veracious diary its indestructible charm. Charlotte Burney has less to
tell us than her famous sister; but it is to her, after all, that we
owe our knowledge of Dr. Johnson’s worsted wig,--a present, it seems,
from Mr. Thrale, and especially valued for its tendency to stay in
curl however roughly used. “The doctor generally diverts himself with
lying down just after he has got a fresh wig on,” writes Charlotte
gayly; and this habit, it must be admitted, is death and destruction to
less enduring perukes. Swift’s Journal to Stella--a true diary, though
cast in the form of correspondence--shows us not only the playful,
tender, and caressing moods of the most savage of English cynics, but
also enlightens us amazingly as to his daily habits and economies.
We learn from his own pen how he bought his fuel by the half-bushel,
and would have been glad to buy it by the pound; how his servant,
“that extravagant whelp Peter,” insisted on making a fire for him, and
necessitated his picking off the coals one by one, before going to bed;
how he drank brandy every morning, and took his pill as regularly as
Mrs. Pullet every night; and how Stella’s mother sent him as gifts “a
parcel of wax candles and a bandbox full of small plum-cakes,” on which
plum-cakes--oh, miracle of sound digestion!--he breakfasted serenely
for a fortnight.
Now, the spectacle of Dr. Swift eating plum-cakes in the early
morning is like the spectacle of Mr. Pepys dining with far less
inward satisfaction at his cousin’s table, where “the venison pasty
was palpable beef.” The most remarkable diary in the world is rich
in the insignificance of its details. It is the sole confidant of a
man who, as Mr. Lang admirably says, was his own Boswell, and its
ruthless sincerity throws the truth-telling of the great biographer
into the shade. Were it not for this strange cipher record, ten years
long, the world--or that small portion of it which reads history
unabridged--would know Mr. Samuel Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty, as
an excellent public servant, loyal, capable, and discreet. The bigger,
lazier world, to which he is now a figure so familiar, would never
have heard of him at all, thereby losing the most vivid bit of human
portraiture ever given for our disedification and delight.
We can understand how Mr. Pepys found time to write his diary when we
remember that he was commonly in his office by four o’clock in the
morning. We can appreciate its wonderful candor when we realize how
safe he thought it from investigation. With the reproaches of his own
conscience he was probably familiar, and the crowning cowardice of
self-told lies offered no temptation to him. “Why should we seek to
be deceived?” asks Bishop Butler, and Mr. Pepys might have answered
truthfully that he didn’t. The romantic shading, the flimsy and false
excuses with which we are wont to color our inmost thoughts, have
no place in this extraordinary chronicle. Its writer neither deludes
himself, like Bunyan, nor bolsters up his soul, like Rousseau, with
swelling and insidious pretenses. It is a true “Human Document,”
full of meanness and kindness, of palpable virtues and substantial
misdemeanors. Mr. Pepys is unkind to his wife, yet he loves her. He is
selfish and ostentatious, yet he denies himself the coveted glory of
a coach and pair to give a marriage portion to his sister. He seeks
openly his own profit and gratification, yet he is never without an
active interest in the lives and needs of other people. Indeed, so keen
and so sensible are his solutions of social problems, or what passed
for such in that easy age, that had philanthropy and its rewards been
invented in the reign of Charles II. we should doubtless see standing
now in London streets a statue of Mr. Samuel Pepys, prison reformer,
and founder of benevolent institutions for improving and harrowing the
poor.
If the principal interest of this famous diary lies in its unflinching
revelation of character, a charm no less enduring may be found in all
the daily incidents it narrates. We like to know how a citizen of
London lived two hundred years ago: what clothes he wore, what food he
ate, what books he read, what plays he heard, what work and pleasure
filled his waking hours. And I would gently suggest to those who hunger
and thirst after the glories of the printed page that if they will only
consent to write for posterity,--not as the poets say they do, and do
not, but as the diarist really and truly does,--posterity will take
them to its heart and cherish them. They may have nothing to say which
anybody wants to listen to now; but let them jot down truthfully the
petty occurrences, the pleasant details of town or country life, and,
as surely as the world lasts, they will one day have a hearing. We
live in a strange period of transition. Never before has the old order
changed as rapidly as it is changing now. O writers of dull verse and
duller prose, quit the well-worked field of fiction, the arid waste
of sonnets and sad poems, and chronicle in little leather-covered
books the incidents which tell their wondrous tale of resistless and
inevitable change. Write of electric motors, of bicycles, of peace
societies, of hospitals for pussy cats, of women’s clubs and colleges,
of the price of food and house rent, of hotel bills, of new fashions
in dress and furniture, of gay dinners, of extension lectures, of
municipal corruption and reform, of robberies unpunished, of murders
unavenged. These things do not interest us profoundly now, being part
of our daily surroundings; but the generations that are to come will
read of them with mingled envy and derision: envy because we have done
so little, derision because we think that we have done so much.
If, then, it is as natural for mankind to peer into the past as to
speculate upon the future, where shall we find such windows for our
observation as in the diaries which show us day by day the shifting
current of what once was life? We can learn from histories all we
want to know about the great fire of London; but to realize just how
people felt and behaved in that terrible emergency we should watch the
alert and alarmed Mr. Pepys burying not only his money and plate, but
his wine and Parmesan cheese. We have been taught at school much more
than we ever wanted to know about Cromwell, and the Protectorate,
and Puritan England; yet to breathe again that dismal and decorous
air we must go to church with John Evelyn, and see, instead of the
expected rector, a sour-faced tradesman mount the pulpit, and preach
for an hour on the inspiriting text, “And Benaiah ... went down also
and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow.” The pious and
accomplished Mr. Evelyn does not fancy this strange innovation. Like
other conservative English gentlemen, he has little leaning to “novices
and novelties” in the house of God; and he is even less pleased when
all the churches are closed on Christmas Day, and a Puritan magistrate
speaks, in his hearing, “spiteful things of our Lord’s Nativity.” His
horror at King Charles’s execution is never mitigated by any of the
successive changes which followed that dark deed. He is repelled in
turn by the tyranny of Cromwell, the dissoluteness of Charles II.,
the Catholicity of James, and the heartlessness of Queen Mary, “who
came to Whitehall jolly and laughing as to a wedding,” without even a
decent pretense of pity for her exiled father. He firmly believes in
witchcraft,--as did many other learned and pious men,--and he persists
in upsetting all our notions of galley slaves and the tragic horror
of their lot by affirming the miserable creatures at Marseilles to be
“cheerful and full of knavery,” and hardly ever without some trifling
occupation at which they toiled in free moments, and by which they made
a little money for the luxuries and comforts that they craved.
In fact, an air of sincere and inevitable truthfulness robs John
Evelyn’s diary of all that is romantic and sentimental. We see in it
the life of a highly cultivated and deeply religious man, whose fate it
was to witness all those tremendous and sovereign changes which swept
over England like successive tidal waves between the execution of the
Earl of Strafford and the accession of Queen Anne. Sharp strife; the
bitter contention of creeds; England’s one plunge into republicanism,
and her abrupt withdrawal from its grim embraces; the plague; the
great fire, with “ten thousand houses all in one flame;” the depth
of national corruption under the last Stuarts; the obnoxious and
unpalatable remedy administered by the house of Orange; the dawning of
fresh prosperity and of a new literature,--all these things Mr. Evelyn
saw, and noted with many comments in his diary. And from all we turn
with something like relief to read about the fire-eater, Richardson,
who delighted London by cooking an oyster on a red-hot coal in his
mouth, or drinking molten glass as though it had been ale, and who
would have made the fortune of any modern museum. Or perhaps we pause
to pity the sorrows of land-lords, always an ill-used and persecuted
race; for Sayes Court, the home of the Evelyns, with its famous old
trees and beautiful gardens, was rented for several years to Admiral
Benbow, who sublet it in the summer of 1698 to Peter the Great, and the
royal tenant so trampled down and destroyed the flower-beds that no
vestige of their loveliness survived his ruthless tenancy. The Tsar,
like Queen Elizabeth, was magnificent when viewed from a distance, but
a most disturbing element to introduce beneath a subject’s humble roof.
If Defoe, that master of narrative, had written fewer political and
religious tracts, and had kept a journal of his eventful career, what
welcome and admirable reading it would have made! If Lord Hervey had
been content to tell us less about government measures, and more about
court and country life, his thick volumes would now be the solace of
many an idle hour. So keen a wit, so powerful and graphic a touch,
have never been wasted upon matters of evanescent interest. History
always holds its share of the world’s attention. The charm of personal
gossip has never been known to fail. But political issues, once dead,
make dull reading for all but students of political economy; and they,
browsing by choice amid arid pastures, scorn nothing so much as the
recreative. Yet Lord Hervey’s epigrammatic definition of the two great
parties, patriots and courtiers, as “Whigs out of place and Whigs in
place,” shows how vital and long-lived is humor; and the trenchant
cynicism of his unkind pleasantry is more easily disparaged than
forgotten.
On the other hand, we can never be sufficiently grateful that
Gouverneur Morris, instead of writing industrious pamphlets on the
causes that led to the French Revolution, has left us his delightful
diary, with its vivid picture of social life and of the great
storm-cloud darkening over France. In his pages we can breathe freely,
unchoked by that lurid and sulphuric atmosphere so popular with
historians and novelists rehearsing “on the safe side of prophecy.” His
courage is of the unsentimental order, his perceptions are pitiless,
his common sense is invulnerable. He has the purest contempt for
the effusive oath-taking of July 14, the purest detestation for the
crimes and cruelties that followed. He persistently treads the earth,
and is in no way dazzled by the mad flights into ether which were so
hopelessly characteristic of the time. Not even Sir Walter Scott--a
man as unlike Morris as day is unlike night--could be more absolutely
free from the unwholesome influences which threatened the sanity
of the world, and of Scott’s journal it is difficult to speak with
self-possession. Our thanks are due primarily to Lord Byron, whose
Ravenna diary first started Sir Walter on this daily task,--a task
which grew heavier when the sad years came, but which shows us now, as
no word from other lips or other pen could ever show us, the splendid
courage, the boundless charity, the simple, unconscious goodness of
the man whom we may approach closer and closer, and only love and
reverence the more. Were it not for this journal, we should never have
known Scott,--never have known how sad he was sometimes, how tired,
how discouraged, how clearly aware of his own fast-failing powers. We
should never have valued at its real worth his unquenchable gayety of
heart, his broad, genial, reasonable outlook on the world. His letters,
even in the midst of trouble, are always cheerful, as the letters of a
brave man should be. His diary alone tells us how much he suffered at
the downfall of hopes and ambitions that had grown deeper and stronger
with every year of life. “I feel my dogs’ feet on my knees, I hear
them whining and seeking me everywhere,” he writes pathetically, when
the thought of Abbotsford, closed and desolate, seems more than he can
bear; and then, obedient to those unselfish instincts which had always
ruled his nature, he adds with nobler sorrow, “Poor Will Laidlaw! poor
Tom Purdie! This will be news to wring your hearts, and many an honest
fellow’s besides, to whom my prosperity was daily bread.”
Of all the journals bequeathed to the world, and which the wise world
has guarded with jealous care, Sir Walter’s makes the strongest appeal
to honest human nature, which never goes so far afield in its search
after strange gods as to lose its love for what is simply and sanely
good. We hear a great deal about the nobler standards of modernity, and
about virtues so fine and rare that our grandfathers knew them not;
but courage and gayety, a pure mind and a kind heart, still give us
the assurance of a man. The pleasant duty of admonishing the rich, the
holy joy of preaching a crusade against other people’s pleasures, are
daily gaining favor with the elect; but to the unregenerate there is
a wholesome flavor in cheerful enjoyment no less than in open-handed
generosity.
The one real drawback to a veracious diary is that--life being but
a cloudy thing at best--the pages which tell the story make often
melancholy reading. Mr. Pepys has, perhaps, the lightest heart of the
fraternity, and we cannot help feeling now and then that a little
more regret on his part would not be wholly unbecoming. However, his
was not a day when people moped in corners over their own or their
neighbors’ shortcomings; and there is no more curious contrast offered
by the wide world of book-land than the life reflected so faithfully in
Pepys’s diary and in the sombre journal of Judge Sewall. New England
is as visible in the one book as is Old England in the other,--New
England under the bleak sky of an austere, inexorable, uncompromising
Puritanism which dominated every incident of life. If Mr. Pepys went to
see a man hanged at Tyburn, the occasion was one of some jollity, alike
for crowd and for criminal; an open-air entertainment, in which the
leading actor was recompensed in some measure for the severity of his
part by the excitement and admiration he aroused. But when Judge Sewall
attended the execution of James Morgan, the unfortunate prisoner was
first carried into church, and prayed over lengthily by Cotton Mather
for the edification of the congregation, who came in such numbers and
pressed in such unruly fashion around the pulpit that a riot took place
within the holy walls, and Morgan was near dying of suffocation in the
dullest possible manner without the gallows-tree.
It is not of hangings only and such direful solemnities that we read
in Sewall’s diary. Every ordinary duty--I cannot say pastime--of
life is faithfully portrayed. We know the faults--sins they were
considered--of his fourteen children; how they played at prayer-time or
began their meals before grace was said, and were duly whipped for such
transgressions. We know how the judge went courting when past middle
age; how he gave the elderly Mrs. Winthrop China oranges, sugared
almonds, and “gingerbread wrapped in a clean sheet of paper,” and how
he ingratiated himself into her esteem by hearing her grand-children
recite their catechism. He has a businesslike method of putting down
the precise cost of the gifts he offered during the progress of his
various wooings; for, in his own serious fashion, this gray-headed
Puritan was one of the most amorous of men. A pair of shoe-buckles
presented to one fair widow came to no less than five shillings
threepence; and “Dr. Mather’s sermons, neatly bound,” was a still more
extravagant _cadeau_. He was also a mighty expounder of the Scriptures,
and prayed and wrestled with the sick until they were fain to implore
him to desist. There is one pathetic story of a dying neighbor to
whose bedside he hastened with two other austere friends, and who was
so sorely harried by their prolonged exhortations that, with his last
breath, he sobbed out, “Let me alone! my spirits are gone!”--to the
terrible distress and scandal of his wife.
On the whole, Judge Sewall’s diary is not cheerful reading, but the
grayness of its atmosphere is mainly due to the unlovely aspect of
colonial life, to the rigors of an inclement climate not yet subdued
by the forces of a luxurious civilization, and by a too constant
consideration of the probabilities of being eternally damned. There
is nowhere in its sedate and troubled pages that piercing sadness,
that cry of enigmatic, inexplicable pain, which shakes the very centre
of our souls when we read the beautiful short journal of Maurice de
Guérin. These few pages, written with no definite purpose by a young
man whose life was uneventful and whose genius never flowered into
maturity, have a positive as well as a relative value. They are not
merely interesting for what they have to tell; they are admirable for
the manner of the telling, and the world of letters would be distinctly
poorer for their loss. Eugénie de Guérin’s journal is charming, but its
merits are of a different order. No finer, truer picture than hers has
ever been given us of that strange, simple, patriarchal life which we
can so little understand, a life full of delicate thinking and homely
household duties. At Le Cayla, the lonely Languedoc château, where “one
could pass days without seeing any living thing but the sheep, without
hearing any living thing but the birds,” the young Frenchwoman found in
her diary companionship and mental stimulus, a link to bind her day by
day to her absent brother for whom she wrote, and a weapon with which
to fight the unconquerable disquiet of her heart. Her finely balanced
nature, which resisted sorrow and ennui to the end, forced her to adopt
that precision of phrase which is the triumph of French prose. There is
a tender grace in her descriptions, a restraint in her sweet, sudden
confidences, a wistfulness in her joy, and always a nobility of thought
which makes even her gentleness seem austere.
But Maurice de Guérin had in him a power of enjoyment and of suffering
which filled his life with profound emotions, and these emotions break
like waves at our feet when we read the brief pages of his diary. There
is the record of a single day at Le Val, so brimming with blessedness
and beauty that it illustrates the lasting nature of pure earthly
happiness; for such days are counted out like fairy gold, and we are
richer all our lives for having grasped them once. There are passages
of power and subtlety which show that nature took to her heart this
trembling seeker after felicity, cast from him the chains of care and
thought, and bade him taste for one keen hour “the noble voluptuousness
of freedom.” Then, breaking swiftly in amid vain dreams of joy, comes
the bitter moment of awakening, and the sad voice of humanity sounds
wailing in his ears.
“My God, how I suffer from life! Not from its accidents,--a little
philosophy suffices for them,--but from itself, from its substance,
from all its phenomena.”
And ever wearing away his heart is the restlessness of a nature which
craved beauty for its daily food, which longed passionately for
whatever was fairest in the world, for the lands and the seas he was
destined never to behold. Eugénie, in her solitude at Le Cayla, trained
herself to echo with gentle stoicism the words of A Kempis: “What canst
thou see anywhere that thou seest not here? Behold the heavens and the
earth and all the elements! For out of these are all things made.”
Her horizon was bounded by the walls of home. She worked, she prayed,
she read her few books, she taught the peasant children the little
it behooved them to know; she played with the gray cat, and with the
three dogs, Lion, Wolf, and little Trilby whom she loved best of all,
and from whom, rather than from a stupid fairy tale, it may be that Du
Maurier stole his heroine’s name. She won peace, if not contentment,
by the fulfillment of near duties; but in her brother the unquenchable
desire of travel burned like a smouldering fire. In dreams he wandered
far amid ancient and sunlit lands whose mighty monuments are part
of the mysterious legends of humanity. “The road of the wayfarer
is a joyous one!” he cries. “Ah! who shall set me adrift upon the
Nile!”--and with these words the journal of Maurice de Guérin comes
to a sudden end. A river deeper than the Nile was opening beneath his
passionate, tired young eyes. Remoter lands than Egypt lay before his
feet.
GUIDES: A PROTEST.
“Life,” sighed Sir George Cornwall Lewis, “would be endurable, if it
were not for its pleasures;” and the impatient wanderer in far-off
lands is tempted to paraphrase this hackneyed truism into, “Traveling
would be enjoyable, if it were not for its guides.” Years ago, Mark
Twain endeavored to point out how much fun could be derived from these
“necessary nuisances” by a judicious course of chaffing; and the
apt illustrations of his methods furnished some of the most amusing
passages in “Innocents Abroad.” But it is not every tourist who
bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which
turns a trial into a blessing. The facility for being diverted where
less fortunate people are annoyed is a rare birthright, and worth
many a mess of pottage. Moreover, in these days when Baedeker smooths
the traveler’s path to knowledge, guides are no longer “necessary
nuisances.” They are plagues to no purpose, whose persistency deprives
inoffensive strangers of that tranquil enjoyment they have come so
far to seek. Nothing is more difficult than to dilate with a correct
emotion when every object of interest is pointed rigorously out, and a
wearisome trickle of information, couched in broken English, is dropped
relentlessly into our tired ears.
It need not be supposed for a moment that there is any real option
about employing a guide or dispensing with his services. There is
none. Practically speaking, I don’t employ him. He takes possession of
me, and never relaxes his hold. In some parts of Europe, Sicily for
example, his unlawful ownership begins from the first moment I set my
foot upon the soil. At Syracuse he is waiting at the station, in charge
of the hotel coach. I think him the hotel porter, point out our bags,
and give him the check for our boxes. As soon as we are under way,
he leans over and informs us confidentially that he is the English
interpreter and guide, officially connected with the hotel, and that
he is happy to place his services at our disposal. At these ominous
words our hearts sink heavily. We know that the hour of captivity is
at hand, and that all efforts to escape will only tighten our chains.
Nevertheless, we make the effort that very day, resolved not to yield
without a struggle.