impression left should be, if not a false, at any rate an inadequate
one; for the temptation is strong to seize only the picturesque traits,
and to pay such undue attention to grouping, color, and general effect,
that we fail in preserving proper perspective, and throw portions of our
description into unnatural relief. The risk of doing this is, of course,
increased when, as in our own case, we take the point of view of the
playwright and the popular writer, and study the world of men and
affairs mainly through the medium of their pages. I trust none the less,
that we have not erred on the side of painting life in Shakspere’s
London in too bright or seductive colors. Yet, to tone down our picture,
let us say a closing word about its darker aspects; for these were many,
and they were very dark indeed.
As Mr. Swinburne has pointed out, one of the most difficult problems
meeting the student of the Elizabethan drama, is that of reconciling the
elements of lofty thought and gross passion, of high idealism and coarse
savagery, which lie so close together, which are indeed bound up
inextricably, in the very woof and texture of the plays of Shakspere’s
time. The literature of the stage shows us with startling distinctness
how in the world of the playwright there frequently went, along with the
deepest and most original thought a revolting ferocity of manners, and
along with a lofty sense of the beautiful and the pure a crude love of
violence, a revelling in blood, a thirst for wanton outrage and low
excitement. All these diverse elements are, separately, prominent enough
in modern letters, as in modern civilization; what seems so strange and
puzzling in our great romantic drama is the way in which they constantly
blend in the most intimate association.
Now, these extraordinary incongruities are not alone to be found in the
world of the playwright; they penetrated the life of Elizabethan
society. To some phases of the coarse brutalism which formed one aspect
of the complex spirit of the English Renaissance incidental reference
has more than once been made. Did space permit, we might here add much
corroborative testimony. But as space does not permit, I will content
myself with accentuating very briefly the difference in temper between
the age of Elizabeth and our own, as exemplified in one very crucial
matter—in the treatment of the large criminal class.
We who are privileged to live in an epoch of growing humanity may well
be startled and shocked at many of the facts brought to light by even a
casual inquiry in this direction. Executions, be it remembered, were
almost invariably public, and formed, as we have seen, not infrequent
distractions in the monotonous round of life. Felons were hanged, drawn,
and quartered; pirates were hanged on the seashore at low water; and
capital punishment was in use for an enormous number of petty offences,
including even theft from the person above the value of one shilling.
The mere circumstance that we read of seventy-four persons being
sentenced to death in one county in a single year, itself speaks
volumes. Indeed, the severity of punishments was held something to boast
of, and men were still of the opinion of Fortescue, who, in the reign of
Henry the Sixth, had proudly proclaimed that “more men are hanged in
England in one year than in France in seven, because the English have
better parts.” Public malefactors of position were usually beheaded, and
their heads exposed in prominent places, as on London Bridge or Temple
Bar. On the tower of the former, Hentzner “counted above thirty” placed
“on iron spikes.”[1] Witches were burnt alive; a horrible fate also
reserved for women who killed their husbands, which crime stood on the
statute-books not as murder, but as petty treason. Heretics, too, were
frequently burnt. Perjury was punished by the pillory and branding, and
rogues and vagabonds, irrespective of age and sex, were sent to the
public stocks and whipping-post.
“In London, and within a mile, I ween,
There are of jails and prisons full eighteen,
And sixty whipping-posts, and stocks, and cages,”
writes Taylor, the Water Poet. Scolds were ducked, and many minor
offences were rewarded by burning the hand, cropping the ears, and
similar mutilations. Finally, felons refusing to plead were subjected to
the _peine forte et dure_, notwithstanding the proud and oft-repeated
boast that torture has always been unknown to the English law.
Footnote 1:
Allusions to the continuance of this revolting practice are numerous
as late as the eighteenth century. See, _e. g._, Pope’s “Essay on
Man,” iv., 251-252, and the famous anecdote of Johnson and Goldsmith
(Boswell, _anno_ 1773).
-----
Surely it is needless for us to go farther than all this, unless it be
to add the striking fact that, despite such brutal severity in
punishment, crimes and outrages of every description remained alarmingly
common throughout the whole of the period with which we have been
concerned. Enough has been said to throw in some of the heavier shadows
necessary to complete the slight sketch we have been trying to furnish
of the social life and every-day manners of Shakspere’s time.
* * * * *
With this as our last word, then, we take leave of “the spacious times
of great Elizabeth,” and become once more denizens of our own century.
And here it would be easy, of course, to fall into the cheap
Macaulay-vein of moralizing; to strike a contrast between present and
past, point out all the manifold and magnificent achievements of modern
civilization, and end with rhetorical rhapsodies over our “wondrous,
wondrous age.” It would be easy, I say, to do this; and I doubt not that
it would be effective. But when in my study of the literature of any
bygone generation I make myself at home for a time among dead things and
long-forgotten people, I do not, I must confess, find myself in any mood
for brass-band celebrations. The feeling left with me is a vaguer and
sadder one. For, as I turn back into our own world, I remember that this
past was once verily and actually the present; that these dead things,
these long-forgotten people, were once intensely alive; that the tragedy
and the comedy of existence went on then as it goes on to-day; and that
in the breasts of men and women fashioned like ourselves beat human
hearts, after all, very like our own. Hope and disappointment, joy and
despair; the memory of yesterday, the expectation of the morrow; the
hunger and thirst of the spirit; the lust of the eye; the pride of life;
the “ancient sorrow of man,”—all that goes to make up the sum total of
our little earthly lot,—was their portion, too, as it will presently be
the portion of the countless generations by which we in our turn shall
be replaced. And thus, musing, I think of the nameless young men and
maidens of that dim, far-off age, who repeated the sweet old story of
love, as their fathers and mothers had done before them, as their
distant descendants do to-day, while there was confusion in high places,
and storm and struggle about the land. I think of the tears that were
shed as gentle hearts broke in anguish; of the brave deeds wrought; of
the tales of the faith of sturdy manhood and the trust of womanly
devotion, which will never be retold. I think of the lives that ran
their placid course; of the children that came as years went by,
bringing “hope with them and forward-looking thoughts”; of mothers
weeping over empty cradles; of tiny graves, long since obliterated,
where many a bright promise found “its earthly close.” I think of lives
that were successful, and of lives that were failures; of prophecies
unfulfilled; of splendid ambitions realized only to bring the inevitable
disillusion; of sordid aims accomplished; of vile things said and done.
The whole dead world seems to take form and flesh in my imagination; the
men and women start from the pages of the book I have been reading—a mad
world, my masters, and a strange one; but behold, a world singularly,
almost grotesquely, like our own. And then my thought takes a sudden
spin; and this age of ours seems to slip some three centuries back into
the past, and becomes weird, and phantasmal, and unreal. And I find
myself peering across the misty years into this throbbing world of
multitudinous enterprise and activity from the standpoint of an era when
you and I will be long since forgotten—when no one will know how we
toiled and suffered and loved and died, when no one will care where we
lie at rest. How curious to think of it all in this way! And with what
tempered enthusiasms and sobered judgments must we needs go back to take
up again the burden of life knowing that the deep, silent current of
time is sweeping us slowly into the great darkness, and that hereafter
the tale will be told of us as it has been told generation after
generation since the world began: Lo, their glory endured but for a
season, and the fashion of it has passed away forever!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pepys and His Diary
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pepys and His Diary
I have undertaken to talk to you this evening about a singular book—a
book that holds a place practically by itself on our library
shelves,—the Diary of Samuel Pepys.[2] The writer of this book was not a
great man, or a strong man, or in any way a man of transcendent mental
or moral characteristics. The work itself has none of those qualities by
virtue of which a piece of literature will, in the average of cases, be
found to survive the lapse of time and the changes of fashions and
tastes. With the acknowledged masterpieces of autobiographic
narration—with the “Confessions” of St. Augustine or Rousseau, for
example, or the “Memoirs” of Benvenuto Cellini or Gibbon, or the
“Dichtung und Wahrheit” of Goethe, or the “Journal” of Amiel, we should
never think of comparing it; for Pepys’s garrulous pages have no
eloquence, no literary quality, no magic of style—they record no intense
spiritual struggles, reveal no deep upheavals of thought and feeling,
flash no new light upon the dark places or into the mysterious recesses
of motive and character. What, then, is the secret of Pepys’s enduring
fascination? Wherein lies the curious spell, the undeniable vitality of
his work? Why do we continue to read this chaotic chronicle of his,
when, in the pressure of modern affairs, so many books of the
past—better books, wiser books, nobler books—are left to slumber in
serenity in those vast mausoleums of genius, our public libraries,
undisturbed, all but forgotten?
Footnote 2:
As the pronunciation of our diarist’s name is often under discussion,
I subjoin, for the reader’s guidance in the matter, some clever
verses, originally published a few years ago in the London “Graphic”:—
“There are people, I’m told,—some say there are heaps,—
Who speak of the talkative Samuel as Peeps;
And some, so precise and pedantic their step is,
Who call the delightful old diarist, Pepys;
But those I think right, and I follow their steps,
Ever mention the garrulous gossip as Peps!”
-----
I say nothing now about the historic value of Pepys’s journal—for
historic value may have no kind of relationship with broad popular
interest; and it is with the popular interest, and not with the special
significance of the work before us, that we are at present concerned.
And therefore my question, concretely put, is just this: How is it that
you and I, who may care little or nothing for the information that Pepys
gives us about the degraded politics and miserable court intrigues of
the Restoration, may still find in his daily capricious jottings a charm
which, as literature goes, is almost, if not absolutely, unique?
For any one who has ever dipped into the Diary at all, the answer to
this question is not far to seek. Pepys’s memoranda have lasting
interest for us on account of their naïve frankness, their plain and
simple spontaneity, their transparent honesty of self-expression. As we
read, we realize that, for once at least, we are brought into the
closest, the most vital contact with a living man, and that this man
speaks to us, who, by the irony of fate, chance to overhear his
unconsidered utterances, without disguise, without reticence or reserve,
of the things which stand nearest to his heart. The reader of Pepys’s
Diary knows Pepys himself better than his acquaintances knew him at the
office, in the coffee-house, at the street-corner; better than his
friends knew him at the social board, spite of the truth that there is
in wine; better even than his wife knew him in the intercourse of the
home. To us he lays bare without sophistication or guile thoughts and
impulses, desires and disappointments, concealed from them beneath the
conventional wrappings of daily manners and life—personal criticisms and
private experiences which, living, he confided to none. Does this strike
you as a small matter? Then, pause for a moment and ask yourselves of
what other man whose written words have ever come into the fierce white
glare of publication such statements as these could truthfully be made?
Autobiographies, memoirs, journals, confessions, letters we have, of
course, without number, and the value of these as human documents may in
most cases be great, in some cases inestimable. But do we, after all,
accept literature of this character as the truth, the whole truth,
nothing but the truth? Do we not rather know that, as a matter of
course, such literature must almost always be, in varying degrees,
forced, unreal, overwrought, theatrical? The moment a man begins to talk
about himself, the dramatic instinct inevitably comes into play; the
least vain of mortals colors his own experiences, the least
self-conscious manipulates his motives and transfigures his feelings.
That which we ought to know best—our own heart—is precisely that which
of set purpose we are forever debarred from describing with more than an
approximation to the stern and solid fact. You remember the famous words
in which Rousseau announced his intention of writing the plain,
unvarnished story of his life: “I enter upon an undertaking which never
had an example, the execution of which will never have an imitation. I
desire to show my fellow-creatures a man in all the truth of his
nature—and this man will be myself.” And with this rhetorical exordium,
the great sentimentalist proceeds, as Mr. Lowell happily phrased it, to
throw “open his waistcoat, and make us the confidants of his dirty
linen.” The very condition of deliberate self-revelation places an
embargo on perfect candor and unconsciousness; an autobiographer, as
George Sand said, always makes himself the hero of his own novel, even
if he be a hero of the dirty vagabond type, as in the case just referred
to. Here, then, is the ultimate secret of Pepys’s peculiar charm. Beside
him, Rousseau is a mere _poseur_, and the rest are nowhere. “Is not,”
asks Mr. Lowell, “is not old Samuel Pepys, after all, the only man who
spoke to himself of himself with perfect simplicity, frankness, and
unconsciousness?” That he should have done this is no trifling thing. He
remains, seemingly for all time, “a creature unique as the dodo, a
solitary specimen, to show that it was possible for nature once in the
centuries to indulge in so odd a whimsey.”
In speaking of the difficulties inherent in autobiographical writing, I
lay stress, it will be observed, on the set purpose, the deliberate
intention, generally characterizing it. No small part of the secret of
Pepys’s success as a diarist is to be found in the simple fact that with
him the set purpose, the deliberate intention, and the resultant
disturbing self-consciousness are almost entirely absent. Pepys did not
write for the public eye, or for any glance save his own; he recorded
his impressions and enterprises, his pleasures, anxieties, ambitions,
aims, and passing fancies because he found satisfaction in thus summing
up “the actions of the day each night before he slept”; and not at all
because he proposed to draw a full-length portrait of himself for the
benefit of his contemporaries or the amusement of posterity. It has been
suggested by one of the wiseacres who can never leave a simple fact
alone, that Pepys regarded his Diary as material towards a fully
developed autobiography. Possibly so. But we may be certain that had
such autobiography ever been written, the self-delineation of its pages
would have differed in many important particulars—in details put in, and
even more seriously in details left out—from that contained in the
journal itself. As it is, we have an odd and uncomfortable sense, when
we first open the Diary, of intruding where we have no proper business,
of breaking in upon the privacy of a man’s life, and surprising him in
the undress which he might wear for himself, but in which he would not
willingly be caught by even his closest friend. For remember that the
six small volumes which contain the manuscript diary are filled with
densely packed short-hand, peppered with occasional words and phrases
from the French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek; and that it was only after
immense labor that the script was transliterated, and the secrets which
poor Pepys had, as he fondly supposed, buried there forever, given to an
impertinent and unsympathetic world.[3] Writing thus for himself, and
for himself alone, and guarding himself by every means within his power
against the possibility of exposure, our chronicler was enabled to make
his narrative the luminous, because free and spontaneous, expression of
his innermost life. A man may be honest with himself in cipher for whom
long-hand, to say nothing of the thought of subsequent publication,
would bring the inevitable and fatal temptations to sophistication.
Could Pepys have foreseen the ultimate fate of his journal, it is safe
to say that it would never have been written, or, once written, would
have been discreetly burned. Poor fellow! His sense of complete
security, of inviolable self-concealment, made possible such confidences
as otherwise would never have been committed to paper.
Footnote 3:
A curious circumstance in connection with the first reading of the
Diary is worth mentioning. An indefatigable student, it is said,
toiled at its decipherment from twelve to fourteen hours a day for the
space of three or four years. All the while—such is the strange
untowardness of earthly things—Pepys had left in his library a
long-hand transcript of his short-hand account of Charles the Second’s
escape, and this, had it been known at the time, would have served the
purpose of the required key.
-----
But this is not all. Pepys’s unreserved frankness is to be partially
accounted for by the fact that he had no fear lest any one but himself
should ever read what he found such curious pleasure in writing down.
Yet allowance must at the same time be made for a deeper cause, to be
sought in an analysis of the character of the man himself. Plenty of
people who can write short-hand and appreciate the usefulness of a
diary, contrive none the less to go through life without finding
themselves under the imperative necessity of recording the minute
happenings, the petty annoyances and satisfactions, the casual meetings,
conversations, comings and goings of the common routine of existence.
They may enjoy their dinner without feeling impelled at the end of the
day to make a solemn note of the fact and add the bill of fare; they may
fall asleep during a sermon, and yet allow the astonishing circumstance
to pass unrecorded; they may say and do a dozen foolish, hasty, and
unnecessary things, and see no cause to dwell upon them, and perpetuate
them, when the evening accounts are made up. But the little things of
life were great to Pepys, its trifles singularly, grotesquely
significant. He was a man, it is clear, of a curiously naïve and
garrulous temper, a born lover of gossip, even when he was gossiping
only of and to himself, and when some of the matters he found to talk
about did not by any means redound to his credit.