Pepys and His Diary
I have undertaken to talk to you this evening about a singular book—a book that holds a place practically by itself on our library shelves,—the Diary of Samuel Pepys.[[2]] The writer of this book was not a great man, or a strong man, or in any way a man of transcendent mental or moral characteristics. The work itself has none of those qualities by virtue of which a piece of literature will, in the average of cases, be found to survive the lapse of time and the changes of fashions and tastes. With the acknowledged masterpieces of autobiographic narration—with the “Confessions” of St. Augustine or Rousseau, for example, or the “Memoirs” of Benvenuto Cellini or Gibbon, or the “Dichtung und Wahrheit” of Goethe, or the “Journal” of Amiel, we should never think of comparing it; for Pepys’s garrulous pages have no eloquence, no literary quality, no magic of style—they record no intense spiritual struggles, reveal no deep upheavals of thought and feeling, flash no new light upon the dark places or into the mysterious recesses of motive and character. What, then, is the secret of Pepys’s enduring fascination? Wherein lies the curious spell, the undeniable vitality of his work? Why do we continue to read this chaotic chronicle of his, when, in the pressure of modern affairs, so many books of the past—better books, wiser books, nobler books—are left to slumber in serenity in those vast mausoleums of genius, our public libraries, undisturbed, all but forgotten?
I say nothing now about the historic value of Pepys’s journal—for historic value may have no kind of relationship with broad popular interest; and it is with the popular interest, and not with the special significance of the work before us, that we are at present concerned. And therefore my question, concretely put, is just this: How is it that you and I, who may care little or nothing for the information that Pepys gives us about the degraded politics and miserable court intrigues of the Restoration, may still find in his daily capricious jottings a charm which, as literature goes, is almost, if not absolutely, unique?
For any one who has ever dipped into the Diary at all, the answer to this question is not far to seek. Pepys’s memoranda have lasting interest for us on account of their naïve frankness, their plain and simple spontaneity, their transparent honesty of self-expression. As we read, we realize that, for once at least, we are brought into the closest, the most vital contact with a living man, and that this man speaks to us, who, by the irony of fate, chance to overhear his unconsidered utterances, without disguise, without reticence or reserve, of the things which stand nearest to his heart. The reader of Pepys’s Diary knows Pepys himself better than his acquaintances knew him at the office, in the coffee-house, at the street-corner; better than his friends knew him at the social board, spite of the truth that there is in wine; better even than his wife knew him in the intercourse of the home. To us he lays bare without sophistication or guile thoughts and impulses, desires and disappointments, concealed from them beneath the conventional wrappings of daily manners and life—personal criticisms and private experiences which, living, he confided to none. Does this strike you as a small matter? Then, pause for a moment and ask yourselves of what other man whose written words have ever come into the fierce white glare of publication such statements as these could truthfully be made? Autobiographies, memoirs, journals, confessions, letters we have, of course, without number, and the value of these as human documents may in most cases be great, in some cases inestimable. But do we, after all, accept literature of this character as the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth? Do we not rather know that, as a matter of course, such literature must almost always be, in varying degrees, forced, unreal, overwrought, theatrical? The moment a man begins to talk about himself, the dramatic instinct inevitably comes into play; the least vain of mortals colors his own experiences, the least self-conscious manipulates his motives and transfigures his feelings. That which we ought to know best—our own heart—is precisely that which of set purpose we are forever debarred from describing with more than an approximation to the stern and solid fact. You remember the famous words in which Rousseau announced his intention of writing the plain, unvarnished story of his life: “I enter upon an undertaking which never had an example, the execution of which will never have an imitation. I desire to show my fellow-creatures a man in all the truth of his nature—and this man will be myself.” And with this rhetorical exordium, the great sentimentalist proceeds, as Mr. Lowell happily phrased it, to throw “open his waistcoat, and make us the confidants of his dirty linen.” The very condition of deliberate self-revelation places an embargo on perfect candor and unconsciousness; an autobiographer, as George Sand said, always makes himself the hero of his own novel, even if he be a hero of the dirty vagabond type, as in the case just referred to. Here, then, is the ultimate secret of Pepys’s peculiar charm. Beside him, Rousseau is a mere poseur, and the rest are nowhere. “Is not,” asks Mr. Lowell, “is not old Samuel Pepys, after all, the only man who spoke to himself of himself with perfect simplicity, frankness, and unconsciousness?” That he should have done this is no trifling thing. He remains, seemingly for all time, “a creature unique as the dodo, a solitary specimen, to show that it was possible for nature once in the centuries to indulge in so odd a whimsey.”
In speaking of the difficulties inherent in autobiographical writing, I lay stress, it will be observed, on the set purpose, the deliberate intention, generally characterizing it. No small part of the secret of Pepys’s success as a diarist is to be found in the simple fact that with him the set purpose, the deliberate intention, and the resultant disturbing self-consciousness are almost entirely absent. Pepys did not write for the public eye, or for any glance save his own; he recorded his impressions and enterprises, his pleasures, anxieties, ambitions, aims, and passing fancies because he found satisfaction in thus summing up “the actions of the day each night before he slept”; and not at all because he proposed to draw a full-length portrait of himself for the benefit of his contemporaries or the amusement of posterity. It has been suggested by one of the wiseacres who can never leave a simple fact alone, that Pepys regarded his Diary as material towards a fully developed autobiography. Possibly so. But we may be certain that had such autobiography ever been written, the self-delineation of its pages would have differed in many important particulars—in details put in, and even more seriously in details left out—from that contained in the journal itself. As it is, we have an odd and uncomfortable sense, when we first open the Diary, of intruding where we have no proper business, of breaking in upon the privacy of a man’s life, and surprising him in the undress which he might wear for himself, but in which he would not willingly be caught by even his closest friend. For remember that the six small volumes which contain the manuscript diary are filled with densely packed short-hand, peppered with occasional words and phrases from the French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek; and that it was only after immense labor that the script was transliterated, and the secrets which poor Pepys had, as he fondly supposed, buried there forever, given to an impertinent and unsympathetic world.[[3]] Writing thus for himself, and for himself alone, and guarding himself by every means within his power against the possibility of exposure, our chronicler was enabled to make his narrative the luminous, because free and spontaneous, expression of his innermost life. A man may be honest with himself in cipher for whom long-hand, to say nothing of the thought of subsequent publication, would bring the inevitable and fatal temptations to sophistication. Could Pepys have foreseen the ultimate fate of his journal, it is safe to say that it would never have been written, or, once written, would have been discreetly burned. Poor fellow! His sense of complete security, of inviolable self-concealment, made possible such confidences as otherwise would never have been committed to paper.
But this is not all. Pepys’s unreserved frankness is to be partially accounted for by the fact that he had no fear lest any one but himself should ever read what he found such curious pleasure in writing down. Yet allowance must at the same time be made for a deeper cause, to be sought in an analysis of the character of the man himself. Plenty of people who can write short-hand and appreciate the usefulness of a diary, contrive none the less to go through life without finding themselves under the imperative necessity of recording the minute happenings, the petty annoyances and satisfactions, the casual meetings, conversations, comings and goings of the common routine of existence. They may enjoy their dinner without feeling impelled at the end of the day to make a solemn note of the fact and add the bill of fare; they may fall asleep during a sermon, and yet allow the astonishing circumstance to pass unrecorded; they may say and do a dozen foolish, hasty, and unnecessary things, and see no cause to dwell upon them, and perpetuate them, when the evening accounts are made up. But the little things of life were great to Pepys, its trifles singularly, grotesquely significant. He was a man, it is clear, of a curiously naïve and garrulous temper, a born lover of gossip, even when he was gossiping only of and to himself, and when some of the matters he found to talk about did not by any means redound to his credit.
Mr. Lowell somewhere speaks of the unconscious humor of the Diary. This unconscious humor is, I think, to be referred very largely to this extraordinary naïveté; to the irresponsible loquacity, the love of commonplace and frivolous detail, which seem to have been among Pepys’s most salient characteristics, and to his amazing lack of any sense of perspective—in other words, to his congenital inability to disentangle the momentous from the trivial in the complex occurrences of life. An interview with the King, a discussion with the naval authorities, the manning of a ship, the arrangements for a war, were serious matters to him; but so, too, were the purchase of a new periwig, the sight of a pretty face in the theatre, a specially succulent joint of meat at the midday repast, a game of billiards or ninepins. It is needful to lay stress on these personal qualities, because they are of the very essence of the man, of the very essence of the Diary. That it should have seemed to him worth while to place on record, if only for his own perusal, so many things that most of us would give no second thought to—that is the point to be noted, as one only a little less astonishing than the diarist’s odd plainness of dealing with himself. I have said that the use of a cipher which none of your family or acquaintances can read, is in itself a premium upon veracity. Yet Pepys’s singular, remorseless honesty of self-expression remains still in the last degree surprising. The Diary is full of confessions which, I venture to think, you and I would hardly feel called upon to make, even to ourselves, so strong, so irresistible does the dramatic tendency become in most of us the moment we begin to touch our own lives. If we are fond of reading, it would be natural to us, I suppose, to jot down the names of the books we buy or dip into, and any criticism we may have to make upon them; but I wonder how many of us would think it incumbent upon us to commit ourselves to such an entry as this?—“To the Strand, to my bookseller’s, and there bought an idle, roguish French book, ‘L’Escholle des Filles,’ which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolved, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of my books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.” A declaration like this may strike us as absurdly familiar when we light upon it, but it takes a Pepys to make it, after all; and we therefore feel that in the solemnity and precision with which such an experience is recorded, rather perhaps than in the experience itself, which is neither very important, nor very creditable, nor very singular, is to be found the key to much that is most interesting and significant in the pages of the Diary. Pepys, for instance, quarrels with a captain in the army, and goes about in mortal dread of possible consequences. Thousands of men, I dare say, have found themselves in just such a predicament; but Pepys makes a note of the fact, plainly, straightforwardly, with no pretence at apology or self-deception, with no tendency towards heroics. Again, he lies awake one night quaking in fear of robbers, and starting at every sound. You and I may have done the same; but I do not imagine that our journals, if searched, would contain any indication of the fact. Take such an entry as the following: “After we had dined came Mr. Mallard, and I brought down my viol.... He played some very fine things of his own, but I was afraid to enter too far into their commendation, for fear he should offer to copy them for me out, and so I be forced to give or lend him something,”—and I wonder how many of us could lay our hands on our hearts and honestly say that this presentation of motive strikes us as remote, unfamiliar, alien. But while we would hardly dare to look a bit of conduct of this kind squarely in the face, Pepys does so, and unflinchingly sets down the not over-flattering results of his observation. And he does this not because he has the modern man’s morbid love of self-analysis, or any of the grim desire of many a recent writer to show himself up as a sorry fellow, but simply because it is his habit all through to report frankly and unreservedly the various circumstances of his life, withholding nothing, adding nothing, disguising nothing.
All this helps to bring the essential naïveté of Pepys’s character into high relief. He tears his new cloak on the latch of a door, and is greatly troubled, though the darning is successfully done; he rejoices when Mr. Pierce’s little girl draws him for her valentine, because a present to her will cost him less than one to a grown-up person; he drinks large quantities of milk and beer, and gets pains in consequence; he acts the sycophant and the tuft-hunter towards those in power, swallowing his own opinions and rejoicing in the success of his diplomacy; his appetite for supper is taken away by the sight of his aunt’s dirty hands; he makes up his mind to try how eating fish will suit him, before vowing to diet himself in Lent;—and down all such matters go pell-mell in the Diary. He wrangles with his mother; breaks an oath never to go to see a play without his wife; gets a headache by drinking overmuch wine; thinks he sees a ghost; rejoices to find himself addressed as Esquire;—and down go all these things, too. He puts his thumb out of joint boxing his footboy’s ears; in a fit of anger he tweaks Mrs. Pepys’s pretty nose; is “vext to the heart” when Sir William Pen’s page chances to catch him kicking his cook-maid, “because I know he will be telling their family of it”;—and all these occurrences, once again, are given due record and chronicle. Finally,—not to multiply, as one might do indefinitely, such illustrations of our writer’s singular simplicity and artlessness,—he even notes being “mightily troubled” with snoring in his sleep, a statement which I have reserved as a kind of climax, since I find the allegation of snoring to be about the last that sensitive humanity is willing to bear. Charge a man with theft, if you will; but, as you value your life, do not suggest that he snores.
To this brief analysis of some of the personal peculiarities upon which the curious charm of Pepys’s Diary so largely depends, it would be unfair to the writer not to add mention of a characteristic of a somewhat different order. If a diarist, like a poet, is rather born than made, then justice compels us to acknowledge that Pepys was a born diarist—a man who, by reason of his strength and his weakness alike, was an almost ideal chronicler of daily affairs and small beer. For he possessed something more than the native garrulousness, the itch to chatter and to tattle, of which we have already said enough. His, too, was another rare quality of equal importance for the success of his chosen undertaking—a keen, immense, tireless interest in “men, women, and things in general.” He was, in the fullest sense of the term, a viveur—a man who made it his business to get the most possible out of existence, and who, as matters went in his day, touched the world at an amazing variety of points. Immersed as he was in practical responsibilities, fond as he was of money and affairs, he nevertheless threw himself with the utmost avidity and ardor into the life of his time, an unheroic Ulysses, forever setting forth upon a voyage of new discovery and fresh adventure. He loved, after his own fashion, literature and painting; he was a devotee of music and an amateur of the drama; and he had the shrewdest eye for character, the largest appreciation of the picturesqueness resulting from the clash of motives, the contests of opinion and feeling, and outworkings of ambitions and passions in the tragedy and comedy of men’s every-day social world. He was indeed, as Sir Walter Scott said of him, a man of the “most undiscriminating, unsatiable, and miscellaneous curiosity.” Although “exceptionally busy and diligent in his attendance at the office,” this same writer continues, “he finds time to go to every play and every execution, to every procession, fire, concert, riot, trial, review, city feast, public dissection, or picture-gallery that he can hear of. Nay, there seems scarcely to have been a school examination, a wedding, christening, charity sermon, bull-baiting, philosophic meeting, or private merrymaking in his neighborhood at which he was not sure to make his appearance, and mindful to record all the particulars.” He had an unbounded love of pleasure, a craving for new sensations, an indefatigable courage in the pursuit of experience, a versatility of enthusiasm simply amazing, an industry in multitudinous enterprises which makes us breathless as we read. “He is the first to hear all the court scandal, and all the public news; to observe the changes of fashions, and the downfall of parties; to pick up family gossip, and retail philosophical intelligence; to criticise every new house or carriage that is built, every new book or new beauty that appears, every measure the King adopts, and every mistress he discards.” In one sentence he will report a debate in Parliament—in the next, carefully itemize the points in a lady’s dress; now he is deeply concerned over the problems of the navy, and anon is to be found mourning the death of a canary, or the ruin of his fine bands, which he has carelessly slobbered with chocolate. Accounts of state crises, details of court profligacy, particulars of his own matrimonial misunderstandings, literary criticisms, headings of sermons, accounts of plays, disquisitions on music and finance, on dinners and dancing, and a thousand other matters, important and petty, are jumbled together in bewildering confusion in his pages, along with sketches of character, bits of the frankest self-delineation, scraps of wisdom and folly, keen judgments of men and circumstances, and those notes of success and failure, of aspiration, achievement, disappointment, of penitence, and sometimes of remorse, which belong to the true story of his inner life. Such is Pepys’s Diary—the record of the daily doings and feelings of a busy, restless, vain, easy-tempered, pleasure-loving, ambitious, shrewd, yet often fatuous, man of the world; take it for all in all, a book without an equal, almost without a rival, in its class.