That there should be such a book as Pepys’s Diary is incomparably
strange. Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period, played the man in public
employments, toiling hard and keeping his honour bright. Much of the
little good that is set down to James the Second comes by right to Pepys;
and if it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate. To his
clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on the
seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys
of the Navy Office had some considerable share. He stood well by his
business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and respected by
some of the best and wisest men in England. He was President of the
Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of his conduct in
that solemn hour—thinking it needless to say more—that it was answerable
to the greatness of his life. Thus he walked in dignity, guards of
soldiers sometimes attending him in his walks, subalterns bowing before
his periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable to his
state and services. On February 8, 1668, we find him writing to Evelyn,
his mind bitterly occupied with the late Dutch war, and some thoughts of
the different story of the repulse of the Great Armada: “Sir, you will
not wonder at the backwardness of my thanks for the present you made me,
so many days since, of the Prospect of the Medway, while the Hollander
rode master in it, when I have told you that the sight of it hath led me
to such reflections on my particular interest, by my employment, in the
reproach due to that miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet
than he is fancied to have who found his face in Michael Angelo’s hell.
The same should serve me also in excuse for my silence in celebrating
your mastery shown in the design and draught, did not indignation rather
than courtship urge me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture
of our House of Lords changed from the story of ’88 to that of ’67 (of
Evelyn’s designing), till the pravity of this were reformed to the temper
of that age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings more operative
than, I fear, he doth in ours his judgments.”
This is a letter honourable to the writer, where the meaning rather than
the words is eloquent. Such was the account he gave of himself to his
contemporaries; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language:
giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public servant. We turn to
the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to
his descendants. The entry begins in the same key with the letter,
blaming the “madness of the House of Commons” and “the base proceedings,
just the epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House
of Lords;” and then, without the least transition, this is how our
diarist proceeds: “To the Strand, to my bookseller’s, and there bought an
idle, rogueish French book, _L’escholle des Filles_, which I have bought
in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I
resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in
the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be
found.” Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more clearly
apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable; but what
about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was
ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the
shame in the pages of his daily journal?
We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we
address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and
acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another,
as befits the nature and demands of the relation. Pepys’s letter to
Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp
which he signed by the pseudonym of _Dapper Dicky_; yet each would be
suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in
this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with
his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of
his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to
march through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable to
others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp
we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the Diary,
and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose? Had
he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in
the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we
should have made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal
the “disgrace” of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole
affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we
can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary.
Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her
husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an
agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys
the tell-tale document; and then—you disbelieve your eyes—down goes the
whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It seems
he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private
book to prove he was not. You are at first faintly reminded of some of
the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment’s thought
the resemblance disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to edify;
it is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes, for he
tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often follows
some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very
formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in Pepys you
come upon good, substantive misdemeanours; beams in his eye of which he
alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature, and
laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief and often
engage the sympathies.
Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world,
sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till
nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the
spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of
sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of
twelve. In our tender years we still preserve a freshness of surprise at
our prolonged existence; events make an impression out of all proportion
to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past
adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental
interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys.
Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was
the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his
father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
“King’s Head” and eat and drink “for remembrance of the old house sake.”
He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his old
walks, “where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I had
the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman’s company, discourse
and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman.” He goes about
weighing up the _Assurance_, which lay near Woolwich underwater, and
cries in a parenthesis, “Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in, in
Captain Holland’s time;” and after revisiting the _Naseby_, now changed
into the _Charles_, he confesses “it was a great pleasure to myself to
see the ship that I began my good fortune in.” The stone that he was cut
for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive such
gratitude for their assistance that for years, and after he had begun to
mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that family to
dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had
a more romantic passion for their past, although at times they might
express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them this childish
fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the _Confessions_, or
Hazlitt, who wrote the _Liber Amoris_, and loaded his essays with loving
personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied egotism? For the two
things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is the first that makes
the second either possible or pleasing.
But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf
of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was—if, for
instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were
jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after
years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognise
myself across the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come upon them
now, and not be moved one tittle—which shows that I have comparatively
failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys. For in the Diary we
can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism; as when he
explains that his candle is going out, “which makes me write thus
slobberingly;” or as in this incredible particularity, “To my study,
where I only wrote thus much of this day’s passages to this *, and so out
again;” or lastly, as here, with more of circumstance: “I staid up till
the bellman came by with his bell under my window, _as I was writing of
this very line_, and cried, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty,
windy morning.’” Such passages are not to be misunderstood. The appeal
to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable. He desires that dear,
though unknown, gentleman keenly to realise his predecessor; to remember
why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall (let us fancy, with a
sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the early, windy morning,
and the very line his own romantic self was scribing at the moment. The
man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences—a sort of pleasure by
ricochet, which comforts many in distress, and turns some others into
sentimental libertines: and the whole book, if you will but look at it in
that way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys’s own address.
Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable attitude preserved by him
throughout his Diary, to that unflinching—I had almost said, that
unintelligent—sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. He
was not unconscious of his errors—far from it; he was often startled into
shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But
whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still
that entrancing _ego_ of whom alone he cared to write; and still sure of
his own affectionate indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and
the Writer come to read what he had written. Whatever he did, or said,
or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a character of
his career; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or
than Alexander, so all should be faithfully set down. I have called his
Diary a work of art. Now when the artist has found something, word or
deed, exactly proper to a favourite character in play or novel, he will
neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act
mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness
of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither
disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his
adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and
enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part
of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he
has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty,
that I am ashamed to name them. It may be said that we all of us write
such a diary in airy characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a
distinction to be made; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an
account of our daily fortunes and behaviour, we too often weave a tissue
of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass
and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more
cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too
timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw
clearly and set down unsparingly.
It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same
single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he
must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work
he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books
were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might
ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains
and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and the thought,
although discouraged, must have warmed his heart. He was not such an
ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives,
the gun-cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let
some contemporary light upon the journal, and Pepys was plunged for ever
in social and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of his terrors
by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth, he tells
about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy; but in
1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue
out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so grave
and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts I think
we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not acquiesced in,
the thought of a far-distant publicity. The first is of capital
importance: the Diary was not destroyed. The second—that he took unusual
precautions to confound the cipher in “rogueish” passages—proves, beyond
question, that he was thinking of some other reader besides himself.
Perhaps while his friends were admiring the “greatness of his behaviour”
at the approach of death, he may have had a twinkling hope of
immortality. _Mens cujusque is est quisque_, said his chosen motto; and,
as he had stamped his mind with every crook and foible in the pages of
the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind him was indeed himself.
There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable of the desire of man for
publicity and an enduring name. The greatness of his life was open, yet
he longed to communicate its smallness also; and, while contemporaries
bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his
periwig was once alive with nits. But this thought, although I cannot
doubt he had it, was neither his first nor his deepest; it did not colour
one word that he wrote; and the Diary, for as long as he kept it,
remained what it was when he began, a private pleasure for himself. It
was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all his pleasures; he lived in
and for it, and might well write these solemn words, when he closed that
confidant for ever: “And so I betake myself to that course which is
almost as much as to see myself go into the grave; for which, and all the
discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me.”