It is doubtful whether any of Bunyan's contemporaries had so strong a
human interest attaching to his person and his work as Samuel Pepys.
There is indeed something in common to the two men,--little or nothing
of character, but a certain _naïveté_ and sincerity of writing, which
makes them remind one of each other many times. All the more because of
this does the contrast between the spirit of the two force itself upon
every reader; and if we should desire to find a typical pagan to match
Bunyan's spirituality and idealism, it would be difficult to go past
Samuel Pepys.
There were, as everybody knows, two famous diarists of the Restoration
period, Pepys and Evelyn. It is interesting to look at the portraits of
the two men side by side. Evelyn's face is anxious and austere,
suggesting the sort of stuff of which soldiers or saints are made. Pepys
is a voluptuous figure, in the style of Charles the Second, with regular
and handsome features below his splendid wig, and eyes that are both
keen and heavy, penetrating and luxurious. These two men (who, in the
course of their work, had to compare notes on several occasions, and
between whom we have the record of more than one meeting) were among the
most famous gossips of the world. But Evelyn's gossip is a succession of
solemnities compared with the racy scandal, the infantile and insatiable
curiosity, and the incredible frankness of the pagan diarist.
Look at his face again, and you will find it impossible not to feel a
certain amount of surprise. Of all the unlikely faces with which history
has astonished the readers of books, there are none more surprising than
those of three contemporaries in the later seventeenth century.
Claverhouse, with his powerful character and indomitable will, with his
Titanic daring and relentless cruelty, has the face of a singularly
beautiful young girl. Judge Jeffreys, whose delight in blood was only
equalled by the foulness and extravagance of his profanity, looks in his
picture the very type of spiritual wistfulness. Samuel Pepys, whose
large oval eyes and clear-cut profile suggest a somewhat voluptuous and
very fastidious aristocrat, was really a man of the people, sharp to a
miracle in all the detail of the humblest kind of life, and apparently
unable to keep from exposing himself to scandal in many sorts of mean
and vulgar predicament.
Since the deciphering and publication of his Diary, a great deal has
been written concerning it. The best accounts of it are Henry B.
Wheatley's _Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in_, and Robert Louis
Stevenson's little essay in his _Short Studies of Men and Books_. The
object of the present lecture is not to give any general account of the
time and its public events, upon which the Diary touches at a thousand
points, but rather to set the spirit of this man in contrast with that
of John Bunyan, which we have just considered. The men are very typical,
and any adequate conception of the spirit of either will give a true
cross-section of the age in which he lived. Pepys, it must be confessed,
is much more at home in his times than Bunyan ever could be. One might
even say that the times seem to have been designed as a background for
the diarist. There is as little of the spirit of a stranger and pilgrim
in Pepys, even in his most pathetic hours, as there is in John Bunyan
the spirit of a man at home, even in his securest. It was a very pagan
time, and Pepys is the pagan _par excellence_ of that time, the bright
and shining example of the pagan spirit of England.
His lot was cast in high places, to which he rose by dint of great
ability and indomitable perseverance in his office. He talks with the
King, the Duke of York, the Archbishop, and all the other great folks of
the day; and no volume has thrown more light on the character of Charles
the Second than his. We see the King at the beginning kissing the Bible,
and proclaiming it to be the thing which he loves above all other
things. He rises early in the morning, and practises others of the less
important virtues. We see him touching all sorts of people for the
King's evil, a process in which Pepys is greatly interested at first,
but which palls when it has lost its novelty. Similarly, the diarist is
greatly excited on the first occasion when he actually hears the King
speak, but soon begins to criticise him, finding that he talks very much
like other people. He describes the starvation of the fleet, the country
sinking to the verge of ruin, and the maudlin scenes of drunkenness at
Court, with a minuteness which makes one ashamed even after so long an
interval. However revolting or shameful the institution may be, the fact
that it is an institution gives it zest for the strange mind of Pepys.
He is, however, capable also of moralising. "Oh, that the King would
mind his business!" he would exclaim, after having delighted himself and
his readers with the most droll accounts of His Majesty's frivolities.
"How wicked a wretch Cromwell was, and yet how much better and safer the
country was in his hands than it is now." And often he will end the
bewildering account with some such bitter comment as the assertion "that
every one about the Court is mad."
In politics he had been a republican in his early days, and when Charles
the First's head fell at Whitehall, he had confided to a friend the
dangerous remark that if he were to preach a sermon on that event he
would choose as his text the words, "The memory of the wicked shall
rot." The later turn of events gave him abundant opportunities for
repenting of that indiscretion, and he repents at intervals all through
his Diary. For now he is a royalist in his politics, having in him not a
little of the spirit of the Vicar of Bray, and of Bunyan's Mr. By-ends.
The political references lead him beyond England, and we hear with
consternation now and again about the dangerous doings of the
Covenanters in Scotland. We hear much also of France and Holland, and
still more of Spain. Outside the familiar European lands there is a
fringe of curious places like Tangier, which is of great account at that
time, and is destined in Pepys' belief to play an immense part in the
history of England, and of the more distant Bombain in India, which he
considers to be a place of little account. Here and there the terror of
a new Popish plot appears. The kingdom is divided against itself, and
the King and the Commons are at drawn battle with the Lords, while every
one shapes his views of things according as his party is in or out of
power.
Three great historic events are recorded with singular minuteness and
interest in the Diary, namely, the Plague, the Dutch War, and the Fire
of London.
As to the Plague, we have all the vivid horror of detail with which
Defoe has immortalised it, with the additional interest that here no
consecutive history is attempted, but simply a record of daily
impressions of the streets and houses. On his first sight of the red
cross upon a door, the diarist cries out, "Lord, have mercy upon us," in
genuine terror and pity. The coachman sickens on his box and cannot
drive his horses home. The gallant draws the curtains of a sedan chair
to salute some fair lady within, and finds himself face to face with the
death-dealing eyes and breath of a plague-stricken patient. Few people
move along the streets, and at night the passenger sees and shuns the
distant lights of the link-boys guiding the dead to their burial. A
cowardly parson flies upon some flimsy excuse from his dangerous post,
and makes a weak apology on his first reappearance in the pulpit.
Altogether it is a picture unmatched in its broken vivid flashes, in
which the cruelty and wildness of desperation mingle with the despairing
cry of pity.
The Dutch War was raging then, not on the High Seas only, but at the
very gates of England; and Pepys, whose important and responsible
position as Clerk of the Acts of the Navy gave him much first-hand
information, tells many great stories in his casual way. We hear the
guns distinctly and loud, booming at the mouth of the Thames. The
press-gang sweeps the streets, and starving women, whose husbands have
been taken from them, weep loudly in our ears. Sailors whose wages have
not been paid desert their ships, in some cases actually joining the
Dutch and fighting against their comrades. One of the finest passages
gives a heartrending and yet bracing picture of the times. "About a
dozen able, lusty, proper men came to the coach-side with tears in their
eyes, and one of them that spoke for the rest began, and said to Sir W.
Coventry, 'We are here a dozen of us, that have long known and loved,
and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Mings, and have now done
the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any
other to offer after him, and in revenge of him. All we have is our
lives; if you will please to get His Royal Highness to give us a
fire-ship among us all, here are a dozen of us, out of all which, choose
you one to be commander; and the rest of us, whoever he is, will serve
him; and, if possible, do that which shall show our memory of our dead
commander, and our revenge.' Sir W. Coventry was herewith much moved, as
well as I, who could hardly abstain from weeping, and took their names,
and so parted."
Perhaps, however, the finest work of all is found in the descriptions of
the Fire of London. From that night when he is awakened by the red glare
of the fire in his bedroom window, on through the days and weeks of
terror, when no man knew how long he would have a home, we follow by the
light of blazing houses the story of much that is best and much that is
worst in human nature. The fire, indeed, cleanses the city from the last
dregs of the plague which are still lingering there, but it also stirs
up the city until its inhabitants present the appearance of ants upon a
disturbed ant-hill. And not the least busy among them, continually
fussing about in all directions, is the diarist himself, eagerly
planning for the preservation of his money, dragging it hither and
thither from hiding-place to hiding-place in the city, and finally
burying it in bags at dead of night in a garden. Nothing is too small
for him to notice. The scrap of burnt paper blown by the wind to a
lady's hand, on which the words are written, "Time is, it is done," is
but one of a thousand equally curious details.
His own character, as reflected in the narrative of these events, is
often little to his credit, and the frank and unblushing selfishness of
his outlook upon things in general is as amusing as it is shameful. And
yet, on the other hand, when most men deserted London, Pepys remained in
it through the whole dangerous time of the plague, taking his life in
his hand and dying daily in his imagination in spite of the quaint
precautions against infection which he takes care on every occasion to
describe. Through the whole dismal year, with plague and fire raging
around him, he sticks to his post and does his work as thoroughly as the
disorganised circumstances of his life allow. If we could get back to
the point of view of those who thought about Pepys and formed a judgment
of him before his Diary had been made public, we should be confronted
with the figure of a man as different from the diarist as it is possible
for two men to be. His contemporaries took him for a great Englishman, a
man who did much for his country, and whose character was a mirror of
all the national and patriotic ideals. His public work was by no means
unimportant, even in a time so full of dangers and so critical for the
destinies of England. Little did the people who loved and hated him in
his day and afterwards dream of the contents of that small volume, so
carefully written in such an unintelligible cipher, locked nightly with
its little key, and hidden in some secure place. When at last the
writing was deciphered, there came forth upon us, from the august and
honourable state in which the Navy Commissioner had lain so long, this
flood of small talk, the greatest curiosity known to English literature.
Other men than Pepys have suffered in reputation from the yapping of
dogs and the barn-door cackle that attacked their memories. England
blushed as she heard the noise when the name of Carlyle became the
centre of such commotion. But if Samuel Pepys has suffered in the same
way he has no one to thank for it but himself; for, if his own
hand-writing had not revealed it, no one could possibly have guessed
it from the facts of his public career. Yet what a rare show it is, that
multitude of queer little human interests that intermingle with the talk
about great things! It may have been quite wrong to translate it, and
undoubtedly much of it was disreputable enough for any man to write, yet
it will never cease to be read; nor will England cease to be glad that
it was translated, so long as the charm of history is doubled by touches
of strange imagination and confessions of human frailty.
Pepys' connection with literature is that rather of a virtuoso than of a
student in the strict sense of the term. He projected a great History of
the Navy, which might have immortalised him in a very different fashion
from that of the immortality which the Diary has achieved. But his life
was crowded with business and its intervals with pleasures. The weakness
of his eyes also militated against any serious contribution to
literature, and instead of the History, for which he had gathered much
material and many manuscripts, he gave us only the little volume
entitled _Memoirs of the Navy_, which, however, shows a remarkable grasp
of his subject, and of all corresponding affairs, such as could only
have been possessed by a man of unusually thorough knowledge of his
business. He collected what was for his time a splendid library,
consisting of some three thousand volumes, now preserved in his College
(Magdalene College, Cambridge), very carefully arranged and catalogued.
We read much of this library while it is accumulating--much more about
the mahogany cases in which the books were to stand than about the books
themselves, or his own reading of them. The details of their arrangement
were very dear to his curious mind. He tells us that where the books
would not fit exactly to the shelves, but were smaller than the space,
he had little gilded stilts made, adjusted to the size of each book, and
placed under the volumes, which they lifted to the proper height. Little
time can have been left over for the study of at least the stiffer works
in that library, although there are many notes which show that he was in
some sense a reader, and that books served the same purpose as events
and personalities in leading him up and down the byways of what he
always found to be a curious and interesting world.
But the immortal part of Pepys is undoubtedly his Diary. Among others of
the innumerable curious interests which this man cultivated was that of
studying the secret ciphers which had been invented and used by literary
people in the past. From his knowledge of these he was enabled to invent
a cipher of his own, or rather to adopt one which he altered somewhat to
serve his uses. Having found this sufficiently secret code, he was now
able to gratify his immense interest in himself and his inordinate
personal vanity by writing an intimate narrative of his own life. The
Diary covers nine and a half years in all, from January 1660 to May
1669. For nearly a century and a half it lay dead and silent, until Rev.
J. Smith, with infinite diligence and pains, discovered the key to it,
and wrote his translation. A later translation has been made by Rev.
Mynors Bright, which includes some passages by the judgment of the
former translator considered unnecessary or inadvisable.
Opinions differ as to the wisdom, and indeed the morality, of forcing
upon the public ear the accidentally discovered secrets which a dead man
had guarded so carefully. There is, of course, the possibility that, as
some think, Pepys desired that posterity should have the complete record
in all its frankness and candour. If this be so, one can only say that
the wish is evidence of a morbid and unbalanced mind. It seems much more
probable that he wrote the Diary for the luxury of reading it to
himself, always intending to destroy it before his death. But a piece of
work so intimate as this is, in a sense, a living part of the man who
creates it, and one can well imagine him putting off the day of its
destruction, and grudging that it should perish with all its power of
awakening old chords of memory and revitalising buried years. For his
own part he was no squeamish moralist and if it were only for his own
eyes he would enjoy passages which the more fastidious public might
judge differently.
So it comes to pass that this amazing _omnium gatherum_ of a book is
among the most living of all the gifts of the past to the present,
telling everything and telling it irresistibly. His hat falls through a
hole, and he writes down all about the incident as faithfully as he
describes the palace of the King of France, and the English war with
Holland. His nature is amazingly complicated, and yet our judgment of it
is simplified by his passion for telling everything, no matter how
discreditable or how ignoble the detail may be. He is a great man and a
great statesman, and he is the liveliest of our English crickets on the
hearth. One set of excerpts would present him as the basest, another set
as the pleasantest and kindliest of men; and always without any
exception he is refreshing by his intense and genial interest in the
facts of the world. Of the many summaries of himself which he has given
us, none is more characteristic than the following, with which he closes
the month of April of the year 1666: "Thus ends this month; my wife in
the country, myself full of pleasure and expence; in some trouble for my
friends, and my Lord Sandwich, by the Parliament, and more for my eyes,
which are daily worse and worse, that I dare not write or read almost
anything." He is essentially a virtuoso who has been forced by
circumstances into the necessity of being also a public man, and has
developed on his own account an extraordinary passion for the
observation of small and wayside things. At the high table of those
times, where Milton and Bunyan sit at the mighty feast of English
literature, he is present also: but he is under the table, a mischievous
and yet observant child, loosening the neckerchiefs of those who are too
drunk, and picking up scraps of conversation which he will retail
outside. There is something peculiarly pathetic in the whole picture.
One remembers Defoe, who for so many years lived in the reputation of
honourable politics and in the odour of such sanctity as Robinson Crusoe
could give, until the discovery of certain yellow papers revealed the
base political treachery for which the great island story had been a
kind of anodyne to conscience. So Samuel Pepys would have passed for a
great naval authority and an anxious friend of England when her foes
were those of her own household, had he only been able to make up his
mind to destroy these little manuscript volumes.
Why did he write them, one still asks? Readers of Robert Browning's
poems, _House_ and _Shop_, will remember the scorn which that poet pours
upon any one who unlocks his heart to the general public. And these
narrations of Pepys' are certainly of such a kind that if he intended
them to be read by any public in any generation of England, he must be
set down as unique among sane men. Stevenson indeed considers that there
was in the Diary a side glance at publication, but the proof which he
adduces from the text does not seem sufficient to sustain so remarkable
a freak of human nature, nor does the fact that on one occasion Pepys
set about destroying all his papers except the Diary, appear to prove
very much one way or another. Stevenson calls it inconsistent and
unreasonable in a man to write such a book and to preserve it unless he
wanted it to be read. But perhaps no writing of diaries is quite
reasonable; and as for his desire to have it read by others than
himself, we find that his Diary was so close a secret that he expresses
regret for having mentioned it to Sir William Coventry. No other man
ever heard of it in Pepys' lifetime, "it not being necessary, nor maybe
convenient, to have it known."
Why, then, did he write it? Why does anybody write a diary? Probably the
answer nearest to the truth will be that every one finds himself
interesting, and some people have so keen an interest in themselves that
it becomes a passion, clamorous to be gratified. Now as Bacon tells us,
"Writing maketh an exact man," and the writing of diaries reduces to the
keenest vividness our own impressions of experience and thoughts about
things. Pepys was, above all other men, interested in himself. He was
intensely in love with himself. The beautiful, jealous, troublesome, and
yet inevitable Mrs. Pepys was but second in her husband's affections
after all. He was his own wife. One remembers fashionable novels of the
time of _Evelina_ or the _Mysteries of Udolpho_, and recollects how the
ladies there speak lover-like of their diaries, and, when writing them,
feel themselves always in the best possible company. For Pepys, his
Diary does not seem to have been so much a refuge from daily cares and
worries, nor a preparation for the luxury of reading it in his old age,
as an indulgence of intense and poignant pleasure in the hour of
writing.
His interest in himself was quite extraordinary. When his library was
collected and his books bound and gilded they were doubtless a treasured
possession of which he was hugely proud. But this was not so much a
possession as it was a kind of _alter ego_, a fragment of his living
self, hidden away from all eyes but his own. No trifle in his life is
too small for record. He cannot change his seat in the office from one
side of the fireplace to another without recording it. The gnats trouble
him at an inn in the country. His wig takes fire and crackles, and he is
mighty merry about it until he discovers that it is his own wig that is
burning and not somebody else's. He visits the ships, and, remembering
former days, notes down without a blush the sentence, "Poor ship, that I
have been twice merry in." Any one could have written the Diary, so far
as intellectual or even literary power is concerned, though perhaps few
would have chosen precisely Pepys' grammar in which to express
themselves. But nobody else that ever lived could have written it with
such sheer abandonment and frankness. He has a positive talent, nay, a
genius for self-revelation, for there must be a touch of genius in any
man who is able to be absolutely true. Other men have struggled hard to
gain sincerity, and when it is gained the struggle has made it too
conscious to be perfectly sincere. Pepys, with utter unconsciousness, is
sincere even in his insincerities. Some of us do not know ourselves and
our real motives well enough to attempt any formal statement of them.
Others of us may suspect ourselves, but would die before we would
confess our real motives even to ourselves, and would fiercely deny them
if any other person accused us of them. But this man's barriers are all
down. There is no reserve, but frankness everywhere and to an unlimited
extent. There is no pose in the book either of good or bad, and it is
one of the very few books of which such a statement could be made. He
has been accused of many things, but never of affectation. The bad
actions are qualified by regrets, and the disarmed critic feels that
they have lost any element of tragedy which they might otherwise have
had. The good actions are usually spoiled by some selfish _addendum_
which explains and at the same time debases them. Surely the man who
could do all this constantly through so many hundreds of pages, must be
in his way a unique kind of genius, to have so clear an eye and so
little self-deception.
The Diary is full of details, for he is the most curious man in the
world. One might apply to him the word catholicity if it were not far
too big and dignified an epithet. The catholicity of his mind is that of
the _Old Curiosity Shop_. The interest of the book is inexhaustible,
because to him the whole world was just such a book. His world was
indeed
So full of a number of things
He was sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Like Chaucer's Pardoner he was "meddlesome as a fly." Now he lights upon
a dane's skin hung in a church. Again, upon a magic-lantern. Yet again
upon a traitor's head, and the prospect of London in the distance. He
will drink four pints of Epsom water. He will learn to whistle like a
bird, and he will tell you a tale of a boy who was disinherited because
he crowed like a cock. He will walk across half the country to see
anything new. His heart is full of a great love of processions,
raree-shows of every kind, and, above all, novelty. His confession that
the sight of the King touching for the evil gave him no pleasure because
he had seen it before, applies to most things in his life. For such a
man, this world must indeed have been an interesting place.
We join him in well-nigh every meal he sits down to, from the first days
when they lived so plainly, on to the greater times of the end, when he
gives a dinner to his friends, which was "a better dinner than they
understood or deserved." He delights in all the detail of the table. The
cook-maid, whose wages were £4 per annum, had no easy task to satisfy
her fastidious master, and Mrs. Pepys must now and then rise at four in
the morning to make mince-pies. Any new kind of meat or drink especially
delights him. He finds ortolans to be composed of nothing but fat, and
he often seems, in his thoughts on other nations, to have for his first
point of view the sight of foreigners at dinner. But this is only part
of the insatiable and omnivorous interest in odds and ends which is
everywhere apparent. The ribbons he has seen at a wedding, the starving
seamen who are becoming a danger to the nation, the drinking of wine
with a toad in the glass, a lightning flash that melted fetters from the
limbs of slaves, Harry's chair (the latest curiosity of the
drawing-rooms, whose arms rise and clasp you into it when you sit down),
the new Messiah, who comes with a brazier of hot coals and proclaims the
doom of England--these, and a thousand other details, make up the
furniture of this most miscellaneous mind.
Everything in the world amuses him, and from first to last there is an
immense amount of travelling, both physical and mental. With him we
wander among companies of ladies and gentlemen walking in gardens, or
are rowed up and down the Thames in boats, and it is always exciting and
delightful. That is a kind of allegory of the man's view of life. But
nothing is quite so congenial to him, after all, as plays at the
theatre. One feels that he would never have been out of theatres had it
been possible, and in order to keep himself to his business he has to
make frequent vows (which are generally more or less broken) that he
will not go to see a play again until such and such a time. When the vow
is broken and the play is past he lamentably regrets the waste of
resolution, and stays away for a time until the next outburst comes. The
plays were then held in the middle of the day, and must have cut in
considerably upon the working-time of business men; although, to be
sure, the office hours began with earliest morning, and by the afternoon
things were growing slacker. The light, however, was artificial, and the
flare of the candles often hurt his eyes, and gave him a sufficient
physical reason to fortify his moral ones for abstention. His taste in
the dramatic art would commend itself to few moderns. He has no patience
with Shakespeare, and speaks disparagingly of _Twelfth Night_,
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _Othello_; while he constantly informs us
that he "never saw anything so good in his life" as the now
long-forgotten productions of little playwrights of his time. He would,
we suspect, prefer at all times a puppet show to a play; partly, no
doubt, because that was the fashion, and partly because that type of
drama was nearer his size. Throughout the volumes of the Diary there are
few things of which he speaks with franker and more enthusiastic delight
than the enjoyment which he derives from punchinello.
Next to the delight which he derived from the theatre must be mentioned
that which he continually found in music. He seems to have made an
expert and scientific study of it, and the reader hears continually the
sound of lutes, harpsichords, violas, theorbos, virginals, and
flageolets. He takes great numbers of music lessons, but quarrels with
his teacher from time to time. He praises extravagantly such music as he
hears, or criticises it unsparingly, passing on one occasion the
desperate censure "that Mrs. Turner sings worse than my wife."
His interest in science is as curious and miscellaneous as his interest
in everything else. He was indeed President of the Royal Society of his
time, and he is immensely delighted with Boyle and his new discoveries
concerning colours and hydrostatics. Yet so rare a dilettante is he,
in this as in other things, that we find this President of the Royal
Society bringing in a man to teach him the multiplication table. He has
no great head for figures, and we find him listening to long lectures
upon abstruse financial questions, not unlike the bimetallism
discussions of our own day, which he finds so clear, while he is
listening, that nothing could be clearer, but half an hour afterwards he
does not know anything whatever about the subject.
Under the category of his amusements, physic must be included; for, like
other egoists, he was immensely interested in his real or imaginary
ailments, and in the means which were taken to cure them. On some days
he will sit all day long taking physic. He derives an immense amount of
amusement from the process of doctoring himself, and still more from
writing down in all their detail both his symptoms and their treatment.
His pharmacopoeia is by no means scientific, for he includes within it
charms which will cure one of anything, and he always keeps a hare's
foot by him, and will sometimes tell of troubles which came to him
because he had forgotten it.
He is constantly passing the shrewdest of judgments upon men and things,
or retailing them from the lips of others. "Sir Ellis Layton is, for a
speech of forty words, the wittiest man that ever I knew in my life, but
longer he is nothing." "Mighty merry to see how plainly my Lord and Povy
do abuse one another about their accounts, each thinking the other a
fool, and I thinking they were not either of them, in that point, much
in the wrong." "How little merit do prevail in the world, but only
favour; and that, for myself, chance without merit brought me in; and
that diligence only keeps me so, and will, living as I do among so many
lazy people that the diligent man becomes necessary, that they cannot do
anything without him." "To the Cocke-pitt where I hear the Duke of
Albemarle's chaplain make a simple sermon: among other things,
reproaching the imperfection of humane learning, he cried, 'All our
physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is not
able to number the days of a man'--which, God knows, is not the fault of
arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing." "The
blockhead Albemarle hath strange luck to be loved, though he be, and
every man must know it, the heaviest man in the world, but stout and
honest to his country." "He advises me in what I write to him, to be as
short as I can, and obscure." "But he do tell me that the House is in
such a condition that nobody can tell what to make of them, and, he
thinks, they were never in before; that everybody leads and nobody
follows." "My Lord Middleton did come to-day, and seems to me but a
dull, heavy man; but he is a great soldier, and stout, and a needy
Lord." A man who goes about the world making remarks of that kind, would
need a cipher in which to write them down. His world is everything to
him, and he certainly makes the most of it so far as observation and
remark are concerned.
If Pepys' curiosity and infinitely varied shrewdness and observation may
be justly regarded as phenomenal, the complexity of his moral character
is no less amazing. He is full of industry and ambition, reading for his
favourite book Bacon's _Faber Fortunæ_, "which I can never read too
often." He is "joyful beyond myself that I cannot express it, to see,
that as I do take pains, so God blesses me, and has sent me masters that
do observe that I take pains." Again he is "busy till night blessing
myself mightily to see what a deal of business goes off a man's hands
when he stays at it." Colonel Birch tells him "that he knows him to be a
man of the old way of taking pains."
This is interesting in itself, and it is a very marked trait in his
character, but it gains a wonderful pathos when we remember that this
infinite taking of pains was done in a losing battle with blindness.
There is a constantly increasing succession of references in the Diary
to his failing eyesight and his fears of blindness in the future. The
references are made in a matter-of-fact tone, and are as free from
self-pity as if he were merely recording the weather or the date. All
the more on that account, the days when he is weary and almost blind
with writing and reading, and the long nights when he is unable to read,
show him to be a very brave and patient man. He consults Boyle as to
spectacles, but fears that he will have to leave off his Diary, since
the cipher begins to hurt his eyes. The lights of the theatre become
intolerable, and even reading is a very trying ordeal, notwithstanding
the paper tubes through which he looks at the print, and which afford
him much interest and amusement. So the Diary goes on to its pathetic
close:--"And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with
my own eyes in the keeping of my Journal, I being not able to do it any
longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time
that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I
must forbear; and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have
it kept by my people in long-hand, and must be contented to set down
no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be
anything, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add,
here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand.
"And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to
see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that
will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!--S.P."
It is comforting to know that, in spite of these fears, he did not grow
blind, but preserved a certain measure of sight to the end of his
career.
In regard to money and accounts, his character and conduct present the
same extraordinary mixture as is seen in everything else that concerns
him. Money flows profusely upon valentines, gloves, books, and every
sort of thing conceivable; yet he grudges the price of his wife's dress
although it is a sum much smaller than the cost of his own. He allows
her £30 for all expenses of the household, and she is immensely pleased,
for the sum is much larger than she had expected. The gift to her of a
necklace worth £60 overtops all other generosity, and impresses himself
so much that we hear of it till we are tired. A man in such a position
as his, is bound to make large contributions to public objects, both in
the forms of donations and of loans; but caution tempers his public
spirit. A characteristic incident is that in which he records his
genuine shame that the Navy Board had not lent any money towards the
expenses caused by the Fire and the Dutch War. But when the loan is
resolved upon, he tells us, with delicious naïveté, how he rushes in to
begin the list, lest some of his fellows should head it with a larger
sum, which he would have to equal if he came after them. He hates
gambling,--it was perhaps the one vice which never tempted him,--and he
records, conscientiously and very frequently, the gradual growth of his
estate from nothing at all to thousands of pounds, with constant thanks
to God, and many very quaint little confessions and remarks.
He was on the one hand confessedly a coward, and on the other hand a man
of the most hasty and violent temper. Yet none of his readers can
despise him very bitterly for either of these vices. For he disarms all
criticism by the incredibly ingenious frankness of his confessions; and
the instances of these somewhat contemptible vices alternate with bits
of real gallantry and fineness, told in the same perfectly natural and
unconscious way.
His relations with his wife and other ladies would fill a volume in
themselves. It would not be a particularly edifying volume, but it
certainly would be without parallel in the literature of this or any
other country for sheer extremity of frankness. Mrs. Pepys appears to
have been a very beautiful and an extremely difficult lady, disagreeable
enough to tempt him into many indiscretions, and yet so virtuous as to
fill his heart with remorse for all his failings, and still more with
vexation for her discoveries of them. But below all this surface play of
pretty disreputable outward conduct, there seems to have been a deep and
genuine love for her in his heart. He can say as coarse a thing about
her as has probably ever been recorded, but he balances it with
abundance of solicitous and often ineffective attempts to gratify her
capricious and imperious little humours.
These curious mixtures of character, however, are but byplay compared
with the phenomenal and central vanity, which alternately amazes and
delights us. After all the centuries there is a positive charm about
this grown man who, after all, never seems to have grown up into
manhood. He is as delighted with himself as if he were new, and as
interested in himself as if he had been born yesterday. He prefers
always to talk with persons of quality if he can find them. "Mighty glad
I was of the good fortune to visit him (Sir W. Coventry), for it keeps
in my acquaintance with him, and the world sees it, and reckons my
interest accordingly." His public life was distinguished by one great
speech made in answer to the accusations of some who had attacked him
and the Navy Board in the House of Commons. That speech seems certainly
to have been distinguished and extraordinarily able, but it certainly
would have cost him his soul if he had not already lost that in other
ways. Every sentence of flattery, even to the point of being told that
he is another Cicero, he not only takes seriously, but duly records.
There is an immense amount of snobbery, blatant and unashamed. A certain
Captain Cooke turns out to be a man who had been very great in former
days. Pepys had carried clothes to him when he was a little
insignificant boy serving in his father's workshop. Now Captain Cooke's
fortunes are reversed, and Pepys tells us of his many and careful
attempts to avoid him, and laments his failure in such attempts. He
hates being seen on the shady side of any street of life, and is
particularly sensitive to such company as might seem ridiculous or
beneath his dignity. His brother faints one day while walking with him
in the street, on which his remark is, "turned my head, and he was
fallen down all along upon the ground dead, which did put me into a
great fright; and, to see my brotherly love! I did presently lift him up
from the ground." This last sentence is so delightful that, were it not
for the rest of the Diary, it would be quite incredible in any human
being past the age of short frocks. All this side of his character
culminates in the immense amount of information which we have concerning
his coach. He has great searching of heart as to whether it would be
good policy or bad to purchase it. All that is within him longs to have
a coach of his own, but, on the other hand, he fears the jealousy of his
rivals and the increased demands upon his generosity which such a luxury
may be expected to bring. At last he can resist no longer, and the coach
is purchased. No sooner does he get inside it than he assumes the air of
a gentleman whose ancestors have ridden in coaches since the beginning
of time. "The Park full of coaches, but dusty, and windy, and cold, and
now and then a little dribbling of rain; and what made it worse, there
were so many hackney coaches as spoiled the sight of the gentlemen's."
A somewhat amazing fact in this strange and contradictory character is
the constant element of subtlety which blends with so much frankness. He
wants to do wrong in many different ways but he wants still more to do
it with propriety, and to have some sort of plausible excuse which will
explain it in a respectable light. Nor is it only other people whom he
is bent on deceiving. Were that all, we should have a very simple type
of hypocritical scoundrel, which would be as different as possible from
the extraordinary Pepys. There is a sense of propriety in him, and a
conscience of obeying the letter of the law and keeping up appearances
even in his own eyes. If he can persuade himself that he has done that,
all things are open to him. He will receive a bribe, but it must be
given in such a way that he can satisfy his conscience with ingenious
words. The envelope has coins in it, but then he opens it behind his
back and the coins fall out upon the floor. He has only picked them up
when he found them there, and can defy the world to accuse him of having
received any coins in the envelope. That was the sort of conscience
which he had, and whose verdicts he never seems seriously to have
questioned. He vows he will drink no wine till Christmas, but is
delighted to find that hippocras, being a mixture of two wines, is not
necessarily included in his vow. He vows he will not go to the play
until Christmas, but then he borrows money from another man and goes
with the borrowed money; or goes to a new playhouse which was not open
when the vow was made. He buys books which no decent man would own to
having bought, but then he excuses himself on the plea that he has only
read them and has not put them in his library. Thus, along the whole
course of his life, he cheats himself continually. He prefers the way of
honour if it be consistent with a sufficient number of other
preferences, and yet practises a multitude of curiously ingenious
methods of being excusably dishonourable. On the whole, in regard to
public business and matters of which society takes note, he keeps his
conduct surprisingly correct, but all the time he is remembering, not
without gusto, what he might be doing if he were a knave. It is a
curious question what idea of God can be entertained by a man who plays
tricks with himself in this fashion. Of Pepys certainly it cannot be
said that God "is not in all his thoughts," for the name and the
remembrance are constantly recurring. Yet God seems to occupy a quite
hermetically sealed compartment of the universe; for His servant in
London shamelessly goes on with the game he is playing, and appears to
take a pride in the very conscience he systematically hoodwinks.
It is peculiarly interesting to remember that Samuel Pepys and John
Bunyan were contemporaries. There is, as we said, much in common between
them, and still more in violent contrast. He had never heard of the
Tinker or his Allegory so far as his Diary tells us, nor is it likely
that he would greatly have appreciated the _Pilgrim's Progress_ if it
had come into his hands. Even _Hudibras_ he bought because it was the
proper thing to do, and because he had met its author, Butler; but he
never could see what it was that made that book so popular. Bunyan and
Pepys were two absolutely sincere men. They were sincere in opposite
ways and in diametrically opposite camps, but it was their sincerity,
the frank and natural statement of what they had to say, that gave its
chief value to the work of each of them. It is interesting to remember
that Pepys was sent to prison just when Bunyan came out of it, in the
year 1678. The charge against the diarist was indeed a false one, and
his imprisonment cast no slur upon his public record: while Bunyan's
charge was so true that he neither denied it nor would give any promise
not to repeat the offence. Pepys, had he known of Bunyan, would probably
have approved of him, for he enthusiastically admired people who were
living for conscience' sake, like Dr. Johnson's friend, Dr. Campbell, of
whom it was said he never entered a church, but always took off his hat
when he passed one. On the whole Pepys' references to the Fanatiques, as
he calls them, are not only fair but favourable. He is greatly
interested in their zeal, and impatient with the stupidity and brutality
of their persecutors.
In regard to outward details there are many interesting little points of
contact between the Diary and the _Pilgrims Progress_. We hear of Pepys
purchasing Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_; Bartholomew and Sturbridge Fairs
come in for their own share of notice; nor is there wanting a
description of such a cage as Christian and Faithful were condemned to
in Vanity Fair. Justice Keelynge, the judge who condemned Bunyan, is
mentioned on several occasions by Pepys, very considerably to his
disadvantage. But by far the most interesting point that the two have in
common is found in that passage which is certainly the gem of the whole
Diary. Bunyan, in the second part of the _Pilgrim's Progress_,
introduces a shepherd boy who sings very sweetly upon the Delectable
Mountains. It is the most beautiful and idyllic passage in the whole
allegory, and has become classical in English literature. Yet Pepys'
passage will match it for simple beauty. He rises with his wife a little
before four in the morning to make ready for a journey into the country
in the neighbourhood of Epsom. There, as they walk upon the Downs, they
come "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
made the boy read to me, which he did.... 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."
Such is some slight conception, gathered from a few of many thousands of
quaint and sparkling revelations of this strange character. Over against
the "ingenious dreamer," Bunyan, here is a man who never dreams. He is
the realist, pure and unsophisticated; and the stray touches of pathos,
on which here and there one chances in his Diary, are written without
the slightest attempt at sentiment, or any other thought than that they
are plain matters of fact. He might have stood for this prototype of
many of Bunyan's characters. Now he is Mr. Worldly Wiseman, now Mr.
By-ends, and Mr. Hold-the-World; and taken altogether, with all his
good and bad qualities, he is a fairly typical citizen of Vanity Fair.
There are indeed in his character exits towards idealism and
possibilities of it, but their promise is never fulfilled. There is, for
instance, his kindly good-nature. That quality was the one and
all-atoning virtue of the times of Charles the Second, and it was
supposed to cover a multitude of sins. Yet Charles the Second's was a
reign of constant persecution, and of unspeakable selfishness in high
places. Pepys persecutes nobody, and yet some touch of unblushing
selfishness mars every kindly thing he does. If he sends a haunch of
venison to his mother, he lets you know that it was far too bad for his
own table. He loves his father with what is obviously a quite genuine
affection, but in his references to him there is generally a significant
remembrance of himself. He tells us that his father is a man "who,
besides that he is my father, and a man that loves me, and hath ever
done so, is also, at this day, one of the most careful and innocent men
of the world." He advises his father "to good husbandry and to be living
within the bounds of £50 a year, and all in such kind words, as not only
made both them but myself to weep." He hopes that his father may recover
from his illness, "for I would fain do all I can, that I may have him
live, and take pleasure in my doing well in the world." Similarly, when
his uncle is dying, we have a note "that he is very ill, and so God's
Will be done." When the uncle is dead, Pepys' remark is, "sorry in one
respect, glad in my expectations in another respect." When his
predecessor dies, he writes, "Mr. Barlow is dead; for which God knows my
heart, I could be as sorry as is possible for one to be for a stranger,
by whose death he gets £100 per annum."
Another exit towards idealism of the Christian and spiritual sort might
be supposed to be found in his abundant and indeed perpetual references
to churches and sermons. He is an indomitable sermon taster and critic.
But his criticisms, although they are among the most amusing of all his
notes, soon lead us to surrender any expectation of escape from paganism
along this line. "We got places, and staid to hear a sermon; but it,
being a Presbyterian one, it was so long, that after above an hour of it
we went away, and I home, and dined; and then my wife and I by water to
the Opera." This is not, perhaps, surprising, and may in some measure
explain his satisfaction with Dr. Creeton's "most admirable, good,
learned, and most severe sermon, yet comicall," in which the preacher
"railed bitterly ever and anon against John Calvin, and his brood, the
Presbyterians," and ripped up Hugh Peters' preaching, calling him "the
execrable skellum." One man preaches "well and neatly"; another "in a
devout manner, not elegant nor very persuasive, but seems to mean well,
and that he would preach holily"; while Mr. Mills makes "an unnecessary
sermon upon Original Sin, neither understood by himself nor the people."
On the whole, his opinion of the Church is not particularly high, and he
seems to share the view of the Confessor of the Marquis de Caranen,
"that the three great trades of the world are, the lawyers, who govern
the world; the Churchmen who enjoy the world; and a sort of fellows whom
they call soldiers, who make it their work to defend the world."
It must be confessed that, when there were pretty ladies present and
when his wife was absent, the sermons had but little chance. "To
Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my
perspective glass up and down the church, by which I had the great
pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what
with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till sermon was done."
Sometimes he goes further, as at St. Dunstan's, where "I heard an able
sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest maid,
whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got
further and further from me; and, at last, I could perceive her to take
pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again--which,
seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design."
He visits cathedrals, and tries to be impressed by them, but more
interesting things are again at hand. At Rochester, "had no mind to stay
there, but rather to our inne, the White Hart, where we drank." At
Canterbury he views the Minster and the remains of Beckett's tomb, but
adds, "A good handsome wench I kissed, the first that I have seen a
great while." There is something ludicrously incongruous about the idea
of Samuel Pepys in a cathedral, just as there is about his presence in
the Great Plague and Fire. Among any of these grand phenomena he is
altogether out of scale. He is a fly in a thunderstorm.
His religious life and thought are an amazing complication. He can
lament the decay of piety with the most sanctimonious. He remembers God
continually, and thanks and praises Him for each benefit as it comes,
with evident honesty and refreshing gratitude. He signs and seals his
last will and testament, "which is to my mind, and I hope to the liking
of God Almighty." But in all this there is a curious consciousness, as
of one playing to a gallery of unseen witnesses, human or celestial. On
a fast-day evening he sings in the garden "till my wife put me in mind
of its being a fast-day; and so I was sorry for it, and stopped, and
home to cards." He does not indeed appear to regard religion as a matter
merely for sickness and deathbeds. When he hears that the Prince, when
in apprehension of death, is troubled, but when told that he will
recover, is merry and swears and laughs and curses like a man in health,
he is shocked. Pepys' religion is the same in prosperous and adverse
hours, a thing constantly in remembrance, and whose demands a gentleman
can easily satisfy. But his conscience is of that sort which requires an
audience, visible or invisible. He hates dissimulation in other people,
but he himself is acting all the time. "But, good God! what an age is
this, and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing
the knave and dissimulation."
Thus his religion gave him no escape from the world. He was a man wholly
governed by self-interest and the verdict of society, and his religion
was simply the celestial version of these motives. He has conscience
enough to restrain him from damaging excesses, and to keep him within
the limits of the petty vices and paying virtues of a comfortable man--a
conscience which is a cross between cowardice and prudence. We are
constantly asking why he restrained himself so much as he did. It seems
as if it would have been so easy for him simply to do the things which
he unblushingly confesses he would like to do. It is a question to which
there is no answer, either in his case or in any other man's. Why are
all of us the very complex and unaccountable characters that we are?
Pepys was a pagan man in a pagan time, if ever there was such a man. The
deepest secret of him is his intense vitality. Here, on the earth, he is
thoroughly alive, and puts his whole heart into most of his actions. He
is always in the superlative mood, finding things either the best or the
worst that "he ever saw in all his life." His great concern is to be
merry, and he never outgrows the crudest phases of this desire, but
carries the monkey tricks of a boy into mature age. He will draw his
merriment from any source. He finds it "very pleasant to hear how the
old cavaliers talk and swear." At the Blue Ball, "we to dancing, and
then to a supper of French dishes, which yet did not please me, and then
to dance and sing; and mighty merry we were till about eleven or twelve
at night, with mighty great content in all my company, and I did, as I
love to do, enjoy myself." "This day my wife made it appear to me that
my late entertainment of this week cost me above £12, an expence which I
am almost ashamed of, though it is but once in a great while, and is the
end for which, in the most part, we live, to have such a merry day once
or twice in a man's life."
The only darkening element in his merriment is his habit of examining it
too anxiously. So greedy is he of delight that he cannot let himself go,
but must needs be measuring the extent to which he has achieved his
desire. Sometimes he finds himself "merry," but at other times only
"pretty merry." And there is one significant confession in connection
with some performance of a favourite play, "and indeed it is good,
though wronged by my over great expectations, as all things else are."
This is one of the very few touches of anything approaching to cynicism
which are to be found in his writings. His greed of merriment overleaps
itself, and the confession of that is the deepest note in all his music.
Thus all the avenues leading beyond the earth were blocked. Other men
escape along the lines of kindliness, love of friends, art, poetry, or
religion. In all these avenues he walks or dances, but they lead him
nowhere. At the bars he stands, an absolute worldling and pagan, full of
an insatiable curiosity and an endless hunger and thirst. There is no
touch of eternity upon his soul: his universe is Vanity Fair.