THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1455, 1 June 1912, Page 9

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK.

Reviewing two recent books on Thomas Love Peacock, Air. Thomas Scccombo writes in tlio "Daily XcwV:— . The number of books about Thomas Luvo Peacock produced during the last MX years has boon surprising. The Oxford "Press" recently gave us Peacock's ".Memoirs of Shelley," with Shelley's letters to Peacock. A complete set of these last is included in Air. Ingpen's excellent edition of the "Letters of Shelley." Then there are. the "Letters of Peacock" lo Edward Hcokhum (1807-1811), and to Shelley (1818-18*!), recently issued in a sumptuous form by the Bibliophile Society of New York. Peacock's Poems mid Peacock's Pliiys have Ijolh been teparately edited. There have been complete editions in very handy form issued by Xewires and KouHedge, art elaborate dissertation on the "Life and Novels," by Dr. Arthur B. Tonne, and now this "Life," by Mr. Van Doreii, and "Critical Study," by Mr. Martin Freeman. Anyone regarding the matter from an adjoining planet, outside the Library System of this {treat country, would infer that a great revulsion of feeling had set in, and that Peacock's posthumous fortune in the matter of literary fame had been suddenly and decisively made. Looking at the phenomena from an entirely sublunary point of view, we should say that the demonstration was almost entirelv due to blind coincidence, and that Peacock's "Puo Sto" remains exactly where it did. Last summer I stood by his table-tomb at Shepperton. Tho inscription of 18GR was already effaced, and could bo deciphered only with the utmost difficulty. There is no popular cry or demand for Peacock whatsoever. He is a minor classic of the romantic period, and the darling of the classically cultured few. Shelley and Meredith. Peacock's life was, in the main, singularly uneventful. Tli6 glamour of it is concentrated into one or two of its associations.. His marriage, liko Landor's, was not without a spice of the poetic; his connections with two great poef.s, Shelley and Meredith, stands his biographer in good stead. Mr. Van Doren has made the best of the material thus provided; he has gleaned with a. discerning eye and with commendable diligence. Mr. Freeman's essay is instinct with knowledge, taste, and distinction of style. His book postulates a knowledge of and an enthusiasm for Peacock which one would not imagine very often to he found in .conjunction—that is the only possible flaw to bo found in it. The chief claims of Peacock upon posterity, as it seems to me, are twofold. First as a stylist, and then as a satirist.,, Peacock's prose style is scholarly, original, and accomplished in «vejy way. Hβ writes with the nervous erispness and tart emphasis of a dean. He may bo a Oxford or Cambridge don of the dry and clever type; or he may be the dean of a cathedral, a hedonist generally, clever enough to have obtained one of the softest billets on l the establishment, of a ruddy and pnrple countenance, a» ofttn as not. and with a strong disinclination lo scribbling or indeed 'to unnecessary toil of any kind. Peacock wrote like a man of this type. Unlike him, he wrote with facility if not copiousness, but always with decision and precise care. His style, in short, is full of good wine, Latin and Greek, aristocratic leisure and contempt for the multitude in general and in particular for all kinds of l : beral faddists. His "con-versation-novels" as T should define them —comedies masquerading as novels for the most part—are tournaments of embodied fads. Aristophanes describes his political enemies as overeating and overdrinking in the company of prostitutes, or worse. Peacock represents the philanthopists of luis day as devoted to gourmand ise and luxury. Economists, teetotalers, vegetarians, profectionists, Scots, Germans, Americans, dissenters of all sorts he had a horror of. End he lived to-day, the Christian Scientists, the anti-man-mania, tho sin-of-mnrriage, Ihe ini-quity-of-discipline, and. tho crime-of-pnn-ishnient manias would have afforded him irresistible material. ■ A-.--:r;t.:. Pet'.Aversions; ... ;. ■'■ :, ..; . His characters arc largely the pet aversions of a pagan and a. pessimist. The novels' of the day were _ frequently concealed satires or comedies. Toko Peacock's Mr. Cranium, for instance; is he not the exact prolotypo of Alarryat's Mr. Kasy and of a crowd of other characters in the fiction of the thirties and forties? Peacock is Escot the pessimist, convinced that the age is growing worse, not better; a profound cynic. He laughs at sentiment of every kind, ecstasy, enthusiasm—mere lack of reality. He loves to blow the froth oft' the absurdities of charlatans and reformers. To Shelley starving himself in a hot fit of republican idealism and universal benevolence he orders "three mutton chops well peppered." He portrays him as Scythrop; Coleridge is Flosky, Mystic and Skionar; Wordsworth is Wontsee and Paperstamp; Souther is Shantsee, Feathernest, and Nightshade; llazlitt is Eavesdrop. Peacock posed somewhat in later life, I am inclined to think, as a. Roman, an out-of-door man and a Conservative, a die-hard with a fine cellarage of antique wit, Latin, well-bound books, and old Madeira. To those who were privileged to meet him in the 'sixties ho must havo seemed rather an unexpected person to havo been singled out as tho friend of Shelley. How he scorched the sentimental tourist, who, perching himself on an old wall, worked himself up into a soliloquy of philosophical pathos on the. vicissitudes of empire and the mutability of. all sublunary things (interrupted only by an occasional peep at his watch to ensure Ijis not overstaying tho minute at which his fowl comfortably roasting at the nearest inn has been promised to be ready). Yet he had once sentimentalised in this fashion himself, and from Goldsmith's day to that of the author of "En Flnnant" (how, it seems, in immediate danger of becoming a member of the French Academy) such books have had their perennial charm. Peacock's conscience—well, not conscience, perhaps, but sympathy, was of that etiolated kind which is the normal product in tho case of a man who falls betimes upon a. very soft billet. He did good service in eliminating a falso elevation from the prose of that period over which Tom Moore poetised so beautifully; nidlio was a great hand at a Symposuim. Has he a rival?