unconscious humor is, I think, to be referred very largely to this
extraordinary naïveté; to the irresponsible loquacity, the love of
commonplace and frivolous detail, which seem to have been among Pepys’s
most salient characteristics, and to his amazing lack of any sense of
perspective—in other words, to his congenital inability to disentangle
the momentous from the trivial in the complex occurrences of life. An
interview with the King, a discussion with the naval authorities, the
manning of a ship, the arrangements for a war, were serious matters to
him; but so, too, were the purchase of a new periwig, the sight of a
pretty face in the theatre, a specially succulent joint of meat at the
midday repast, a game of billiards or ninepins. It is needful to lay
stress on these personal qualities, because they are of the very essence
of the man, of the very essence of the Diary. That it should have seemed
to him worth while to place on record, if only for his own perusal, so
many things that most of us would give no second thought to—that is the
point to be noted, as one only a little less astonishing than the
diarist’s odd plainness of dealing with himself. I have said that the
use of a cipher which none of your family or acquaintances can read, is
in itself a premium upon veracity. Yet Pepys’s singular, remorseless
honesty of self-expression remains still in the last degree surprising.
The Diary is full of confessions which, I venture to think, you and I
would hardly feel called upon to make, even to ourselves, so strong, so
irresistible does the dramatic tendency become in most of us the moment
we begin to touch our own lives. If we are fond of reading, it would be
natural to us, I suppose, to jot down the names of the books we buy or
dip into, and any criticism we may have to make upon them; but I wonder
how many of us would think it incumbent upon us to commit ourselves to
such an entry as this?—“To the Strand, to my bookseller’s, and there
bought an idle, roguish French book, ‘L’Escholle des Filles,’ which I
have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound,
because I resolved, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may
not stand in the list of my books, nor among them, to disgrace them if
it should be found.” A declaration like this may strike us as absurdly
familiar when we light upon it, but it takes a Pepys to make it, after
all; and we therefore feel that in the solemnity and precision with
which such an experience is recorded, rather perhaps than in the
experience itself, which is neither very important, nor very creditable,
nor very singular, is to be found the key to much that is most
interesting and significant in the pages of the Diary. Pepys, for
instance, quarrels with a captain in the army, and goes about in mortal
dread of possible consequences. Thousands of men, I dare say, have found
themselves in just such a predicament; but Pepys makes a note of the
fact, plainly, straightforwardly, with no pretence at apology or
self-deception, with no tendency towards heroics. Again, he lies awake
one night quaking in fear of robbers, and starting at every sound. You
and I may have done the same; but I do not imagine that our journals, if
searched, would contain any indication of the fact. Take such an entry
as the following: “After we had dined came Mr. Mallard, and I brought
down my viol.... He played some very fine things of his own, but I was
afraid to enter too far into their commendation, for fear he should
offer to copy them for me out, and so I be forced to give or lend him
something,”—and I wonder how many of us could lay our hands on our
hearts and honestly say that this presentation of motive strikes us as
remote, unfamiliar, alien. But while we would hardly dare to look a bit
of conduct of this kind squarely in the face, Pepys does so, and
unflinchingly sets down the not over-flattering results of his
observation. And he does this not because he has the modern man’s morbid
love of self-analysis, or any of the grim desire of many a recent writer
to show himself up as a sorry fellow, but simply because it is his habit
all through to report frankly and unreservedly the various circumstances
of his life, withholding nothing, adding nothing, disguising nothing.
All this helps to bring the essential naïveté of Pepys’s character into
high relief. He tears his new cloak on the latch of a door, and is
greatly troubled, though the darning is successfully done; he rejoices
when Mr. Pierce’s little girl draws him for her valentine, because a
present to her will cost him less than one to a grown-up person; he
drinks large quantities of milk and beer, and gets pains in consequence;
he acts the sycophant and the tuft-hunter towards those in power,
swallowing his own opinions and rejoicing in the success of his
diplomacy; his appetite for supper is taken away by the sight of his
aunt’s dirty hands; he makes up his mind to try how eating fish will
suit him, before vowing to diet himself in Lent;—and down all such
matters go pell-mell in the Diary. He wrangles with his mother; breaks
an oath never to go to see a play without his wife; gets a headache by
drinking overmuch wine; thinks he sees a ghost; rejoices to find himself
addressed as Esquire;—and down go all these things, too. He puts his
thumb out of joint boxing his footboy’s ears; in a fit of anger he
tweaks Mrs. Pepys’s pretty nose; is “vext to the heart” when Sir William
Pen’s page chances to catch him kicking his cook-maid, “because I know
he will be telling their family of it”;—and all these occurrences, once
again, are given due record and chronicle. Finally,—not to multiply, as
one might do indefinitely, such illustrations of our writer’s singular
simplicity and artlessness,—he even notes being “mightily troubled” with
snoring in his sleep, a statement which I have reserved as a kind of
climax, since I find the allegation of snoring to be about the last that
sensitive humanity is willing to bear. Charge a man with theft, if you
will; but, as you value your life, do not suggest that he snores.
To this brief analysis of some of the personal peculiarities upon which
the curious charm of Pepys’s Diary so largely depends, it would be
unfair to the writer not to add mention of a characteristic of a
somewhat different order. If a diarist, like a poet, is rather born than
made, then justice compels us to acknowledge that Pepys was a born
diarist—a man who, by reason of his strength and his weakness alike, was
an almost ideal chronicler of daily affairs and small beer. For he
possessed something more than the native garrulousness, the itch to
chatter and to tattle, of which we have already said enough. His, too,
was another rare quality of equal importance for the success of his
chosen undertaking—a keen, immense, tireless interest in “men, women,
and things in general.” He was, in the fullest sense of the term, a
_viveur_—a man who made it his business to get the most possible out of
existence, and who, as matters went in his day, touched the world at an
amazing variety of points. Immersed as he was in practical
responsibilities, fond as he was of money and affairs, he nevertheless
threw himself with the utmost avidity and ardor into the life of his
time, an unheroic Ulysses, forever setting forth upon a voyage of new
discovery and fresh adventure. He loved, after his own fashion,
literature and painting; he was a devotee of music and an amateur of the
drama; and he had the shrewdest eye for character, the largest
appreciation of the picturesqueness resulting from the clash of motives,
the contests of opinion and feeling, and outworkings of ambitions and
passions in the tragedy and comedy of men’s every-day social world. He
was indeed, as Sir Walter Scott said of him, a man of the “most
undiscriminating, unsatiable, and miscellaneous curiosity.” Although
“exceptionally busy and diligent in his attendance at the office,” this
same writer continues, “he finds time to go to every play and every
execution, to every procession, fire, concert, riot, trial, review, city
feast, public dissection, or picture-gallery that he can hear of. Nay,
there seems scarcely to have been a school examination, a wedding,
christening, charity sermon, bull-baiting, philosophic meeting, or
private merrymaking in his neighborhood at which he was not sure to make
his appearance, and mindful to record all the particulars.” He had an
unbounded love of pleasure, a craving for new sensations, an
indefatigable courage in the pursuit of experience, a versatility of
enthusiasm simply amazing, an industry in multitudinous enterprises
which makes us breathless as we read. “He is the first to hear all the
court scandal, and all the public news; to observe the changes of
fashions, and the downfall of parties; to pick up family gossip, and
retail philosophical intelligence; to criticise every new house or
carriage that is built, every new book or new beauty that appears, every
measure the King adopts, and every mistress he discards.” In one
sentence he will report a debate in Parliament—in the next, carefully
itemize the points in a lady’s dress; now he is deeply concerned over
the problems of the navy, and anon is to be found mourning the death of
a canary, or the ruin of his fine bands, which he has carelessly
slobbered with chocolate. Accounts of state crises, details of court
profligacy, particulars of his own matrimonial misunderstandings,
literary criticisms, headings of sermons, accounts of plays,
disquisitions on music and finance, on dinners and dancing, and a
thousand other matters, important and petty, are jumbled together in
bewildering confusion in his pages, along with sketches of character,
bits of the frankest self-delineation, scraps of wisdom and folly, keen
judgments of men and circumstances, and those notes of success and
failure, of aspiration, achievement, disappointment, of penitence, and
sometimes of remorse, which belong to the true story of his inner life.
Such is Pepys’s Diary—the record of the daily doings and feelings of a
busy, restless, vain, easy-tempered, pleasure-loving, ambitious, shrewd,
yet often fatuous, man of the world; take it for all in all, a book
without an equal, almost without a rival, in its class.
* * * * *
The author of this extraordinary book, despite some rather aristocratic
connections, was the son of a not very successful tailor, and was born,
perhaps in London, perhaps in Brampton, Huntingdonshire, (the point
remains unsettled,) on 23d February, 1632. He seems to have been at one
time at school in Huntingdon; but he afterwards entered regularly as a
scholar of St. Paul’s, London, passing thence, in 1650, to the
University of Cambridge. Of his college career we know little; but we
have the record of one incident, interesting as foreshadowing the
convivial tendencies which come out so often and so strongly in the
pages of the Diary. In the Regents’ Book of Magdalene College appears
the following highly suggestive entry:—
“Oct 21, 1653. Mem. That Peapys and Hind were solemnly
admonished by myself and Mr. Hill for having been scandalously
overserved with drink y^e night before. This was done in the
presence of all the fellows then resident, in Mr. Hill’s
chamber.
“[Signed] JOHN WOOD, Registrar.”
Yet, notwithstanding this episode, and whatever it may be taken to stand
for as an exemplification of Pepys’s way of life, as an undergraduate he
became the good friend of some of the most industrious of his
contemporaries, and, we have reason to believe, acquitted himself in his
own studies, if not brilliantly, still with a very fair measure of
success. At all events, he took his bachelor’s degree, in 1653—the very
year, it will be observed, of his bacchanalian misadventure,—and
received his mastership seven years later. Meanwhile, as we learn from a
passing note in the Diary, made a long while after, he dabbled in
literary composition to the extent of beginning a romance, called “Love
a Cheat.” The manuscript of this he tore up and destroyed on 30th
January, 1663, adding to his chronicle of the event: “I liked it very
well, and wondered a little at myself, at my vein at that time, when I
wrote it, doubting that I cannot do so well now if I would try.” Pepys
may not have shown himself in every emergency of life a strong man or a
brave; but thus to sacrifice the first heir of his invention, even on
finding it, after all, rather better than he had imagined—let us
recognize here resolution and courage not by any means to be sneered at.
Pepys was but twenty-three when he married Elizabeth St. Michel, an
exceedingly pretty girl of fifteen, the daughter of a Huguenot who had
come to England with Elizabeth Maria on her union with Charles the
First. Of the relations of husband and wife we shall have something to
say by and by. Poor St. Michel was a man of countless resources and
infinite ingenuity, and in consequence was frequently both a burden to
himself and a tax upon his friends. He had the genius for inventing
things without, it would appear, the talent for turning his inventions
to much practical account. He obtained a patent for curing smoky
chimneys, and another for cleaning muddy pools; evolved plans for the
raising of submerged ships; and in a moment of special illumination
actually discovered the whereabouts of King Solomon’s gold and silver
mines—in this respect anticipating the interesting performance of Mr.
Rider Haggard. In view of these facts, it is hardly necessary to add
that, Micawber-like, he was always in an impecunious condition, and,
pending the establishment of the said mines on a modern working basis,
was fain to support himself and wife on the offerings of his daughter’s
husband, with an additional four shillings a week contributed out of the
charitable fund of the French church in London. To one so keenly alive
to the meaning and value of money, and so cautious and economical in the
management of his own affairs, as Mr. Pepys, the visions and vagaries of
such a father-in-law must have given constant cause for dissatisfaction
and alarm.
Mrs. Pepys thus brought her husband no fortune but her beauty, and as,
at the time of their marriage, Pepys himself had obtained no settled
position, the early years of their wedded life were rendered picturesque
(from an artistic point of view) by financial difficulties, and often
harassed by the ancient problem of how to make one shilling do the work
of two. The young couple, however, seem to have put a brave face on the
matter, and to have kept faith in each other, and in the coming of
better days. At this period, it must be remembered, the Diary had not
been started, and direct information, therefore, fails us. But in after
years, as wealth grew, and his prosperity became firmly established,
Pepys would often cast a back-glance at these early times of anxiety and
struggle, indulging, after his manner, in many quaint expressions of
thankfulness to God over the change, and frequent prayers for strength
and courage in case of sudden fall.
On the first page of his Diary he notes that, though “esteemed rich”, he
was in reality “very poor,”—a combination of circumstances which is apt
at times to be trying even to the most philosophical. His salary was
then only fifty pounds a year, and the straitened character of his
domestic conditions is shown by the fact that, when the curtain rises on
the journal, we discover Mr. and Mrs. Pepys dining in the garret on the
remains of a turkey—in the preparation of which, be it mentioned as
matter of history, poor Mrs. Pepys burned her hand. But changes were
pending. Chosen secretary to Sir Edward Montague on his taking command
of the fleet sent to bring Charles the Second to England, Pepys was
shortly afterwards made clerk to the King’s ships, a position in which,
through his industry and astuteness, he was presently to be of great
service to the country in very critical times. This appointment was not,
however, secured without complications and difficulties. The actual
incumbent of the coveted office—one Barlow—was a rival in the field,
with personal prestige and influence strong enough to fill poor Pepys
with dismal misgivings concerning his own chances of success. Matters at
length were amicably settled between the candidates on the basis of a
rather singular compromise. Pepys was inducted into the position on
undertaking to pay the said Mr. Barlow fifty pounds a year so long as
his (Pepys’s) salary was not increased, and one hundred pounds a year
when it was raised to three hundred and fifty pounds or more. The tax
seems a heavy one, but Pepys was willing to accept the responsibility on
observing, as he duly notes in the Diary, that Mr. Barlow was “an old
consumptive man,” and therefore, assumably, not one likely to call for
many annual payments. The old consumptive man lived till 1665, and the
entry made by Pepys on hearing of his decease is too characteristic not
to be reproduced in full:—
“9 Feb., 1665. Sir William Petty tells me that Mr. Barlow is
dead; for which, God knows my heart, I would be as sorry as it
is possible for one to be for a stranger, by whose death he gets
£100 per annum.”
While still a young man, Pepys was made Clerk of the Privy Seal, and a
justice of the peace, the latter appointment “mightily” pleasing him,
though he notes the somewhat unfortunate circumstance that he was
“wholly ignorant” of the duties of the post. Little by little he rose to
be the most important and influential of the naval officials, with a
steadily improving financial condition, the record of which is given,
year by year, in great detail in the Diary. Trouble came presently in
the shape of failing eyesight, and by and by he lost his wife; but
material fortune continued to attend him through years which were
fraught, for the world of English politics, with vast fluctuation and
change. At length reverses came. In 1679-80, he was imprisoned for
alleged complicity in the famous Popish Plot. After his release he was
made Secretary to the Admiralty, and was for two consecutive years
President of the Royal Society. In 1690, he was again imprisoned, this
time on the charge of Jacobinism. With this occurrence, Pepys’s active
life may be said to have come to a close. His constitution had long been
undermined by a malady which had been intensified by his sedentary
existence, and in 1700 he was persuaded by his physicians to leave his
house in York Buildings and take up his abode at the home of his old
friend and servant, William Hewer, at Clapham. There he died on 26th
May, 1703, having just passed the Scriptural term of life.
Pepys’s only acknowledged piece of literary work was “The Memoirs of the
Royal Navy,” published in 1690, though a small volume entitled “Relation
of the Troubles in the Court of Portugal.” and bearing the initials, S.
P., is sometimes ascribed to him by bibliographers. Apart from the
Diary, however,—the peculiar qualities of which, it will be understood,
remove it altogether from the region of comparison—Pepys’s most useful
and lasting achievement was the foundation of the famous library at
Cambridge, which still bears his name—a collection of manuscript naval
memoirs, prints, old English ballads, and curious miscellanea, which, by
the judgment of high authorities, remains to-day one of the richest of
its class. The visitor to Magdalene College, Cambridge, may still
inspect this library as it stands in Pepys’s original book-presses; and
if he be a student of the journal, and withal a man of any imaginative
power, he will hardly fail to recall with what true bibliomaniac delight
the old collector gathered these treasures about him in his own home,
with what twinges of conscience he sometimes laid out larger sums than
he felt he could well afford in their acquisition, with what enthusiasm
he pored over their pages, with what satisfaction and pride he arranged
and rearranged them on many a dull and tedious day.
* * * * *
I have sketched in brief the external history of Pepys’s life, but you
must not be under the impression that the whole, or even the larger part
of his career, is covered by the voluminous Diary. This daily record
comprises some ten years only, extending from 1st January, 1659-60, when
the writer was nearly twenty-seven, to May, 1669, when he had recently
completed his thirty-seventh year. Just how and why he came to open his
secret chronicle, he nowhere tells us; but he makes it very clear that
he closed it at length, not because he had grown weary of it, or ceased
to find satisfaction in its composition, but simply on account of the
failure of eyesight, above referred to. Very pathetic is the final
entry:—
“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 not being 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 endeavor to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and
there a note in short-hand 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.” May 31,
1669. S. P.
Few readers probably will rise from the perusal of the Diary, dismissing
it with such an entry as this as the closing note, without regretting
that the end should have come just when it did; for we would well have
liked to know how Pepys responded to some of his later experiences, and
especially in what spirit he accepted the tragic accidents which
presently forced his manhood to the test. About these matters we can now
only speculate, with the feeling that had the journal been continued for
even a few years longer, we should perhaps have been brought into
contact with a deeper, stronger, more earnest side of the writer’s
character than actually makes itself apparent in the narrative. We
little guess what resources of courage and power lie somewhere
mysteriously stored up in men and women seemingly the least heroic, to
be drawn upon only when the great and decisive moments of a lifetime
come; and it might well give us, we fancy, a certain sense of
satisfaction if we could follow the vain and garrulous Pepys through his
season of growing wealth and prosperity onward to the time when he fell
on evil days, and watch him in the enveloping darkness, bowing his head
amid reverses of fortune, or standing face to face with death beside his
wife’s open grave. But it is useless to indulge in hypothesis. We must
accept the Diary as it is, and be thankful that the years covered by it
were so full of matters of private interest and public importance.
And if we only think for a moment of all that happened in a public way
during these ten critical years, and remember that Pepys, by virtue of
his official position, was often drawn into very close relations with
some of the moving forces and figures of the time—“names that in their
motion were full-welling fountain-heads of change,”—we can realize at
once that on the historical side this Diary has immense value. I do not
dwell upon this side now, for time is limited, and there are other
matters, not so frequently dealt with, to which I want to direct
attention. Yet it is necessary just to say that, as documentary evidence
concerning the inner life of the court and society, the inconceivable,
the unutterable profligacy of the King and his followers, the
irresponsibility of those in charge of public affairs, the complete
demoralization of the upper classes during the early years of the
Restoration, Pepys’s chronicle furnishes a record that we cannot afford
to overlook. His simplicity, insouciance, and habitual self-possession
are often more telling than the most eloquent descriptions of
historians, the most fervid denunciations of moralists. An accidental
word of his will often lay bare a condition of things which lengthy
analysis, supported by innumerable references to authorities will hardly
make us realize, a few passing sentences, penned _au jour le jour_,
having frequently the power of throwing some circumstance, otherwise
almost incredible, into sudden and lurid relief. Indeed, the mere fact
that the temper of moral indignation is not one to which Pepys often or
easily gives way, itself lends added force to all he writes, and
intensifies the meaning of his rare exclamations of horror or protest.
If Pepys had any political convictions at all, they were of the most
flexible kind; he did not cultivate the sort of conscience which has the
troublesome faculty of interfering at unexpected times with its owner’s
chances of worldly advancement and success. Brought up under the
Commonwealth, and, for a time at least, marked by Roundhead
proclivities, he readily and rapidly transferred his allegiance to the
new _régime_, his only anxiety being, it would seem, lest his earlier
opinions should be resuscitated, with unpleasant practical results.
Oddly enough, though the Diary opens in the midst of a great political
crisis—when Monk was marching from Scotland, and English affairs were
hanging poised in the balance of fate,—it nowhere contains any utterance
of strong party feeling, any distinctly enunciated wish, either for the
restoration of the Stuarts or for the preservation of the Commonwealth.
When the Merry Monarch was settled upon the throne, Pepys quietly
accepted the fact—along with the very desirable office in the Admiralty
secured thereby. You say that the spirit thus shown is not a manly, not
a noble one. Alas! no. Pepys, I am afraid, had but one firmly rooted
political principle—the principle proverbially associated with the
celebrated Vicar of Bray, of looking out for himself and his own
welfare. Here, of course, we are strongly tempted to indulge by the way
in a little conventional moralizing, and to congratulate ourselves that
in our own days, in enlightened America, the low aims and sordid
ambitions of poor old Pepys are quite unknown. But I restrain my
eloquence, having other matters on hand. The point I want to dwell on
for the moment is, that testimony to the political and social corruption
following the Restoration, coming from such a man as this, is testimony
of almost unique value, on account of the very character of the witness.
To lead you through the miry places of the Diary is no part of my
present plan; but let me just say that when such a man, albeit unused to
the chiding mood, bursts out with the exclamation, “So they are all
mad!—and thus the kingdom is governed!”—when, as sometimes happens, he
speaks with genuine sorrow of what he has heard, or perhaps seen, in the
high places of the land; when he scatters among his small talk and
frivolous details sentences full of dismal apprehension concerning the
country’s position and outlook,—then things must have come to a pretty
pass indeed. Pepys was professionally committed to the Stuart dynasty;
yet, as has been well said, a splendid eulogy of Cromwell could be
gathered from the _obiter dicta_ of his pages. Certainly, we need hardly
travel outside the Diary itself, if we seek only to understand and
estimate the iniquities and political short-sightedness of those who
succeeded Cromwell in place and power.
* * * * *
But now we will descend from the dignity of history—if these things
belong to the dignity of history—to the plane of common every-day life.
Abandoning our quest for edification, we will wander for a little while
about the Diary, for no other purpose than that of deriving what
amusement we may from its personal banalities and social tittle-tattle.
Pepys tempts us to be as unsystematic and inconsequential as himself. We
will assume, therefore, the privilege which, according to Hazlitt,
Coleridge so constantly abused in his conversational monologues—that of
beginning nowhere in particular, and ending, if we see fit, in the same
place.