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  Even those of us who have not the disputacious, metaphysical Scottish blood which Peacock had slyly infused into the veins of Mr. Crotchet, may join in his unhopeful sigh. What is the good of inviting intellectuals down for the week end unless they settle matters like these once and for all? Alas, the habit of the intellectual is to be unsettling and in both senses of the word. There is a chronic Mr. Firedamp in every posse of the brainy; even when final order seems to have been achieved, there is always one bat left in the belfries:

  “There is another great question,” said Mr. Firedamp, “greater than those, seeing that it is necessary to be alive in order to settle any question and this is the question of water against human woe. Wherever there is water, there is malaria, and wherever there is malaria there are the elements of death. The great object of a wise man should be to live on a gravelly hill, without so much as a duckpond within 10 miles of him, eschewing cisterns and water butts….”

  Dr. Folliott, a Tory and a practical man, had at any rate, the answer in his cellar. “The proximity of wine”, he said, was of more importance “than the longinquity of water.” After sufficient Burgundy the endless and cantankerous algebra of life appears lucid and limited. Wine has the triple merit of enriching the vocabulary, cheering the heart, and narrowing the mind, and the sooner one cuts the cackle of the intellectuals with some good food and drink the sooner comes peace on earth.

  The food and drink question is fundamental in Peacock. On Samuel Butler’s theory that all Radicals have bad digestions, it is clear that from the wine and food test Peacock comes out true-blue Tory. There is no stab of that sublimated bellyache which drives the rest of us into progressive politics. Of course we know that Peacock called himself a Liberal and wrote for the Liberal reviews; but the enemies of the Utilitarians considered him a joke and Hazlitt teased him for “warbling” on the wrong side of the fence.

  The game Peacock played was a dangerous one, and in a man less original and gifted it would have been disastrous. Peacock’s virtue was that he had no political opinions in a very political age; or rather, that he had all the opinions, as a dog has fleas in order to keep his mind off being a dog. Peacock’s mind kept open house and ruled the table; too often that leads, in literary circles, to banging the table. One can see this in the Rev. Dr. Folliott. A great character, perhaps the greatest of the Peacock characters, but how close the guzzling clergyman comes to being one of those vinous boors, one of those bottled, no-nonsense dogmatists who tyrannise the table and bully the world of letters with comic bluster about their common sense:

  Mr. MacQuedy. Then, sir, I presume you set no value on the right principles of rent, profit, wages and currency.

  Revd. Dr. Folliott. My principles, sir, in these things are to take as much as I can get and to pay no more than I can help. These are everyman’s principles, whether they be the right principles or no. There, sir, is political economy in a nutshell.

  There is too great a finality in the well-fed; and though Dr. Folliott redresses a balance and is a brilliant and mature device for winding the theorists back to the earth—very necessary in the novel of ideas—one’s mind does wander to “poor Mrs. Folliott” who, having combed her husband’s wig, is firmly left at home. One remembers other poor Mrs. Folliotts pecking a timid and hen-like way behind their boozy, common-sensical cockalorums. And while we have still got political economy in a nutshell it is interesting to note how strong a respect for money is ingrained in the crackling, phlegmatic temper of our satirical writers. It is strong in lago, it is strong in Swift (the Drapier letters), Shaw is an enthusiastic accountant and Peacock’s principles regarding paper money amount to mania. On that subject he was a Firedamp. We may imagine his reactions when, having invited Shelley to live in Marlow, he heard that the poet was giving away his clothes and his money to the indigent inhabitants. It is always surprising when poetic justice is benevolent, and most critics have gasped with incredulous satisfaction at Peacock’s luck in hooking a job worth £2,000 a year or more out of the East India Company; what is significant and even more poetically fitting is that Peacock was a success at the job. He it was who organised the building and dispatch of the flat-bottomed gunboats used by the company in the East. There blossomed the Utilitarian. One doubts whether Wordsworth was as efficient at the Excise.

  The life of Peacock covers a period of enormous differences. One of Peacock’s modern critics, Mr. John Mair, has pointed out how fantastic is the range of his life.

  He lived through the French Revolution and the Great Exhibition; he could have read his first books to Nelson and his last to Bernard Shaw [who would not have understood it], Dr. Johnson died a year before his birth and Yeats was born a year before his death. He both preceded and survived Byron, Shelley, Keats and Macaulay; he was contemporary with Rowlandson and with Landseer.

  For a satirical mind this was the perfect feast; history at its most conflicting and indigestible. For a temperament liable to be infected by all schools of thought in turn and unable to resist cocking snooks at them, here was wealth. Peacock dined off his disabilities and one can almost hear his unholy highbrow cackle when he finds himself not only pre-dating but surviving his victims. Some annoyance has been felt because he became a kind of reactionary by default; you ought not to pull the leg of your own party. But could there have been a more delightful occupation for one whose baptismal water had a drop of the acid of perversity in it? A Grub Street hack in his time, and one who (according to Hazlitt anyway) overpraised as wildly as any of our commercial reviewers, he sneers at the puffs of Grubb Street. A hater of Scotsmen, he was a theoretical Scotsman for, as Professor Saintsbury discovered, Peacock was baptised at the Scottish kirk. He scarifies Miss Philomel Poppyseed for saying true love is impossible on less than £1,000 a year but is as acute about the marriage settlements of his own characters as Jane Austen herself. Everywhere the satirist is reacting against his own wishes and disappointments. There is little doubt that an erratic education fostered his originality as it also failed to provide some strong stamp which would have made up his mind; there would have been no Peacock if he had gone to the University. But those sneers at the University which always crop up in his books are prolonged; and when the debates between the deteriorationists, the progressives, the transcendentalists and rational economists bore us, we cannot reject the suspicion that Peacock spent a good deal of his literary life training to be an undergraduate.

  If Peacock’s mind was not made up, if he snapped at his opponents and his friends, it would be a mistake to think of him as a complete farceur. When the effervescence has died down there is a deposit of belief which is not party belief but is rather his century’s habit of mind. The eighteenth century had formed him; he belonged to that middleman and professional class which did not share—at least, did not directly share—in the rewards of the industrial revolution. When Mr. Escot speaks against the mills in Headlong Hall, he is not putting a party view; he is pleading like a merchant philosopher for the content of living in a world that was violently altering its form in the optimistic delusion that the content would look after itself. If Mr. Peacock-Escot is a reactionary, then one can only reply that it is the rôle of reactionaries, once they have given up obstruction, to remind us that the Sabbath was made for man. Their function is to preserve amenities and that private humanity which revolutionaries care for so little. Here is Mr. Escot with his everything-is-as-bad-as-it-can-be-in-the-worst-of-possible-worlds:

  You present to me a complicated picture of artificial life, and require me to admire it. Seas covered with vessels; every one of which contains two or three tyrants, and from fifty to a thousand slaves, ignorant, gross, perverted and active only in mischief. Ports resounding with life: in other words with noise and drunkenness, the mingled din of avarice, intemperance and prostitution. Profound researches, scientific inventions: to what end? To contract the sum of human wants? to teach the art of living on a little? to disseminate independence, liberty and health? No; to multiply fact
itious desires, to stimulate depraved appetites, to invent irrational wants, to heap up incense on the shrine of luxury, and accumulate expedients of selfish and ruinous profusion.

  He goes on to a description of children in the cotton mills, a true piece of Dickensian phantasmagoria—“observe their pale and ghastly features, more ghastly in that baleful and malignant light and tell me if you do not fancy yourself on the threshold of Virgil’s Hell….” Did that passage have any effect on the more ruthless of Peacock’s readers? One doubts it. The voice of the Age of Reason was reactionary and decadent from the point of view of the nineteenth-century liberals, and most of us were born into the nineteenth century’s belief that a period is decadent which has arrived at the civilised stillness of detached self-criticism. Peacock said the wise thing in the wrong way, i.e. the detached way. It was the attached people, more vulgar, more sentimental, more theatrically subject to the illusions of the new period, who could and did attack child labour and the mills with some effect.

  For a man as mercurial and unseizable as Peacock was, what really counted was the farce. Detached, isolated, hiding caution behind a fantasticating brain, silent about the private urges of his heart, unimaginative, timid of “acrimonious dispute” (as the scathing so often are), he enjoyed the irresponsibilities of an intellect which cannot define its responsibilities. His cruelty to his victims is merely the brain’s. There he can display an extravagance which elsewhere a prudent nature denies him. His satire was not resented, as far as one knows, by the victims. Shelley laughed at Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey. No doubt Shelley’s own irresponsibility responded to Peacock’s distorted picture of him torn between Harriet and Mary Godwin, “like a shuttlecock between two battledores, changing its direction as rapidly as the oscillations of a pendulum receiving many a hard knock on the cork”—the cork!—“of a sensitive heart and flying from point to point in the feathers of a super-sublimated head”.

  As they come fragmentarily into focus, the Peacock novels have the farcical dream-atmosphere of the sur-realists’ dreams. Their slapstick and their unexpected transitions, their burlesque discussions, and their fancy lead through Alice in Wonderland to the present. It is amusing to find present parallels for the deteriorationist and the rational economist. Peacock chose permanent types; but without the knock-about and the romance, that amusement would soon become bookish and musty. Scythrop concealing his lady in the tower and lying about the movable bookcase, Mr. Toobad jumping out of the window at the sight of the “ghost” and being fished out of the moat by the dreary scientists who are down there with their nets fishing for mermaids, Squire Headlong’s experiments with explosives, Dr. Folliott’s adventures with the highwaymen—this picaresque horseplay is the true stuff of the English comic tradition from Sterne and Fielding, a new gloss on the doings of the Pickwick Club. And Peacock can alternate the perfunctory with the heroic manner, which our tradition especially requires. Gradually, as he perfected his genre, progressing from the Hall to the Abbey, from the Abbey to the Castle, Peacock balanced his extremes. Romantic love plays its part, not the wild meadowy stuff of course, but a romance which secretes an artificial sweetness, the faux naturel of the eighteenth century, which at once suggests the formal and untutored. In this heady world the women alone—if one excepts the highbrow Poppyseed and the awful Mrs. Glowry—have the sense and sensibility. Peacock cuts short the sighs; marriages are arranged, not made in Heaven, dowries are not forgotten; but what a delightful convention (the India clerk reminds us) marriage is.

  One might expect more broadness in so keen a reader of Rabelais, but Peacock (unless my memory is bad or my ear for double entendre dull) appears to share the primness of Dr. Folliott, a primness one often finds among the drinkers. There is only one smoke-room remark in Crotchet Castle—and a very good one it is. It occurs after the cook has set her room on fire when she has fallen asleep over a treatise on hydrostatics in cookery:

  Lord Bossnowl. But, sir, by the bye, how came your footman to be going into your cook’s room? It was very providential, to be sure but …

  Revd. Dr. Folliott. Sir, as good came of it, I shut my eyes and ask no questions. I suppose he was going to study hydrostatics and he found himself under the necessity of practising hydraulics.

  I suppose it should be argued that Dr. Folliott’s anger about the exhibition of an undraped female figure on the stockbroker’s mantelpiece was grounded less in the prudery of the bibulous than in the general Peacockian dislike of popular education. He was against putting ideas into his footman’s head. An act of benevolence, for no one knew so well as Peacock how funny a man with an idea in his head can be.

  An Anatomy of Greatness

  There are two books which are the perfect medicine for the present time: Voltaire’s Candide and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild. They deal with our kind of news but with this advantage over contemporary literature: the news is already absorbed, assumed and digested. We see our situation at a manageable remove. This is an important consolation and, on the whole, Jonathan Wild is the more specific because the narrower and more trenchant book. Who, if not ourselves, are the victims of what are called “Great Men”? Who can better jump to the hint that the prig or cut-purse of Newgate and the swashbuckler of Berchtesgaden are the same kind of man and that Caesar and Alexander were morally indistinguishable from the gang leaders, sharpers, murderers, pickpockets from whom Mr. Justice Fielding, in later years, was to free the City of London? Europe has been in the hands of megalomaniacs for two decades. Tyranny abroad, corruption at home—that recurrent theme of the eighteenth-century satirists who were confronted by absolute monarchy and the hunt for places—is our own. Who are we but the good—with a small middle-class “g”—and who are “they” but the self-elected “leaders” and “the Great”? And Jonathan Wild has the attraction of a great tour de force which does not shatter us because it remains, for all its realism, on the intellectual plane. Where Swift, in contempt, sweeps us out of the very stables; where Voltaire advises us not to look beyond our allotments upon the wilderness humanity has left everywhere on a once festive earth, Fielding is ruthless only to the brain. Our heads are scalped by him but soul and body are left alive. He is arbitrary but not destructive. His argument that there is an incompatibility between greatness and goodness is an impossible one, but of the eighteenth century’s three scourgers of mankind he is the least egotistical and the most moral. He has not destroyed the world; he has merely turned it upside down as a polished dramatist will force a play out of a paradox:

  “… contradicting the obsolete doctrines of a Set of Simple Fellows called, in Derision, Sages or Philosophers, who have endeavoured as much as possible to confound the Ideas of Greatness and Goodness, whereas no two Things can possibly be more distinct from each other. For Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind, and Goodness in removing it from them.”

  Jonathan Wild is a paradox sustained with, perhaps the strain, but above all, with the decisiveness, flexibility and exhilaration of a scorching trumpet call which does not falter for one moment and even dares very decorative and difficult variations on the way to its assured conclusion. When we first read satire we are aware of reading against the whole current of our beliefs and wishes, and until we have learned that satire is anger laughing at its own futility, we find ourselves protesting and arguing silently against the author. This we do less, I think, in reading Jonathan Wild than with Candide or Gulliver. If there is any exhaustion in Jonathan Wild it does not come from the tussle of our morality with his. There is no moral weariness. If we tire it is because of the intellectual effort of reversing the words “great” and “good” as the eye goes over the page. Otherwise it is a young man’s book, very vain of its assumptions and driven on with masterly nonchalance.

  To the rigidity of his idea Fielding brought not only the liveliness of picaresque literature but, more important, his experience as a playwright. Of its nature satire deals in types and artifices and needs the schooling of the dra
matist, who can sweep a scene off the moment the point is made and who can keep his nimble fingers on a complicated plot. Being concerned with types, satire is in continual need of intrigue and movement; it needs tricks up the sleeve and expertness in surprise. We are distracted in Jonathan Wild between pleasure in his political references (the pointed one on the quarrels between the gangsters about the style of their hats for example, which Wild settles with the genius of a dictator), and the dexterity of the author. “Great men are lonely”: one of the best scenes in the book, one fit to stand beside Wild’s wonderful quarrel with his wife Tishy when he calls her a bitch, is the superb comedy of Wild’s soliloquy in the boat. Put adrift in an open boat by the Captain who has rescued Heartfree’s wife from Wild’s attempt at rape, Wild has his “black Friday” and muses on the loneliness of “the Great”, their fear of death and their unhappiness. Since death is inevitable, Wild cries, why not die now? A man of action, for ever acting to an audience if only an imaginary one, he staggers us by at once throwing himself into the sea. Were we wrong? Was he courageous after all? We knew that a crook lives on gestures, that a show of toughness is all—but were we misreading him? Down comes the curtain, the chapter ends. Its dramatic effect is enormous, quite beyond the reach of the picaresque novelists who depend on the convolutions of intrigue alone. Among the satirists, only Voltaire, another writer for the stage, was capable of Fielding’s scene; Swift was always willing to let a situation ease off into ironical discussion. And then, up goes Fielding’s curtain again: Wild does not die. He is saved. He is in a boat once more. Saved by one of those disillusioning miracles of fiction? Not at all. He is back in his own boat. He swam back to it. Philosophy had told him to die, but Nature, whom he knew had designed him to be Great, told him not to be such a fool. That is a masterstroke.