MAID MARIAN AND CROTCHET CASTLE BY THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY ILontoon MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1895 INTRODUCTION DURING many years 7 reading, with ever fresh enjoyment, of Peacocks novels, I had until quite the other day indeed until a time later than that at which I undertook the pleasant duty of writing this preface been unable to understand what special model the author had had before him in these unique performances. Lord Houghton had noticed, and ...
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MAID MARIAN AND CROTCHET CASTLE BY THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY ILontoon MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1895 INTRODUCTION DURING many years 7 reading, with ever fresh enjoyment, of Peacocks novels, I had until quite the other day indeed until a time later than that at which I undertook the pleasant duty of writing this preface been unable to understand what special model the author had had before him in these unique performances. Lord Houghton had noticed, and nobody who had any knowledge of the subject was likely to gainsay, the obvious indebtedness of Peacock to the French tale-tellers of the eighteenth century from Anthony Hamilton to Pigault-Lebrun though, by the way, Lord Houghtons attribution of the Compare Mathieu to Pigault-Lebrun was a mistake, or more probably a slip of memory. But in the model which Hamilton, set, which Voltaire borrowed, and which others imitated from Voltaire, there was a very great deal which is quite different from Peacock different not merely in the details where differ ence was necessary, considering the time and country of the writers, but m other ways much more important. I had lot solved the problem when, some nine years since, I first wrote about Peacock in Macmillaris Magazine and I have not noticed that anybody has ever solved it. But a month or two ago I happened to be reading for a different purpose the old English version of Marmontels Contes Moraux a book which in the original I had not read since a period vii MAID MARIAN AND CROTCHET CASTLE before that at which I commenced Peacockian. And it so happened that one of the first things I hit upon was the phrase the beautiful Cephalisin the English version of Les Manages Samnites. It would be an insult to any practised reader of Peacock, and will be unnecessary when in a later volume of this series Headlong Hall has reappeared, to explain to others how and why the train at once caught fire. Cephalis is not a common name the adjective attached to it in the two writers alike as a sort of perpetual epithet connects the pair still closer and though in Peacock the name itself has a special propriety, though in Marmontel it is perfectly general, this, the Englishman being the later writer of the two, does not invalidate, but, on the contrary, strengthens the coincidence. Nor have I any doubt that these famous Moral Tales, which were immensely popular in England exactly at the time when Peacock was a boy and a very young man, give the line between the Hamiltonian-Voltairian conte and Peacock. In them the fantastic-sarcastic story is brought more home to the actual society of the day than is the case in Voltaires own. In them, though Marmontel sub mitted more than Peacock ever did to the philosophical fads and crazes of his own day, the undercurrent of satirical criticism on these fads is distinctly apparent. In both a slightly not by any means more than slightly pagan disposition to blink positive doctrines is made up by a vigorous advocacy of good fellowship and the general moral virtues, which stops a good deal short of the all-pervading depreciation of The Patriarch In both there is a quasi romantic touch. And in both, let me add, there is evidence of that latent conservatism which made the philosophe Marmontel in his later days a stout reactionary, viii INTRODUCTION and which causes little quivers very delightful tobehold in English advocates of Progress who try to excuse and belittle at the same moment the senile delinquencies of Peacock. This, however, is only a curiosity of literature which happens to have come from the accident of studying two authors, both known, but one long neglected, at the same time. It seemed worth mentioning, but need not be further pursued...
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