Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic,
composing "a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own to
be) to all studies and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but the
Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his portrait
by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright's edition, is a
confirmation of the Diary. Hales it would appear, had known his
business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost
breaking his neck "to have the portrait full of shadows," and draping him
in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was preoccupied
about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the essence of the
man. Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the Diary by the
picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the number of those
who can "surprise the manners in the face." Here we have a mouth
pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet apt for
weeping too; a nose great alike in character and dimensions; and
altogether a most fleshly, melting countenance. The face is attractive
by its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word _greedy_, but the
reader must not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred
one of _hungry_; for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better
things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face
of an artist; it is the face of a _viveur_--kindly, pleased and pleasing,
protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the shifting
versatility of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly to be
called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may balance
and control another.
The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida.
Wherever he went, his steps were winged with the most eager expectation;
whatever he did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An
insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets of
knowledge, filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported him
in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never
happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in
Holland, he was "with child" to see any strange thing. Meeting some
friends and singing with them in a palace near The Hague, his pen fails
him to express his passion of delight, "the more so because in a heaven
of pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all famous
executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced
"with a broad wound," he says, "that makes my hand now shake to write of
it." He learned to dance, and was "like to make a dancer." He learned
to sing, and walked about Gray's Inn Fields "humming to myself (which is
now my constant practice) the trillo." He learned to play the lute, the
flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his
intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned
to compose songs, and burned to give forth "a scheme and theory of music
not yet ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle like a
bird exceeding well," he promised to return another day and give an angel
for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, "I took the Bezan back with
me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the Hope,
taking great pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing when
they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin grammar,
he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of Harrington's
Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before it had
received the name. Boyle's _Hydrostatics_ was "of infinite delight" to
him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible concordances, a
captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle. We find him,
in a single year, studying timber and the measurement of timber; tar and
oil, hemp, and the process of preparing cordage; mathematics and
accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships from a model; and "looking
and improving himself of the (naval) stores with"--hark to the
fellow!--"great delight." His familiar spirit of delight was not the
same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him through life! He is only
copying something, and behold, he "takes great pleasure to rule the
lines, and have the capital words wrote with red ink;" he has only had
his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold, "it do please him
exceedingly." A hog's harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot
ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must exclaim, with
breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach!" When he is bound for a supper
party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure." When he has a new watch, "to
see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear carrying it in my
hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times." To go to
Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear
fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here laughing, and
there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the nightingales,
I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again "with great
pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the
fog was rising and the April sun broke through.
He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two
agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's
tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes,
lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If
he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by
playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book
of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women. When
he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile the way in
case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets of London,
with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted,
his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the true
headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of
idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was
conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he
could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought himself
unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how to eat
alone;" pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and ear must
be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content. He had no zest
in a good dinner when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street and in a
periwig-maker's house;" and a collation was spoiled for him by
indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman service
in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he mentions
that he went to bed "weary, _which I seldom am_;" and already over
thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it is
never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career, as
in all others, it is failure that kills. The man who enjoys so wholly
and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is just the
man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his right to
fiddle on the leads, or to be "vexed to the blood" by a solecism in his
wife's attire; and we find in consequence that he was always peevish when
he was hungry, and that his head "aked mightily" after a dispute. But
nothing could divert him from his aim in life; his remedy in care was the
same as his delight in prosperity; it was with pleasure, and with
pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow; and, whether he was
jealous of his wife or skulking from a bailiff, he would equally take
refuge in the theatre. There, if the house be full and the company
noble, if the songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the play
diverting, this old hero of the secret Diary, this private self-adorer,
will speedily be healed of his distresses.
Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the
fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the
beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his
fellow-creatures. He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist.
Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of
knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbors. And
perhaps it is in this sense that charity may be most properly said to
begin at home. It does not matter what quality a person has: Pepys can
appreciate and love him for it. He "fills his eyes" with the beauty of
Lady Castlemaine; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought of her
for years; if a woman be good-looking and not painted, he will walk miles
to have another sight of her; and even when a lady by a mischance spat
upon his clothes, he was immediately consoled when he had observed that
she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs. Pett
upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James: "a poor, religious,
well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that
with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken with Pen's
merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of
Coventry. He is jolly with a drunken sailor, but listens with interest
and patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to the story of a Quaker's
spiritual trials and convictions. He lends a critical ear to the
discourse of kings and royal dukes. He spends an evening at Vauxhall
with "Killigrew and young Newport--loose company," says he, "but worth a
man's being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner of
talk and lives." And when a rag-boy lights him home, he examines him
about his business and other ways of livelihood for destitute children.
This is almost half-way to the beginning of philanthropy; had it only
been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys had perhaps been a man
famous for good deeds. And it is through this quality that he rises, at
times, superior to his surprising egotism; his interest in the love
affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is filled with concern for
my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only knows by sight, shares in her very
jealousies, joys with her in her successes; and it is not untrue, however
strange it seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved his maid Jane
because she was in love with his man Tom.
Let us hear him, for once, at length: "So the women and W. Hewer and I
walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant
and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and
his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible
to him; so I make the boy to read to me, which he did with the forced
tone that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty; and then I
did give him something, and went to the father, and talked with him. He
did content himself mightily in my liking his boy's reading, and did
bless God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I
saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world
in my mind for two or three days after. We took notice of his woollen
knit stockings of two colors mixed, and of his shoes shod with iron, both
at the toe and heels, and with great nails in the soles of his feet,
which was mighty pretty; and taking notice of them, 'Why,' says the poor
man, 'the downes, you see, are full of stones, and we are faine to shoe
ourselves thus; and these,' says he, 'will make the stones fly till they
ring before me.' I did give the poor man something, for which he was
mighty thankful, and I tried to cast stones with his home crooke. He
values his dog mightily, that would turn a sheep any way which he would
have him, when he goes to fold them; told me there was about eighteen
score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four shillings a week the year
round for keeping of them; and Mrs. Turner, in the common fields here,
did gather one of the prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life."
And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's pleasuring; with
cups of milk, and glow-worms, and people walking at sundown with their
wives and children, and all the way home Pepys still dreaming "of the old
age of the world" and the early innocence of man. This was how he walked
through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and his hand, you will
observe, not shut; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and the
manners of his fellow-men, with prose fidelity of detail and yet a
lingering glamour of romance.
It was "two or three days after" that he extended this passage in the
pages of his Journal, and the style has thus the benefit of some
reflection. It is generally supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank
at the bottom of the scale of merit. But a style which is indefatigably
lively, telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of everyday
experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is
rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars,
and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative,--such
a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue
of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true
function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and
though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter
has been transformed and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and
delight. The gusto of the man speaks out fierily after all these years.
For the difference between Pepys and Shelly, to return to that half
whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not one of degree; in his
sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true prose of poetry--prose
because the spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but poetry because
he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a passage as this about the
Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's mind is entire conviction
and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the thing fell out, not otherwise;
and you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of
Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's, or a favored reminiscence of
your own.
There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one. The
tang was in the family; while he was writing the journal for our
enjoyment in his comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of his
cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make music to the
country girls. But he himself, though he could play so many instruments
and pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur. It is
not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to
understand. That he did not like Shakespeare as an artist for the stage
may be a fault, but it is not without either parallel or excuse. He
certainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on
the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not to be" by
heart. Nor was he content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it
to himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear
to tread, he set it to music. Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the
heroic quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig
chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from brave
Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his
sublime theorbo. "To be or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler"--"Beauty
retire, thou dost my pity move"--"It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O
Rome;"--open and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the
sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no timid, spirit that
selected such a range of themes. Of "Gaze not on Swans," I know no more
than these four words; yet that also seems to promise well. It was,
however, not a probable suspicion, the work of his master, Mr.
Berkenshaw--as the drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young
ladies' seminary are the work of the professor attached to the
establishment. Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his pupil.
The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist, some leaven of the world
still clogging him; and we find Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the
man who taught him composition. In relation to the stage, which he so
warmly loved and understood, he was not only more hearty, but more
generous to others. Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, "a man," says he,
"who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for it."
And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridiculous insipid piece,
"Glad we were," he writes, "that Betterton had no part in it." It is by
such a zeal and loyalty to those who labor for his delight that the
amateur grows worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in mind that,
not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced to recognize his betters.
There was not one speck of envy in the whole human-hearted egotist.