Introduction
In two books a fresh light has recently been thrown on the character and position of
Samuel Pepys. Mr. Mynors Bright has given us a new transcription of the Diary, increasing
it in bulk by near a third, correcting many errors, and completing our knowledge of the
man in some curious and important points. We can only regret that he has taken liberties
with the author and the public. It is no part of the duties of the editor of an
established classic to decide what may or may not be "tedious to the reader."
The book is either an historical document or not, and in condemning Lord Braybrooke Mr.
Bright condemns himself. As for the time-honored phrase, "unfit for
publication," without being cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a precaution
more or less commercial; and we may think, without being sordid, that when we purchase six
huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like
scholars and rather less like children. But Mr. Bright may rest assured: while we
complain, we are still grateful. Mr. Wheatley, to divide our obligation, brings together,
clearly and with no lost words, a body of illustrative material. Sometimes we might ask a
little more; never, I think, less. And as a matter of fact, a great part of Mr. Wheatley's
volume might be transferred, by a good editor of Pepys, to the margin of the text, for it
is precisely what the reader wants.
In the light of these two books, at least, we have now to read our author. Between them
they contain all we can expect to learn for, it may be, many years. Now, if ever, we
should be able to form some notion of that unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind -
unparalleled for three good reasons: first, because he was a man known to his
contemporaries in a halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote descendants with an
indecent familiarity, like a tap - room comrade; second, because he has outstripped all
competitors in the art or virtue of a conscious honesty about oneself; and, third,
because, being in many ways a very ordinary person, he has yet placed himself before the
public eye with such a fulness and such an intimacy of detail as might be envied by a
genius like Montaigne. Not then for his own sake only, but as a character in a unique
position, endowed with a unique talent, and shedding a unique light upon the lives of the
mass of making, he is surely worthy of prolonged and patient study.
The Diary
That there should be such a book as Pepys' Diary is incomparably strange. Pepys, in a
corrupt and idle period, played the man in public employments, toiling hard and keeping
his honor bright. Much of the little good that is set down to James the Second comes by
right to Pepys; and if it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate. To his
clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on the seas. In the
exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some
considerable share. He stood well by his business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was
loved and respected by some of the best and wisest men in England. He was President of the
Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of his conduct in that solemn hour -
thinking it needless to say more - that it was answerable to the greatness of his life.
Thus he walked in dignity, guards of soldiers sometimes attending him in his walks,
subalterns bowing before his periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable
to his state and services. On February 8, 1668, we find him writing to Evelyn, his mind
bitterly occupied with the late Dutch war, and some thoughts of the different story of the
repulse of the great Armada: "Sir, you will not wonder at the backwardness of my
thanks for the present you made me, so many days since, of the Prospect of the Medway,
while the Hollander rode master in it, when I have told you that the sight of it hath led
me to such reflections on my particular interest, by my employment, in the reproach due to
that miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet than he is fancied to have who
found his face in Michael Angelo's hell. The same should serve me also in excuse for my
silence in celebrating your mastery shown in the design and draught, did not indignation
rather than courtship urge me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture of our
House of Lords changed from the story of '88 to that of '67 (of Evelyn's designing), till
the pravity of this were reformed to the temper of that age, wherein God Almighty found
his blessings more operative than, I fear, he doth in ours his judgments."
This is a letter honorable to the writer, where the meaning rather than the words is
eloquent. Such was the account he gave of himself to his contemporaries; such thoughts he
chose to utter, and in such language: giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public
servant. We turn to the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries,
to his descendants. The entry begins in the same key with the letter, blaming the
"madness of the House of Commons" and "the base proceedings, just the
epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House of Lords"; and then,
without the least transition, this is how our diarist proceeds: "To the Strand, to my
bookseller's, and there bought an idle, rogueish French book, L'escholle des Filles, which
I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolve,
as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor
among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found." Even in our day, when
responsibility is so much more clearly apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be
notable; but what about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was
ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the shame in the pages of
his daily journal?
We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we address our
fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by some particular side; we
are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature and demands of the relation.
Pepys' letter to Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp
which he signed by the pseudonym of Dapper Dicky; yet each would be suitable to the
character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in this, for man, being a Protean
animal, swiftly shares and changes with his company and surroundings; and these changes
are the better part of his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and
to march through life like a drum - major, is to be highly disagreeable to others and a
fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp we understand the double facing;
but to whom was he posing in the Diary, and what, in the name of astonishment, was the
nature of the pose? Had he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it,
gloried in the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we should
have made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal the "disgrace"
of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole affair in pen and ink. It is a sort
of anomaly in human action, which we can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary.
Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her husband, and
written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an agony lest the world should
come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys the tell tale document; and then - you
disbelieve your eyes - down goes the whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest
detail. It seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private
book to prove he was not. You are at first faintly reminded of some of the vagaries of the
morbid religious diarist; but at a moment's thought the resemblance disappears. The design
of Pepys is not at all to edify; it is not from repentance that he chronicles his
peccadillos, for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often
follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very formal
pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in Pepys you come upon good,
substantive misdemeanors; beams in his eye of which he alone remains unconscious; healthy
outbreaks of the animal nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself that always command
belief and often engage the sympathies.
Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world, sowed his wild
oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till nearly forty the headlong gusto of a
boy. So, to come rightly at the spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a
class of sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of twelve. In
our tender years we still preserve a freshness of surprise at our prolonged existence;
events make an impression out of all proportion to their consequence; we are unspeakably
touched by our own past adventures; and look forward to our future personality with
sentimental interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys. Although not
sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental about himself. His own past clung
about his heart, an evergreen. He was the slave of an association. He could not pass by
Islington, where his father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
"King's Head" and eat and drink "for remembrance of the old house
sake." He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his old walks,
"where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I had the first sentiments
of love and pleasure in a woman's company, discourse and taking her by the hand, she being
a pretty woman." He goes about weighing up the Assurance, which lay near Woolwich
under water, and cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in,
in Captain Holland's time"; and after revisiting the Naseby, now changed into the
Charles, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to myself to see the ship that I began
my good fortune in." The stone that he was cut for he preserved in a case; and to the
Turners he kept alive such gratitude for their assistance that for years, and after he had
begun to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that family to dinner on
the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had a more romantic passion for
their past, although at times they might express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared
with them this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the Confessions,
or Hazlitt, who wrote the Liber Amoris, and loaded his essays with loving personal detail,
share with Pepys in his unwearied egotism? For the two things go hand in hand; or, to be
more exact, it is the first that makes the second either possible or pleasing.
But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the experience of
children. I can remember to have written, in the fly - leaf of more than one book, the
date and the place where I then was - if, for instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a
certain garden; these were jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note
in after years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognize myself across
the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come upon them now, and not be moved one title -
which shows that I have comparatively failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys.
For in the Diary we can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism; as when
he explains that his candle is going out, "which makes me write thus
slobberingly"; or as in this incredible particularity, "To my study, where I
only wrote thus much of this day's passage to this,* and so out again"; or lastly, as
here, with more of circumstance: "I staid up till the bellman came by with his bell
under my window, as I was writing of this very line, and cried, 'Past one of the clock,
and a cold, frosty, windy morning.'" Such passages are not to be misunderstood. The
appeal to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable. He desires that dear, though unknown,
gentleman keenly to realize his predecessor; to remember why a passage was uncleanly
written; to recall (let us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the
early, windy morning, and the very line his own romantic self was scribing at the moment.
The man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences - a sort of pleasure by ricochet,
which comforts many in distress, and turns some others into sentimental libertines: and
the whole book, if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work of art to
Pepys' own address.
Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable attitude preserved by him throughout his
Diary, to that unflinching - I had almost said, that unintelligent - sincerity which makes
it a miracle among human books. He was not unconscious of his errors - far from it; he was
often startled into shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But
whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still that entrancing
ego of whom alone he cared to write; and still sure of his own affectionate indulgence,
when the parts should be changed, and the writer come to read what he had written.
Whatever he did, or said, or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a
character of his career; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or than
Alexander, so all should be faithfully set down. I have called his Diary a work of art.
Now when the artist has found something, word or deed, exactly proper to a favorite
character in play or novel, he will neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be
silly or the act mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness of
Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither disappointment nor
disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his adored protagonist: adored not
blindly, but with trenchant insight and enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and
over the greater part of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny,
he has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty, that I am
ashamed to name them. It may be said that we all of us write such a diary in airy
characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a distinction to be made; I fear that as we
render to our consciousness an account of our daily fortunes and behavior, we too often
weave a tissue of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass
and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more cowardly than he. The
bald truth about oneself, what we are all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to
see it, that was what he saw clearly and set down unsparingly.
It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same single spirit in
which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he must have perceived, as he went on,
the extraordinary nature of the work he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew
what other books were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might
ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains and pleasures, be
resuscitated in some later day; and the thought, although discouraged, must have warmed
his heart. He was not such an ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly
explosives, the guncotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let some
contemporary light upon the Journal, and Pepys was plunged forever in social and political
disgrace. We can trace the growth of his terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary
was still in its youth, he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the
navy; but in 1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue out,
as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so grave and friendly as Sir
William Coventry. And from two other facts I think we may infer that he had entertained,
even if he had not acquiesced in, the thought of a far - distant publicity. The first is
of capital importance: the Diary was not destroyed. The second - that he took unusual
precautions to confound the cipher in "roguish" passages - proves, beyond
question, that he was thinking of some other reader besides himself. Perhaps while his
friends were admiring the "greatness of his behavior" at the approach of death,
he may have had a twinkling hope of immortality. Mens cujusque is est quisque, said his
chosen motto; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and foible in the pages of
the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind him was indeed himself. There is perhaps
no other instance so remarkable of the desire of man for publicity and an enduring name.
The greatness of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also; and,
while contemporaries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his
periwig was once alive with nits. But this thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was
neither his first nor his deepest; it did not color one word that he wrote; the Diary, for
as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a private pleasure for himself.
It was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all his pleasures; he lived in and for it, and
might well write these solemn words, when he closed that confidant forever: "And so I
betake myself to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the grave;
for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God
prepare me."
How, thought I, is not the truth every where the same? Is it possible that what is true
with one person can be false with another? If the method taken by him who is in the right,
and by him who is in the wrong, be the same, what merit or demerit hath the one more than
the other? Their choice is the effect of accident, and to impute it to them is unjust: -
it is to reward or punish them for being born in this or that country. To say that the
Deity can judge us in this manner is the highest impeachment of his justice.
Now, either all religions are good and agreeable to God, or if there be one which he
hath dictated to man, and will punish him for rejecting, he hath certainly distinguished
it by manifest signs and tokens as the only true one. These signs are common to all times
and places, and are equally obvious to all mankind - to the young and old, the learned and
ignorant, to Europeans, Indians, Africans, and Savages.
[Footnote 3: All of them, says a certain wise and good priest, pretend that they derive
their doctrines not from men, nor from any created being, but from God. But to say truth,
without flattery or disguise, there is nothing in such pretentions: however they may talk,
they owe their religion to human means. Witness the manner in which they first adopt it.
The nation, country and place where they are born and bred determine it. Are we not
circumcised or baptized, - made Jews, Jews, or Christians before we are men? Our religion
is not the effect of choice; witness our lives and manners so little accordant to it:
witness how we act contrary to the tenets of it on the most trifling occasions. - Charron,
on Wisdom.]
A Liberal Genius
Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic, composing
"a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own to be) to all studies
and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but the Diary is, in a sense, the very
song that he was seeking; and his portrait by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors
Bright's edition, is a confirmation of the Diary. Hales it would appear, had known his
business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost breaking his neck
"to have the portrait full of shadows," and draping him in an Indian gown hired
expressly for the purpose, he was preoccupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to
portray the essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the Diary by
the picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the number of those who can
"surprise the manners in the face." Here we have a mouth pouting, moist with
desires; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet apt for weeping too; a nose great alike in
character and dimensions; and altogether a most fleshly, melting countenance. The face is
attractive by its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word greedy, but the reader must
not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred one of hungry; for there is
here no aspiration, no waiting for better things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It
could never be the face of an artist; it is the face of a viveur - kindly, pleased and
pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the shifting versatility of
his desires. For a single desire is more rightly to be called a lust; but there is health
in a variety, where one may balance and control another.
The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida. Wherever he went,
his steps were winged with the most eager expectation; whatever he did, it was done with
the most lively pleasure. An insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all
the secrets of knowledge, filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported him
in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never happier than when he
read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in Holland, he was "with child"
to see any strange thing. Meeting some friends and singing with them in a palace near The
Hague, his pen fails him to express his passion of delight, "the more so because in a
heaven of pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all famous
executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced "with a broad
wound," he says, "that makes my hand now shake to write of it." He learned
to dance, and was "like to make a dancer." (He learned to sing, and walked about
Gray's Inn Fields "humming to myself (which is now my constant practice) the
trillo." He learned to play the lute, the flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and
it was not the fault of his intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet.
He learned to compose songs, and burned to give forth" a scheme and theory of music
not yet ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle like a bird
exceeding all," he promised to return another day and give an angel for a lesson in
the art. Once, he writes, "I took the Bezan back with me, and with a brave gale and
tide reached up that night to the Hope, taking great pleasure in learning the seamen's
manner of singing when they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin
grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of Harrington's Club till
its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before it had received the name. Boyle's
Hydrostatics was "of infinite delight" to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find
him comparing Bible concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and
Aristotle. We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the measurement of timber;
tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing cordage; mathematics and accounting; the
hull and the rigging of ships from a model; and "looking and improving himself of the
(naval) stores with" - hark to the fellow! - "great delight." His familiar
spirit of delight was not the same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him through
life! He is only copying something, and behold, he "takes great pleasure to rule the
lines, and have the capital words wrote with red ink"; he has only had his coal -
cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold, "it do please him exceedingly." A hog's
harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot ride home in my Lord
Sandwich's coach, but he must exclaim, with breathless gusto, "his noble, rich
coach." When he is bound for a supper party, he anticipates a "glut of
pleasure." When he has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he,
"I could not forbear carrying it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred
times." To go to Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other
birds, hear fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here laughing, and there
fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the nightingales, I take it, were
particularly dear to him; and it was again "with great pleasure" that he paused
to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke
through.
He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two agreeable things
at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and
a blackbird that whistled tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an
empty moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by
playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book of Tobit or
divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women. When he walked, it must be with a
book in his pocket to beguile the way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along
the streets of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be
saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the
true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in
pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was conscious of a rose - leaf out of
place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he
thought himself unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how to
eat alone;" pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and ear must be
flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content. He had no zest in a good dinner
when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street and in a periwigmaker's house"; and a
collation was spoiled for him by indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him
yeoman service in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he mentions that
he went to bed "weary, which I seldom am"; and already over thirty, he would sit
up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it is never pleasure that exhausts the
pleasure - seeker; for in that career, as in all others, it is failure that kills. The man
who enjoys so wholly and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is just
the man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his right to fiddle on the
leads, or to be "vexed to the blood" by a solecism in his wife's attire; and we
find in consequence that he was always peevish when he was hungry, and that his head
"aked mightily" after a dispute. But nothing could divert him from his aim in
life; his remedy in care was the same as his delight in prosperity; it was with pleasure,
and with pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow; and, whether he was jealous of
his wife or skulking from a bailiff, he would equally take refuge in the theatre. There,
if the house be full and the company noble, if the songs be tunable, the actors perfect,
and the play diverting, this old hero of the secret Diary, this private self adorer, will
speedily be healed of his distresses.
Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the fiddle, or a
fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the beauty, the worth, the mirth, or
the mere scenic attitude in life of his fellow creatures. He shows himself throughout a
sterling humanist. Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude
of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbors. And perhaps it is in this
sense that charity may be most properly said to begin at home. It does not matter what
quality a person has: Pepys can appreciate and love him for it. He "fills his
eyes" with the beauty of Lady Castlemaine; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the
thought of her for years; if a woman be good - looking and not painted, he will walk miles
to have another sight of her; and even when a lady by a mischance spat upon his clothes,
he was immediately consoled when he had observed that she was pretty. But, on the other
hand, he is delighted to see Mrs. Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James;
"a poor, religious, well - meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty,
and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken with Pen's
merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of Coventry. He is
jolly with a drunken sailor, but listens with interest and patience, as he rides the Essex
roads, to the story of a Quaker's spiritual trials and convictions. He lends a critical
ear to the discourse of kings and royal dukes. He spends an evening at Vauxhall with
"Killigrew and young Newport - loose company," says he, "but worth a man's
being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner of talk and lives." And
when a rag boy lights him home, he examines him about his business and other ways of
livelihood for destitute children. This is almost half - way to the beginning of
philanthropy; had it only been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys had perhaps been a
man famous for good deeds. And it is through this quality that he rises, at times,
superior to his surprising egotism; his interest in the love affairs of others is, indeed,
impersonal; he is filled with concern for my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only knows by
sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with her in her successes; and it is not
untrue, however strange it seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved his maid Jane
because she was in love with his man Tom.
Let us hear him, for once, at length: "So the women and W. Hewer and I walked upon
the Downes, where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever
I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or
sight of people, the Bible to him; so I make the boy to read to me, which he did with the
forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty; and then I did give him
something, and went to the father, and talked with him. He did content himself mightily in
my liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old
patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the
world in my mind for two or three days after. We took notice of his woollen knit stockings
of two colors mixed, and of his shoes shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and with
great nails in the soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty; and taking notice of them,
'Why,' says the poor man, 'the downes, you see, are full of stones, and we are faine to
shoe ourselves thus; and these,' says he, 'will make the stones fly till they ring before
me.' I did give the poor man something, for which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to
cast stones with his horne crooke. He values his dog mightily, that would turn a sheep any
way which he would have him, when he goes to fold them; told me there was about eighteen
score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four shillings a week the year round for
keeping of them; and Mrs. Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the
prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life."
And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's pleasuring; with cups of milk, and
glow - worms, and people walking at sundown with their wives and children, and all the way
home Pepys still dreaming "of the old age of the world" and the early innocence
of man. This was how he walked through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and his hand,
you will observe, not shut; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and the manners of
his fellow - men, with prose fidelity of detail and yet a lingering glamour or romance.
It was "two or three days after" that he extended this passage in the pages
of his Journal, and the style has thus the benefit of some reflection. It is generally
supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank at the bottom of the scale of merit. But a
style which is indefatigably lively, telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of
everyday experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely
wearisome, which condescends to the most of fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all
away in the forthright current of the narrative, - such a style may be ungrammatical, it
may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit.
The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout;
and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter has been
transformed and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and delight. The gusto of the man
speaks out fierily after all these years. For the difference between Pepys and Shelley, to
return to that half whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not one of degree; in
his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true prose of poetry - prose because the
spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive.
Hence, in such a passage as this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's
mind is entire conviction and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the thing fell out, not
otherwise; and you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of
Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's, or a favored reminiscence of your own.
There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one. The tang was in the
family; while he was writing the journal for our enjoyment in his comely house in Navy
Gardens, no fewer than two of his cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make
music to the country girls. But he himself, though he could play so many instruments and
pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur. It is not given to any one so
keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to understand. That he did not like
Shakespeare as an artist for the stage may be a fault, but it is not without either
parallel or excuse. He certainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere
actors on the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not to be"
by heart. Nor was he content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it to himself in
the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear to tread, he set it to music.
Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the heroic quality of the verses that our little
sensualist in a periwig chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from
brave Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his sublime theorbo.
"To be or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler" - "Beauty retire, thou dost my
pity move" - "It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O Rome"; - open and
dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was
certainly no timid, spirit that selected such a range of themes. Of "Gaze not on
Swans," I know no more than these four words; yet that also seems to promise well. It
was, however, not a probable suspicion, the work of his master, Mr. Berkenshaw - as the
drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young ladies' seminary are the work of the
professor attached to the establishment. Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his
pupil. The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist, some leaven of the world still
clogging him; and we find Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the man who taught him
composition. In relation to the stage, which he so warmly loved and understood, he was not
only more hearty, but more generous to others. Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, "a
man," says he, "who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him
for it." And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridiculous insipid piece,
"Glad we were," he writes, "that Betterton had no part in it." It is
by such a zeal and loyalty to those who labor for his delight that the amateur grows
worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in mind that, not only in art, but in morals,
Pepys rejoiced to recognize his betters. There was not one speck of envy in the whole
human - hearted egotist.
Respectability
When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present degraded meaning of the
word, they are usually suspected of a taste for clay pipes and beer cellars; and their
performances are thought to hail from the Owl's Nest of the comedy. They have something
more, however, in their eye than the dulness of a round million dinner parties that sit
down yearly in old England. For to do anything because others do it, and not because the
thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to resign all moral control and
captaincy upon yourself, and go post - haste to the devil with the greater number. We
smile over the ascendancy of priests; but I had rather follow a priest than what they call
the leaders of society. No life can better than that of Pepys illustrate the dangers of
this respectable theory of living. For what can be more untoward than the occurrence, at a
critical period and while the habits are still pliable, of such sweeping transformation as
the return of Charles the Second? Round went the whole fleet of England on the other tack;
and while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by the stars and
their own private compass, the cock - boat, Pepys, must go about with the majority among
"the stupid starers and the loud huzzas."
The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a positive need for
countenance. The weaker and the tamer than man, the more will he require this support; and
any positive quality relieves him, by just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways,
Pepys was quite strong enough to please himself without regard for others; but his
positive qualities were not co - extensive with the field of conduct; and in many parts of
life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the footprints of the contemporary Mrs.
Grundy. In morals, particularly, he lived by the countenance of others; felt a slight from
another more keenly than a meanness in himself, and then first repented when he was found
out. You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; and by the artist side of him,
by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he could rise, as it were dramatically, to the
significance of what you said. All that matter in religion which has been nicknamed other
- worldliness was strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that should make a man rudely
virtuous, following right in good report and ill report, was foolishness and a stumbling -
block to Pepys. He was much thrown across the Friends; and nothing can be more instructive
than his attitude toward these most interesting people of that age. I have mentioned how
he conversed with one as he rode; when he saw some brought from a meeting under arrest,
"I would to God," said he, "they would either conform, or be more wise and
not be catched"; and to a Quaker in his own office he extended a timid though
effectual protection. Meanwhile there was growing up next door to him that beautiful
nature, William Pen. It is odd that Pepys condemned him for a fop; odd, though natural
enough when you see Pen's portrait, that Pepys was jealous of him with his wife. But the
cream of the story is when Pen publishes his Sandy Foundation Shaken, and Pepys has it
read aloud by his wife. "I find it," he says, "so well writ as, I think, it
is too good for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of book, and not fit
for everybody to read." Nothing is more galling to the merely respectable than to be
brought in contact with religious ardor. Pepys had his own foundations, sandy enough, but
dear to him from practical considerations, and he would read the book with true uneasiness
of spirit; for conceive the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen were to convert
him! It was a different kind of doctrine that he judged profitable for himself and others.
"A good sermon of Mr. Gifford's at our church, upon 'Seek ye first the kingdom of
heaven.' A very excellent and persuasive, good and moral sermon. He showed, like a wise
man, that righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and villainy." It
is thus that respectable people desire to have their Greathearts address them, telling, in
mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, and be a moral hero without
courage, kindness, or troublesome reflection; and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern
metaphor, becomes a manual of worldly prudence, and a handybook for Pepys and the
successful merchant.
The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He has no idea of truth except for the
Diary. He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but appear; gives out that he has
inherited a good estate, when he has seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased
to be thought liberal when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously ostentatious.
I say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have been taken for a fop, like Pen,
but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to
assume the famous periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions, not
foppishly before, nor dowdily behind, the central movement of his age. For long he durst
not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances, would have been improper; but a time
comes, with the growth of his fortune, when the impropriety has shifted to the other side,
and he is "ashamed to be seen in a hackney." Pepys talked about being "a
Quaker or some very melancholy thing"; for my part, I can imagine nothing so
melancholy, because nothing half so silly, as to be concerned about such problems. But so
respectability and the duties of society haunt and burden their poor devotees; and what
seems at first the very primrose path of life, proves difficult and thorny like the rest.
And the time comes to Pepys, as to all the merely respectable, when he must not only order
his pleasures, but even clip his virtuous movements, to the public patter of the age.
There was some juggling among officials to avoid direct taxation; and Pepys, with a noble
impulse, growing ashamed of this dishonesty, designed to charge himself with 1000 pounds;
but finding none to set him an example, "nobody of our ablest merchants" with
this moderate liking for clean hands, he judged it "not decent"; he feared it
would "be thought vain glory"; and, rather than appear singular, cheerfully
remained a thief. One able merchant's countenance, and Pepys had dared to do an honest
act! Had he found one brave spirit, properly recognized by society, he might have gone far
as a disciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make him
believe, against the testimony of his senses, that Pen's venison pasty stank like the
devil; but, on the other hand, Sir William Coventry can raise him by a word into another
being. Pepys, when he is with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he
care for office or emolument? "Thank God, I have enough of my own," says he,
"to buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife." And again, we
find this pair projecting an old age when an ungrateful country shall have dismissed them
from the field of public service; Coventry living retired in a fine house, and Pepys
dropping in, "it may be, to read a chapter of Seneca."
Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued zealous and, for
the period, pure in his employment. He would not be "bribed to be unjust," he
says, though he was "not so squeamish as to refuse a present after," suppose the
king to have received no wrong. His new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier, he
tells us with honest complacency, will save the king a thousand and gain Pepys three
hundred pounds a year, - a statement which exactly fixes the degree of the age's
enlightenment. But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too high. It was an
unending struggle for the man to stick to his business in such a garden of Armida as he
found this life; and the story of his oaths, so often broken, so courageously renewed, is
worthy rather of admiration than the contempt it has received.
Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry's influence, we find him losing scruples
and daily complying further with the age. When he began the Journal, he was a trifle prim
and puritanic; merry enough, to be sure, over his private cups, and still remembering
Magdalene ale and his acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot
season with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble; and in
spite of a disordered practice, Pepys' theory, the better things that he approved and
followed after, we may even say were strict. Where there was "tag, rag, and bobtail,
dancing, singing, and drinking," he felt "ashamed, and went away"; and when
he slept in church he prayed God forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some
ladies keeping each other awake "from spite," as though not to sleep in church
were an obvious hardship; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service, looking
about him, with a perspective glass, on all the pretty women. His favorite ejaculation,
"Lord!" occurs but once that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in
'62, and at least five times in '63; after which the "Lords" may be said to
pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a
whale among the shoal. He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms
at a marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's mistress, who
was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail,
dancing, singing, and drinking become his natural element; actors and actresses and
drunken, roaring courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved
with Saturnalian manners and companions that he was shot almost unconsciously into the
grand domestic crash of 1668.
That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk and
conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in a powder magazine
finds himself at last the author and the victim of a hideous disaster. So with our
pleasant - minded Pepys and his peccadillos. All of a sudden, as he still trips
dexterously enough among the dangers of a double faced career, thinking no great evil,
humming to himself the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that matter from his
hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences of his acts. For a man still,
after so many years, the lover, although not the constant lover, of his wife, - for a man,
besides, who was so greatly careful of appearances, - the revelation of his infidelities
was a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the indignities that he endured, are not to
be measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail of
suffering. She was violent, threatening him with the tongs; she was careless of his honor,
driving him to insult the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to discard; worst
of all, she was hopelessly inconsequent in word and thought and deed, now lulling him with
reconciliations, and anon flaming forth again with the original anger. Pepys had not used
his wife well; he had wearied her with jealousies, even while himself unfaithful; he had
grudged her clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon himself; he had abused her in
words; he had bent his fist at her in anger; he had once blacked her eye; and it is one of
the oddest particulars in that odd Diary of his, that, while the injury is referred to
once in passing, there is no hint as to the occasion or the manner of the blow. But now,
when he is in the wrong, nothing can exceed the long - suffering affection of this
impatient husband. While he was still sinning and still undiscovered, he seems not to have
known a touch of penitence stronger than what might lead him to take his wife to the
theatre, or for an airing, or to give her a new dress, by way of compensation. Once found
out, however, and he seems to himself to have lost all claim to decent usage. It is
perhaps the strongest instance of his externality. His wife may do what she pleases, and
though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left but
tears and the most abject submission. We should perhaps have respected him more had he not
given away so utterly - above all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an
insulting letter to his unhappy fellow - culprit, Miss Willet; but somehow I believe we
like him better as he was.
The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have stamped the impression of
this episode upon his mind. For the remaining years of his long life we have no Diary to
help us, and we have seen already how little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his
correspondence; but what with the recollection of the catastrophe of his married life,
what with the natural influence of his advancing years and reputation, it seems not
unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end for Pepys; and it is beyond a doubt
that he sat down at last to an honored and agreeable old age among his books and music,
the correspondent of Sir Isaac Newton, and in one instance at least, the poetical
counsellor of Dryden. Through all this period, that Diary which contained the secret
memoirs of his life, with all its inconsistencies and escapades, had been religiously
preserved; nor when he came to die, does he appear to have provided for its destruction.
So we may conceive him faithful to the end to all his dear and early memories; still
mindful of Mrs. Hely in the woods at Epsom; still lighting at Islington for a cup of
kindness to the dead; still, if he heard again that air that once so much disturbed him,
thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him to his wife.
Source:
Essays, English and American, with introductions notes and illustrations. New
York, P. F. Collier & son [c1910] Harvard classics ; no.XXVIII.
This text is part of the Internet
Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and
copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.
