The psychographer is apt to be hampered in his study of women by lack of material. Men of energy and vigor make themselves felt in the world at large. Even if they write little, they have a vast acquaintance, come into close contact with those who can write, and all their doings and sayings of importance are narrowly watched and minutely chronicled. In making their portraits one is more often embarrassed by the excess of material than by the lack of it.
With women this is not the case. Those who have public careers, historical figures, artists, writers especially, are approachable enough. And there is a great temptation to portray such mainly, if not exclusively. Yet so far from being all of the sex, they are not fairly representative of it, perhaps one may even say they are not normally representative. It is the quiet lives that count, the humble lives, the simple lives, lives perhaps of great achievement and of great influence, but of great influence through others, not direct. The richest and fullest and most fruitful of these lives often pass without leaving any written record, without a single trace that can be seized and followed to good purpose by the curious student. No doubt such women would prefer to be left in shadow, as they lived. But the loss to humanity in the study of their nobility and usefulness is very great. Above all, in portraying women of another type we should not forget these fugitive and silent figures who ought to be occupying the very first place in the history of their sex.
No one will maintain that Elizabeth, wife of Samuel Pepys, was an especially noble or heroic personage, or that her influence in the world, direct or indirect, was of a character to deserve any particular celebration. She appears, however, to have been thoroughly feminine and she is exceptional and interesting in this one point, at least, that she has not left posterity a single written line, yet she is known to us, from the Diary of her husband, with an intimacy and an accuracy of detail which we can hope to acquire with few characters who lived so long ago. George Sand remarked justly of Rousseau’s “Confessions,” that while he was without doubt at liberty to expose his own frailty, he had no right, in doing so, to expose the frailty of others. Right or wrong, Pepys certainly exposed his wife, in all her humanity, to the curious gaze of those who care to read. If we had a full volume of her letters, we could probably add something to certain phases of her experience, and more than anything else we should be glad to have her frank and daily comment on her husband. But, as it is, we know her as we know few of our living acquaintances and not all of our intimate friends.
When she first appears to us, she was twenty years old. Pepys married her at the early age of fifteen. It was a pure love match. He was poor and she was poor. Her father was a French Protestant. He was unsuccessful and unthrifty and Pepys helped the whole family, so far as he could. Of Elizabeth’s early life we know little, except that her Catholic friends tried to convert her. Of her married life before the Diary begins, in 1660, we know nothing.
She was eminently beautiful. Pepys assures us of that, and he was a connoisseur. Nor was this a lover’s illusion on his part. Years after his marriage, when too much friction had set in between them, he reiterates his opinion and notes with pride that she is not outdone by the greatest beauties of the time: “My wife, by my troth, appeared as pretty as any of them; I never thought so much before; and so did Talbot and W. Hewer, as they said, I heard, to one another.” The admiring husband does not attempt details, and perhaps it is as well. In the likenesses that have come down to us we do not discern any singular charm: a forehead rather full and prominent, eyebrows gracefully arched, a strongly marked nose, the mouth somewhat heavy, with lips, especially the upper, protruding.
That dress occupied a large place in Mrs. Pepys’s thoughts, as well as in her husband’s finances, goes without saying. He wishes her at all times to look well, but is not always eager about paying the bills. She follows the fashion, but not, it would seem, too curiously. Black patches, pendant curls, enhance, or disfigure, her natural charm. She cuts her dresses low in the neck, considerably to Pepys’s disgust, “out of a belief, but without reason, that it is the fashion.” When worldly prospects are favorable, she gets gifts,—for example, a new silk petticoat, “a very fine rich one, the best I did see there, and much better than she desires or expects.” On the other hand, if a speculation—or a dinner—goes awry, her adornments are viewed less amiably. The purchase of a costly pair of earrings “did vex me and brought both me and her to very high and very foule words from her to me.”
As this shows, she was in many ways a child; and what else should she have been? Married at fifteen, after a wandering and uncertain youth, how could she have attained solid training or any staid capacity? When she came to Pepys, she had apparently little education, but it is clear that she had a quick mother wit, so that with the passage of years she probably acquired as much as might decently justify the eulogy of her delightful epitaph, “forma, artibus, linguis cultissima.” Her husband was vexed by her false spelling, which must, therefore, have been indeed atrocious. But in his leisure hours he taught her arithmetic, geography, astronomy, and declares, in his patronizing way, that she made good profit.
She was a considerable reader, perhaps not of very solid literature, but at any rate of the poets and novelists. When obliged to remain at home, with a new Easter bonnet, on account of Pepys’s indisposition, she consoles him, if not herself, by reading Fuller’s “Worthies.” On other similar occasions she reads Du Bartas or Ovid. Her erudition at times even produces a great effect on her husband, as when she assures him that the plot of a popular play is taken from a novel, goes home and puts the passage before him, also when she laboriously copies out a letter on jealousy from the “Arcadia” and submits it to him for his edification. The romances that she loved she knew by heart, for her mentor finds occasion to check her for “her long stories out of Grand Cyrus, which she would tell, though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner.”
When she was married, she had not many accomplishments. But Pepys wanted a wife who would do him credit and took pains to teach her. Also, it must be added that music was one of the greatest pleasures of his life and he tried hard to share it with her. Sometimes he is encouraged. She really has quite a voice, if it were not that she has no ear. And even if she has no voice, she is so deft with her fingers that he is sure she will play the flageolet charmingly. Then it ends too often in the wail of the musical temperament over the temperament that is not musical and never can be. With drawing it is somewhat better. The lady makes progress; she decidedly outdoes Peg Penn, which is gratifying, and in one case, at least, her husband defers abjectly to her esthetic judgment. I “did choose two pictures to hang up in my house, which my wife did not like when I came home, and so I sent the picture of Paris back again.”
Mrs. Pepys’s enthusiasm for her artistic pursuits was so great as occasionally to bring reproach upon her for neglect of her household duties. But in general we may conclude that she was a faithful, a devoted, and an interested housekeeper. In a girl of twenty some slips were surely to be expected. “Finding my wife’s clothes lie carelessly laid up, I was angry with her, which I was troubled for.” The record, however, usually indicates both intelligence and energy. “My poor wife, who works all day at home like a horse,” remarks the not always appreciative husband. There are spurts of cleanliness, when the lady and her maids rise early and labor late, with a grim determination to rid their belongings of dirt, that monster of the world. Every woman will sympathize and will resent the unkindly comment of the observing cynic: “She now pretends to a resolution of being hereafter very clean. How long it will hold I can guess.”