Crotchet Castle
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Thomas Love Peacock >> Crotchet Castle
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9 This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition.
CROTCHET CASTLE
by Thomas Love Peacock
INTRODUCTION
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 [Greek text] 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).
CROTCHET CASTLE
by Thomas Love Peacock
CHAPTER I: THE VILLA
Captain Jamy. I wad full fain hear some question 'tween you tway.
HENRY V.
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) rolls a clear flood
through flowery meadows, under the shade of old beech woods, and
the smooth mossy greensward of the chalk hills (which pour into it
their tributary rivulets, as pure and pellucid as the fountain of
Bandusium, or the wells of Scamander, by which the wives and
daughters of the Trojans washed their splendid garments in the days
of peace, before the coming of the Greeks); in one of those
beautiful valleys, on a bold round-surfaced lawn, spotted with
juniper, that opened itself in the bosom of an old wood, which rose
with a steep, but not precipitous ascent, from the river to the
summit of the hill, stood the castellated villa of a retired
citizen. Ebenezer Mac Crotchet, Esquire, was the London-born
offspring of a worthy native of the "north countrie," who had
walked up to London on a commercial adventure, with all his surplus
capital, not very neatly tied up in a not very clean handkerchief,
suspended over his shoulder from the end of a hooked stick,
extracted from the first hedge on his pilgrimage; and who, after
having worked himself a step or two up the ladder of life, had won
the virgin heart of the only daughter of a highly respectable
merchant of Duke's Place, with whom he inherited the honest fruits
of a long series of ingenuous dealings.
Mr. Mac Crotchet had derived from his mother the instinct, and from
his father the rational principle, of enriching himself at the
expense of the rest of mankind, by all the recognised modes of
accumulation on the windy side of the law. After passing many
years in the Alley, watching the turn of the market, and playing
many games almost as desperate as that of the soldier of Lucullus,
the fear of losing what he had so righteously gained predominated
over the sacred thirst of paper-money; his caution got the better
of his instinct, or rather transferred it from the department of
acquisition to that of conservation. His friend, Mr. Ramsbottom,
the zodiacal mythologist, told him that he had done well to
withdraw from the region of Uranus or Brahma, the Maker, to that of
Saturn or Veeshnu, the Preserver, before he fell under the eye of
Jupiter or Seva, the Destroyer, who might have struck him down at a
blow.
It is said that a Scotchman, returning home after some years'
residence in England, being asked what he thought of the English,
answered: "They hanna ower muckle sense, but they are an unco braw
people to live amang;" which would be a very good story, if it were
not rendered apocryphal by the incredible circumstance of the
Scotchman going back.
Mr. Mac Crotchet's experience had given him a just title to make,
in his own person, the last-quoted observation, but he would have
known better than to go back, even if himself, and not his father,
had been the first comer of his line from the north. He had
married an English Christian, and, having none of the Scotch
accent, was ungracious enough to be ashamed of his blood. He was
desirous to obliterate alike the Hebrew and Caledonian vestiges in
his name, and signed himself E. M. Crotchet, which by degrees
induced the majority of his neighbours to think that his name was
Edward Matthew. The more effectually to sink the Mac, he
christened his villa "Crotchet Castle," and determined to hand down
to posterity the honours of Crotchet of Crotchet. He found it
essential to his dignity to furnish himself with a coat of arms,
which, after the proper ceremonies (payment being the principal),
he obtained, videlicet: Crest, a crotchet rampant, in A sharp;
Arms, three empty bladders, turgescent, to show how opinions are
formed; three bags of gold, pendent, to show why they are
maintained; three naked swords, tranchant, to show how they are
administered; and three barbers' blocks, gaspant, to show how they
are swallowed.
Mr. Crotchet was left a widower, with two children; and, after the
death of his wife, so strong was his sense of the blessed comfort
she had been to him, that he determined never to give any other
woman an opportunity of obliterating the happy recollection.
He was not without a plausible pretence for styling his villa a
castle, for, in its immediate vicinity, and within his own enclosed
domain, were the manifest traces, on the brow of the hill, of a
Roman station, or castellum, which was still called the "Castle" by
the country people. The primitive mounds and trenches, merely
overgrown with greensward, with a few patches of juniper and box on
the vallum, and a solitary ancient beech surmounting the place of
the praetorium, presented nearly the same depths, heights, slopes,
and forms, which the Roman soldiers had originally given them.
From this cartel Mr. Crotchet christened his villa. With his
rustic neighbours he was, of course, immediately and necessarily a
squire: Squire Crotchet of the Castle; and he seemed to himself to
settle down as naturally into an English country gentleman, as if
his parentage had been as innocent of both Scotland and Jerusalem,
as his education was of Rome and Athens.
But as, though you expel nature with a pitch-fork, she will yet
always come back; he could not become, like a true-born English
squire, part and parcel of the barley-giving earth; he could not
find in game-bagging, poacher-shooting, trespasser-pounding,
footpath-stopping, common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all the
other liberal pursuits and pastimes which make a country gentleman
an ornament to the world and a blessing to the poor: he could not
find in these valuable and amiable occupations, and in a
corresponding range of ideas, nearly commensurate with that of the
great King Nebuchadnezzar when he was turned out to grass; he could
not find in this great variety of useful action, and vast field of
comprehensive thought, modes of filling up his time that accorded
with his Caledonian instinct. The inborn love of disputation,
which the excitements and engagements of a life of business had
smothered, burst forth through the calmer surface of a rural life.
He grew as fain as Captain Jamy, "to hear some argument betwixt ony
tway," and being very hospitable in his establishment, and liberal
in his invitations, a numerous detachment from the advanced guard
of the "march of intellect," often marched down to Crotchet Castle.
When the fashionable season filled London with exhibitors of all
descriptions, lecturers and else, Mr. Crotchet was in his glory;
for, in addition to the perennial literati of the metropolis, he
had the advantage of the visits of a number of hardy annuals,
chiefly from the north, who, as the interval of their metropolitan
flowering allowed, occasionally accompanied their London brethren
in excursions to Crotchet Castle.
Amongst other things, he took very naturally to political economy,
read all the books on the subject which were put forth by his own
countrymen, attended all lectures thereon, and boxed the technology
of the sublime science as expertly as an able seaman boxes the
compass.
With this agreeable mania he had the satisfaction of biting his
son, the hope of his name and race, who had borne off from Oxford
the highest academical honours; and who, treading in his father's
footsteps to honour and fortune, had, by means of a portion of the
old gentleman's surplus capital, made himself a junior partner in
the eminent loan-jobbing firm of Catchflat and Company. Here, in
the days of paper prosperity, he applied his science-illumined
genius to the blowing of bubbles, the bursting of which sent many a
poor devil to the gaol, the workhouse, or the bottom of the river,
but left young Crotchet rolling in riches.
These riches he had been on the point of doubling, by a marriage
with the daughter of Mr. Touchandgo, the great banker, when, one
foggy morning, Mr. Touchandgo and the contents of his till were
suddenly reported absent; and as the fortune which the young
gentleman had intended to marry was not forthcoming, this tender
affair of the heart was nipped in the bud.
Miss Touchandgo did not meet the shock of separation quite so
complacently as the young gentleman: for he lost only the lady,
whereas she lost a fortune as well as a lover. Some jewels, which
had glittered on her beautiful person as brilliantly as the bubble
of her father's wealth had done in the eyes of his gudgeons,
furnished her with a small portion of paper-currency; and this,
added to the contents of a fairy purse of gold, which she found in
her shoe on the eventful morning when Mr. Touchandgo melted into
thin air, enabled her to retreat into North Wales, where she took
up her lodging in a farm-house in Merionethshire, and boarded very
comfortably for a trifling payment, and the additional
consideration of teaching English, French, and music, to the little
Ap-Llymrys. In the course of this occupation she acquired
sufficient knowledge of Welsh to converse with the country people.
She climbed the mountains, and descended the dingles, with a foot
which daily habit made by degrees almost as steady as a native's.
She became the nymph of the scene; and if she sometimes pined in
thought for her faithless Strephon, her melancholy was anything but
green and yellow: it was as genuine white and red as occupation,
mountain air, thyme-fed mutton, thick cream, and fat bacon could
make it: to say nothing of an occasional glass of double X, which
Ap-Llymry, who yielded to no man west of the Wrekin in brewage,
never failed to press upon her at dinner and supper. He was also
earnest, and sometimes successful, in the recommendation of his
mead, and most pertinacious on winter nights in enforcing a trial
of the virtues of his elder wine. The young lady's personal
appearance, consequently, formed a very advantageous contrast to
that of her quondam lover, whose physiognomy the intense anxieties
of his bubble-blowing days, notwithstanding their triumphant
result, had left blighted, sallowed, and crow's-footed, to a degree
not far below that of the fallen spirit who, in the expressive
language of German romance, is described as "scathed by the
ineradicable traces of the thunderbolts of Heaven;" so that,
contemplating their relative geological positions, the poor
deserted damsel was flourishing on slate, while her rich and false
young knight was pining on chalk.
Squire Crotchet had also one daughter, whom he had christened
Lemma, and who, as likely to be endowed with a very ample fortune
was, of course, an object very tempting to many young soldiers of
fortune, who were marching with the march of mind, in a good
condition for taking castles, as far as not having a groat is a
qualification for such exploits. She was also a glittering bait to
divers young squires expectant (whose fathers were too well
acquainted with the occult signification of mortgage), and even to
one or two sprigs of nobility, who thought that the lining of a
civic purse would superinduce a very passable factitious nap upon a
thread-bare title. The young lady had received an expensive and
complicated education, complete in all the elements of superficial
display. She was thus eminently qualified to be the companion of
any masculine luminary who had kept due pace with the "astounding
progress" of intelligence. It must be confessed, that a man who
has not kept due pace with it, is not very easily found: this
march being one of that "astounding" character in which it seems
impossible that the rear can be behind the van. The young lady was
also tolerably good looking: north of Tweed, or in Palestine, she
would probable have been a beauty; but for the valleys of the
Thames she was perhaps a little too much to the taste of Solomon,
and had a nose which rather too prominently suggested the idea of
the tower of Lebanon, which looked towards Damascus.
In a village in the vicinity of the Castle was the vicarage of the
Reverend Doctor Folliott, a gentleman endowed with a tolerable
stock of learning, an interminable swallow, and an indefatigable
pair of lungs. His pre-eminence in the latter faculty gave
occasion to some etymologists to ring changes on his name, and to
decide that it was derived from Follis Optimus, softened through an
Italian medium into Folle Ottimo, contracted poetically into
Folleotto, and elided Anglice into Folliott, signifying a first-
rate pair of bellows. He claimed to be descended lineally from the
illustrious Gilbert Folliott, the eminent theologian, who was a
Bishop of London in the twelfth century, whose studies were
interrupted in the dead of night by the Devil, when a couple of
epigrams passed between them, and the Devil, of course, proved the
smaller wit of the two.
This reverend gentleman, being both learned and jolly, became by
degrees an indispensable ornament to the new squire's table. Mr.
Crotchet himself was eminently jolly, though by no means eminently
learned. In the latter respect he took after the great majority of
the sons of his father's land; had a smattering of many things, and
a knowledge of none; but possessed the true northern art of making
the most of his intellectual harlequin's jacket, by keeping the
best patches always bright and prominent.
CHAPTER II: THE MARCH OF MIND
Quoth Ralpho: nothing but the abuse
Of human learning you produce.--BUTLER
"God bless my soul, sir!" exclaimed the Reverend Doctor Folliott,
bursting, one fine May morning, into the breakfast-room at Crotchet
Castle, "I am out of all patience with this march of mind. Here
has my house been nearly burned down by my cook taking it into her
head to study hydrostatics in a sixpenny tract, published by the
Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for
doing all the world's business as well as his own, and is equally
well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge. I have a
great abomination of this learned friend; as author, lawyer, and
politician, he is triformis, like Hecate; and in every one of his
three forms he is bifrons, like Janus; the true Mr. Facing-both-
ways of Vanity Fair. My cook must read his rubbish in bed; and, as
might naturally be expected, she dropped suddenly fast asleep,
overturned the candle, and set the curtains in a blaze. Luckily,
the footman went into the room at the moment, in time to tear down
the curtains and throw them into the chimney, and a pitcher of
water on her nightcap extinguished her wick; she is a greasy
subject, and would have burned like a short mould."
The reverend gentleman exhaled his grievance without looking to the
right or to the left; at length, turning on his pivot, he perceived
that the room was full of company, consisting of young Crotchet,
and some visitors whom he had brought from London. The Reverend
Doctor Folliott was introduced to Mr. Mac Quedy, the economist; Mr.
Skionar, the transcendental poet; Mr. Firedamp, the meteorologist;
and Lord Bossnowl, son of the Earl of Foolincourt, and member for
the borough of Rogueingrain.
The divine took his seat at the breakfast-table, and began to
compose his spirits by the gentle sedative of a large cup of tea,
the demulcent of a well-buttered muffin, and the tonic of a small
lobster.
REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. You are a man of taste, Mr. Crotchet. A man of
taste is seen at once in the array of his breakfast-table. It is
the foot of Hercules, the far-shining face of the great work,
according to Pindar's doctrine: [Greek text]. The breakfast is
the [Greek text] of the great work of the day. Chocolate, coffee,
tea, cream, eggs, ham, tongue, cold fowl, all these are good, and
bespeak good knowledge in him who sets them forth: but the
touchstone is fish: anchovy is the first step, prawns and shrimps
the second; and I laud him who reaches even to these: potted char
and lampreys are the third, and a fine stretch of progression; but
lobster is, indeed, matter for a May morning, and demands a rare
combination of knowledge and virtue in him who sets it forth.
MR. MAC QUEDY. Well, sir, and what say you to a fine fresh trout,
hot and dry, in a napkin? or a herring out of the water into the
frying-pan, on the shore of Loch Fyne?
REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Sir, I say every nation has some eximious
virtue; and your country is pre-eminent in the glory of fish for
breakfast. We have much to learn from you in that line at any
rate.
MR. MAC QUEDY. And in many others, sir, I believe. Morals and
metaphysics, politics and political economy, the way to make the
most of all the modifications of smoke; steam, gas, and paper
currency; you have all these to learn from us; in short, all the
arts and sciences. We are the modern Athenians.
REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. I, for one, sir, am content to learn nothing
from you but the art and science of fish for breakfast. Be
content, sir, to rival the Boeotians, whose redeeming virtue was in
fish, touching which point you may consult Aristophanes and his
scholiast in the passage of Lysistrata, [Greek text], and leave the
name of Athenians to those who have a sense of the beautiful, and a
perception of metrical quantity.
MR. MAC QUEDY. Then, sir, I presume you set no value on the right
principles of rent, profit, wages, and currency?
REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. My principles, sir, in these things are, to
take as much as I can get, and pay no more than I can help. These
are every man's principles, whether they be the right principles or
no. There, sir, is political economy in a nutshell.
MR. MAC QUEDY. The principles, sir, which regulate production and
consumption are independent of the will of any individual as to
giving or taking, and do not lie in a nutshell by any means.
REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Sir, I will thank you for a leg of that capon.
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 -
REV. 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.
MR. FIREDAMP. Sir, you seem to make very light of science.
REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Yes, sir, such science as the learned friend
deals in: everything for everybody, science for all, schools for
all, rhetoric for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all,
and sense for none. I say, sir, law for lawyers, and cookery for
cooks: and I wish the learned friend, for all his life, a cook
that will pass her time in studying his works; then every dinner he
sits down to at home, he will sit on the stool of repentance.
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