superseded by Wheatley. It is elaborate, and I think fanciful. I doubt
if it could have been accepted upon the then available evidence: it
is clean out of date now. Shortly, it was that Pepys, taking (as he
did) infinite pleasure in the minutiæ of memory, was careful to make a
hoard of such things for his after-needs. But even when that theory was
propounded we knew that Pepys recorded his shames and humiliations, and
it is difficult to allow that he might have looked forward to recalling
those towards his latter end. Now, however, we know the worst that
Pepys could say of himself, and lack nothing but the literal details of
his acts. We know how he glorifies and how he humiliates himself--for
he writes down all his failures along with his triumphs; we can see him
splash in the bagnio, and afterwards get rolled in the gutter. It can
be no question of remembrance. What is it, then? Any man may conceive,
and many will do the things which Pepys did: but not record them,
complacently, with the grin of relish. Why on earth did he do that?
I have a suggestion to make, though I am not certain that it meets
the whole case. My first opinion was that he derived that cerebral
excitation out of his details which it is to be supposed the lad may
who defaces walls with a stump of pencil, or the lover who, writing
about kisses, or craving them as he writes, ends up his letter with
a pullulation of little crosses--paraphrases of his passion. Reading
him again, I see that that is not all. It is part of the truth; it is
true of the middle of the Diary. But it is not the whole truth--not
true of the beginning, not true of the end. I now believe that he
originally intended his entries of delinquency as an act of penance or
humiliation--and that is supported by the accounts he gives of all his
shifts and turns under the screw of jealousy--but that out of that
act he found himself obtaining a perverse pleasure, which overlaid his
first intention and supplanted it. In the earlier diary you will find
him expressing his relief over lapses avoided or temptations withstood;
from 1663 onwards that is exceedingly rare; then, at the very end,
when he has been found out and has lost conceit in his delight,
his reflections are as contrite as you please. For the moment that
explanation satisfies me.
Pepys’s Diary covers ten years of his life, his twenty-seventh to his
thirty-eighth. They would be critical years in the life of any married
man, particularly when, as was the case, they coincided with the
Restoration and the sudden unlocking of all doors. When he began to
record he had been married five years, to a woman seven years younger
than himself, a diligent, handsome, thrifty, responsive little French
girl, whom he ruled, evidently, upon a theory; for he says more than
once that he found it desirable to give way when she showed a knowledge
of what her rights were. Being, as she was, exceedingly alive to them
in one essential matter, so long as those were observed she was easy
about others. Therefore, for the first two recorded years, Pepys had
very much of his own way. He kept her short of money, stinted her in
clothes and fal-lals[3]; and left her much alone while he pursued
business and pleasure abroad. All that she took in good part, until
her eyes were opened to what was going on. She did not, for instance,
mind his going to the theatre three or four times a week, until she
found out what he did when he was there. But when she became aware of
Mrs. Knipp and Mrs. Pierce and Mrs. Gwynne, and of relations which were
not scenic, there was great trouble at home. After it she insisted
on going with him, and he hardly dared show his nose in a playhouse
without her. But that was later on: for for the first three years of
the diary, beyond a little kissing, or staying up “playing the fool
with the lass of the house” when he was on a jaunt, there was little
for Mrs. Pepys to worry over. Kissing, indeed, of the ceremonial kind,
she did not mind in the least. It was the English habit, as it still is
in one class of life at least. Pepys himself was advised to put up with
it when his wife was so distinguished. “So to Mrs. Hunt, where I found
a Frenchman, a lodger of hers, at dinner, and just as I came in was
kissing my wife, which I did not like, though there could not be any
hurt in it.” Surely not.
But Pepys himself was not content with kisses of ceremony, nor did he
select proper objects of ceremony for his attentions of the sort--that
is, when once he was fairly on the primrose path. At first it was, “God
forgive me! what a mind I had to her, but did not meddle with her.”
That did not last. In September of that very year--it was 1662--he both
had the mind and the opportunity; he followed his inclination; and
though he recorded his first total lapse with great contrition, he was
past praying for, and with increasing frequency past writing about.
Vivacious man of pleasure as he was, and as his portrait shows him,
he discovers himself to us as voracious too. He cast a wide net, and
took all fish that came, gentle and simple, mistress and maid, mother
and daughter. Not a shop that had a handsome woman in it, not a tavern
with a pretty maid, between Fish Street Hill and Westminster Hall, but
he drew it regularly, like a covert. I am sure he was no worse than his
superiors; I think he may have been a good deal better than most of
them; he was never a corsair, like Rochester, Sedley, Jermyn; he was in
too small a way for that. But we can only guess at the whole of their
malpractice by adding two to two, and we know all about his; therefore
our gorges rise. Even his peculiar depravity was probably not peculiar
at all.
“Yet to our buzzards overfed
Virtue was Pandarus to Vice;
A maiden was a maidenhead,
A maidenhead a matter of price....”
That was the foible of a hateful age, and it was Pepys’s. He preyed
upon modesty. He must overcome virtue. He could not tire of that, and
wrought in his way incurable mischief. In short, he was a middle-class
Minotaur, a devourer of virgins.
I shall not follow him in his hateful bird-netting except just as far
as may be necessary to relate the manner of his discomfiture. It is
sufficient to say that, given time to spread his lures, he succeeded
often enough. His office and patronage were favourite decoys of his.
So Mrs. Bagwell, who pleased him as “a virtuous modest woman,” became
something else by his leading her to suppose that he would get her
husband a good job, he being a carpenter in Deptford Yard. So it was
with other unfortunate creatures who courted his dispensing of places
to their men. But he had an easier prey, a natural prey nearer home,
in his wife’s maids. It lay among their duties, it seems, to assist
him at his levee and coucher: he certainly had a way with him--so what
were the poor girls to do? They had no chance. It does not appear that
any one of them escaped altogether, though, thanks to his lively fear
of Mrs. Pepys, no one of them found Mrs. Bagwell’s fate. That was not
their fault, poor things; they were mostly as wax under his hands. But
Mercer, Mary Mercer, faced him and got off with nothing worse than a
little fondling. She was a girl with both wit and courage; remained on
friendly terms with the household afterwards, visiting terms; and, when
once she had shown him her mind, was not chased by the destroyer. But
she, who came of good people--“a decayed tradesman’s daughter”--was
an accomplished young woman, with a singing-voice which had been well
trained, and plenty of _savoir faire_. Really, I think, Pepys, taught
by a rebuff, came to respect Mercer. In August 1665 he noted of her in
his jargon that he had his head combed “by my little girle, to whom
I confess que je sum demasiado kind ... mais il faut que je leave it
lest it bring me to alcum major inconvenience.” That was just what it
did lead to. Mercer left the house on the day the Fire of London broke
out, and for the best Pepys could do did not choose to return. The
Fire gave him other and healthier thoughts for a time: presently when
he met her in church, she refused to look at him. So she escaped,
slightly chipped; and afterwards, when, as I say, she came to be on
visiting terms with Mrs. Pepys, there are signs that she came and went
unmolested. But to her succeeded by-and-by Deb Willett, the last victim
of the Minotaur of Axe Yard. It was the addition of this girl to his
harvest which upset his load of Hesperian apples.
He was disposed to her on hearsay, before he saw her; for Mrs. Pepys
had been light-minded enough to declare the engagement of a pretty
girl--the very thing to set him on fire. So presently, on the 27th
September 1667, “while I was busy at the office, my wife sends for me
to come home, and what was it but to see the pretty girl which she is
taking to wait upon her: and though she seems not altogether so great a
beauty as she had before told me, yet indeed she is mighty pretty; and
so pretty that I find I shall be too pleased with it.... She seems, by
her discourse, to be grave beyond her bigness and age, and exceeding
well bred as to her deportment, having been a scholar in a school at
Bow these seven or eight years. To the office again, my head running
on this pretty girl.” It certainly did, if we may trust the Diary. She
kept him awake at night; and when she came, brought by Mr. Batelier, he
was more than smitten with her, he was impressed. “So grave as I never
saw a little thing in my life,” he says. “Indeed, I think her a little
too good for my family, and so well carriaged as I hardly ever saw.”
His next recorded sentiment is, “I wish my wife may use her well.” How
are you to deal with a man like that--except by remembering that all
men are like that?
She accompanied her employers to Brampton and gave satisfaction at
least to one of them. By the middle of October that had been observed
by the other, for he writes of that day that they had been to see “The
Coffee House” at the Duke’s Theatre; and “here, before the play began,
my wife begun to complain of Willett’s confidence in sitting cheek
by jowl by us, which was a poor thing; but I perceive she is already
jealous of my kindness to her, so that I begin to fear this girl is
not likely to stay long with us.” She stayed too long for her comfort,
or for his. On December 22nd Pepys “first did give her a little kiss,
she being a very pretty humoured girle, and so one that I do love
mightily.” In January she is promoted to be “Deb” in the Diary; in
March she is kissed, and more than kissed. Then comes the last volume.
By the time that was reached, Pepys’s weakness had become a mania. His
apple-cart, so to speak, was full to overflowing, Deb Willett, though
he had no suspicion of it, the last fruit he was to add to it. His
work suffered, his mind suffered; there were omens of dirty weather.
June 18th, 1668: “At noon home to dinner, where my wife still in a
melancholy, fusty humour, and crying, and do not tell me plainly what
it is; but I by little words find that she hath heard of my going to
plays, and carrying people abroad every day in her absence; and that
I cannot help [fearing] but the storm will break out, I think, in a
little time.” At night it was no better: “My wife troubled all night,
and about one o’clock goes out of bed to the girl’s bed, which did
trouble me, she crying and sobbing, without telling me the cause.”
That ought to have warned him, if he had not gone too far. But he had.
He pursued his course unabated; and then, October 25th, came the crash.
It was Sunday. He rose, “discoursing with my wife about our house and
the many new things we are doing of”; he went to church, saw Jack Fenn
and his wife, “a pretty black woman”; he dined at home, had his wife
and the boy to read to him; at night “W. Batelier comes and sups with
us”--all well so far. And then--thunder, out of a clear sky, pealing
about his ears. “After supper, to have my head combed by Deb, which
occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world,
for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl....”
(_sic_).
A comic scene, but humiliating to all three. “I was,” he says, “at a
wonderful loss upon it, and the girle also, and I endeavoured to put it
off, but my wife was struck mute, and grew angry, and so her voice come
to her, grew quite out of order, and I to say little, but to bed.” To
bed, but not to sleep. At two in the morning the storm which had been
massing itself in the heart and mind of Mrs. Pepys broke over his head,
at first in tears and a secret. That--and it was a shrewd hit--was that
“she was a Roman Catholic, and had received the Holy Sacrament.” Pepys,
who had always been a Puritan at heart, was very much disturbed, yet
dared no reproaches, so that the blow failed of its mark. She went on,
then, “from one thing to another,” until “at last it appears plainly
her trouble was at what she saw.” Yes, but what had she seen? “I did
not know how much she saw, and therefore said nothing to her.” Towards
morning “a little sleep.” If he thought that the end of it, he was
to find it only the beginning. Mrs. Pepys, outraged on her tenderest
side, grew from strength to strength; and as for her deplorable spouse,
for the first time in his Diary, if not in his days, he really felt
something which reads like remorse. His mind, he says of it next day,
“was mightily troubled for the poor girle, whom I fear I have undone by
this, my wife telling me that she would turn her out of doors.” That
threat was not at once executed. Deb was treated with severe clemency
for the better part of a month, allowed to visit her friends and suit
herself with a new situation; made to feel, however, that she was in
disgrace, and definitely cut off from any further assistance at her
master’s toilette. The miserable man hardly dared look at her; not a
word seems to have passed between them, though after a while, forced
to take a line of conduct by his wife’s reiterated attacks, Pepys “did
by a little note ... advise her (Deb) that I did continue to deny that
ever I kissed her, and so she might govern herself.” Deb read it and
threw it back again as he bade her; but she could not “govern herself.”
The very next day Mrs. Pepys examined her, and everything came out.
Pepys had to dine alone that night, for his wife kept her room, and
when he went up to see her, blazed out upon him his infidelity and
perjury together. To make it all the worse for him, she then told him
of temptations which had been put in her own way--by Captain Ferrers,
Lord Sandwich and other friends of his. _A la guerre comme à la
guerre._ All which “I did acknowledge, and was troubled for, and wept.”
Without a leg to stand on, he must do as he was told. On the 12th
November, therefore, he must call Deb to his chamber in the presence
of his wife, “and there did, with tears in my eyes, which I could not
help, discharge her, and advise her to be gone as soon as she could,
and never to see me, or let me see her more while she was in the house,
which she took with tears too.” She had found herself a place, and
went to it; and Pepys looked forward now to a peace which he had not
known, he says, for twenty days. He did not get it, because he was both
knave and fool. Which this shows him to be I don’t pretend to decide.
He writes on the very day the girl left: “The truth is, I have a good
mind to have the maidenhead of this girl, which I should not doubt to
have if je could get time para be con her.” The Italians used to call
the compound of inclination and ability _il talento_, a word which our
language lacks. Under the spur of _il talento_ this incurable rascal
hunted London to find Deb’s whereabouts. He had reason for suspecting
Holborn, and quartered that; then Whetstone Park seemed probable, in
the service of one Dr. Allbon. Not known there. In Eagle Court, off the
Strand, he presently found out that “this Dr. Allbon is a kind of poor
broken fellow that dare not show his head, nor to be known where he is
gone.” Nevertheless, he did finally run down his doctor in Fleet Street
or thereby, even met a man in his employ, bribed him to take a message
“to a little gentlewoman, one Mrs. Willett, that is with him,” and
waited in the court of Somerset House for an answer. He did not have
it till after dark. She was well, and he might see her if he would,
“but no more.” That was enough for Pepys. Off he went in a coach, “it
being now dark,” and “she come into the coach to me, and je did baiser
her....” Then the real, the incredible Pepys: “I did nevertheless give
her the best council I could, to have a care of her honour, and to
fear God, and suffer no man para avoir to do con her as je have done,
which she promised.” The advice was sound and, from him, infallible.
To-morrow was to prove that much to him. I must afford myself the
morrow’s entry.
“19th. Up and at the office all the morning, with my heart full of joy
to think in what a safe condition all my matters now stand between
my wife and Deb and me, and at noon, running upstairs to see the
upholsterers, who are at work hanging my best room ... I find my wife
sitting sad in the dining-room; which enquiring into the reason of, she
begun to call me all the false, rotten-hearted rogues in the world,
letting me understand that I was with Deb yesterday, which, thinking it
impossible for her ever to understand, I did a while deny, but at last
did, for the ease of my mind and hers, and for ever to discharge my
heart of this wicked business, I did confess all, and above stairs in
our bed chamber there I did endure the sorrow of her threats and vows
and curses all the afternoon.... So with most perfect confusion of face
and heart, and sorrow and shame, in the greatest agony in the world I
did pass this afternoon, fearing that it will never have an end; but
at last I did call for W. Hewer, who I was forced to make privy now
to all, and the poor fellow did cry like a child, and obtained what I
could not, that she would be pacified upon condition that I would give
it under my hand never to see or speak with Deb while I live, as I had
before with Pierce and Knipp, and which I did also, God knows, promise
for Deb too, but I have the confidence to deny it to the perjury of
myself.”
It is extraordinary that Pepys, who could face with sangfroid
committees of Lords and Commons, marshal his facts and figures and come
off with credit, could be such a poltroon in this domestic inquest as
to deny what was obviously within his wife’s knowledge. But when to
terror you add a sense of guilt, a man will tell you anything. It is
still more incredible that that did not finish the story--but it did
not. The next day, what must he do but send W. Hewer off to Deb, “to
tell her that I had told my wife all of my being with her the other
night, so that if my wife should send she might not make the business
worse by denying it.” The alert Mrs. Pepys made it her business to find
out the whole of that, no doubt from W. Hewer himself; so that when
Pepys came home the whole thing began all over again, and this time
with violence. She “did fall to revile me in the bitterest manner in
the world, and could not refrain to strike me and pull my hair, which I
resolved to bear with, and had good reason to bear it.” He was driven
to call in Hewer again as intermediary; but this time the conditions
were terrible. Nothing would suit Mrs. Pepys but a letter conceived
in the most insulting and outrageous terms to the girl, who was not
what it styled her, from Pepys, who had done his best to make her so.
Even he was shocked at it, and once wrote it out without the word. Mrs.
Pepys tore it up. Then, on a wink passing from Hewer, he wrote it down,
and domestic fury was satisfied. It was handed to Hewer to deliver,
with “a sharp message” from Mrs. Pepys. That was the climax. No man
could be more deeply degraded than that; and to do Pepys credit, he
knew it, and could hardly bear himself. Hewer, on his own motion, it
would seem, delivered but half of the letter; the other, the injurious
half, was brought back to the unfortunate sinner. Deb never knew the
worst of him, and, so far as the Diary reveals, never saw him again.
Love will lead a man any lengths, and justify itself, at least to
himself; but not lust. That is a sensitive plant, and shrivels in the
cold. Pepys, it will have been seen, was not prepared to go a yard out
of his prosperous way in pursuit or defence of the favourites of his
whim. If it is to his credit that he reports at length his humiliating
rebuffs, that is all that can be said for him. If he affords a
disagreeable spectacle, luckily it is also exceedingly ridiculous,
and the only thing about it difficult to understand is that he _does_
afford it. To me it is much more interesting to speculate upon the
attitude of his victims towards these amorous advances. Concerned they
must have been; but were they interested, amused, embarrassed, or
bored? Did they take it as all in the day’s work; had they resentment
and feared to show it; or were they, poor children, led to take him
seriously? I am not thinking of the Knipps and Pierces, Betty Lanes
and half-dozen Nells--hardy perennials--but of his fresh young Mercer,
“decayed tradesman’s daughter,” or grave young Deb, carefully educated
at Bow, come also of a good Bristol family, with established aunts and
uncles, and all the rest of it--girls who certainly came new to the
kind of thing. Is it possible that Deb thrilled to a possible romance?
And how did she accept the discovery of what in fact it was? With the
one exception of Mercer, they are almost lay figures in the Diary,
mute and passive under his greedy hands. Some were baggages, no doubt,
or baggages-elect. They cannot all have been baggages. Deb, with her
gravity and measured speech, what was she? There’s no telling. I don’t
commend her for having seen him again, certainly not for sitting with
him in the coach. Then I remember that she was barely twenty years old.
She escaped, however, with some smirches, and one may hope that she
found a good husband. _Bocca baciata non perde ventura._
FOOTNOTE:
[3] In 1665, for instance, he laid out, at one blow, £55 on his own,
and £12 on her clothes.
ONE OF LAMB’S CREDITORS
There are writers upon the roll of whom nobody demands, “How begot,
how nourishéd”--not many, but one or two. Milton, for instance: does
anyone try to derive Milton? Or Cowper? Or Wordsworth? Others, nearly
all the others, abide our question, and no wonder. Is not all creative
effort the agony of recalling? Is not the brain a sponge? Is there
anything new except arrangement? Very well--then Defoe must have been a
borrower, though he seems stark new. We know that Charles Lamb picked
up words, phrases, cadences as a magnet steel-filings; but his latest
and best biographer now goes further and seeks to lay his mental habit
to somebody. He has devoted an essay to deriving his whimsicality, as
he calls it, for want of a more comprehensive term, which shall include
the freakish humour which is peculiarly Lamb’s, and the “unreluctant
egoism” which he thinks Lamb was the first of us to signalise. I could
quarrel with him there, “if I had the mind,” being very sure that Lamb
was not the first egoist in English Literature by a very long way.
If he was, then Mr. Lucas must devote another essay dealing with the
claims of Sterne, Colley Cibber, Sir Thomas Browne, Cowley, Pepys,
and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to name no more. However, let that go.
Lamb’s cast of humour, a glancing, many-faceted thing, as wayward as
the wind, but like the wind, from whatever airt it blow, bringing upon
it the scent of what garden plots, hedgerows, beanfields and thymy
uplands it may have crossed--_that_ Mr. Lucas has been driven, seeing
that he must needs buckle it to his egoism, to obtain from the mild
mock-epic of Cowper, which does seem to me a wide cast to have made,
with a small fry netted for his pains. When I came upon and had read
that essay, in Mr. Lucas’s _Giving and Receiving_, I gazed for a few
minutes thoughtfully into the fire, then got up and took down from the
shelf the second volume of the _Life_ of Charles by the same hand. In a
useful Appendix III, upon “Charles Lamb’s Books,” I found what I wanted.