When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present degraded
meaning of the word, they are usually suspected of a taste for clay pipes
and beer cellars; and their performances are thought to hail from the
_Owl’s Nest_ of the comedy. They have something more, however, in their
eye than the dulness of a round million dinner parties that sit down
yearly in old England. For to do anything because others do it, and not
because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to
resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste
to the devil with the greater number. We smile over the ascendency of
priests; but I had rather follow a priest than what they call the leaders
of society. No life can better than that of Pepys illustrate the dangers
of this respectable theory of living. For what can be more untoward than
the occurrence, at a critical period and while the habits are still
pliable, of such a sweeping transformation as the return of Charles the
Second? Round went the whole fleet of England on the other tack; and
while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by
the stars and their own private compass, the cock-boat, Pepys, must go
about with the majority among “the stupid starers and the loud huzzas.”
The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a
positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the
more will he require this support; and any positive quality relieves him,
by just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways, Pepys was quite
strong enough to please himself without regard for others; but his
positive qualities were not co-extensive with the field of conduct; and
in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the
footprints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy. In morals, particularly, he
lived by the countenance of others; felt a slight from another more
keenly than a meanness in himself; and then first repented when he was
found out. You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; and by
the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he could
rise, as it were dramatically, to the significance of what you said. All
that matter in religion which has been nicknamed other-worldliness was
strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that should make a man rudely
virtuous, following right in good report and ill report, was foolishness
and a stumbling-block to Pepys. He was much thrown across the Friends;
and nothing can be more instructive than his attitude towards these most
interesting people of that age. I have mentioned how he conversed with
one as he rode; when he saw some brought from a meeting under arrest, “I
would to God,” said he, “they would either conform, or be more wise and
not be catched;” and to a Quaker in his own office he extended a timid
though effectual protection. Meanwhile there was growing up next door to
him that beautiful nature William Pen. It is odd that Pepys condemned
him for a fop; odd, though natural enough when you see Pen’s portrait,
that Pepys was jealous of him with his wife. But the cream of the story
is when Pen publishes his _Sandy Foundation Shaken_, and Pepys has it
read aloud by his wife. “I find it,” he says, “so well writ as, I think,
it is too good for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of
book, and _not fit for everybody to read_.” Nothing is more galling to
the merely respectable than to be brought in contact with religious
ardour. Pepys had his own foundation, sandy enough, but dear to him from
practical considerations, and he would read the book with true uneasiness
of spirit; for conceive the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen
were to convert him! It was a different kind of doctrine that he judged
profitable for himself and others. “A good sermon of Mr. Gifford’s at
our church, upon ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven.’ A very excellent
and persuasive, good and moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that
righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and villainy.”
It is thus that respectable people desire to have their Greathearts
address them, telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both
worlds, and be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome
reflection; and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, becomes a
manual of worldly prudence, and a handybook for Pepys and the successful
merchant.
The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He has no idea of truth
except for the Diary. He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but
appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has
seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought liberal
when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously ostentatious. I
say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have been taken for a
fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to his
position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous periwig; for a
public man should travel gravely with the fashions not foppishly before,
nor dowdily behind, the central movement of his age. For long he durst
not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances would have been improper;
but a time comes, with the growth of his fortune, when the impropriety
has shifted to the other side, and he is “ashamed to be seen in a
hackney.” Pepys talked about being “a Quaker or some very melancholy
thing;” for my part, I can imagine nothing so melancholy, because nothing
half so silly, as to be concerned about such problems. But so
respectability and the duties of society haunt and burden their poor
devotees; and what seems at first the very primrose path of life, proves
difficult and thorny like the rest. And the time comes to Pepys, as to
all the merely respectable, when he must not only order his pleasures,
but even clip his virtuous movements, to the public pattern of the age.
There was some juggling among officials to avoid direct taxation; and
Pepys, with a noble impulse, growing ashamed of this dishonesty, designed
to charge himself with £1000; but finding none to set him an example,
“nobody of our ablest merchants” with this moderate liking for clean
hands, he judged it “not decent;” he feared it would “be thought vain
glory;” and, rather than appear singular, cheerfully remained a thief.
One able merchant’s countenance, and Pepys had dared to do an honest act!
Had he found one brave spirit, properly recognised by society, he might
have gone far as a disciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full
of sordid scandal, and make him believe, against the testimony of his
senses, that Pen’s venison pasty stank like the devil; but, on the other
hand, Sir William Coventry can raise him by a word into another being.
Pepys, when he is with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What
does he care for office or emolument? “Thank God, I have enough of my
own,” says he, “to buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a
good wife.” And again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an
ungrateful country shall have dismissed them from the field of public
service; Coventry living retired in a fine house, and Pepys dropping in,
“it may be, to read a chapter of Seneca.”
Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued
zealous and, for the period, pure in his employment. He would not be
“bribed to be unjust,” he says, though he was “not so squeamish as to
refuse a present after,” suppose the king to have received no wrong. His
new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier he tells us with honest
complacency, will save the king a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred
pounds a year,—a statement which exactly fixes the degree of the age’s
enlightenment. But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too
high. It was an unending struggle for the man to stick to his business
in such a garden of Armida as he found this life; and the story of his
oaths, so often broken, so courageously renewed, is worthy rather of
admiration that the contempt it has received.
Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry’s influence, we find him
losing scruples and daily complying further with the age. When he began
the journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic; merry enough, to be
sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Magdalene ale and his
acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season
with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble;
and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys’s theory, the better things
that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict. Where
there was “tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,” he
felt “ashamed, and went away;” and when he slept in church, he prayed God
forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping
each other awake “from spite,” as though not to sleep in church were an
obvious hardship; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service,
looking about him, with a perspective glass, on all the pretty women.
His favourite ejaculation, “Lord!” occurs but once that I have observed
in 1660, never in ’61, twice in ’62, and at least five times in ’63;
after which the “Lords” may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here
and there a solitary “damned,” as it were a whale among the shoal. He
and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a
marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker’s
mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of
mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,
become his natural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring
courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved
with Saturnalian manners and companions that he was shot almost
unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668.
That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk
and conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in
a powder magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim of a
hideous disaster. So with our pleasant-minded Pepys and his
peccadilloes. All of a sudden, as he still trips dexterously enough
among the dangers of a double-faced career, thinking no great evil,
humming to himself the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that
matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences
of his acts. For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although
not the constant lover, of his wife,—for a man, besides, who was so
greatly careful of appearances,—the revelation of his infidelities was a
crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the indignities that he endured,
are not to be measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly incensed, Mrs.
Pepys spared him no detail of suffering. She was violent, threatening
him with the tongs; she was careless of his honour, driving him to insult
the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to discard; worst of
all, she was hopelessly inconsequent, in word and thought and deed, now
lulling him with reconciliations, and anon flaming forth again with the
original anger. Pepys had not used his wife well; he had wearied her
with jealousies, even while himself unfaithful; he had grudged her
clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon himself; he had abused
her in words; he had bent his fist at her in anger; he had once blacked
her eye; and it is one of the oddest particulars in that odd Diary of
his, that, while the injury is referred to once in passing, there is no
hint as to the occasion or the manner of the blow. But now, when he is
in the wrong, nothing can exceed the long-suffering affection of this
impatient husband. While he was still sinning and still undiscovered, he
seems not to have known a touch of penitence stronger than what might
lead him to take his wife to the theatre, or for an airing, or to give
her a new dress, by way of compensation. Once found out, however, and he
seems to himself to have lost all claim to decent usage. It is perhaps
the strongest instance of his externality. His wife may do what she
pleases, and though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame
her; he has no weapon left but tears and the most abject submission. We
should perhaps have respected him more had he not given way so
utterly—above all, had he refused to write, under his wife’s dictation,
an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but
somehow I believe we like him better as he was.
The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have stamped the
impression of this episode upon his mind. For the remaining years of his
long life we have no Diary to help us, and we have seen already how
little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his correspondence; but
what with the recollection of the catastrophe of his married life, what
with the natural influence of his advancing years and reputation, it
seems not unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end for Pepys;
and it is beyond a doubt that he sat down at last to an honoured and
agreeable old age among his books and music, the correspondent of Sir
Isaac Newton, and, in one instance at least the poetical counsellor of
Dryden. Through all this period, that Diary which contained the secret
memoirs of his life, with all its inconsistencies and escapades, had been
religiously preserved; nor, when he came to die, does he appear to have
provided for its destruction. So we may conceive him faithful to the end
to all his dear and early memories; still mindful of Mrs. Hely in the
woods at Epsom; still lighting at Islington for a cup of kindness to the
dead; still, if he heard again that air that once so much disturbed him,
thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him to his wife.