Flesh in the Age of Reason (69 page)

What would he have said? What can any body say, save what Solomon said long before us? After all, it is but passing from one counter to another, from the bookseller’s to the other tradesman’s – grocer or pastry-cook. For my part, I have met with most poetry upon trunks; so that I am apt to consider the trunk-maker as the sexton of authorship.

The cultured and well-connected East India Office civil servant Thomas Love Peacock is best remembered for his sparkling series of satirical novels, beginning with
Headlong Hall
(1816). The commentary they offer on the exchanges about man’s estate surveyed in this book aptly introduces this Conclusion.

Each of Peacock’s novels centres upon a country-house gathering of gentlemen (garnished by a few token desirable damsels) representative of the leading currents of opinion and faddish sensibilities of the day. The debates conducted by these pundits over their pheasant and port constitute a wry intellectual symposium, a pot-pourri of different sounds – political, religious, social, philosophical and aesthetic – giving Peacock the opportunity to poke gentle fun, not just at each persuasion individually but at his age’s infatuation with earnest intellectual chatter.

Like every satirist, Peacock delighted in the bizarre assortment of tenets tenaciously adopted (no foible or crotchet but had its impassioned defender) and in the preposterous lengths to which those mounted upon their curious hobby horses would canter with their doctrines. Comparison is obviously expected with the
Spectator
club a century earlier. Addison and Steele had aimed to show how in a polite urbane world diverse types – the landowner, the merchant, the soldier, the beau, the cleric – should be able to club harmoniously together; and the fact that a similar congregation manages to sit down at Peacock’s tables and sink their differences as they sink their bumpers may, in effect, be taken as evidence of the success of the Spectatorial endeavour. Certain changes are also highly conspicuous. In the Spectator club, diversity is principally a function of social type and rank. By Peacock’s time, what count are the intellectual and
ideological, rather than the social, divides. A world of variegated and polarized opinion has emerged – a clear indication of the rise in the intervening century of a lay intelligentsia buoyed up by the printing revolution and the media. Peacock’s talking heads do not so much express vested class and professional interests as offer rival readings of human personality, behaviour and destiny. Evidently, the business of defining the very nature of man had become a major source of unsettling controversy.

While they are indeed models of conviviality, Peacock’s thinkers hold views as sharply polarized as those grotesquely parodied in
A Tale of a Tub
. Whereas for Swift, however, the disparate doctrines expressed were all primarily theological in complexion, in Peacock’s world the intricacies of Christian doctrine had become utterly marginal to debates over the nature of man. Even his clergymen – for example, the Revd Dr Gaster in
Headlong Hall
– are, as his very name reveals, typically bon vivants, concerned more with gastronomy than God. At a comparable dining table in
Melincourt
(1817), the Revd Mr Portpipe (again,
nomen est omen
) expounds a theological pragmatism, obviously meant to remind readers of Archdeacon William Paley:

When I open the bottle, I shut the book of Numbers. There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it.… Wine is the elixir of life. ‘The soul,’ says St. Augustine, ‘cannot live in drought.’ What is death? Dust and ashes. There is nothing so dry. What is life? Spirit. What is Spirit? Wine.

As is hinted by the honest divine’s materialization of spirit, Peacock is depicting a world essentially secular. Admittedly, in
Nightmare Abbey
(1818), Mr Flosky, aka Samuel Taylor Coleridge, champions the supernatural: ‘He dreamed with his eyes open, and saw ghosts dancing round him at noontide.’ Indeed, his conversation is mainly spectral: ‘It is seldom that ghosts appeal to two senses at once; but, when I was in Devonshire, the following story was well attested to me,’ is one of his opening gambits. But another guest, Mr Hilary,
will have none of this, proceeding to psycho-pathologize Flosky’s spirits: ‘All these anecdotes admit of solution on psychological principles,’ he counters:

It is more easy for a soldier, a philosopher, or even a saint, to be frightened of his own shadow, than for a dead man to come out of his grave. Medical writers cite a thousand singular examples of the force of imagination. Persons of feeble, nervous, melancholy temperament, exhausted by fever, by labour, or by spare diet, will readily conjure up, in the magic ring of their own phantasy, spectres, gorgons, chimeras, and all the objects of their hatred and their love.

Peacock’s caricatures encompass some of the leading doctrines then circulating about human nature and self-identity. Notable are the by-then standard perfectibilists like Mr Foster in
Headlong Hall
. ‘Every thing we look on’, he declares, ‘attests the progress of mankind in all the arts of life, and demonstrates their gradual advancement towards a state of unlimited perfection.’ Such progressives are counterbalanced by nostalgia-mongers, like Mr Escot in the same novel, who hanker after mankind in its state of primitive simplicity, holding that the human race began hale and hearty, and has subsequently degenerated. ‘The natural and original man’, he opines,

lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires, and no diseases. [But since] man first applied fire to culinary purposes… the stature of mankind has been in a state of gradual diminution, and I have not the least doubt that it will continue to grow
small by degrees, and lamentably less
, till the whole race will vanish imperceptibly from the face of the earth.

Escot was the archetypal lambaster of luxury and
laudator temporis acti
.

Gaster, Foster, Escot and others – by contrast to Flosky – were not meant by Peacock to epitomize a single living individual: they were versions of types prominent in Georgian debates about health, diet, education and the vices and virtues of civilization.

As well as satirizing distinct models of man, Peacock gave his own
renderings of some of the key intellectual debates of the day. One, for instance, was the furore over Malthus’s
Essay on the Principle of Population
(see above,
Chapter 23
). In
Crotchet Castle
(1831), Mr Fax – such a brilliant moniker for the Revd Thomas Robert Malthus! – argues that reform of society and social progress are quite out of the question without a root-and-branch transformation of human nature, that is, the withering away of sexual instincts – or, in other words, are pie in the sky. By contrast,
in Nightmare Abbey
Scythrop – that is, Percy Bysshe Shelley – is endlessly hatching plans for effecting precisely that regeneration of mankind. ‘He now became troubled with the
passion for reforming the world
,’ discloses Peacock in a phrase he liked so much he used it repeatedly. ‘He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species.’ In this parody of Shelley, Peacock was spot-on in drawing attention to the Hartleyan and Godwinian underpinnings of Scythrop’s philosophical musings:

‘Action,’ thus he soliloquised, ‘is the result of opinion, and to new-model opinion would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power; it is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for their own selfish purposes of aggrandisement and appropriation. What if it were in the hands of a few who should employ it to lead the many? What if it were universal, and the multitude were enlightened? No. The many must be always in leading-strings; but let them have wise and honest conductors.’

Here in a nutshell was a precise if cruel simplification of the thrust of Godwinian ideology, viewed as the culmination of the debate about the malleability of human nature (central to this study) which went back as far as Locke.

Still more radical, perhaps, as a satire on human nature, and harking back to many sources, including
Gulliver’s Travels
, is the character introduced in
Melincourt
of Sir Oran Haut-Ton. This higher primate has been taught to dress in human clothes, and despite – or rather precisely because of – being utterly silent, Sir Oran makes an
impeccable backbench Tory MP.
*
‘Sir Telegraph [Paxarett] looked earnestly at the stranger, but was too polite to laugh,’ writes Peacock, framing this monster through the bemused eyes and mystified brain of another guest:

though he could not help thinking there was something very ludicrous in Sir Oran’s physiognomy, notwithstanding the air of high fashion which characterized his whole deportment, and which was heightened by a pair of enormous whiskers, and the folds of his vast cravat. He therefore bowed to Sir Oran with becoming gravity, and Sir Oran returned the bow with very striking politeness.

… Sir Oran preserved an inflexible silence during the whole duration of dinner, but showed great proficiency in the dissection of game.

Over the dinner table, Sir Oran’s unusual origins are finally revealed, in a sequence which displays Peacock’s matchless ear for the nuances of inane upper-class dialogue:

MR. FORESTER
. Sir Oran Haut-ton was caught very young in the woods of Angola.

SIR TELEGRAPH PAXARETT
. Caught!

MR. FORESTER
. Very young. He is a specimen of the natural and original
      man – the wild man of the woods; called, in the language of the more
     civilized and sophisticated natives of Angola,
Pongo
, and in that of the
     Indians of South America,
Oran Outang
.

SIR TELEGRAPH PAXARETT
. The devil he is!

MR. FORESTER
. Positively. Some presumptuous naturalists have refused his
     species the honours of humanity; but the most enlightened and illustrious
     philosophers agree in considering him in his true light as the natural and
     original man.

Here Peacock kills several birds with one stone. He satirizes the views of Lord Monboddo, who held that mankind had evolved from the higher primates which were themselves human although as yet lacking the power of speech. He also spikes the absurdity of the Tory Party, which evidently possessed the brains of apes and hadn’t a word to say for itself. (By implication the political public was also derided, for being taken in by such speechless wonders.) Little did Peacock know it, but around the same time Charles Darwin was pencilling in one of his notebooks: ‘He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.’ Evidently, he should have been one of the guests.

Sir Oran’s physiognomy is found ‘ludicrous’, and it is noteworthy that other anthropological send-ups in Peacock’s satires, trading upon the tendentious notion that the inner man can be fully ascertained by his exterior casing, include the after-dinner lectures given to the guests at Headlong Hall by an adept of the fashionable new science of phrenology. ‘Mr. Cranium stood up and addressed the company,’ opens Peacock’s spoof upon Franz Gall:

Ardently desirous, to the extent of my feeble capacity, of disseminating, as much as possible, the inexhaustible treasures to which this golden key admits the humblest votary of philosophical truth, I invite you, when you have sufficiently restored, replenished, refreshed, and exhilarated that osteosarchæmatosplanchnochondroneuromuelous, or to employ a more intelligible term, osseocarnisanguineovisceri cartilaginonervomedullary,
compages
, or shell, the body, which at once envelops and develops that mysterious and inestimable kernel, the desiderative, determinative, ratiocinative, imaginative, inquisitive, appetitive, comparative, reminiscent, con
geries of ideas and notions, simple and compound, comprised in the comprehensive denomination of mind, to take a peep with me into the mechanical arcana of the anatomico-metaphysical universe.

We are evidently back to Swift and his mechanical operation of the spirit: the mechanical-reductionist bug was still biting. As practised by Mr Cranium, phrenology repeated what Peacock presumably took to be the ancient error (earlier enshrined in physiognomy) of reducing the human to the mechanical or the animalistic. ‘Here is the skull of a beaver, and that of Sir Christopher Wren,’ declares the lecturer. ‘You observe, in both these specimens, the prodigious development of the organ of constructiveness.’

As these novels reveal, by the early nineteenth century a cartload of contrasting philosophies of social and personal identity was on offer – one probably much more varied than a century earlier. In particular, such systems had become notably secular: by Peacock’s day a lay intelligentsia was blithely expounding a comprehensive syllabus of conflicting scientific and ideological views (many would say
errors
) about human nature and destiny.

This book has surveyed – selectively rather than systematically – changing thinking about the self and the personality in modernizing Britain. No simple unilinear shift from point A to position Z can be discerned: there was no undeviating teleological development, no final solution. A variety of traditions of thinking about the self blossomed; controversies flared up and raged unresolved. Different parties, cliques and religious sects advanced favourite nostrums of their own; women’s thinking dissented from male orthodoxies, and there were always stand-offs between radical alternatives and reactionary rebuttals. Indeed, the innovations in material culture brought by the commercial society and consumer culture – above all, growing literacy, the explosion of print, the rise of privacy, the emergence of such genres as the novel that created chambers of private thinking for the reader – invited questioning of old truths and the proliferation of new models for self-fashioning. All such developments spurred
further diversification: by the early nineteenth century the creeds of the seventeenth century had divided out into that kaleidoscope of opinions so brilliantly captured not just by Peacock but also by Hazlitt’s
The Spirit of the Age
and chewed over so earnestly by the
Edinburgh Review
, the
Quarterly Review
and the other new literary heavies.