Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (top 10 best books of all time txt) 📕
Description
Published in 1818, Peacock’s novella Nightmare Abbey is a gentle satire of the then-popular gothic movement in literature. He pokes fun at the genre’s obsessions and most of the book’s characters are caricatures of well-known personages of the time.
Young Scythrop is the only son of Mr. Glowry, living in the semi-ruined Nightmare Abbey on his estate in Lincolnshire. Mr. Glowry, the survivor of a miserable marriage, is addicted to the depressing and the morbid, surrounding himself with servants whose names, such as Raven, Graves and Skellet, reflect his obsessions. His friends, also, are chosen from those who best reflect his misanthropic views.
Scythrop himself imagines himself a philosopher with a unique view of the world, and to this end has written a treatise titled “Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind.” Only seven copies of this treatise have ever been sold, and Scythrop dreams of being united with one of the buyers. His passions, though, become more earthy when he falls in love both with his cousin Marionetta and then also with a mysterious woman who appears in his apartment and begs him for asylum, thus creating a situation of romantic farce as he tries to decide between the two.
These events are interleaved between entertaining discussions among the varied guests at Nightmare Abbey, richly filled with humor, allusions and quotation.
Nightmare Abbey is probably Peacock’s most successful work of fiction, and helped establish his position as an important satirist of his times. His satire, though, is light-hearted rather than savage and is directed more at foolish opinions than attacking particular persons.
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- Author: Thomas Love Peacock
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The false knave, sir, is my honest friend; therefore, I beseech you, let him be countenanced. God forbid but a knave should have some countenance at his friend’s request.
Mr. Toobad“Good men and true” was their common term, like the χαλος χάγαδος of the Athenians. It is so long since men have been either good or true, that it is to be questioned which is most obsolete, the fact or the phraseology.
Mr. CypressThere is no worth nor beauty but in the mind’s idea. Love sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind.9 Confusion, thrice confounded, is the portion of him who rests even for an instant on that most brittle of reeds—the affection of a human being. The sum of our social destiny is to inflict or to endure.10
Mr. HilaryRather to bear and forbear, Mr. Cypress—a maxim which you perhaps despise. Ideal beauty is not the mind’s creation: it is real beauty, refined and purified in the mind’s alembic, from the alloy which always more or less accompanies it in our mixed and imperfect nature. But still the gold exists in a very ample degree. To expect too much is a disease in the expectant, for which human nature is not responsible; and, in the common name of humanity, I protest against these false and mischievous ravings. To rail against humanity for not being abstract perfection, and against human love for not realising all the splendid visions of the poets of chivalry, is to rail at the summer for not being all sunshine, and at the rose for not being always in bloom.
Mr. CypressHuman love! Love is not an inhabitant of the earth. We worship him as the Athenians did their unknown God: but broken hearts are the martyrs of his faith, and the eye shall never see the form which fantasy paints, and which passion pursues through paths of delusive beauty, among flowers whose odours are agonies, and trees whose gums are poison.11
Mr. HilaryYou talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.
Mr. CypressThe mind is diseased of its own beauty, and fevers into false creation. The forms which the sculptor’s soul has seized exist only in himself.12
Mr. FloskyPermit me to discept. They are the mediums of common forms combined and arranged into a common standard. The ideal beauty of the Helen of Zeuxis was the combined medium of the real beauty of the virgins of Crotona.
Mr. HilaryBut to make ideal beauty the shadow in the water, and, like the dog in the fable, to throw away the substance in catching at the shadow, is scarcely the characteristic of wisdom, whatever it may be of genius. To reconcile man as he is to the world as it is, to preserve and improve all that is good, and destroy or alleviate all that is evil, in physical and moral nature—have been the hope and aim of the greatest teachers and ornaments of our species. I will say, too, that the highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakespeare and Socrates were the most festive of companions. But now the little wisdom and genius we have seem to be entering into a conspiracy against cheerfulness.
Mr. ToobadHow can we be cheerful with the devil among us!
The Honourable Mr. ListlessHow can we be cheerful when our nerves are shattered?
Mr. FloskyHow can we be cheerful when we are surrounded by a reading public, that is growing too wise for its betters?
ScythropHow can we be cheerful when our great general designs are crossed every moment by our little particular passions?
Mr. CypressHow can we be cheerful in the midst of disappointment and despair?
Mr. GlowryLet us all be unhappy together.
Mr. HilaryLet us sing a catch.
Mr. GlowryNo: a nice tragical ballad. “The Norfolk Tragedy” to the tune of the Hundredth Psalm.
Mr. HilaryI say a catch.
Mr. GlowryI say no. A song from Mr. Cypress.
AllA song from Mr. Cypress.
Mr. CypressSung.
There is a fever of the spirit,
The brand of Cain’s unresting doom,
Which in the lone dark souls that bear it
Glows like the lamp in Tullia’s tomb:
Unlike that lamp, its subtle fire
Burns, blasts, consumes its cell, the heart,
Till, one by one, hope, joy, desire,
Like dreams of shadowy smoke depart.
When hope, love, life itself, are only
Dust—spectral memories—dead and cold—
The unfed fire burns bright and lonely,
Like that undying lamp of old:
And by that drear illumination,
Till time its clay-built home has rent,
Thought broods on feeling’s desolation—
The soul is its own monument.
Admirable. Let us all be unhappy together.
Mr. HilaryNow, I say again, a catch.
The Reverend Mr. LarynxI am for you.
Mr. Hilary“Seamen Three.”
The Reverend Mr. LarynxAgreed. I’ll be Harry Gill, with the voice of three. Begin.
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