That Macaulay should have worked himself up into a frenzy of indignation over Miss Burney’s five years at court is an amusing instance of his unalterable point of view. The sacred and exalted profession of letters had in him its true believer and devotee. That kings and queens and princesses should fail to share this deference, that they should arrogantly assume the privileges of their rank when brought into contact with a successful novelist, was to him an incredible example of barbaric stupidity. The spectacle of Queen Charlotte placidly permitting the authoress of “Cecilia” to assist at the royal toilet filled him with grief and anger. It is but too apparent that no sense of intellectual unworthiness troubled her Majesty for a moment, and this shameless serenity of spirit was more than the great Whig historian could endure. To less ardent minds it would seem that five years of honorable and well-paid service were amply rewarded by a pension for life; and that Miss Burney, however hard-worked and overdriven, must have had long, long hours of leisure in which to write the endless pages of her journal. Indeed, a woman who had time to listen to Fox speaking “with violence” for five hours, had time, one would imagine, for anything. Then what delicious excitation to sit blushing and smiling in the royal box, and hear Miss Farren recite these intoxicating lines!
“Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause,
Whose every passion yields to nature’s laws.”
And as if this were not enough, the king, the queen, the royal princesses, all turn their heads and gaze at her for one distracting moment. “To describe my embarrassment,” she falters, “would be impossible. I shrunk back, so astonished, and so ashamed of my public situation, that I was almost ready to take to my heels and run away.”
Well, well, the days for such delights are over. We may say what we please about the rewards of modern novel-writing; but what, after all, is the cold praise of reviewers compared with this open glory and exaltation? It is moderately impressive to be told over and over again by Marie Corelli’s American publishers that the queen of England thinks “The Soul of Lilith” and “The Sorrows of Satan” are good novels; but this mere announcement, however reassuring,—and it is a point on which we require a good deal of reassurance,—does not thrill us with the enthusiasm we should feel if her Majesty, and the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York, and the British public united in a flattering ovation. The incidents which mark the irresistible and unwelcome changes forced upon the world by each successive generation which inhabits it are the incidents we love to read about, and which are generally considered too insignificant for narration. In a single page Addison tells us more concerning the frivolous, idle, half torpid, wholly contented life of an eighteenth-century citizen than we could learn from a dozen histories. His diaries, meant to be purely satiric, have now become instructive. They show us, as in a mirror, the early hours, the scanty ablutions,—“washed hands, but not face,”—the comfortable eating and drinking, the refreshing absence of books, the delightful vagueness and uncertainty of foreign news. A man could interest himself for days in the reported strangling of the Grand Vizier, when no intrusive cablegram came speeding over the wires to silence and refute the pleasant voice of rumor.
It is this wholesome and universal love of detail which lends to a 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.