I said that in this part of my lecture I should make no attempt to maintain logical consistency. This must be my excuse for leading you by an abrupt transition from the stage to the pulpit. Pepys occasionally stayed at home on Sundays to work up his accounts, or look over his papers, and once (but he was sick that day) to read plays; but he was, on the whole, a faithful church-goer, and, as we have had occasion to observe, made special use of the Lord’s Day for a display of his new clothes and finery, a practice which to modern readers must needs seem both strange and reprehensible. His notes of discourses heard by him are sometimes extremely interesting; while his criticisms—and he was evidently by no means easy to satisfy in the matter of sermons—are often as pungent and incisive as they are quaint and characteristic. “A lazy, poor sermon,” he writes, after hearing Dr. Fuller. Once he reports “an unnecessary sermon upon original sin, neither understood” by the preacher himself “nor the people”; and another time he hears a young man “play the fool upon the doctrine of Purgatory.” Considerable space is given in his jottings to a certain poor young Scotchman, who had a perfect genius for preaching “most tediously,” and who becomes for Pepys a sort of type and standard of dulness and nebulosity. Poor little Scot, thus to be pilloried to the end of time! Pepys had, however,—let us put it euphemistically,—a wonderful power of withdrawing into himself, when the exercises of the pulpit became unusually trying—when, to adapt the phrase of Madame de Sévigné, a preacher abused the privilege preachers have of being long-winded and tiresome. Over and over again he chronicles sleeping soundly through a sermon, and waking refreshed, if not edified, at the close. “After dinner, to church again, where the young Scot preaching, I slept all the while.”—“So up and to church, where Mr. Mills preached, but I know not how; I slept most of the sermon.”—“So to church, and slept all the sermon, the Scot, to whose voice I am not to be reconciled [one would suppose that he had become pretty well reconciled to it, judging by its soporific influences] preaching.” I pick these at random, as specimen entries. There were seasons, however, when, the sermon being bad, and himself unable to achieve the benign relief of slumber, Pepys confesses to killing time in less innocent ways. Susceptible to an extreme degree to feminine charms and graces, he often passed the hour of exhortation in looking out for pretty women, and in studying carefully their various styles of beauty and of dress. Here are a few instances to the point. “To church, where, God forgive me! I spent most of my time in looking on my new Morena [brunette] at the other side of the church.” So runs one of his confidences. And again: “After dinner, I by water alone to Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective-glass up and down the church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that and sleeping, I passed away the time till the sermon was done.” He even reports that once, at St. Dunstan’s, in the midst too of an “able sermon,” he found himself beside a “pretty, modest maid,” whom “I did labor to take by the hand, but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket, to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours ended also.”
This time, by a transition strictly logical, we are led to speak for a moment about the most intimate side of Pepys’s domestic existence—his relations with his wife. The subject is a difficult and delicate one; it is, moreover, too complicated to be dealt with in any detail here. A few general words must suffice.
Their marriage had been one of love, and it can hardly be called, on the whole, an unfortunate one, in spite of many unhappy episodes and a good deal of misunderstanding; for even in the white glare of the Diary, where every fleck shows, their home life often comes out in a very pleasant light. Still there were unquestionably, even from the very beginning, little rifts within the lute, and these rifts widen terribly, we notice, as the journal runs its course. To the outside world, very probably, such rifts were not often apparent; but we are privileged to see matters close at hand, and from the inside; and this undercurrent of tragedy, beneath the broad stream of prosperity and success, becomes at times painfully manifest as we read.
I suppose it can hardly be said that in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Pepys’s various matrimonial difficulties, the entire blame rested on either pair of shoulders. Mrs. Pepys was extremely pretty and attractive, and her husband admired her thoroughly, and was after his own rather singular fashion, devotedly attached to her. Yet she was evidently whimsical, somewhat capricious, apt to get into what Pepys calls “fusty” humors, and at times exceedingly trying to the nerves. Many a little crisis, not serious perhaps, but distinctly unpleasant, seems to have been brought about by a word unnecessarily spoken, a look or a phrase interpreted amiss. But, after all, we fear that the main burden of responsibility rested with Pepys himself. Why would he undertake to teach the poor young woman astronomy and arithmetic, when, admittedly, she had neither taste nor talent for such subjects? Why was he so much upset on finding that her ear for music was not nearly as good as he thought it should have been? Why did he cut her short so peremptorily on one most unfortunate occasion when she was telling that long-winded story of hers from “The Grand Cyrus”? Why was he petulant with her, at another time, for no better reason, as he himself confesses, than that he was hungry, and she had dressed herself, as she not infrequently did, in a manner that displeased him? Why, finally, when she was berating him rather roundly about her deficient wardrobe, did he fall to reading Boyle’s “Hydrostatics” aloud, “and let her talk till she was tired, and vexed that I would not hear her”? It is surely, to say the least of it, far from tactful in a husband to declaim from a treatise on hydrostatics, when his wife is determined to discuss more serious matters. These may be trifles; but such trifles are important things, when viewed from the standpoint of domestic peace. But all this touches merely the fringe of the problem. The really serious troubles were generally, if not always, caused by poor Mr. Pepys’s fatal over-sensibility—that characteristic weakness of his, to which he himself from time to time became only too keenly alive. The simple fact of the matter is, that our diarist had a fondness for the society of pretty women; that his wife, naturally enough, grew jealous; and that all sorts of unpleasantness, deepening sometimes into genuine domestic tragedy, was the inevitable result. I have not time now to go into the ins and outs of what is really a very long story, to follow the rapid fluctuations of feeling, or mark out the converging lines of approach to the unavoidable catastrophe. But I cannot resist the temptation of recounting one curious episode—that of a neat joke once played by Mrs. Pepys on her susceptible better-half. Pepys, early in the period of the Diary, had fallen in with his wife’s desire to have a girl to live with them—a kind of companion and lady’s maid. He did not like the expense incurred; but as long as the young lady was sufficiently well-favored to be a pleasant object to look on, he saw but little other cause for complaint—though cause for complaint, and good cause too, Mrs. Pepys was presently to find. Well, on one occasion his wife told him she had engaged a new maid—a girl so pretty and winsome, she went on to say, that positively she was already jealous. Mr. Pepys was a little uneasy about all this. However, he concluded that she “meant it merrily,” and awaited with a good deal of ill-repressed excitement the coming of the domestic beauty. In due season, Hebe arrived; and judge his astonishment and disgust, when he found, as he plaintively reports, that she was not pretty at all, but a very ordinary wench! For once, at all events, the laugh was on Mrs. Pepys’s side.
Towards the latter part of the Diary the conjugal misunderstandings pass into a very acute stage, and for a time a break-up of the Pepys establishment seems imminent. But we are glad to be able to record that the crisis was a comparatively brief one. Mr. Pepys, sorrow-smitten and full of remorse over his recent ill-doings, undertakes to mend his ways, and sets manfully, though with some misgivings and much difficulty, about the task of so doing. And thus the curtain falls upon what promises to be a complete reconciliation; and we close the Diary with the hope that the new peace lasted for the few brief years that were destined to elapse before the life of poor Elizabeth Pepys was brought to its untimely end. There is one odd commentary on matrimony, which I must needs add for its characteristic strain. Pepys, going to church one day, happens by accident to witness a wedding, and is much interested in what Thackeray described as “the happy couple, as the saying is.” In chronicling this incident, he makes the following extraordinary remark: “Strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling upon them.”
There is much still on the purely personal side of the Diary about which I should well have liked to speak; and, in particular, I had hoped to dwell for a little on Pepys’s notices of the Great Plague (which are much more interesting, as well as accurate, than Defoe’s well-known romancing book), and on his graphic account of the fire of London, which forms an admirable commentary on the second half of Dryden’s famous, if somewhat unmanageable, poem, “Annus Mirabilis.” But these matters, and many other such, cannot now be even touched upon. Meanwhile, in bringing these rambling memoranda to a close, I do not feel inclined to apologize for what may seem the frivolous character of my material. The unique charm of Pepys’s Diary, as I said at the outset, lies very largely in the frankness, the naïveté, the unsophisticated directness of its record; it is, as I insisted, really and truly what other chronicles of the kind have been simply in name, a journal intime. Something of this frankness, this naïveté, it has been my aim to illustrate, and to show you at the same time how quaint and startling are some of the results. And let me ask you not to judge too harshly of the man into whose existence we have thus ventured to pry. Remember that we have been privileged in his case to push aside the curtain which men habitually keep carefully drawn across the penetralia of their lives; that we have caught him often enough at unfair advantage, and in a light fiercer than that which, Tennyson says, beats upon a throne, blackening each blot. At any rate, I, for my own part, see no reason why, as we lay his Diary aside, we should indulge in platitudes of criticism—still less, why we should console ourselves with the flattering thought of moral superiority. Pepys was not a great man, it is true: he was often weak, often foolish; the temptations of the world again and again proved too much for him; at many important points, his theory and practice of life were alike unsound. But it might be well perhaps, before we undertake to throw stones at his glass house, to look a little carefully into the vitreous mansion in which we ourselves dwell. And if you and I were forced to lay bare, as he has done for himself, the secret thoughts and feelings, the passing fancies, the unspoken desires, the foibles and failures of our every-day existence, I wonder how many of us would see reason to be proud of the revelation so made. O my brothers, let us be humble and charitable! Humility and charity are excellent things; and humility and charity, I confess, I find constantly forced upon me whenever I dip, for an hour’s genuine amusement, into the Diary of old Samuel Pepys.
Two Novelists of the English
Restoration.
Two Novelists of the English