It is true that that relentless Diary has scenes as painful as they are curious, scenes in which the estimable naval secretary and friend of Newton and Evelyn comports himself after a fashion that would be disgraceful in any station of life. There are outbursts of jealousy and fits of temper, kickings of furniture and trinkets smashed in spite, abuse, blows, and nose and ear pullings of intolerable indignity. The fault is confessed and temporarily forgotten, “Last night I was very angry, and do think I did give her as much cause to be angry with me.” Then, some wretched trifle, an ill-timed visit, a shilling mis-spent, a foolish fashion followed, sets all awry again. I do not know where in literature to find a fiercer or more cutting scene of domestic infelicity than that of the tearing of the old love letters. Mrs. Pepys had written a remonstrance as to some phases of ill-treatment. “She now read it, and it was so piquant, and wrote in English, and most of it true, of the retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was; that being wrote in English, and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was vexed at it, and desired her and then commanded her to tear it: when she desired to be excused, I forced it from her, and tore it, and withal took her other bundle of papers from her.... I pulled them out one by one and tore them all before her face, though it went against my heart to do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it, but such was my passion and trouble to see the letters of my love to her ... to be joyned with a paper of so much disgrace to me and dishonour, if it should have been found by anybody.”
Things like this, one would say, could never be forgotten. Yet they are. “After winter comes summer,” says the “Imitation,” “after the night the day, and after a storm a great calm.” Great calms came in the Pepys family also. “I home, and to writing, and heare my boy play on the lute, and a turne with my wife pleasantly in the garden by moonshine, my heart being in great peace, and so home to supper and to bed.” Truly, life is made up of delightful—and pitiful—contrasts.
The worst domestic troubles of the Pepyses were caused by the husband’s extreme susceptibility to feminine charm. “A strange slavery that I stand in to beauty,” he remarks, with that pleased amazement at himself which makes him so attractive.
The detail of these infatuations—how they were mildly resisted at first, and how they grew and developed to an extent hardly possible for such a man in a less scandalous age, how they were indulged, and then repented, and again indulged, and again repented—belongs to the history of Mr. Pepys—and of human nature. Mrs. Pepys knew little of them, though she divined much.
What does concern her is the very instructive fashion in which she gradually gained power over her husband by his infidelities themselves. She knew well that he loved her at heart. At any rate, she knew that he was tied to her by bonds of habit and circumstance which a man of his temperament could never shake off. Therefore, by the aid of jealousy and tears and scenes she learned that she could in time mould him to almost anything she wished. This experience begins with outsiders, with Mrs. Pierce and Mrs. Knipp. A little well-placed anger—certainly not feigned—was found to accomplish wonders. “Which is pretty to see how my wife is come to convention with me, that whatever I do give to anybody else, I shall give her as much, which I am not much displeased with.” By the time the crisis of the maid, Deb Willett, had arrived, Mrs. Pepys had become past-mistress in the art of working on her husband’s sensibilities. Note that I do not mean that this was a coldly deliberate process; simply, that all the instinct of her outraged affection concentrated itself on energetic means of overcoming this foolish and recalcitrant male, and triumphed magnificently. Deb is wooed and forsaken and wooed again and banished. The man’s will is bent, and bent, and bent, till he comes right square down upon his knees: “Therefore I do, by the grace of God, promise never to offend her more, and did this night begin to pray to God upon my knees alone in my chamber, which God knows I cannot yet do heartily; but I hope God will give me the grace more and more every day to fear Him, and to be true to my poor wife.”
Even after this the symptoms recur, but milder, and in that pathetic blank stop which ends the Diary because of failing sight, the phrase “my amours to Deb are past,” seems to leave the wife victorious, we hope permanently.
So, after we have known her for nine years in the closest intimacy, she steps out from us into great night. A few months later, still a young woman, she died; but she dies for us with the last line of her husband’s imperishable record. In that record it may be said, in a certain sense, that she is shown at the greatest possible disadvantage, as we may in part realize, if we consider what a similar record would have been, kept by herself. Yet even seen as her husband reports her, we feel that she had, with much of a woman’s weakness, much also of a woman’s charm.