Idle Hours in a Library

by William Henry Hudson

Here we ought perhaps to add that, in an ill-advised moment, Mr. Pepys undertook to learn to dance. “The truth is, I think it a thing very useful for a gentleman, and sometimes I may have occasion of using it, and though it cost me what I am heartily sorry it should,” (he deeply deplores the payment of ten shillings entrance fee to the class,) “yet I am resolved to get it up some other way.... So, though it be against my stomach, yet I will try it for a little while.” The subsequent introduction of a dancing-master, whose name was Pemberton, turned out, however, to be the introduction of a serpent into Pepys’s matrimonial Paradise. Mrs. Pepys, crazy over the new accomplishment, insisted on his coming twice a day, which, as Mr. Pepys properly protested, was “a folly.” Moreover, he by and by grew jealous of his wife’s attention to the said Pemberton, and some heartache and much petulance were the result. Pepys gives us one graphic description of himself, too angry to join his wife at her lesson, yet walking up and down in his own chamber, “listening to hear whether they danced or no.” But he presently became an adept in the art, and danced his own part, infinitely to his satisfaction, in many a corranto and jig.

For Pepys, as we have said, was a highly convivial person, and abandoned himself to the pleasure of the moment with an ardor and whole-heartedness which fill the grimly serious modern reader with something like amazement. The thought of the morrow rarely for him disturbed the enjoyment of to-day, though with the coming of the morrow he sometimes found that he had applied himself to the good things of this life not wisely but too well. Accounts of suppers, of social festivities kept up until ever so much o’clock in the morning, of mirthmaking of the most boisterous kind, abound in his pages, mixed up with matters of more serious import in quite a bewildering way. Pepys will often round off some such detailed report with a characteristic comment expressive of deep satisfaction; as, for example, “mighty merry,” or “so home, mighty pleased with this day’s sport.” Carpe diem was evidently his counsel of perfection. There is something charming about the man’s juvenile capacity for enjoyment, though we are frequently inclined to wonder how he managed in certain emergencies to keep his clear head and his steady hand. Yet only occasionally does the journal record any marked reaction from even the most roistering overnight carousal. Here, however, is just one case in point. On 14th August, 1666,—in the midst, be it noted, of a good deal of mental disturbance caused by a misunderstanding between himself and Lord Peterborough,—Pepys describes at length an evening of wild frolic and buffoonery. After dinner, with his wife and wife’s maid, Mercer (who played a rather prominent part in subsequent domestic unpleasantnesses), he takes a turn at the Bear Garden, where there is much wine-drinking.

“Then we supped at home, and very merry. And then about 9 o’clock to Mrs. Mercer’s gate, where the fire and boys expected us, and her son had provided abundance of serpents and rockets; and there mighty merry (my Lady Pen and Pegg going thither with us, and Nan Wright) till about 12 at night, flinging our fireworks and burning one another and the people over the way. At last our businesses being most spent, we into Mrs. Mercer’s, and there mighty merry, smutting one another with candle-grease and soot, till most of us were like devils. And that being done, then we broke up, and to my house, and there I made them drink; and upstairs we went, and there fell into dancing (W. Batelier dancing well), and dressing him and I and one Mr. Banister ... like women; and Mercer put on a suit of Tom’s like a boy, and mighty mirth we had; and Mercer danced a jig, and Nan Wright and my wife and Pegg Pen put on periwigs. Thus we spent till three or four in the morning, mighty merry; and then parted and to bed.”

Do we wonder that the next day’s entry should significantly open—“Mighty sleepy; slept till past eight of the clock”?

As wine-bibbing, and even downright drunkenness, occupy so large a space in our record, it may be proper to note indications contained in it of the rise of domestic forces destined to do much in a quiet way towards the gradual improvement of general manners in this particular respect. From the point of view of social history, there is much to interest us in Pepys’s occasional references to tea, coffee, and chocolate. These three beverages found their way into England within a few years of one another, about the middle of the seventeenth century, cocoa leading the way, and tea bringing up the rear. We have seen that on one occasion our diarist spoilt his bands by spilling chocolate upon them. The coffee-house was an accomplished fact in his time. There he often met distinguished men on business; there he passed many a chatty hour; there he once reports seeing “Dryden the poet ... and all the wits of the town.” For tea he never seems to have acquired special fondness. I have marked but two references to it in the Diary. Once, on 28th September, 1660, he notes: “I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I never had drank before,”—and unfortunately, for a wonder, he does not tell us how he liked it. And again, on 28th June, 1667, he chronicles returning home to find his wife “making of tea, a drink which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, tells her is good for her cold.” Tea, by the way, was enormously dear in those days, and was supposed to possess astonishing and mysterious medicinal properties, concerning which we may read much in a broadside issued by Thomas Garway, the coffee-man of Change Alley,—a rare and curious document, a copy of which is still preserved in the British Museum.

It does not, of course, surprise us to learn that this pleasure-loving man of the town was a regular attendant at all the public amusements of his time. He visited the cockpit, the bear-garden, the gambling-room, the prize-ring; though, much to his credit, he found little pleasure in these places of popular resort—a fact which makes it harder for us to understand his frequent presence at public executions, in witnessing which, as many entries serve to show, he found a curious kind of satisfaction. On the other hand, his enthusiasm for everything connected with the theatre was simply unbounded; his Diary remaining to-day an important source of first-hand information on all matters pertaining to the drama of the Restoration. From his miscellaneous jottings we gain a wonderfully vivid impression of the manners and customs of the playhouse of the period, together with a sense of life in things otherwise dead beyond recall. For Pepys saw the great Betterton in all his glory, and was bewitched by the beautiful and fascinating Nell Gwynne. When his record opens, boys were still playing female parts, as they had done in Shakspere’s time, and the introduction of women to the English stage is duly registered by him as an event. He details, after his manner, all the odds and ends of scandal concerning prominent theatrical people; was himself on very friendly terms—somewhat too friendly at times for domestic peace—with various pretty actresses; and was an occasional visitor to that mysterious realm which lies behind the scenes. Once in a while, however, he acknowledges the disillusion caused by such excursions. The extremely human proportions into which the heroes and heroines of that magic stage-land dwindled when seen at close quarters,—the dust, noise, confusion, paint, powder, and general dinginess of the dressing-rooms and coulisses,—these are subjects of frequent remark. Perhaps his most disenchanting experience was one connected with Nell Gwynne—“pretty, witty Nelly,” as he fondly calls her,—(we will not forget that the Diary was written in cipher). He finds her once behind the curtain,—alas, that we should have to repeat it!—swearing like a trooper because of the smallness of the audience. Now, a small house is a trial sufficient to tax the philosophy of any actress; but we are sorry that pretty, witty Nelly, should have behaved herself in this way. Pepys confesses that on this occasion he went home a sadder and a wiser man.

Let us not imagine that Pepys followed his career of pleasure without twinges of conscience and occasional remorse. The expense involved frequently worried him, and again and again he reproved himself for wasting valuable time. It saddened him once in a while, too, to realize that he could not say “No” when temptation came in his way,—“a very great fault of mine which I must amend in.” Sometimes he argued the matter out to a logical issue; as, for instance, when, on 9th March, 1665, he writes:—

“The truth is I do indulge myself a little more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time they are getting their estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it.”

This eminently philosophical generalization appears to have given him a good deal of relief. Still, the qualms would come, philosophy notwithstanding. The thought of neglected business is like a death’s head at the feast when he dines once with Lady Batten and Madame Williams; and when, on another memorable occasion, he goes to the playhouse when he knows well enough that he should have been elsewhere, he is so thoroughly ashamed of himself that he sneaks in and takes a back place—only to be immediately singled out by an acquaintance, who spies him out from afar, and, much to his mortification, insists on sitting beside him. Incidents of this kind are numerous enough to show us that the way of the transgressor was sometimes hard.

Pepys, however, managed upon occasion to get even with himself in these delicate matters by a very curious device. He registered solemn vows,—as, for instance, not to drink wine for a specified period, or not to go to the play till after a certain date,—inflicting various penalties upon himself for infraction. These penalties habitually took financial forms—payments to charities and the like; and we note that in cases of infraction—and these were sufficiently frequent—Pepys was more deeply concerned about the spent money than about the broken vow. Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that some fine casuistry is now and then shown by him in the way in which he manages to elude the sense of an obligation while technically fulfilling its letter. Under pledge not to touch wine, he consumes hypocras, a mixture of red and white wine with sugar and spices, and comforts himself with the extraordinary theory that this is, “to the best of my personal judgment, ... only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine.” Equally dubious are some of his theatrical doings. Once he congratulates himself that he has kept his vow because he arrives at the playhouse too late to make it worth his while to go in—a really magnificent confusion of intention with result. Once again, he allows an acquaintance to pay for him, and exonerates himself on the ground that he was taken to the performance, and did not, so to speak, take himself—did not, in other words, go as a free agent, and of his own impulse and will. And on yet another occasion,—such is his subtlety,—he gets Mr. Creed to treat him in this way, actually lending the said Mr. Creed the money necessary for the purpose. This, however, he felt to be going rather too far, even for an ethical theorist. In reporting the incident, he adds that this “is a fallacy that I have found now once, to avoid my vow with, but never to be more practised, I swear.”