Gryll Grange | Page 2

was--and it is not at
all improbable that he had the Republican measles, a very common
disease of youth, pretty early--he certainly had never been a democrat.
Even his earlier satire is double-edged; and, as must be constantly
repeated and remembered, it was always his taste and his endeavour to
shoot folly as it flew, to attack existent and not extinct forms of popular
or fashionable delusion. Such follies, whether in 1860 or since, have
certainly not as a rule been of the aristocratic, monarchical, or Tory
order generally.
He found plenty of these follies, however, in the other kind--the kind
which he had begun to satirise smartly in Crotchet Castle--and he
showed pretty decisively that his hand had not lost its cunning, nor his
sword its sharpness. The satire, though partly, is not mainly political;
and it is an interesting detail (though it only refreshes the memory of
those who knew the facts then or have studied them since) that barely
she years before a far more sweeping reform than that of 1832, a very
acute judge who disliked and resisted it spoke of 'another reform
lunacy' as 'not likely to arise in his time.' And these words, it must be
remembered, are put in the mouth of Mr. MacBorrowdale, who is
represented as merely middle-aged.
It is fortunate, however, for the interest of Gryll Grange that politics, in
the strict sense, occupy so small a part of it; for of all subjects they lose
interest first to all but a very select number of readers. The bulk of the
satiric comment of the book is devoted either to purely social matters,
or to the debateable land between these and politics proper. A little but
not very much of this is obsolete or obsolescent. American slavery is

no more; and the 'Pantopragmatic Society' (in official language the
Social Science Congress) has ceased to exist as a single recognised
institution. But there is not much about slavery here, and if
pantopragmatics have lost their special Society they flourish more than
ever as a general and fashionable subject of human attention. You shall
not open a number of the Times twice, perhaps not once in a week,
without finding columns of debate, harangue, or letter-writing purely
pantopragmatical.
Still more is this the case with another subject which has even more
attention, and on which what some think the central and golden
sentence of the book is laid down by Dr. Opimian in the often-quoted
words, 'If all the nonsense which in the last quarter of a century [it is
appalling to think that this quarter is getting on for three-quarters now]
has been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all
that has been talked on the subject of Education alone were thrown into
the other, I think the latter would preponderate.' Indeed it cannot be
said that after nearly five-and-thirty years, up to and including the
present moment, during which Competitive Examination has been a
field of battle, much has been added to Peacock's attack on it, or
anything said on the other side to weaken the cogency of that attack.
No doubt he was to some extent a prejudiced judge; for, though few
people would at any time of his youth have had less to fear from
competitive examination, his own fortune had been made by the
opposite system, and the competitive scheme must infallibly tend rather
to exclude than to admit persons like him. But a wise criticism does not
ask cut bone in cases of argument, it simply looks to see whether the
advocacy is sound, not whether the advocate has received or expects
his fee. And Peacock's advocacy is here not merely sound; it is, in so
far as it goes, inexpugnable. It is true there is a still more irrefragable
rejoinder to it which has kept competition safe hitherto, though for
obvious reasons it will very rarely be found openly expressed by the
defenders of the system; and that is, that, under the popular jealousy
resulting from wide or universal suffrage, there is no alternative but
competitive examination, or else the American system of alternating
spoils to the victors, which is demonstrably worse for the public, and
not demonstrably much better for private interests.

As for table-turning, and lectures, and the 'excess of hurrying about,'
and 'Siberian' dinners and so forth, they are certainly not dead.
Table-turning may have changed its name; the others have not even
adopted the well-known expedient of the alias, but appear just as they
were thirty years ago in the social and satiric dictionaries of to-day.
It would be odd if this comparative freshness and actuality of subject
did not make Gryll Grange one of the lightest and brightest of
Peacock's novels; and I think it fully deserves