Nightmare Abbey
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Thomas Love Peacock >> Nightmare Abbey
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MARIONETTA
Sit with your back to the lady and read Dante; only be sure to begin
in the middle, and turn over three or four pages at once--backwards
as well as forwards, and she will immediately perceive that you are
desperately in love with her--desperately.
_(The Honourable Mr Listless sitting between Scythrop and Marionetta,
and fixing all his attention on the beautiful speaker, did not observe
Scythrop, who was doing as she described.)_
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
You are pleased to be facetious, Miss O'Carroll. The lady would
infallibly conclude that I was the greatest brute in town.
MARIONETTA
Far from it. She would say, perhaps, some people have odd methods of
showing their affection.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
But I should think, with submission--
MR FLOSKY (_joining them from another part of the room_)
Did I not hear Mr Listless observe that Dante is becoming fashionable?
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
I did hazard a remark to that effect, Mr Flosky, though I speak on
such subjects with a consciousness of my own nothingness, in the
presence of so great a man as Mr Flosky. I know not what is the colour
of Dante's devils, but as he is certainly becoming fashionable I
conclude they are blue; for the blue devils, as it seems to me, Mr
Flosky, constitute the fundamental feature of fashionable literature.
MR FLOSKY
The blue are, indeed, the staple commodity; but as they will not
always be commanded, the black, red, and grey may be admitted as
substitutes. Tea, late dinners, and the French Revolution, have played
the devil, Mr Listless, and brought the devil into play.
MR TOOBAD (_starting up_)
Having great wrath.
MR FLOSKY
This is no play upon words, but the sober sadness of veritable fact.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
Tea, late dinners, and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the
connection of ideas.
MR FLOSKY
I should be sorry if you could; I pity the man who can see the
connection of his own ideas. Still more do I pity him, the connection
of whose ideas any other person can see. Sir, the great evil is,
that there is too much common-place light in our moral and political
literature; and light is a great enemy to mystery, and mystery is a
great friend to enthusiasm. Now the enthusiasm for abstract truth is
an exceedingly fine thing, as long as the truth, which is the object
of the enthusiasm, is so completely abstract as to be altogether out
of the reach of the human faculties; and, in that sense, I have
myself an enthusiasm for truth, but in no other, for the pleasure of
metaphysical investigation lies in the means, not in the end; and if
the end could be found, the pleasure of the means would cease. The
mind, to be kept in health, must be kept in exercise. The proper
exercise of the mind is elaborate reasoning. Analytical reasoning is a
base and mechanical process, which takes to pieces and examines, bit
by bit, the rude material of knowledge, and extracts therefrom a few
hard and obstinate things called facts, every thing in the shape of
which I cordially hate. But synthetical reasoning, setting up as its
goal some unattainable abstraction, like an imaginary quantity in
algebra, and commencing its course with taking for granted some two
assertions which cannot be proved, from the union of these two assumed
truths produces a third assumption, and so on in infinite series, to
the unspeakable benefit of the human intellect. The beauty of this
process is, that at every step it strikes out into two branches, in
a compound ratio of ramification; so that you are perfectly sure of
losing your way, and keeping your mind in perfect health, by the
perpetual exercise of an interminable quest; and for these reasons I
have christened my eldest son Emanuel Kant Flosky.
THE REVEREND MR LARYNX
Nothing can be more luminous.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
And what has all that to do with Dante, and the blue devils?
MR HILARY
Not much, I should think, with Dante, but a great deal with the blue
devils.
MR FLOSKY
It is very certain, and much to be rejoiced at, that our literature is
hag-ridden. Tea has shattered our nerves; late dinners make us slaves
of indigestion; the French Revolution has made us shrink from the name
of philosophy, and has destroyed, in the more refined part of the
community (of which number I am one), all enthusiasm for political
liberty. That part of the _reading public_ which shuns the solid
food of reason for the light diet of fiction, requires a perpetual
adhibition of _sauce piquante_ to the palate of its depraved
imagination. It lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons (I and my
friend Mr Sackbut served up a few of the best), till even the devil
himself, though magnified to the size of Mount Athos, became too base,
common, and popular, for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have
therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness,
and now the delight of our spirits is to dwell on all the vices and
blackest passions of our nature, tricked out in a masquerade dress of
heroism and disappointed benevolence; the whole secret of which lies
in forming combinations that contradict all our experience, and
affixing the purple shred of some particular virtue to that precise
character, in which we should be most certain not to find it in the
living world; and making this single virtue not only redeem all the
real and manifest vices of the character, but make them actually
pass for necessary adjuncts, and indispensable accompaniments and
characteristics of the said virtue.
MR TOOBAD
That is, because the devil is come among us, and finds it for his
interest to destroy all our perceptions of the distinctions of right
and wrong.
MARIONETTA
I do not precisely enter into your meaning, Mr Flosky, and should be
glad if you would make it a little more plain to me.
MR FLOSKY
One or two examples will do it, Miss O'Carroll. If I were to take all
the mean and sordid qualities of a money-dealing Jew, and tack on to
them, as with a nail, the quality of extreme benevolence, I should
have a very decent hero for a modern novel; and should contribute my
quota to the fashionable method of administering a mass of vice, under
a thin and unnatural covering of virtue, like a spider wrapt in a
bit of gold leaf, and administered as a wholesome pill. On the same
principle, if a man knocks me down, and takes my purse and watch by
main force, I turn him to account, and set him forth in a tragedy as
a dashing young fellow, disinherited for his romantic generosity, and
full of a most amiable hatred of the world in general, and his own
country in particular, and of a most enlightened and chivalrous
affection for himself: then, with the addition of a wild girl to fall
in love with him, and a series of adventures in which they break all
the Ten Commandments in succession (always, you will observe, for some
sublime motive, which must be carefully analysed in its progress), I
have as amiable a pair of tragic characters as ever issued from that
new region of the belles lettres, which I have called the Morbid
Anatomy of Black Bile, and which is greatly to be admired and rejoiced
at, as affording a fine scope for the exhibition of mental power.
MR HILARY
Which is about as well employed as the power of a hothouse would be in
forcing up a nettle to the size of an elm. If we go on in this way, we
shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will
be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine
and music in the world.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
It seems to be the case with us at present, or we should not have
interrupted Miss O'Carroll's music with this exceedingly dry
conversation.
MR FLOSKY
I should be most happy if Miss O'Carroll would remind us that there
are yet both music and sunshine--
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
In the voice and the smile of beauty. May I entreat the favour
of--(_turning over the pages of music._)
All were silent, and Marionetta sung:
Why are thy looks so blank, grey friar?
Why are thy looks so blue?
Thou seem'st more pale and lank, grey friar,
Than thou wast used to do:--
Say, what has made thee rue?
Thy form was plump, and a light did shine
In thy round and ruby face,
Which showed an outward visible sign
Of an inward spiritual grace:--
Say, what has changed thy case?
Yet will I tell thee true, grey friar,
I very well can see,
That, if thy looks are blue, grey friar,
'Tis all for love of me,--
'Tis all for love of me.
But breathe not thy vows to me, grey friar,
Oh, breathe them not, I pray;
For ill beseems in a reverend friar,
The love of a mortal may;
And I needs must say thee nay.
But, could'st thou think my heart to move
With that pale and silent scowl?
Know, he who would win a maiden's love,
Whether clad in cap or cowl,
Must be more of a lark than an owl.
Scythrop immediately replaced Dante on the shelf, and joined the
circle round the beautiful singer. Marionetta gave him a smile of
approbation that fully restored his complacency, and they continued
on the best possible terms during the remainder of the evening. The
Honourable Mr Listless turned over the leaves with double alacrity,
saying, 'You are severe upon invalids, Miss O'Carroll: to escape your
satire, I must try to be sprightly, though the exertion is too much
for me.'
* * * * *
CHAPTER VII
A new visitor arrived at the Abbey, in the person of Mr Asterias,
the ichthyologist. This gentleman had passed his life in seeking the
living wonders of the deep through the four quarters of the world;
he had a cabinet of stuffed and dried fishes, of shells, sea-weeds,
corals, and madrepores, that was the admiration and envy of the Royal
Society. He had penetrated into the watery den of the Sepia Octopus,
disturbed the conjugal happiness of that turtle-dove of the ocean, and
come off victorious in a sanguinary conflict. He had been becalmed
in the tropical seas, and had watched, in eager expectation, though
unhappily always in vain, to see the colossal polypus rise from the
water, and entwine its enormous arms round the masts and the rigging.
He maintained the origin of all things from water, and insisted that
the polypodes were the first of animated things, and that, from their
round bodies and many-shooting arms, the Hindoos had taken their gods,
the most ancient of deities. But the chief object of his ambition, the
end and aim of his researches, was to discover a triton and a mermaid,
the existence of which he most potently and implicitly believed, and
was prepared to demonstrate, _à priori, à posteriori, à fortiori_,
synthetically and analytically, syllogistically and inductively,
by arguments deduced both from acknowledged facts and plausible
hypotheses. A report that a mermaid had been seen 'sleeking her soft
alluring locks' on the sea-coast of Lincolnshire, had brought him in
great haste from London, to pay a long-promised and often-postponed
visit to his old acquaintance, Mr Glowry.
Mr Asterias was accompanied by his son, to whom he had given the name
of Aquarius--flattering himself that he would, in the process of time,
become a constellation among the stars of ichthyological science. What
charitable female had lent him the mould in which this son was cast,
no one pretended to know; and, as he never dropped the most distant
allusion to Aquarius's mother, some of the wags of London maintained
that he had received the favours of a mermaid, and that the scientific
perquisitions which kept him always prowling about the sea-shore, were
directed by the less philosophical motive of regaining his lost love.
Mr Asterias perlustrated the sea-coast for several days, and reaped
disappointment, but not despair. One night, shortly after his arrival,
he was sitting in one of the windows of the library, looking towards
the sea, when his attention was attracted by a figure which was moving
near the edge of the surf, and which was dimly visible through the
moonless summer night. Its motions were irregular, like those of a
person in a state of indecision. It had extremely long hair, which
floated in the wind. Whatever else it might be, it certainly was not a
fisherman. It might be a lady; but it was neither Mrs Hilary nor Miss
O'Carroll, for they were both in the library. It might be one of the
female servants; but it had too much grace, and too striking an air of
habitual liberty, to render it probable. Besides, what should one of
the female servants be doing there at this hour, moving to and fro,
as it seemed, without any visible purpose? It could scarcely be a
stranger; for Claydyke, the nearest village, was ten miles distant;
and what female would come ten miles across the fens, for no purpose
but to hover over the surf under the walls of Nightmare Abbey? Might
it not be a mermaid? It was possibly a mermaid. It was probably a
mermaid. It was very probably a mermaid. Nay, what else could it be
but a mermaid? It certainly was a mermaid. Mr Asterias stole out of
the library on tiptoe, with his finger on his lips, having beckoned
Aquarius to follow him.
The rest of the party was in great surprise at Mr Asterias's movement,
and some of them approached the window to see if the locality would
tend to elucidate the mystery. Presently they saw him and Aquarius
cautiously stealing along on the other side of the moat, but they saw
nothing more; and Mr Asterias returning, told them, with accents of
great disappointment, that he had had a glimpse of a mermaid, but she
had eluded him in the darkness, and was gone, he presumed, to sup with
some enamoured triton, in a submarine grotto.
'But, seriously, Mr Asterias,' said the Honourable Mr Listless, 'do
you positively believe there are such things as mermaids?'
MR ASTERIAS
Most assuredly; and tritons too.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
What! things that are half human and half fish?
MR ASTERIAS
Precisely. They are the oran-outangs of the sea. But I am persuaded
that there are also complete sea men, differing in no respect from us,
but that they are stupid, and covered with scales; for, though our
organisation seems to exclude us essentially from the class of
amphibious animals, yet anatomists well know that the _foramen ovale_
may remain open in an adult, and that respiration is, in that case,
not necessary to life: and how can it be otherwise explained that the
Indian divers, employed in the pearl fishery, pass whole hours under
the water; and that the famous Swedish gardener of Troningholm lived
a day and a half under the ice without being drowned? A nereid, or
mermaid, was taken in the year 1403 in a Dutch lake, and was in every
respect like a French woman, except that she did not speak. Towards
the end of the seventeenth century, an English ship, a hundred and
fifty leagues from land, in the Greenland seas, discovered a flotilla
of sixty or seventy little skiffs, in each of which was a triton, or
sea man: at the approach of the English vessel the whole of them,
seized with simultaneous fear, disappeared, skiffs and all, under
the water, as if they had been a human variety of the nautilus. The
illustrious Don Feijoo has preserved an authentic and well-attested
story of a young Spaniard, named Francis de la Vega, who, bathing with
some of his friends in June, 1674, suddenly dived under the sea and
rose no more. His friends thought him drowned; they were plebeians and
pious Catholics; but a philosopher might very legitimately have drawn
the same conclusion.
THE REVEREND MR LARYNX
Nothing could be more logical.
MR ASTERIAS
Five years afterwards, some fishermen near Cadiz found in their nets a
triton, or sea man; they spoke to him in several languages--
THE REVEREND MR LARYNX
They were very learned fishermen.
MR HILARY
They had the gift of tongues by especial favour of their brother
fisherman, Saint Peter.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
Is Saint Peter the tutelar saint of Cadiz?
(_None of the company could answer this question, and_ MR ASTERIAS
_proceeded_.)
They spoke to him in several languages, but he was as mute as a fish.
They handed him over to some holy friars, who exorcised him; but the
devil was mute too. After some days he pronounced the name Lierganes.
A monk took him to that village. His mother and brothers recognised
and embraced him; but he was as insensible to their caresses as any
other fish would have been. He had some scales on his body, which
dropped off by degrees; but his skin was as hard and rough as
shagreen. He stayed at home nine years, without recovering his
speech or his reason: he then disappeared again; and one of his old
acquaintance, some years after, saw him pop his head out of the water
near the coast of the Asturias. These facts were certified by his
brothers, and by Don Gaspardo de la Riba Aguero, Knight of Saint
James, who lived near Lierganes, and often had the pleasure of
our triton's company to dinner.--Pliny mentions an embassy of the
Olyssiponians to Tiberius, to give him intelligence of a triton which
had been heard playing on its shell in a certain cave; with several
other authenticated facts on the subject of tritons and nereids.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
You astonish me. I have been much on the sea-shore, in the season, but
I do not think I ever saw a mermaid. (_He rang, and summoned Fatout,
who made his appearance half-seas-over_.) Fatout! did I ever see a
mermaid?
FATOUT
Mermaid! mer-r-m-m-aid! Ah! merry maid! Oui, monsieur! Yes, sir, very
many. I vish dere vas von or two here in de kitchen--ma foi! Dey be
all as melancholic as so many tombstone.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
I mean, Fatout, an odd kind of human fish.
FATOUT
De odd fish! Ah, oui! I understand de phrase: ve have seen nothing
else since ve left town--ma foi!
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
You seem to have a cup too much, sir.
FATOUT
Non, monsieur: de cup too little. De fen be very unwholesome, and I
drink-a-de ponch vid Raven de butler, to keep out de bad air.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
Fatout! I insist on your being sober.
FATOUT
Oui, monsieur; I vil be as sober as de révérendissime père Jean. I
should be ver glad of de merry maid; but de butler be de odd fish,
and he swim in de bowl de ponch. Ah! ah! I do recollect de leetle-a
song:--'About fair maids, and about fair maids, and about my merry
maids all.' (_Fatout reeled out, singing_.)
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
I am overwhelmed: I never saw the rascal in such a condition before.
But will you allow me, Mr Asterias, to inquire into the _cui bono_ of
all the pains and expense you have incurred to discover a mermaid? The
_cui bono_, sir, is the question I always take the liberty to ask when
I see any one taking much trouble for any object. I am myself a sort
of Signor Pococurante, and should like to know if there be any thing
better or pleasanter, than the state of existing and doing nothing?
MR ASTERIAS
I have made many voyages, Mr Listless, to remote and barren shores:
I have travelled over desert and inhospitable lands: I have defied
danger--I have endured fatigue--I have submitted to privation. In the
midst of these I have experienced pleasures which I would not at any
time have exchanged for that of existing and doing nothing. I have
known many evils, but I have never known the worst of all, which, as
it seems to me, are those which are comprehended in the inexhaustible
varieties of _ennui_: spleen, chagrin, vapours, blue devils,
time-killing, discontent, misanthropy, and all their interminable
train of fretfulness, querulousness, suspicions, jealousies, and
fears, which have alike infected society, and the literature of
society; and which would make an arctic ocean of the human mind, if
the more humane pursuits of philosophy and science did not keep alive
the better feelings and more valuable energies of our nature.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
You are pleased to be severe upon our fashionable belles lettres.
MR ASTERIAS
Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other
varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only _beau idéal_
of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the
speculative energy. A gloomy brow and a tragical voice seem to have
been of late the characteristics of fashionable manners: and a morbid,
withering, deadly, antisocial sirocco, loaded with moral and political
despair, breathes through all the groves and valleys of the modern
Parnassus; while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course,
affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid--to maturity, calm
and grateful occupation--to old age, the most pleasing recollections
and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and,
while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the
intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself
independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of
human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His
days are always too short for his enjoyment: _ennui_, is a stranger to
his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices
to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing
and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.[6]
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
Really I should like very well to lead such a life myself, but the
exertion would be too much for me. Besides, I have been at college.
I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed,
and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the
intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few
vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that
amiable discontent and antisociality which you reprobate in our
present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very
fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favourite pursuit of
doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing any thing for.
MARIONETTA
But is there not in such compositions a kind of unconscious
self-detection, which seems to carry their own antidote with them? For
surely no one who cordially and truly either hates or despises the
world will publish a volume every three months to say so.
MR FLOSKY
There is a secret in all this, which I will elucidate with a dusky
remark. According to Berkeley, the _esse_ of things is _percipi_. They
exist as they are perceived. But, leaving for the present, as far
as relates to the material world, the materialists, hyloists, and
antihyloists, to settle this point among them, which is indeed
A subtle question, raised among
Those out o' their wits, and those i' the wrong:
for only we transcendentalists are in the right: we may very safely
assert that the _esse_ of happiness is _percipi_. It exists as it is
perceived. 'It is the mind that maketh well or ill.' The elements of
pleasure and pain are every where. The degree of happiness that any
circumstances or objects can confer on us depends on the mental
disposition with which we approach them. If you consider what is meant
by the common phrases, a happy disposition and a discontented temper,
you will perceive that the truth for which I am contending is
universally admitted.
_(Mr Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally
trespassing within the limits of common sense.)_
MR HILARY
It is very true; a happy disposition finds materials of enjoyment
every where. In the city, or the country--in society, or in
solitude--in the theatre, or the forest--in the hum of the multitude,
or in the silence of the mountains, are alike materials of reflection
and elements of pleasure. It is one mode of pleasure to listen to
the music of 'Don Giovanni,' in a theatre glittering with light, and
crowded with elegance and beauty: it is another to glide at sunset
over the bosom of a lonely lake, where no sound disturbs the silence
but the motion of the boat through the waters. A happy disposition
derives pleasure from both, a discontented temper from neither, but
is always busy in detecting deficiencies, and feeding dissatisfaction
with comparisons. The one gathers all the flowers, the other all the
nettles, in its path. The one has the faculty of enjoying every thing,
the other of enjoying nothing. The one realises all the pleasure of
the present good; the other converts it into pain, by pining after
something better, which is only better because it is not present, and
which, if it were present, would not be enjoyed. These morbid spirits
are in life what professed critics are in literature; they see nothing
but faults, because they are predetermined to shut their eyes to
beauties. The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy;
that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then he
complains of the decline of literature. In like manner, these cankers
of society complain of human nature and society, when they have
wilfully debarred themselves from all the good they contain, and done
their utmost to blight their own happiness and that of all around
them. Misanthropy is sometimes the product of disappointed
benevolence; but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening
and mortified vanity, quarrelling with the world for not being better
treated than it deserves.
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