I
I have often thought of editing the diary (which is in my possession)
of one Jeremy Wendover, of Bullingford, in the county of Berkshire,
England, Gent., who departed this life in the year of grace 1758, and
giving to the world a document as human as the record of Pepys and as
deeply imbued with the piety of a devout Christian as the Confessions
of Saint Augustine. A little emendation of an occasional ungrammatical
and disjointed text--though in the main the diary is written in the
scholarly, florid style of the eighteenth century; a little intelligent
conjecture as to certain dates; a footnote now and then elucidating an
obscure reference--and the thing would be done. It has been a great
temptation, but I have resisted it. The truth is that to the casual
reader the human side would seem to be so meagre, the pietistic so
full. One has to seek so carefully for a few flowers of fact among a
wilderness of religious and philosophical fancy--nay, more: to be so
much in sympathy with the diarist as to translate the pious rhetoric
into terms of mundane incident, that only to the curious student can
the real life history of the man be revealed. And who in these
hurrying days would give weeks of patient toil to a task so barren of
immediate profit? I myself certainly would not do it; and it is a good
working philosophy of life (though it has its drawbacks) not to expect
others to do what you would not do yourself. It is only because the
study of these yellow pages, covered with the brown, almost
microscopic, pointed handwriting, has amused the odd moments of years
that I have arrived at something like a comprehension of the things
that mattered so much to Jeremy Wendover, and so pathetically little to
any other of the sons and daughters of Adam.
How did the diary, you ask, come into my possession? I picked it up,
years ago, for a franc, at a second-hand bookseller's in Geneva. It
had the bookplate of a long-forgotten Bishop of Sodor and Man, and an
inscription on the flyleaf: "John Henderson, Calcutta, 1835." How it
came into the hands of the Bishop, into those of John Henderson, how it
passed thence and eventually found its way to Geneva, Heaven alone
knows.
I have said that Jeremy Wendover departed this life in 1758. My
authority for the statement is a lichen-covered gravestone in the
churchyard of Bullingford, whither I have made many pious pilgrimages
in the hope of finding more records of my obscure hero. But I have
been unsuccessful. The house, however, in which he lived, described at
some length in his diary, is still standing--an Early Tudor building,
the residence of the maltster who owned the adjoining long, gabled
malthouse, and from whom he rented it for a considerable term of years.
It is situated on the river fringe of the little town, at the end of a
lane running at right angles to the main street just before this loses
itself in the market square.
I have stood at the front gate of the house and watched the Thames,
some thirty yards away, flow between its alder-grown banks; the wide,
lush meadows and cornfields beyond dotted here and there with the red
roofs of farms and spreading amid the quiet greenery of oaks and
chestnuts to the low-lying Oxfordshire hills; I have breathed in the
peace of the evening air and I have found myself very near in spirit to
Jeremy Wendover, who stood, as he notes, many and many a summer
afternoon at that self-same gate, watching the selfsame scene, far away
from the fever and the fret of life.
I have thought, therefore, that instead of publishing his diary I might
with some degree of sympathy set forth in brief the one dramatic
episode in his inglorious career.