five hundred references to dress and personal decoration. I have not
checked the statement, but I can easily believe it. This gives, roughly
speaking, an average of one such notice to each week covered by the
journal. Dress and the affairs of the toilet were indeed for Pepys
always matters of serious importance, not to be disregarded in the midst
of the greatest strain of public events. We learn that at times Mrs.
Pepys’s feminine desire for a new gown or some expensive bit of finery
gave rise to domestic bickering and husbandly reproof, and that the
money laid out on tailoring and haberdashery occasionally caused an
uneasy hour. Yet, with all his thrift, Pepys seems to have had a
remarkably free hand when questions of this kind stood in the way. He
reports, without remorse, the payment of twenty-four pounds for a single
suit—the best, he adds, “that I ever wore in my life”; and later on,
notes the spending of eighty pounds for a necklace for his wife—though
in this case he has misgivings. It is sad to relate that, on the whole,
our diarist was much less concerned about his own personal extravagances
than about the extravagances of his better-half—a fact which shows us
that husbands, like other conveniences of life, have been improved by
the course of civilization. At any rate, once noting, to his great
sorrow and alarm, a month’s outlay of seventy-seven pounds on dress and
its accompaniments, he adds that about twelve pounds of this had gone
for his wife, and the small remaining balance—some fifty-five pounds—for
himself. Charity begins at home; but economy, like justice, often starts
next door. Pepys’s marital parsimoniousness frequently manifests itself
in very petty ways; as when, for example, under date 14th February,
1666-7, he writes—“I am also this year my wife’s valentine, and it will
cost me £5; _but that I must have laid out if we had not been
valentines_.”
Once upon a time, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys went to the theatre together, and
there they saw “Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with
puffs, as my wife calls them, and several other great ladies had their
hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily; but it is
only because she sees it is the fashion.” This is all very well as a
piece of superior masculine judgment; but unfortunately our moralist
betrays no such scruples when social opinion prescribes a new departure
in his own accoutrement. We notice with interest in the jottings of the
journal the first appearance, or early reappearance, of several curious
customs in dress. Patches were used by Mrs. Pepys, for the first time
“since we were married,” on 30th August, 1660; and on 12th June, 1663,
after observing the growth of the practice then indulged in by ladies,
of wearing vizards, or masks, at the theatre—a practice we can
understand better as we come to know more of the character of the
performances given on the Restoration stage,—Mr. Pepys goes forthwith to
the Exchange “to buy things with my wife; among others, a vizard for
herself.” On 3d November, in this same year, he reports the adoption by
himself of the new mode of wearing a periwig in place of the natural
hair. It went a little to his heart, we find, to part with his own
head-gear. However, he was somewhat reassured when, causing all his
maids to look upon him, he observed their satisfaction with the result;
though he notes intense self-consciousness and some embarrassment when,
the next day, he went abroad for the first time in his new guise. About
the same period he begins to shave himself—a performance which pleases
him “mightily,” as promising to save both time and money. “Up betimes
and shaved myself,” so runs a later entry, “after a week’s growth; but
Lord! how ugly I was yesterday, and how fine to-day.”
One is sorely tempted here to reproduce a few of the many passages in
which the vain old chronicler gloats over his handsome clothing, and the
imposing figure cut by him at the theatre, or on the promenade, or in
church. But one or two must suffice as specimens:—
“July 10, 1660. This day I put on my new silk suit, the first
that ever I wore in my life.”
“Feb. 3, 1661, (Lord’s Day). This day I first begun [sic] to go
forth in my coat and sword, as the manner now among gentlemen
is.”
“April 22, 1661. Up early, and made myself as fine as I could.”
“Oct 19, 1662, (Lord’s Day). Put on my first new lace-band; and
so neat it is, that I am resolved my great expense shall be
lace-bands, and it will set off anything else the more.”
“May 17, 1668, (Lord’s Day). Up and put on my new stuff suit,
with a shoulder belt, according to the new fashion, and the
bands of my vest and tunique laced with silk lace of the colour
of my suit; and so very handsome to church.”
Alas, poor Pepys! Where be your lace-bands now? your shoulder-belts?
your rich silk vests?
The prominence of dress in the Diary may well surprise us, but we are
scarcely less astonished by the amount of space given by our busy man of
affairs to the most various kinds of pleasure and simple merrymaking.
Amongst the games in which Mr. Secretary Pepys seems to have found
special satisfaction, tennis, ninepins, and billiards hold high place;
but these, after all, never yielded him a tithe of the pure enjoyment
that he derived from his more intellectual pastimes, reading and music.
Pepys was a genuine musician; and we get the impression from the journal
that his love of music reached the proportions of a real passion—the
only passion, indeed, of his life. On the other hand, he was not a
systematic scholar, though he devoured books with avidity, keeping in
touch with the literary output of his day, and at least tasting all
sorts of things, from Cicero, the Hebrew grammar, and Hooker’s
“Ecclesiastical Polity,” downward to Audley’s “Way to be Rich,” and the
last-published comedy of the popular playwrights of his time. Here are a
couple of sample entries:—
“Feb. 10, 1661-2. To Paul’s Churchyard, and there I met with Dr.
Fuller’s ‘England’s Worthys,’ the first time that ever I saw it;
and so I sat down reading in it; being much troubled that
(though he had some discourse with me about my family and arms)
he says nothing at all, nor mentions us either in Cambridgeshire
or Norfolke. But I believe, indeed, our family were never
considerable.”
“July 1, 1666. ... Walked to Woolwich, reading ‘The Rivall
Ladys’[4] all the way, and find it a most pleasant and fine writ
play.”
Footnote 4:
This is a tragi-comedy by Dryden, written partly in blank verse,
partly in rhyme. Pepys had seen it performed some two years before,
and had then pronounced it “a very innocent and most pretty witty
play.”
-----
Pepys’s passing opinions have not much critical value, but they are his
own, which is more than can be said of many literary _dicta_ far more
pretentious than his. It is rather instructive to follow some of his
fluctuations in taste. We notice—to take a single illustration only—that
when the first part of “Hudibras” was issued, he bought a copy for half
a crown, having heard it much cried up for its pungent wit; but was so
much disappointed when he came to dip into it, that he sold it again the
same afternoon for eighteen-pence. Still every one talked of the poem,
and Pepys began to wonder whether he had given it a fair trial. So a few
days later he purchased another copy, resolved on closer study. Now, I
will venture to say that in this emergency poor Pepys kept himself by no
means free from the sham admiration and cuckoo-criticism which is the
bane of our drawing-rooms, and, for that matter, of some of our college
classrooms, at the present day. Had you met him in social gatherings,
and had the talk turned on “Hudibras,” as it would almost certainly have
done, then, doubtless, you would have found that Pepys, fearful of
appearing deficient in acumen or taste, would have little or nothing to
say about his adverse judgment, and might even consent to laugh
perfunctorily at jokes he really did not think funny, and at doggerel
rhymes which in his heart of hearts he held to be simply stupid.
Meanwhile, he confides to his Diary the expression of his honest
opinion, promising himself that, on the appearance of the second part of
the poem, he will borrow it from some friend, and buy it only if, on
inspection, it should turn out to be better than the first part. All
this is surely edifying.
Here we ought perhaps to add that, in an ill-advised moment, Mr. Pepys
undertook to learn to dance. “The truth is, I think it a thing very
useful for a gentleman, and sometimes I may have occasion of using it,
and though it cost me what I am heartily sorry it should,” (he deeply
deplores the payment of ten shillings entrance fee to the class,) “yet I
am resolved to get it up some other way.... So, though it be against my
stomach, yet I will try it for a little while.” The subsequent
introduction of a dancing-master, whose name was Pemberton, turned out,
however, to be the introduction of a serpent into Pepys’s matrimonial
Paradise. Mrs. Pepys, crazy over the new accomplishment, insisted on his
coming twice a day, which, as Mr. Pepys properly protested, was “a
folly.” Moreover, he by and by grew jealous of his wife’s attention to
the said Pemberton, and some heartache and much petulance were the
result. Pepys gives us one graphic description of himself, too angry to
join his wife at her lesson, yet walking up and down in his own chamber,
“listening to hear whether they danced or no.” But he presently became
an adept in the art, and danced his own part, infinitely to his
satisfaction, in many a corranto and jig.
For Pepys, as we have said, was a highly convivial person, and abandoned
himself to the pleasure of the moment with an ardor and
whole-heartedness which fill the grimly serious modern reader with
something like amazement. The thought of the morrow rarely for him
disturbed the enjoyment of to-day, though with the coming of the morrow
he sometimes found that he had applied himself to the good things of
this life not wisely but too well. Accounts of suppers, of social
festivities kept up until ever so much o’clock in the morning, of
mirthmaking of the most boisterous kind, abound in his pages, mixed up
with matters of more serious import in quite a bewildering way. Pepys
will often round off some such detailed report with a characteristic
comment expressive of deep satisfaction; as, for example, “mighty
merry,” or “so home, mighty pleased with this day’s sport.” _Carpe diem_
was evidently his counsel of perfection. There is something charming
about the man’s juvenile capacity for enjoyment, though we are
frequently inclined to wonder how he managed in certain emergencies to
keep his clear head and his steady hand. Yet only occasionally does the
journal record any marked reaction from even the most roistering
overnight carousal. Here, however, is just one case in point. On 14th
August, 1666,—in the midst, be it noted, of a good deal of mental
disturbance caused by a misunderstanding between himself and Lord
Peterborough,—Pepys describes at length an evening of wild frolic and
buffoonery. After dinner, with his wife and wife’s maid, Mercer (who
played a rather prominent part in subsequent domestic unpleasantnesses),
he takes a turn at the Bear Garden, where there is much wine-drinking.
“Then we supped at home, and very merry. And then about 9
o’clock to Mrs. Mercer’s gate, where the fire and boys expected
us, and her son had provided abundance of serpents and rockets;
and there mighty merry (my Lady Pen and Pegg going thither with
us, and Nan Wright) till about 12 at night, flinging our
fireworks and burning one another and the people over the way.
At last our businesses being most spent, we into Mrs. Mercer’s,
and there mighty merry, smutting one another with candle-grease
and soot, till most of us were like devils. And that being done,
then we broke up, and to my house, and there I made them drink;
and upstairs we went, and there fell into dancing (W. Batelier
dancing well), and dressing him and I and one Mr. Banister ...
like women; and Mercer put on a suit of Tom’s like a boy, and
mighty mirth we had; and Mercer danced a jig, and Nan Wright and
my wife and Pegg Pen put on periwigs. Thus we spent till three
or four in the morning, mighty merry; and then parted and to
bed.”
Do we wonder that the next day’s entry should significantly open—“Mighty
sleepy; slept till past eight of the clock”?
As wine-bibbing, and even downright drunkenness, occupy so large a space
in our record, it may be proper to note indications contained in it of
the rise of domestic forces destined to do much in a quiet way towards
the gradual improvement of general manners in this particular respect.
From the point of view of social history, there is much to interest us
in Pepys’s occasional references to tea, coffee, and chocolate. These
three beverages found their way into England within a few years of one
another, about the middle of the seventeenth century, cocoa leading the
way, and tea bringing up the rear. We have seen that on one occasion our
diarist spoilt his bands by spilling chocolate upon them. The
coffee-house was an accomplished fact in his time. There he often met
distinguished men on business; there he passed many a chatty hour; there
he once reports seeing “Dryden the poet ... and all the wits of the
town.” For tea he never seems to have acquired special fondness. I have
marked but two references to it in the Diary. Once, on 28th September,
1660, he notes: “I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I
never had drank before,”—and unfortunately, for a wonder, he does not
tell us how he liked it. And again, on 28th June, 1667, he chronicles
returning home to find his wife “making of tea, a drink which Mr.
Pelling, the Potticary, tells her is good for her cold.” Tea, by the
way, was enormously dear in those days, and was supposed to possess
astonishing and mysterious medicinal properties, concerning which we may
read much in a broadside issued by Thomas Garway, the coffee-man of
Change Alley,—a rare and curious document, a copy of which is still
preserved in the British Museum.
It does not, of course, surprise us to learn that this pleasure-loving
man of the town was a regular attendant at all the public amusements of
his time. He visited the cockpit, the bear-garden, the gambling-room,
the prize-ring; though, much to his credit, he found little pleasure in
these places of popular resort—a fact which makes it harder for us to
understand his frequent presence at public executions, in witnessing
which, as many entries serve to show, he found a curious kind of
satisfaction. On the other hand, his enthusiasm for everything connected
with the theatre was simply unbounded; his Diary remaining to-day an
important source of first-hand information on all matters pertaining to
the drama of the Restoration. From his miscellaneous jottings we gain a
wonderfully vivid impression of the manners and customs of the playhouse
of the period, together with a sense of life in things otherwise dead
beyond recall. For Pepys saw the great Betterton in all his glory, and
was bewitched by the beautiful and fascinating Nell Gwynne. When his
record opens, boys were still playing female parts, as they had done in
Shakspere’s time, and the introduction of women to the English stage is
duly registered by him as an event. He details, after his manner, all
the odds and ends of scandal concerning prominent theatrical people; was
himself on very friendly terms—somewhat too friendly at times for
domestic peace—with various pretty actresses; and was an occasional
visitor to that mysterious realm which lies behind the scenes. Once in a
while, however, he acknowledges the disillusion caused by such
excursions. The extremely human proportions into which the heroes and
heroines of that magic stage-land dwindled when seen at close
quarters,—the dust, noise, confusion, paint, powder, and general
dinginess of the dressing-rooms and coulisses,—these are subjects of
frequent remark. Perhaps his most disenchanting experience was one
connected with Nell Gwynne—“pretty, witty Nelly,” as he fondly calls
her,—(we will not forget that the Diary was written in cipher). He finds
her once behind the curtain,—alas, that we should have to repeat
it!—swearing like a trooper because of the smallness of the audience.
Now, a small house is a trial sufficient to tax the philosophy of any
actress; but we are sorry that pretty, witty Nelly, should have behaved
herself in this way. Pepys confesses that on this occasion he went home
a sadder and a wiser man.
Let us not imagine that Pepys followed his career of pleasure without
twinges of conscience and occasional remorse. The expense involved
frequently worried him, and again and again he reproved himself for
wasting valuable time. It saddened him once in a while, too, to realize
that he could not say “No” when temptation came in his way,—“a very
great fault of mine which I must amend in.” Sometimes he argued the
matter out to a logical issue; as, for instance, when, on 9th March,
1665, he writes:—
“The truth is I do indulge myself a little more in pleasure,
knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and out
of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do
forget to take pleasure during the time they are getting their
estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is
too late for them to enjoy it.”
This eminently philosophical generalization appears to have given him a
good deal of relief. Still, the qualms would come, philosophy
notwithstanding. The thought of neglected business is like a death’s
head at the feast when he dines once with Lady Batten and Madame
Williams; and when, on another memorable occasion, he goes to the
playhouse when he knows well enough that he should have been elsewhere,
he is so thoroughly ashamed of himself that he sneaks in and takes a
back place—only to be immediately singled out by an acquaintance, who
spies him out from afar, and, much to his mortification, insists on
sitting beside him. Incidents of this kind are numerous enough to show
us that the way of the transgressor was sometimes hard.
Pepys, however, managed upon occasion to get even with himself in these
delicate matters by a very curious device. He registered solemn
vows,—as, for instance, not to drink wine for a specified period, or not
to go to the play till after a certain date,—inflicting various
penalties upon himself for infraction. These penalties habitually took
financial forms—payments to charities and the like; and we note that in
cases of infraction—and these were sufficiently frequent—Pepys was more
deeply concerned about the spent money than about the broken vow.
Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that some fine casuistry is now and
then shown by him in the way in which he manages to elude the sense of
an obligation while technically fulfilling its letter. Under pledge not
to touch wine, he consumes hypocras, a mixture of red and white wine
with sugar and spices, and comforts himself with the extraordinary
theory that this is, “to the best of my personal judgment, ... only a
mixed compound drink, and not any wine.” Equally dubious are some of his
theatrical doings. Once he congratulates himself that he has kept his
vow because he arrives at the playhouse too late to make it worth his
while to go in—a really magnificent confusion of intention with result.
Once again, he allows an acquaintance to pay for him, and exonerates
himself on the ground that he was taken to the performance, and did not,
so to speak, take himself—did not, in other words, go as a free agent,
and of his own impulse and will. And on yet another occasion,—such is
his subtlety,—he gets Mr. Creed to treat him in this way, actually
lending the said Mr. Creed the money necessary for the purpose. This,
however, he felt to be going rather too far, even for an ethical
theorist. In reporting the incident, he adds that this “is a fallacy
that I have found now once, to avoid my vow with, but never to be more
practised, I swear.”
I said that in this part of my lecture I should make no attempt to
maintain logical consistency. This must be my excuse for leading you by
an abrupt transition from the stage to the pulpit. Pepys occasionally
stayed at home on Sundays to work up his accounts, or look over his
papers, and once (but he was sick that day) to read plays; but he was,
on the whole, a faithful church-goer, and, as we have had occasion to
observe, made special use of the Lord’s Day for a display of his new
clothes and finery, a practice which to modern readers must needs seem
both strange and reprehensible. His notes of discourses heard by him are
sometimes extremely interesting; while his criticisms—and he was
evidently by no means easy to satisfy in the matter of sermons—are often
as pungent and incisive as they are quaint and characteristic. “A lazy,
poor sermon,” he writes, after hearing Dr. Fuller. Once he reports “an
unnecessary sermon upon original sin, neither understood” by the
preacher himself “nor the people”; and another time he hears a young man
“play the fool upon the doctrine of Purgatory.” Considerable space is
given in his jottings to a certain poor young Scotchman, who had a
perfect genius for preaching “most tediously,” and who becomes for Pepys
a sort of type and standard of dulness and nebulosity. Poor little Scot,
thus to be pilloried to the end of time! Pepys had, however,—let us put
it euphemistically,—a wonderful power of withdrawing into himself, when
the exercises of the pulpit became unusually trying—when, to adapt the
phrase of Madame de Sévigné, a preacher abused the privilege preachers
have of being long-winded and tiresome. Over and over again he
chronicles sleeping soundly through a sermon, and waking refreshed, if
not edified, at the close. “After dinner, to church again, where the
young Scot preaching, I slept all the while.”—“So up and to church,
where Mr. Mills preached, but I know not how; I slept most of the
sermon.”—“So to church, and slept all the sermon, the Scot, to whose
voice I am not to be reconciled [one would suppose that he had become
pretty well reconciled to it, judging by its soporific influences]
preaching.” I pick these at random, as specimen entries. There were
seasons, however, when, the sermon being bad, and himself unable to
achieve the benign relief of slumber, Pepys confesses to killing time in
less innocent ways. Susceptible to an extreme degree to feminine charms
and graces, he often passed the hour of exhortation in looking out for
pretty women, and in studying carefully their various styles of beauty
and of dress. Here are a few instances to the point. “To church, where,
God forgive me! I spent most of my time in looking on my new Morena
[brunette] at the other side of the church.” So runs one of his
confidences. And again: “After dinner, I by water alone 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 the sermon was
done.” He even reports that once, at St. Dunstan’s, in the midst too of
an “able sermon,” he found himself beside a “pretty, modest maid,” whom
“I did labor 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. And then I fell to gaze upon
another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go
about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then
withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours
ended also.”
This time, by a transition strictly logical, we are led to speak for a
moment about the most intimate side of Pepys’s domestic existence—his
relations with his wife. The subject is a difficult and delicate one; it
is, moreover, too complicated to be dealt with in any detail here. A few
general words must suffice.