Gryll Grange

Gryll Grange, by Thomas Love
Peacock

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Title: Gryll Grange
Author: Thomas Love Peacock
Commentator: George Saintsbury
Illustrator: F. H. Townsend
Release Date: May 17, 2007 [EBook #21514]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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GRANGE ***

Produced by David Widger

GRYLL GRANGE

By Thomas Love Peacock
[Illustration: Minuet de la Cour 009-177]
[Illustration: Titlepage]
GRYLL GRANGE
BY
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896

INTRODUCTION
Gryll Grange, the last and mellowest fruit from Peacock's tree, was,
like most mellow fruit, not matured hastily. In saying this I do not refer
to the long period--exactly a generation in the conventional
sense--which intervened between Crotchet Castle of 1831 and this of
1861. For we know as a matter of fact, from the preface to the 1856
edition of Melincourt, that Peacock was planning Gryll Grange at a
time considerably nearer to, but still some years from, its actual
publication.
There might perhaps have been room for fear lest such a proceeding, on
the part of a man of seventy-five who was living in retirement, should
result in an ill-digested mass of detail, tempered or rather distempered

by the grumbling of old age, and exhibiting the marks of failing powers.
No anticipation could have been more happily falsified. The advance in
good temper of Gryll Grange, even upon Crotchet Castle itself, is
denied by no one. The book, though long for its author, is not in the
least overloaded; and no signs of failure have ever been detected in it
except by those who upbraid the still further severance between the line
of Peacock's thought and the line of what is vulgarly accounted
'progress,' and who almost openly impute decay to powers no longer
used on their side but against them. The only plausible pretext for this
insinuation is that very advance in mildness and mellowness which has
been noted--that comparative absence of the sharper and cruder strokes
of the earlier work. But since the wit is as bright as ever, though less
hard, it seems unreasonable to impute as a defect what, but for very
obvious reasons, would be admitted as an improvement.
Except Brougham, who still comes in for some severe language, no one
of Peacock's old favourite abominations undergoes personal
chastisement. On the contrary, indirect but pretty distinct apology is
tendered to Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge by appreciative
citation of their work. Even among the general victims, Scotchmen and
political economists have a still more direct olive-branch extended to
them by the introduction of the personage of Mr. MacBorrowdale: there
is no more blasphemy of Scott: and I do not at the present moment
remember any very distinct slaps at paper money. Peace had been made
long ago with the Church of England, through the powerful medium of
Dr. Folliott; but it is ratified and cemented anew here not merely by the
presentation of Dr. Opimian, but (in rather an odd fashion perhaps) by
the trait of Falconer's devotion to St. Catharine. So also, as the fair hand
of Lady Clarinda, despite some hard knocks administered to her father
and brother, had beckoned Peacock away from his cut-and-dried satire
of the aristocracy, so now Lord Curryfin exhibits a further stage of
reconciliation. In short, all those elements of society to which very
young men, not wanting either in brains or heart, often take crude and
fanciful objection, had by this time approved themselves (as they
always do, with the rarest exceptions, to les âmes bien nées) at worst
graceful if unnecessary ornaments to life, at best valuable to the social
fabric as solid and all but indispensable buttresses of it.

In all these 'reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries,' however, it is
very important to observe that there is no mawkishness; and, whatever
may have been sometimes thought and said, there is no 'ratting* in the
real sense. As must be obvious to any attentive reader of the novels,
and as has been pointed out once or twice before in these introductions,
Peacock had at no time been anything like an enrolled, much less a
convinced, member of the Radical or any party. He may have been a
Republican in his youth, though for my part I should like more
trustworthy evidence for it than that of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a very
clever but a distinctly unscrupulous person. If he