Born, at Weymouth, 18 Oct. 1785. At a school at Englefield Green, 1793–98. To London, 1801. Sec. to Sir Home Riggs Popham, winter of 1808–09. Friendship with Shelley begun, 1812; visit to Edinburgh with him, 1813. Appointed to post in East India House, 1819; Chief Examiner, 1836. Married Jane Gryffydh, 20 March 1820. Settled at Lower Halliford, 1823. Retired from East India House, March 1856. Died, at Halliford, 23 Jan. 1866. Buried in Shepperton Cemetery. Works: “The Monks of St. Mark,” 1804; “Palmyra,” 1806; “The Genius of the Thames,” 1810; “The Philosophy of Melancholy,” 1812; “Sir Proteus” (under pseudonym: “P. M. O’Donovan, Esq.”), 1814; “Headlong Hall” (anon.), 1816; “Melincourt” (anon.), 1817; “Nightmare Abbey” (anon.), 1818; “Sir Hornbrook” (anon.), 1818; “Rhododaphne” (anon.), 1818; “Maid Marian” (anon.), 1822; “The Misfortunes of Elphin” (anon.), 1829; “Crotchet Castle” (anon.), 1831; “Paper Money Lyrics,” 1837; “Gryll Grange” (anon.), 1861. He translated: “Gli Ingannat; and Ælia Lælia Crispis,” 1862. Collected Works: ed., with memoirs, by Sir H. Cole (3 vols.), 1873; by R. Garnett (10 vols.), 1891.

Personal

  Did you ever read “Headlong Hall” and “Maid Marian”?—a charming lyrical poet and Horatian satirist he was when a writer; now he is a white-headed jolly old worldling, and secretary to the E. India House, full of information about India and everything else in the world.

  I met Peacock; a clever fellow, and a good scholar. I am glad to have an opportunity of being better acquainted with him. We had out Aristophanes, Æschylus, Sophocles and several other old fellows, and tried each other’s quality pretty well. We are both strong enough in these matters for gentlemen. But he is editing the Supplices. Æschylus is not to be edited by a man whose Greek is only a secondary pursuit.

  I saw a good deal of Mr. Peacock about this time, and enjoyed his society extremely, He was utterly unlike anybody I have ever seen before or since, and is best represented, to those who never knew him, by “Gryll Grange”—surely one of the brightest, as well as the most fantastic, books that has appeared in our time.

  The portrait prefixed to the collected edition of his works conveys a very good idea of the man as I first saw him—a stately old gentleman with hair as white as snow, a keen, merry eye, and a characteristic chin. His dress was plain black, with white neckcloth, and low shoes, and on his head he wore a plaited straw hat. One glance at him was enough to reveal his delightful character, that of his own Dr. Opimian. “His tastes in fact were four: a good library, a good dinner, a pleasant garden, and rural walks.” This was the man who, as a beautiful boy, had been caught up and kissed by Queen Caroline; who, when he grew up to manhood, had been christened “Greeky Peeky,” on account of his acquirement in Greek…. Age had mellowed and subdued the “cameo leopard,” but the “fine wit,” as I very speedily discovered, was as keen as ever. His life had been passed in comparative peace and retirement…. He had his “good library,” and it was a good one—full of books it was a luxury to handle, editions to make a scholar’s mouth water, bound completely in the old style in suits as tough as George Fox’s suit of leather…. Knowing Peacock only from his books, I was not prepared to find in him that delightful bonhomie which was in reality his most personal characteristic, in old age at least; and when we became acquainted, and read and talked together, I was as much astonished at the sweetness of his disposition as amused and captivated by his quaint erudition. In that green garden, in the lanes of Halliford, on the bright river, in walks and talks such as “brightened the sunshine,” I learned to know him, and although he was so much my senior he took pleasure (I am glad to say) in my society, partly because I never worried him with “acrimonious dispute,” which he hated above all things.

  Peacock’s literary style was elaborately polished, and he disliked writing letters, lest he should fall into any fault in hasty composition…. If, in conclusion, I may supplement these imperfect memories and family traditions from the sources of Peacock’s books and the memoirs of his grand-daughter, I should say that he was a kind-hearted, genial, friendly man, who loved to share his enjoyment of life with all around him; and he was self-indulgent without being selfish. His ideals of life were noble and generous, and in “Melincourt” they temper with seriousness, even sadness, the boyish love of fun and caricature which never fail him. And if we see in “The Misfortunes of Elphin” and “Crotchet Castle” increased intellectual power accompanied by a more worldly tone of thought, the natural consequence of prosperous enjoyment of life as he found it, it is pleasant to recognise signs in “Gryll Grange,” the child of his old age, a softer and better morality than that which characterises the two last-named books.

  Peacock’s character is well delineated in a few words by Sir Edward Strachey: “A kind-hearted, genial, friendly man, who loved to share his enjoyment of life with all around him, and self-indulgent without being selfish.” He is a rare instance of a man improved by prosperity; an element of pedantry and illiberality in his earlier writings gradually disappears in genial sunshine although with the advance of age, obstinate prejudice takes its place, good humoured but unamenable to argument.

Poetry

  The poetry of Peacock is neither the poetry of sentimental namby-pambyism nor of burning passion. If he does not glow with the fire of Shelley, he does not pall with the sickly maunderings of later nerveless versifiers, whose genius has had some difficulty in crawling through its long clothes. While our author’s verse is liquid and musical, it is never weak and faltering. He is able to endow his creations with some amount of life-breathing power. It can scarcely be said that he was happier in his poetry than his prose; rather, indeed, must the reverse be admitted. His intellectual and dissecting strength was greater than his emotional. He knew, probably, that the general reader would take no delight in his verse; but that mattered little to him; he could give him none other—consequently all his work in this direction betrays rather the thinking than the feeling man.

  The fame of Peacock as a prose humourist of incomparable vivacity has tended to overshadow and stunt his reputation as a poet. It is time, however, that his claims in verse should be vindicated, and a place demanded for him as an independent figure in the crowded Parnassus of his age,—a place a little below the highest, and somewhat isolated, at the extreme right of the composition. He has certain relations, not wholly accidental, with Shelley, who stands above him, and with such minor figures as Horace Smith and Thomas Haynes Bayly, who stand no less obviously below him; but in the main he is chiefly notable for his isolation. His ironical and caustic songs are unique in our literature, illuminated by too much fancy to be savage, but crackling with a kind of ghastly merriment that inspires quite as much terror as amusement. In parody he has produced at least one specimen, “There is a fever of the spirit,” which does not possess its equal for combined sympathy and malice. When we pass to his serious and sentimental lyrics, our praise cannot be so unmeasured.

  The riper and richer humour of Peacock, as superior to Praed’s as dry champagne to sweet, or a Sultana grape to a green gooseberry, is excellently represented by the masterly and generous satire of “Rich and Poor, or Saint and Sinner;” his deeper and sweeter gift of grave and tender song, by the matchless elegiac idyl of “Youth and Age.”

  Why, after having scored a brilliant success in prose, as he certainly did in his novels he should have gone back to verse in “Rhododaphne” is one of those puzzles with which the lives of men of genius abound, and which weaken, if they do not destroy, our belief in their self-knowledge. “Rhododaphne” was a delusion, and an aberration on the part of Peacock, in whom, at the age of thirty-three, it was inexcusable. It possesses no interest in itself, and is only interesting in the history of modern English poetry when compared with the “Endymion” of Keats, which was written at the same time. There was no comparison between the two men; for Peacock was a Grecian, and Keats was not. But he was better than a Grecian—he was a Greek, as Landor said, and, better still, he was a great poet.

  Thomas Love Peacock wrote for respectable and sentimental England five of the very best drinking-songs ever given to an ungrateful world. No thought of possible disapprobation vexed his soul’s serenity. He lived in the nineteenth century, as completely uncontaminated by nineteenth-century ideals as though Robinson Crusoe’s desert island had been his resting place. The shafts of his good-tempered ridicule were leveled at all that his countrymen were striving to prove sacred and beneficial. His easy laugh rang out just when everybody was most strenuous in the cause of progress. His wit was admirably calculated to make people uncomfortable and dissatisfied. And in addition to these disastrous qualities, he apparently thought it natural and reasonable and right that English gentlemen—sensible, educated, married English gentlemen—should sit around their dinner-tables until the midnight hour, drinking wine and singing songs with boyish and scandalous joviality.

General

  Peacock has married a Welsh turtle, and is employed at present in devising inextinguishable lanterns: which he puffs at with a pair of bellows.

  A new generation rose around him, to many of whose name—the name of one who had written novels when Bulwer and Disraeli were children—was unknown. His vigorous and versatile mind employed itself in new directions. He planned vessels which weathered the Cape, as he had produced books which will weather the century; but so far was he from abandoning letters, that his genius had an Indian summer not a whit less full of life and colour than the summer of its prime. “Gryll Grange,” published in “Fraser” some six or seven years ago, when Peacock was more than seventy years of age, is quite as fresh as any book of the “Headlong Hall” series, and even more remarkable than the best of them, for ingenuity, liveliness of humor, genial vigour of wit, and wide reading in literature. What is no less interesting about “Gryll Grange” is its similarity in tone and character to the author’s novels of half a century before. His favorite views are not altered, only strengthened and confirmed.

  It would, perhaps, be too much to aver that without his classicism, without his constant resort to the rich bank of ancient authors for the loan of thoughts and images, his novels would have been devoid of a residuary charm; for Peacock had a strong vein, a rare lyrical faculty, some invention, and a large and decided bent for satire: but the grace which harmonized these, and lent a spirit of “long, long ago” to the quaint modern figures, with which he loved to people his halls and granges, abbeys, castles, and green woods, was derived from those intellectual repasts of Greek and Latin authors which furnished to him a perpetual banquet.

  His vast learning, his precise style, his great research, his boundless sarcasm, his intense abhorrence of cant, are all so many claims upon our regard. With the ordinary novelists he has little in common; in most respects he cannot be put into competition with them; for, whilst he has many virtues which they do not possess, he exhibits few of their vices.

  In this ironic banter and reductio ad absurdum Peacock has no superior. His books themselves will probably seem tedious to the hasty reader, but even he will find in them innumerable suggestions which subsequent writers have made capital of. His wine and beasts have helped us to many feasts since his day.

  Smile as we may at the formality and pedantry of the eighteenth century, there were giants in those days; and Peacock resembled them in intellectual stature. His books will live, if only for their touches of quaint erudition; but they abound in delicious little pictures, such as that of Mr. Falconer and his seven Vestal attendants in “Gryll Grange,” or those of Coleridge and Shelley in “Nightmare Abbey.” Sir Oran Haut-ton is perfect, a masterpiece of characterisation, and as for Dr. Opimian, he is as sure of immortality as “my Uncle Toby” himself.

  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.

  When his robust independence is associated with a congenial subject, the effect is very agreeable,—it is like being made thoroughly at home by one who is thoroughly at home himself. Peacock seldom responded to the mere call of a publisher or editor, for such a call was seldom addressed to him. He was neither popular enough nor needy enough to be frequently diverted from his own bent, and thus exempt from taskwork, he could always be fresh and vigorous.

  Peacock’s prose is what Matthew Arnold maintained poetry should be—a criticism of life, not life in the abstract, but life in the concrete—the social, political, national life of his own people and period.

  There is no obscurity in Peacock; there is no gush; and there is a great deal of very active and poignant ridicule of gush, of obscurity, and of affectation…. He began by making fun of the times of our grandfathers, he ended by making fun of the times which are almost, if not quite our own; and if, as perhaps he did, he showed himself rather obstinately blind to many of the higher aspects of life in general, he saw what he did see with an unmatched clearness of vision, and expressed the ironic results of his sight with powerful distinction and scholarship…. Peacock had a more poetical, a more ironic, and a less popular temperament than Macaulay’s: but there was a good deal in him which might be called Macaulayish, on the negative side. He was nearly as knock-down in his depreciation as Macaulay was in his eulogism of progress and reform; he was, also like Macaulay, an omnivorous reader, and he had to a great extent the same clear, emphatic, unshadowed and unclouded caste of thought. Being, as has been said, an unpopular Macaulay, he never pushes his positiveness even in the negative direction to the extent of Philistinism; but he is open to the charge of being as hard if not as hollow as Macaulay at his worst. His special merits, however, will always, while they indispose towards him those whom Macaulay fully satisfies, enchant those who, while they fully admit the merits of Macaulay, are half disgusted by his demerits.