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The Diary
The Diary
That there should be such a book as Pepys` Diary is incomparably
strange. Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period, played the man in public
employments, toiling hard and keeping his honor bright. Much of the little
good that is set down to James the Second comes by right to Pepys; and if it
were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate. To his clear, capable
head was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on the seas. In the
exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office
had some considerable share. He stood well by his business in the appalling
plague of 1666. He was loved and respected by some of the best and wisest men
in England. He was President of the Royal Society; and when he came to die,
people said of his conduct in that solemn hour - thinking it needless to say
more - that it was answerable to the greatness of his life. Thus he walked in
dignity, guards of soldiers sometimes attending him in his walks, subalterns
bowing before his periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable
to his state and services. On February 8, 1668, we find him writing to Evelyn,
his mind bitterly occupied with the late Dutch war, and some thoughts of the
different story of the repulse of the great Armada: "Sir, you will not wonder
at the backwardness of my thanks for the present you made me, so many days
since, of the Prospect of the Medway, while the Hollander rode master in it,
when I have told you that the sight of it hath led me to such reflections on
my particular interest, by my employment, in the reproach due to that
miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet than he is fancied to have
who found his face in Michael Angelo`s hell. The same should serve me also in
excuse for my silence in celebrating your mastery shown in the design and
draught, did not indignation rather than courtship urge me so far to commend
them, as to wish the furniture of our House of Lords changed from the story of
`88 to that of `67 (of Evelyn`s designing), till the pravity of this were
reformed to the temper of that age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings
more operative than, I fear, he doth in ours his judgments."
This is a letter honorable to the writer, where the meaning rather than
the words is eloquent. Such was the account he gave of himself to his
contemporaries; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language: giving
himself out for a grave and patriotic public servant. We turn to the same date
in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to his descendants.
The entry begins in the same key with the letter, blaming the "madness of the
House of Commons" and "the base proceedings, just the epitome of all our
public proceedings in this age, of the House of Lords"; and then, without the
least transition, this is how our diarist proceeds: "To the Strand, to my
bookseller`s, and there bought an idle, rogueish French book, L`escholle des
Filles, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better
bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may
not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should
be found." Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more clearly
apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable; but what about the
man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was ashamed of doing so,
yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the shame in the pages of his
daily journal?
We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we
address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by
some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the
nature and demands of the relation. Pepys` letter to Evelyn would have little
in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp which he signed by the pseudonym
of Dapper Dicky; yet each would be suitable to the character of his
correspondent. There is no untruth in this, for man, being a Protean animal,
swiftly shares and changes with his company and surroundings; and these
changes are the better part of his education in the world. To strike a posture
once for all, and to march through life like a drum - major, is to be highly
disagreeable to others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and
to Knipp we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the
Diary, and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose? Had
he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in the
act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we should have
made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal the "disgrace" of
the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole affair in pen and ink. It
is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we can exactly parallel from
another part of the Diary.
Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her
husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an agony
lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys the tell -
tale document; and then - you disbelieve your eyes - down goes the whole story
with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It seems he has no design
but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private book to prove he was
not. You are at first faintly reminded of some of the vagaries of the morbid
religious diarist; but at a moment`s thought the resemblance disappears. The
design of Pepys is not at all to edify; it is not from repentance that he
chronicles his peccadillos, for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be
just to him, there often follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the
religious diarist are of a very formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate
whine. But in Pepys you come upon good, substantive misdemeanors; beams in his
eye of which he alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal
nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief and
often engage the sympathies.
Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world,
sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till nearly
forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the spirit in which
the Diary was written, we must recall a class of sentiments which with most of
us are over and done before the age of twelve. In our tender years we still
preserve a freshness of surprise at our prolonged existence; events make an
impression out of all proportion to their consequence; we are unspeakably
touched by our own past adventures; and look forward to our future personality
with sentimental interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to
Pepys. Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was the
slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his father used
to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the "King`s Head" and eat
and drink "for remembrance of the old house sake." He counted it good fortune
to lie a night at Epsom to renew his old walks, "where Mrs. Hely and I did use
to walk and talk, with whom I had the first sentiments of love and pleasure in
a woman`s company, discourse and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty
woman." He goes about weighing up the Assurance, which lay near Woolwich under
water, and cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry
in, in Captain Holland`s time"; and after revisiting the Naseby, now changed
into the Charles, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to myself to see the
ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that he was cut for he
preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive such gratitude for their
assistance that for years, and after he had begun to mount himself into higher
zones, he continued to have that family to dinner on the anniversary of the
operation. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their
past, although at times they might express it more romantically; and if Pepys
shared with them this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him
the Confessions, or Hazlitt, who wrote the Liber Amoris, and loaded his essays
with loving personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied egotism? For
the two things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is the first that
makes the second either possible or pleasing.
But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly - leaf of
more than one book, the date and the place where I then was - if, for
instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were jottings
for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after years, I
thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognize myself across the
intervening distance. Indeed, I might come upon them now, and not be moved one
title - which shows that I have comparatively failed in life, and grown older
than Samuel Pepys. For in the Diary we can find more than one such note of
perfect childish egotism; as when he explains that his candle is going out,
"which makes me write thus slobberingly"; or as in this incredible
particularity, "To my study, where I only wrote thus much of this day`s
passage to this,* and so out again"; or lastly, as here, with more of
circumstance: "I staid up till the bellman came by with his bell under my
window, as I was writing of this very line, and cried, `Past one of the clock,
and a cold, frosty, windy morning.`" Such passages are not to be
misunderstood. The appeal to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable. He
desires that dear, though unknown, gentleman keenly to realize his
predecessor; to remember why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall (let
us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the early, windy
morning, and the very line his own romantic self was scribing at the moment.
The man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences - a sort of pleasure by
ricochet, which comforts many in distress, and turns some others into
sentimental libertines: and the whole book, if you will but look at it in that
way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys` own address.
Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable attitude preserved by him
throughout his Diary, to that unflinching - I had almost said, that
unintelligent - sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. He was
not unconscious of his errors - far from it; he was often startled into shame,
often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But whether he did
ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still that entrancing ego
of whom alone he cared to write; and still sure of his own affectionate
indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and the writer come to read what
he had written. Whatever he did, or said, or thought, or suffered, it was
still a trait of Pepys, a character of his career; and as, to himself, he was
more interesting than Moses or than Alexander, so all should be faithfully set
down. I have called his Diary a work of art. Now when the artist has found
something, word or deed, exactly proper to a favorite character in play or
novel, he will neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or
the act mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness
of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither
disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his adored
protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and enduring,
human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part of the Diary; and
the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he has seemed not perfectly
sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty, that I am ashamed to name
them. It may be said that we all of us write such a diary in airy characters
upon our brain; but I fear there is a distinction to be made; I fear that as
we render to our consciousness an account of our daily fortunes and behavior,
we too often weave a tissue of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even
if Pepys were the ass and coward that men call him, we must take rank as
sillier and more cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are
all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he
saw clearly and set down unsparingly.
It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same
single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he must
have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work he was
producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books were like. It
must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might ultimately decipher
the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains and pleasures, be
resuscitated in some later day; and the thought, although discouraged, must
have warmed his heart. He was not such an ass, besides, but he must have been
conscious of the deadly explosives, the guncotton and the giant powder, he was
hoarding in his drawer. Let some contemporary light upon the Journal, and
Pepys was plunged forever in social and political disgrace. We can trace the
growth of his terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its
youth, he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy;
but in 1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue
out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so grave and
friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts I think we may
infer that he had entertained, even if he had not acquiesced in, the thought
of a far - distant publicity. The first is of capital importance: the Diary
was not destroyed. The second - that he took unusual precautions to confound
the cipher in "roguish" passages - proves, beyond question, that he was
thinking of some other reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were
admiring the "greatness of his behavior" at the approach of death, he may have
had a twinkling hope of immortality. Mens cujusque is est quisque, said his
chosen motto; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and foible in
the pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind him was indeed
himself. There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable of the desire of man
for publicity and an enduring name. The greatness of his life was open, yet he
longed to communicate its smallness also; and, while contemporaries bowed
before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his periwig was
once alive with nits. But this thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was
neither his first nor his deepest; it did not color one word that he wrote;
the Diary, for as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a
private pleasure for himself. It was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all
his pleasures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn
words, when he closed that confidant forever: "And so I betake myself to that
course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the grave; for which,
and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God
prepare me."
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