But Pepys, perhaps without intention, described his England very well. He set down so much detail that he provided something resembling cinema films of daily life. As you read his pages you drop away from your own century and walk in his. His work is not a selection of phenomena; you make your selection from it. You can, in fact, make a diary from his diary. His many pages become one page, or half a page, in your diary.
There was in Russia, up to the Revolution, in which he perished a Pepysian writer, more selective, it is true, but determined to write down all, everything that occurred to him from day to day through life. He became naturally voluminous, and put down all manner of things, discreet and indiscreet, some very shocking to decent minds. But in one of his later volumes of fragments and thoughts he wrote, “It may be asked what possible interest is there is these things I am recording, but that is my affair. For a long while now I have been writing without reader. If some one reads, that is his lookout; I do not invite him. One resolution I have made, and will carry out, and that is to print all.” So many of his daybook entries have curious tags after them, such as “Written on my cuff at Mme. So-and-So’s reception”; “Written while waiting for the tram on Nevski.”
It is fair to him to say that he only recorded thoughts and observations. If he was making love to a Captain’s wife at any time he did not tell of it—but only gave current reflections on love and what women really are. His whole literary output makes one spiritual notebook.
Few people however have much persistence. The January mood is familiar; this year I will keep a diary. The February pages of most diaries look pale and consumptive. March may pass without a single entry, as if throughout that glorious month nothing of moment had passed before one’s eyes or occurred to one’s being. That is not, however, such a default as may appear. One drops the diary; one resumes it. To-day I take stock of life and thought and all good things that are mine; to-morrow I will swing all day on the garden gate singing a nursery rhyme; the day after I shall put on my silk hat and go to the city and a company meeting; I shall promenade at night. Something will occur sooner or later and I shall say, “Hah, my diary, my tablets, my ink fountain, that I may write down something special and wonderful and curious that has occurred to me this day.”
Some are so fortunate that their professional and intellectual life blend—the writer, the artist, the social worker, the barrister, sometimes the lawyer, the politician, often the doctor. Matters of deep interest professionally have also a personal spiritual interest. But whatever the profession or calling all interests become one on an occasion of travel, on a tramping expedition or visit to a strange country. Then the daybook rests in the inner pocket, the ready helpmeet of one’s thoughts.
In visiting foreign countries and studying other peoples, I always look out for what may be called key phenomena. I like to be able to record a fact which means so much more than its bare utterance seems to imply. Such a fact, bursting with brilliant significance is like a luminary on the page. It may be light on your way for the whole of the year. A nation reveals its secret in a sentence. Or it may be, an animal tells its nature by one trait observed. There is a curious satisfaction of the soul in knowing about the ways of men and of beasts.
Of course, I do not mean that there is any particular satisfaction in recording trivialities and prejudices. A man once wrote in his diary, “The Frenchmen eat frogs: I do not like them.” It was not worth his writing down. But one day, tramping with a hungry American, I was astonished to hear him exclaim, “I wish I could see a frog; I would soon have him in the pot.” That rid me of a prejudice, and I sat down complacently afterwards to a dish of frogs’ legs. It was worth a line in the diary.
A pilgrim once said to me: “I do not know you; to know a man one must eat forty pounds of salt.” It was worth a line in my diary. “Nitchevo,” said a Russian peasant servant to Bismarck, when out hunting they were lost in the snow in the forest. “Nitchevo,” and it lasted Bismarck all his life. He never forgot Nitchevo and was always fond of saying it. “He is a gentleman; he keeps a gig,” Carlyle overheard, and it became one of the brevities of his spiritual life—“gigmanity.” “I am a workingman; I have carried my dinner pail,” some one else said, defining himself and a workingman at the same time. Such definitions and explanations, pointers, and street lamps, are worth keeping.
The diary of this kind is sometimes called a Commonplace book, which, however, seems to me too modest a title, as one does not inscribe in it one’s commonplaces. The Dean of St. Paul’s published recently large extracts from a wonderful series of “Commonplace books,” which he had kept during most of his life, but I would rather call them uncommonplace books. Truly, in the Dean’s case these scrapbooks garnered the fruits of reading rather than of life, and my especial plea is not for the fruits of reading as for the fruits of life. The digest of books is the habit of the good student, who sets down in brevity the content of whatever he reads and so preserves knowledge for future guidance. But the keeping of the daybook represents a different habit of mind.
With many it begins in happy school days or school holidays when natural history diaries were started. The enthusiastic collector of birds’ eggs, butterflies, or beetles, makes constant expeditions and delights in chronicling the results. He may do it at length, or briefly; may describe habits of species and adventures in tracking them, or merely set down the names of captures and of the localities. In boyhood one records the marvelous doings of the oak-egger female; later on one records what man, the insect, is doing.