INTRODUCTION

Melincourt is usually considered the least interesting of Peacock’s novels; and in the strictly comparative sense—that is to say that it is the least interesting of a group, every one of which has peculiar and exceptional interest—the statement is no doubt true. The defects of the book are very obvious, and exceedingly easy to account for. Headlong Hall had been very popular; and it was only in the course of nature that the author should repeat his successful experiment. But Headlong Hall had been by no means free from faults; and it certainly was not out of the course of nature that they should reappear in the new venture. In the very noteworthy introduction which the author wrote nearly forty years later, and which contains the promise of Gryll Grange as supplement to complete the satire, it is not unimportant to observe that he pays no attention to anything but the satirical purport. A man of seventy, satiated with business and not specially hungering after popularity, was not perhaps very likely to discuss his own novels in

detail, even to the extent to which Scott and other persons of irreproachable taste have discussed theirs in separate or collected editions. But it is not extravagant to take his silence as a kind of indication of his point of view.

His practice, however, if not his expressed theory, testifies to a consciousness that he had made a mistake in the scale viiiof this novel. Nightmare Abbey, the next, is only just a third of its length: no two of the next three, even if added together, come up to it; and though Gryll Grange is not so very much shorter, Gryll Grange contains the accumulated irony of a lifetime, and is not open to any of the objections to which Melincourt is exposed.

These objections, put briefly, come to this, that the author has not yet acquired the knack of telling a story, and that he has not discarded the habit of inapposite dissertation. There is truth in this summary, sharp and blunt at once as it is, and there is probably no reader who will not sometimes put up a prayer for the excision, extinction, expulsion, and general extermination of Mr. Fax. But political economy had always been a favourite subject of Peacock’s French masters; it had acquired, through Malthus (of whom Mr. Fax has sometimes been thought to be a Peacockian portrait), considerable vogue in England; and we have seen it reappear in our own time as a loading or padding to novels. Mr. Forester’s anti-saccharine fervour was a real thing for many years after Melincourt was published—though I have never heard whether the amiable anti-saccharists or their descendants have founded any association to weep for the ruin of the West India planters first, and the West India Islands afterwards.

Two other kinds of purpose appear in the novel, both of them distinctly political. In Headlong Hall the attack on the Quarterly Review had been tolerably obvious, but it had kept, if not entirely, yet mainly free of personalities. The scenes at Cimmerian Lodge and Mainchance Villa, with Mr. Feathernest’s sojourn at Melincourt, substitute for this impersonality a directness of personal lampoon as to the taste of which there cannot be very much question, while as to the justice and accuracy of it there cannot be, ixand among rational people of both sides never has been, any but one opinion. Mr. Vamp (Gifford), Mr. Anyside Antijack (Canning), and Mr. Killthedead (believed to be Barrow, Secretary to the Admiralty, and a well-known writer on naval subjects), were perhaps fair game, for the two last were public men—in other words, public targets—and Gifford had only himself to blame if, after playing all his life at the roughest and most vicious of bowls, he got some rubbers. But the animus, the injustice, and, above all, the ludicrous

inaccuracy of the attacks on Coleridge (Mr. Mystic), Southey (Mr. Feathernest), and Wordsworth (Mr. Paperstamp), are still almost inconceivable. That there was a certain superficial justification for accusing them all, especially Coleridge and Southey, of rather remarkable changes of opinion, that Coleridge was apt to be a little transcendental, and so forth, may be granted. But the attempt to carry the satire on to their moral and personal conduct is not only unjustifiable in itself, but displays a quite ludicrous ignorance and recklessness. Coleridge, heaven knows, was open enough to satire; and if Peacock had known anything whatever about him, he might have made a rather terrible exposure. But ‘Mr. Mystic,’ with his elaborate establishment at Cimmerian Lodge, is so unlike the fugitive philosopher who seldom had where to lay his head except in other men’s houses, that even amusement is difficult. And when we remember the style of living in which Wordsworth, even at his wealthiest, indulged, and his tastes in all matters of art,

coarse and fine, the extensive dinner-party at Mainchance Villa and its ‘mighty claret-shed’ become a very poor jest. The ‘sooth bourd’ may be ‘nae bourd,’ but the bourd which is altogether and glaringly opposite to the truth is a good deal worse. Most inexcusable of the three attacks, however, is that on Southey, which, I am sorry to say, is xrenewed (as it were, sotto voce) by the allusions to ‘Mr. Sackbut’ in Nightmare Abbey. That Southey gave some provocation to the irregulars of the Whig party by his slightly pharisaic airs of virtue, and some handle not merely by his curious political history, but by his more voluminous than impeccable poetical work, is undeniable. But to represent him as a rascal, though it might be worthy of Byron, was not worthy of Peacock; and to represent him as selling his soul for the pittance of the laureateship was unpardonable. Southey, as Shelley himself and many others of Peacock’s friends could have told the author of Melincourt, ‘feathered his nest’ with nothing but books,

worked like a navvy (only that the navvy works in bursts and Southey worked unceasingly), at the least paying kinds of literature, in order to procure that lining, and lived, though not sordidly, with the utmost simplicity. It would perhaps be less difficult to forgive this unfairness if the result were more amusing, but as it is Peacock is condemned by the laws of art no less than by those of ethics.

He was quite infinitely more fortunate in his other political foray—the satire on rotten boroughs in the history of the Onevote election. The rotten-borough system may have had its advantages, but nobody ever denied that it lent itself admirably to satire; and I am rather inclined to fix on this as the first complete example of Peacock’s method of sarcastic exposure. Indeed, ‘Mr. Sarcastic’ himself, unless my imagination deceives me, comes nearer to Peacock’s own character than almost any other of his personages. And the whole thing, in a bravura style, is capital. It is indeed sad to notice that the constant legislative curtailments of the picturesque and pleasing in politics have quite recently done away with the last shred of actuality in the Onevote episode. For it was recorded, during the first xiParish Council elections recently, that an actual Mr. Christopher Corporate was practically disfranchised, because, though he proposed his candidate, and might have voted for him, he was not allowed as a seconder, and no other existed.

The not sarcastic or not purely sarcastic scenes and personages of the novel have considerable merit, which would be more easily perceptible if they were not kept apart from each other by so much of the Fax-and-Forester business. Anthelia has excited interest and admiration as a reminiscence of Peacock’s first love, and a first draft of the more perfectly conceived Susannah Touchandgo in Crotchet Castle. They both exhibit—with some modern touches, chiefly in the latter of the pair—the sentimental but intelligent heroine of the last century. Mrs. Pinmoney and her daughter are slight, but good, and the former’s list of tastes is a capital passage, while Sir Telegraph Paxarett is an excellent personage, showing something of Thackeray’s partiality for making a young man of fashion not quite a coxcomb, such as the older novelists had been prone to draw him. Mr. Derrydown, who is a sort of first sketch of Mr. Chainmail in Crotchet Castle, is a very intelligent mediaevalist; and the ‘supers,’ Mr. O’Scarum and the rest, play their parts very well.

These compliments, however, will hardly extend to the hero or the villains, though they apply with redoubled force to Sir Oran Haut-ton. The quadrumanous baronet, indeed, is such an excellent fellow, that one almost wishes he could have been discovered to be no Orang at all, but a baby lost early in the woods, could have recovered his speech, improved his good looks, and married Anthelia. For his patron, friend, rival, and almost namesake, Sylvan Forester, is a terrible prig and bore. It is difficult to believe that Peacock xiican have sympathised with him, and impossible not to think that he simply followed the old theory of the good young hero, as he did other old theories in the elopement and recovery. But Mr. Forester is not much worse than the villains. Grovelgrub indeed, though he is much worse than Portpipe (who is not detestable), and is the sequel to Gaster in Peacock’s curious warfare against the clergy, has a touch of wit now and then. But Lord Anophel Achthar (how with that title he came to be heir-apparent to a marquis

Peacock does not explain) is an exceeding poor creature, not much more valorous than Bob Acres, without any of Bob’s redeeming fun, and as dull a dog as need or need not be.

One very curious feature in the book is the chess dance, which has been sometimes carried out since in reality. It is one of not the least interesting points in Peacock’s rather enigmatic character that he seems to have had a liking for pageants and shows, whether in themselves, or (in this particular instance) because of the example in his beloved Rabelais, or as fashions of old time—for there never was such a lover of old time as this Liberal free-lance. His grand-daughter tells us that he used to hold Lady-of-the-May revels in his old age for the children at Halliford, and the Aristophanic play in Gryll Grange partakes at least as much of this fancy as of the direct liking for theatrical performance proper which Peacock had, and which made him for some years a regular theatrical and operatic critic.

The songs of Melincourt are, considering its length, not numerous, and only one of them is, for Peacock, of the first class. Anthelia’s first ballad, “The Tomb of Love,” is not very much above the strains of the unhappy Della Crusca and his mates, whose bodies in her time still, to speak figuratively, lay scattered on the critic mountains cold, where xiiithey had been left by Gifford’s tomahawk. Nor is her second, “The Flower of Love,” much better. The terzetto, which immediately follows this, is not very strong, though “Hark o’er the Silent Waters Stealing” is tolerable, and “The Morning of Love” is very fair imitation-Moore, and the Antijacobin quintet very fair Hook. Of the two remaining serious pieces “The Sun-Dial” is much better than “The Magic Bark.” But the credit of the verse of this novel must rest upon “The Ghosts.” It faces a page in which Southey is represented as saying of himself, “I knocked myself down to the highest bidder,” and interrupts a discussion which, putting aside this childish

injustice, Mr. Hippy most properly describes as “dry,” so that it must have been a considerable relief at the time. The disputants, it is true, relapse; but probably few attended to them originally, and now, through most of the rest of the novel, the reader catches himself humming at intervals,

PREFACE TO THE EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1856[2]

‘Melincourt’ was first published thirty-nine years ago. Many changes have since occurred, social, mechanical, and political. The boroughs of Onevote and Threevotes have been extinguished: but there remain boroughs of Fewvotes, in which Sir Oran Haut-ton might still find a free and enlightened constituency. Beards disfigure the face, and tobacco poisons the air, in a degree not then imagined. A boy, with a cigar in his mouth, was a phenomenon yet unborn. Multitudinous bubbles have been blown and have burst: sometimes prostrating dupes and impostors together; sometimes leaving a colossal jobber upright in his triumphal chariot, which has crushed as many victims as the car of Juggernaut. Political mountebanks have founded profitable investments on public gullibility. British colonists have been compelled to emancipate their slaves; and foreign slave labour, under the 2pretext of free trade, has been brought to bear against them by the friends of liberty. The Court is more moral: therefore, the public is more moral; more decorous, at least in external

semblance, wherever the homage, which Hypocrisy pays to Virtue, can yield any profit to the professor: but always ready for the same reaction, with which the profligacy of the Restoration rolled, like a spring-tide, over the Puritanism of the Commonwealth. The progress of intellect, with all deference to those who believe in it, is not quite so obvious as the progress of mechanics. The ‘reading public’ has increased its capacity of swallow, in a proportion far exceeding that of its digestion. Thirty-nine years ago, steamboats were just coming into action, and the railway locomotive was not even thought of. Now everybody goes everywhere: going for the sake of going, and rejoicing in the rapidity with which they accomplish nothing. On va, mais on ne voyage pas. Strenuous idleness drives us on the wings of steam in boats and trains, seeking the art of enjoying life, which, after all, is in the regulation of the mind, and not in the whisking about of the body.[3] Of the disputants whose opinions and public characters (for I never trespassed on private life) were

shadowed in some of the persons of the story, almost all have passed from the diurnal scene. Many of the questions, discussed in the dialogues, have more of general than of temporary application, and have still their advocates on both sides: and new questions have arisen, which furnish abundant argument for similar conversations, and of which I may yet, perhaps, avail myself on some future occasion.

March 1856.

Both Irishmen and clergymen.

CHAPTER I ANTHELIA

Anthelia Melincourt, at the age of twenty-one, was mistress of herself and of ten thousand a year, and of a very ancient and venerable castle in one of the wildest valleys in Westmoreland. It follows of course, without reference to her personal qualifications, that she had a very numerous list of admirers, and equally of course that there were both Irishmen and clergymen among them. The young lady nevertheless possessed sufficient attractions to kindle the flames of disinterested passion; and accordingly we shall venture to suppose that there was at least one in the number of her sighing swains with whom her rent-roll and her old castle were secondary considerations; and if the candid reader should esteem this supposition too violent for the probabilities of daily experience in this calculating age, he will at least concede it to that degree of poetical licence which is invariably accorded to a tale founded on facts.

Melincourt Castle had been a place of considerable strength in those golden days of feudal and royal prerogative, when no man was safe in his own house unless he adopted every possible precaution for shutting out all his neighbours. It is, therefore, not surprising, that a rock, of which three sides were perpendicular, and which was only accessible on the fourth by a narrow ledge, forming a natural bridge over a tremendous chasm, was considered a very enviable situation for a gentleman to build on. An impetuous torrent boiled through the depth of the chasm, and after eddying round the base of the castle-rock, which it almost insulated, disappeared in the obscurity of a woody glen, whose mysterious recesses, by popular superstition formerly consecrated to the devil, are now 6fearlessly explored by the solitary angler, or laid open to view by the more profane hand of the picturesque tourist, who contrives, by the magic of his pencil, to transport their romantic terrors from the depths of mountain solitude to the gay and crowded, though not very wholesome, atmosphere of a metropolitan

exhibition.

The narrow ledge, which formed the only natural access to the castle-rock, had been guarded by every impediment which the genius of fortification could oppose to the progress of the hungry Scot, who might be disposed, in his neighbourly way, to drop in without invitation and carouse at the expense of the owner, rewarding him, as usual, for his extorted hospitality, by cutting his throat and setting fire to his house. A drawbridge over the chasm, backed by a double portcullis, presented the only mode of admission. In this secure retreat thus strongly guarded both by nature and art, and always plentifully victualled for a siege, lived the lords of Melincourt in all the luxury of rural seclusion, throwing open their gates on occasional halcyon days to regale all the peasants and mountaineers of the vicinity with roasted oxen and vats of October.

When these times of danger and turbulence had passed, Melincourt Castle was not, as most of its brother edifices were, utterly deserted. The drawbridge, indeed, became gradually divorced from its chains; the double portcullis disappeared; the turrets and battlements were abandoned to the owl and the ivy; and a very spacious wing was left free to the settlement of a colony of ghosts, which, according to the report of the peasantry and the domestics, very soon took possession, and retained it most pertinaciously, notwithstanding the pious incantations of the neighbouring vicar, the Reverend Mr. Portpipe, who often passed the night in one of the dreaded apartments over a blazing fire with the same invariable exorcising apparatus of a large venison pasty, a little Prayer-book, and three bottles of Madeira: for the reverend gentleman sagaciously observed, that as he had always found the latter an infallible charm against blue devils, he had no doubt of its proving equally efficacious against black, white, and gray. In this opinion experience seemed to confirm him; for though

he always maintained a becoming silence as to the mysteries of which he was a witness during his spectral vigils, yet a very correct inference might be drawn from the fact that he was 9always found in the morning comfortably asleep in his large arm-chair, with the dish scraped clean, the three bottles empty, and the Prayer-book clasped and folded precisely in the same state and place in which it had lain the preceding night.

He was always found in the morning comfortably asleep.

But the larger and more commodious part of the castle continued still to be inhabited; and while one half of the edifice was fast improving into a picturesque ruin, the other was as rapidly degenerating, in its interior at least, into a comfortable modern dwelling.

In this romantic seclusion Anthelia was born. Her mother died in giving her birth. Her father, Sir Henry Melincourt, a man of great acquirements, and of a retired disposition, devoted himself in solitude to the cultivation of his daughter’s understanding; for he was one of those who maintained the heretical notion that women are, or at least may be, rational beings; though, from the great pains usually taken in what is called education to make them otherwise, there are unfortunately very few examples to warrant the truth of the theory.