
advancing in and accelerating the progress of knowledge, the poet
is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up
the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the
grown babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poacher and
cattle-stealers of the ancient Border. Lord Byron cruises
for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the
Greek islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes
of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects
all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially
poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of
monstrosities, strings them into an epic.” And so
forth; Peacock going on to characterise, in further illustration
of his argument, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moore, and
Campbell. He did not refer to Shelley; and Shelley read his
friend’s whimsical attack on poetry with all good humour,
proceeding to reply to it with a “Defence of Poetry,”
which would have appeared in the same journal, if the journal had
survived. In this novel of “Crotchet Castle”
there is the same good-humoured exaggeration in the treatment of
“our learned friend”—Lord Brougham—to
whom and to whose labours for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
there are repeated allusions. In one case Peacock
associates the labours of “our learned friend” for
the general instruction of the masses with encouragement of
robbery (page 172), and in another with body-snatching, or,
worse,—murder for dissection (page 99). “The
Lord deliver me from the learned friend!” says Dr.
Folliott. Brougham’s elevation to a peerage in
November, 1830, as Lord Brougham and Vaux, is referred to on page
177, where he is called Sir Guy do Vaux. It is not to be
forgotten, in the reading, that this story was written in 1831,
the year before the passing of the Reform Bill. It ends
with a scene suggested by the agricultural riots of that
time. In the ninth chapter, again, there is a passage
dealing with Sir Walter Scott after the fashion of the criticisms
in the “Four Ages of Poetry.” But this critical
satire gave nobody pain. Always there was a ground-work of
good sense, and the broad sweep of the satire was utterly unlike
the nibbling censure of the men whose wit is tainted with
ill-humour. We may see also that the poet’s nature
cannot be expelled. In this volume we should find the touch
of a poet’s hand in the tale itself when dealing with the
adventures of Mr. Chainmail, while he stays at the Welsh mountain
inn, if the story did not again and again break out into actual
song, for it includes half-a-dozen little poems.
When Peacock wrote his attack on Poetry, he had, only two
years before, produced a poem of his
own—“Rhododaphne”—with a Greek fancy of
the true and the false love daintily worked out. It was his
chief work in verse, and gave much pleasure to a few, among them
his friend Shelley. But he felt that, as the world went, he
was not strong enough to help it by his singing, so he confined
his writing to the novels, in which he could speak his mind in
his own way, while doing his duty by his country in the East
India House, where he obtained a post in 1818. From 1836 to
1856, when he retired on a pension, he was Examiner of India
Correspondence. Peacock died in 1866, aged eighty-one.
H. M.
Note that in this tale Mac Quedy is
Mac Q. E. D., son of a demonstration; Mr. Skionar, the
transcendentalist, is named from Ski(as) onar, the dream of a
shadow; and Mr. Philpot,—who loves rivers, is
Phil(o)pot(amos).
