MR. PEPYS HIS APPLE-CART
It is hard to deal fairly by Samuel Pepys, and that because he has dealt so fairly by himself. You cannot even put that amazing candour of his down to his credit, for reasons which grow upon you as you read. If he was candid it was to please himself, and, as one must suppose, nobody else in the world. Whatever his motive was, it certainly was not to read a moral lesson to mankind. But that he is all in his Diary, the whole of him, inside and out, is evident upon any prolonged perusal of it. He has neither been blind to himself, nor kind; he never excuses himself, and rarely accuses. He pities himself, when he has been found out, and hugs himself when he has made a good deal, or played the fortunate gallant; but he rarely indeed pities anybody else, and if he hugs other persons, always mentions it. Though we cannot impute his honesty to righteousness, nevertheless it seems rather hard that he should have to suffer for it.
Anyhow, his merits would have transpired without a diary. State papers exist to testify to them; his mounting credit is its own record. Evelyn liked him, so did the King and his brother, so did Sir William Coventry. Undoubtedly he was an able Clerk of the Acts, and by the standard of any times but some which are still modern history, an honest public servant. Had he lived in the golden age of the Civil Service, an age which only ended a few years ago, he would not have taken any commissions at all. As things are now, he took very few; as they were in his day, what he took was negligible. I feel sure that the Crown did uncommonly well by him. Then, socially, he was a brisk, companionable creature, with an infectious laugh, a taste for languages, the drama, parlour-science and chamber-music. He had curiosity, which always makes a man good company; he was both dilettante and connoisseur; he was affable with all sorts and conditions, gave himself no airs, had vanity, but little conceit. Women liked him; he had a way with him. And then he liked them. I cannot imagine Pepys for five minutes in a woman’s company without her knowing all that she need about him, and about it. Morally, he was a beast, without pity or scruple, or personal shame, or courage, or honour. He was depraved, and knew it, and didn’t care so long as no one else knew it. He was the slave of public opinion, and in moments of apprehension what that might be, sacrificed his companion in his dealing without a thought. And yet women liked him, and suffered him. Psychologically, he is, so far, an unsolved problem. Nobody has found out why on earth he wrote himself down what he did write down; I have seen no account which satisfies. To that I should add that no attempt to explain him seems to have been made since we received all that we ever can receive of his Diary.
R. L. Stevenson’s exegesis was based upon Minors Bright, who is now 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.