Considering the by no means holy living of Mr. Pepys, it is rather remarkable that he never seems to have suffered from venereal disease, and this leads me to suspect that possibly these ailments were not so common in the England of the Restoration as they are to-day. It seems impossible that any man could live in Sydney so promiscuously as Mr. Pepys without paying the penalty; and the experience of our army in London seems to show that things there must be much the same as here (Sydney). I often wonder whether Charles II and his courtiers were really representative of the great mass of people in England at that time; probably the prevalence of venereal disease in modern times is due to the enormous increase in city life; probably men and women have always been very much the same from generation to generation—inflammable as straw, given the opportunities which occur mainly in cities and crowded houses.
Ignoble as was Pepys, he yet showed real moral courage during the Plague. When that great enemy of cities attacked London he, very wisely, sent his family into the country at Woolwich, while he remained faithful to his duty and continued to work at the navy in Greenwich, Deptford, and London. I cannot find in the Diary any mention of any particular attraction that kept him in London during those awful five months; he would, no doubt, have mentioned her name if there had been such; yet candour compels me to observe that there was seldom any one attraction for Mr. Pepys, unless poor Deb Willet may have somehow mastered—temporarily—his wayward heart. But, as might have been expected, he was little more virtuous during his wife’s absence than before; indeed, possibly the imminent danger of death may have led him to enjoy his life while yet he might, with his usual fits of agonized remorse, whose effects upon his conduct were brief. We owe far more to his organizing power and honesty—not a bigoted variety—than is generally remembered. His babble is not the best medium for vigorous description, and you will not get from Pepys any idea of the epidemic comparable with that which you will get from the journalist Defoe; yet through those months there lurks a feeling of horror which still impresses mankind. The momentary glimpse of a citizen who stumbles over the “corps” of a man dead of the plague, and running home tells his pregnant wife; she dies of fear forthwith; a man, his wife, and three children dying and being buried on one day; persons quick to-day and dead to-morrow—not in scores, but in hundreds; ten thousand dying in a week; the horrid atmosphere of fear and suspicion which overlay London; and Pepys himself setting his papers in order, so that men might think well of him should it please the Lord to take him suddenly: all give us a sense of doom all the more poignant because recently we went through a much milder version of the same experience ourselves. The papers talked glibly of the influenza as “The Plague.” How different it was from the real bubonic plague is shown by the statistics. In five months of 1665 there died of the plague in the little London of that day no less than about 70,000 people, according to the bills of mortality; in truth, probably far more; that is to say, probably a fifth of the people perished. There is no doubt that the bubonic plague kept back the development of cities, and therefore of civilization, for centuries, and that the partial conquest of the rat has been one of the greatest achievements of the human race. What is happening in Lord Howe Island, where it is exceedingly doubtful whether rats or men shall survive in that beautiful speck of land, shows how slender is the hold which mankind has upon the earth; and wherever the rat is able to breed unchecked, man is liable to sink back into savagery. The rat, the tubercle bacillus, and the bacillus of typhoid are the three great enemies of civilization; we hold our position against them at the price of eternal vigilance, and probably the rat is not the least deadly of these enemies.
I need not go through the Diary in search of incidents; most of them, while intensely amusing, are rather of interest to the psychologist in the study of self-revelation than to the medical man. When Pepys’s brother lay dying the doctor in charge hinted that possibly the trouble might have been of syphilitic origin; Pepys was virtuously wrathful, and the unhappy doctor had to apologize and was forthwith discharged. I cannot here narrate how they proved that the unhappy patient had never had syphilis in his life; you must read the Diary for that. Their method would not have satisfied either Wassermann or Bordet. Another time Pepys was doing something that he should not have been doing at an open window in a draught; the Lord punished him by striking him with Bell’s palsy. Still again, at another time he got something that seems to have resembled pseudo-ileus, possibly reflex from his latent calculi. Everybody in the street was much distressed at his anguish; all the ladies sent in prescriptions for enemata; the one which relieved him consisted of small beer! Indeed, one marvels always at the extraordinary interest shown by Pepys’s lady-friends in his most private ailments. London must have been a friendly little town in the seventeenth century, in the intervals of hanging people and chopping off heads.
But the great problem remains: Why did Pepys write down all these intimate details of his private life? Why did he confess to things which most men do not confess even to themselves? Why did he write it all down in cypher? Why, when he narrated something particularly disgraceful, did he write in a mongrel dialect of bad French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin? He could not have seriously believed that a person who was able to read the Diary would not be able to read the very simple foreign words with which it is interspersed. Most amazing of all: Why did he keep the manuscript for more than thirty years, a key with it? One thinks of the fabled ostrich who buries his head in the sand. The problem of Pepys still remains unsolved, in spite of the efforts of Stevenson in Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Stevenson was the last man in the world to understand Pepys, but more competent exegetists have tried and failed. One can only say that his failing sight—which Professor Osborne of Melbourne attributes to astigmatism—has deprived the world of a treasure that can never be sufficiently regretted. No man can be considered educated who has not read at least part of the Diary; in no other way is it possible to get so vivid a picture of the ordinary people of a past age; as we read they seem to live before us, and it comes as a shock to remember that poor Pall Pepys—his plain sister—and “my wife” and Mrs. Batelier—“my pretty valentine”—and Sir William Coventry and Mercer, and the hundreds more who pass so vividly before us, are all dead these centuries.
If this little paper shall send some to the reading of this most extraordinary book, I shall be more than satisfied. The only edition which is worth while is Wheatley’s, in ten volumes, with portraits and a volume of Pepysiana. The smaller editions are apt to transmute Pepys into an ordinary humdrum and industrious civil servant.
Edward Gibbon
FOR many years it has been taught—I have taught it myself to generations of students—that Gibbon’s hydrocele surpassed in greatness all other hydroceles, that it contained twelve pints of fluid, and that it was, in short, one of those monstrous things which exist mainly in romance; one of those chimeras which grow in the minds of the half-informed and of those who wish to be deceived. For a brief moment this chimera looms its huge bulk over serious history; it is pricked; it disappears for ever, carrying with it into the shades the greatest of historians, perhaps the greatest of English prose writers. What do we really know about it?
The first hint of trouble given by the hydrocele occurs in a letter by Gibbon to his friend Lord Sheffield. It is so delicious, so typical of the eighteenth century, of which Gibbon himself was probably the most typical representative, that I cannot resist re-telling it. Two days before, he has hinted to his friend that he was rather unwell; now he modestly draws the veil. “Have you never observed, through my inexpressibles, a large prominency circa genitalia, which, as it was not very painful and very little troublesome, I had strangely neglected for many years?” “A large prominency circa genitalia” is a variation on the “lump in me privits, doctor,” to which we are more accustomed. Gibbon’s is the more graceful, and reminds us of the mind which had described chivalry as the “worship of God and the ladies”; the courteous and urbane turn of speech which refuses to call a spade a spade lest some polite ear may be offended.
Gibbon had been staying at Sheffield House in the preceding June—the letter was written in November—and his friends all noted that “Mr. G.” had become strangely loath to take exercise and very inert in his movements. Indeed, he had detained the house-party in the house during lovely days together while he had orated to them on the folly of unnecessary exertion; and such was his charm that every one, both women as well as men, seems to have cheerfully given up the glorious English June weather to keep him company. Never was he more brilliant—never a more delightful companion; yet all the time he was like the Spartan boy and the wolf, for he knew of his secret trouble, yet he thought that no one else suspected. It is an instance of how little we see ourselves as others see us that this supremely able man, who could see as far into a millstone as anyone, lived for years with a hydrocele that reached below his knees while he wore the tight breeches of the eighteenth century and was in the fond delusion that nobody else knew anything about it. Of course, everybody knew; probably it had been the cause of secret merriment among all his acquaintance; when the tragedy came to its last act it turned out that every one had been talking about it all the time, and that they had thought it to be a rupture about which Mr. Gibbon had of course taken advice.
After leaving Sheffield House the hydrocele suddenly increased, as Gibbon himself says, “most stupendously”; and it began to dawn upon him that it “ought to be diminished.” So he called upon Dr. Walter Farquhar; and Dr. Farquhar was very serious and called in Dr. Cline, “a surgeon of the first eminence,” both of whom “viewed it and palped it” and pronounced it a hydrocele. Mr. Gibbon, with his usual good sense and calm mind, prepared to face the necessary “operation” and a future prospect of wearing a truss which Dr. Cline intended to order for him. In the meantime he was to crawl about with some labour and “much indecency,” and he prayed Lord Sheffield to “varnish the business to the ladies, yet I am much afraid it will become public,” as if anything could any longer conceal the existence of this monstrous chimera. It is hardly credible, but Gibbon had had the hydrocele since 1761—thirty-two years—yet had never even hinted of it to Lord Sheffield, with whom he had probably discussed every other fact connected with his life; and had even forbidden his valet to mention it in his presence or to anyone else. Gibbon, the historian who, more than any other, set Reason and Common Sense on their thrones, seems to have been ashamed of his hydrocele. Once more we wonder how little even able men may perceive the truth of things! In 1761 he had consulted Cæsar Hawkins, who apparently had not been able to make up his mind whether it was a hernia or a hydrocele. In 1787 Lord Sheffield had noticed a sudden great increase in the size of the thing; and in 1793, as we have seen, it came to tragedy.