Chapter II: Part 2

As regards eating, important as the subject doubtless is, we need not say much. Comparing the Elizabethan age with the immediate past, we may safely assert that men were more temperate now than they had been—that they fed less grossly, and spent less time at table. But the abstemiousness was, after all, only relative. It was still, from our point of view, a period of gluttony. The early breakfast of meat and ale; the morning luncheon, or bever; the twelve-o’clock dinner, with its exceedingly substantial fare; and, finally, in the evening, what Don Armado, in “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” described as “the nourishment which is called supper,”—all these made up a series of gastronomic undertakings at which we can look back only with mingled amazement and disgust. The staple articles of diet were the various kinds of meat, which were partaken of in immense quantities, with but little bread and only a limited accompaniment of vegetables. But almost as important as the meats was the pudding, for which the English had acquired so great a reputation that a contemporary foreigner fairly goes into a transport of enthusiasm about it. The worst feature of all was the enormous consumption of intoxicating liquors. Tea, coffee, and cocoa—those delightful cups that cheer but not inebriate, for which we moderns can hardly be too thankful—were as yet unknown in England; and, in their absence, every meal was washed down with mighty draughts of ale and sack. Testimony to the drunkenness of the English at this time is appalling, whether we turn to the plays themselves, or to the writings of professed moralists, such as Camden’s “Elizabeth,” Reeve’s “God’s Plea for Nineveh,” Tryon’s “Way to Health,” Dekker’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” Wither’s “Abuses Stript and Whipt,” and Thomas Young’s “England’s Bane,” which may be mentioned as specimens of a voluminous output of similar character. No wonder that, as Iago and Hamlet remind us, the English people had become a byword for inebriety among the nations of the continent.

It must, however, be added, as one favorable sign of the times, that table manners were, on the whole, distinctly improving. Bad as they still were in many important particulars, a change for the better was quite perceptible. For instance, people thought it incumbent on them now to wash before and after dinner, a ceremony all the more needful, as fingers were still commonly used where we use forks, “the laudable use” of which, as Jonson has it, came in towards the close of Shakspere’s life; and generally a certain amount of delicacy in what Ouida has pronounced the essentially disgusting operation of eating, was for the first time beginning to be looked for, at any rate amongst those in the higher ranks of society.

Hardly less important in social economy than eating is dress, which in turn demands a share of our attention. Unfortunately, however, it is impossible in the small space here at our disposal to give any adequate idea of the extent, variety, and extravagance of the fashions prevalent during the period with which we are now dealing, and which form a curious offset to the crudities we have noticed in household furniture and appliances. Harrison, in his “Description of England,” declares that the taste for change and novelty had simply run wild; and he and the outspoken Stubbs are never weary of declaring that while other nations have their own special extravagances, the English gather up and adopt the follies of all the rest of Europe. Here is a passage from another contemporary writer, Thomas Becon, on the same subject: “I think no realm in the world, no, not among the Turks and Saracens, doth so much in the variety of their apparel as the Englishmen do at this present. Their coat must be made after the Italian fashion, their cloak after the use of the Spaniards, their gown after the manner of the Turks; their cap must be of the French fashion; and at the last their dagger must be Scottish with a Venetian tassel of silk. To whom may the Englishman be compared worthily, but to Esop’s crow? For as the crow decked himself with feathers of all kinds of birds, even so doth the vain Englishman.... He is an Englishman; but he is also an Italian, a Spaniard, a Turk, a Frenchman, a Scotch, a Venetian, and at last what not?”

This is only a sample; passages of similar import might be multiplied almost without number. The fashions of the day were indeed absurd and extravagant to the last degree. Richness and picturesqueness were the two things aimed at alike in male and in female costume; and in both cases the colors were as brilliant as the stuffs were costly. The following speech of Sir Glorious Tipto, in Jonson’s “New Inn,” will give some idea of the run of masculine modes, as seen by the vigorous old satirist:—

“I would put on
The Savoy chain about my neck, the ruff
And cuffs of Flanders; then the Naples hat
With the Rome hatband and the Florentine agate,
The Milan sword, the cloak of Genoa, set
With Brabant buttons—all my given pieces,
Except my gloves, the natives of Madrid.”

Over against such a strange human specimen as is thus pictured in the imagination, we may well set the women of the time, as painted, rouged, highly scented, bejewelled, bewigged, in French hoods, starched Cambric ruffs, close-fitting jerkins, and embroidered velvet gowns, they look down upon us from the walls of many an Elizabethan house, and fill the busy scene in many a contemporary play. Women, Lyly thought—so far had the artifices of the toilet carried them,—were in reality the least part of themselves. Some of their freaks of fashion in particular drew down the ire alike of the playwright and of the more serious satirist. One was the habit of painting the face, so frequently referred to by Shakspere and others. A second was the very common practice of wearing false hair, treated at length, along with nearly all similar extravagances of the period, by the irrepressible Stubbs. Every reader of Shakspere will recall the passage from Bassanio’s moralizings on “outward shows,” in which this fashion is alluded to:—

“Look on beauty,
And you shall see ’tis purchased by the weight;
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it;
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre;”

and the parallel lines in the sixty-eighth sonnet, in which the same point is touched on, with striking similarity of phrasing. The “golden” color of the locks, here specially emphasized, it may be noted in passing, was particularly popular, on account of the reddish, or, as her flatterers would insist, the golden, hue of Queen Elizabeth’s head-gear. Finally, a great deal was said about the altogether needless and reprehensible extravagance shown in certain small details of dress. We may take the one item of foot-covering as an example. Herein all the worst taste of the day was illustrated; for shoes were made of the most expensive materials, and were frequently covered with artificial flowers and other kinds of decoration. Thus, Massinger, in “The City Madam,” speaks of rich “pantofles in ostentation shown, and roses worth a family”; while Stubbs, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” refers to shoes “embroidered with gold and silver all over the foot.”

Yet, upon the whole, truth compels us to admit that, if we are to trust contemporary evidence, masculine fashions exceeded in wildness, absurdity, and monstrous barbarity those of the other sex. “Women are bad, but men are worse,”—such is the distinct judgment of Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy”; and while we know from the speculative Jaques that “the city madam,” would sometimes bear “the cost of princes on unworthy shoulders,” Burton again is our authority for the statement that it was no uncommon thing for a man to put a thousand oxen into a suit of apparel, and to wear a whole manor on his back.

I mentioned incidentally just now that class distinctions were severely marked out by differences in costume. Certain sumptuary enactments promulgated about this time undertook to regulate down to the minutest details what should and what should not be worn by the various classes of the community, wealth and social standing being taken together as the basis on which to settle the problems of the toilet and personal adornment. But within the limits allowed by such regulations, and sometimes even irrespective of them (for grandmotherly legislation here as always stood foredoomed to failure) extravagance in fashion remained throughout one of the salient characteristics of the day. The dress of the citizen and his wife, if less elegant, was equally showy, and sometimes quite as expensive, as that of the man of mode and the woman of the court; and so it was through all grades of society, from the highest to the lowest, or, as Harrison put it in his vivid phrase, from the courtier to the carter.

While we are still concerned with this item of dress it is amusing to notice that three hundred years ago people were to be found worrying their tailors and abusing their dressmakers as it is the custom to do at the present day. We might quote illustrations from more than one comedy; but let us once more fall back upon Harrison. “How many times,” says this quaint old writer, “must a garment be sent back to him that made it? What chafing, what fretting, what reproachful language doth the poor workman bear away.... For we must puff and blow and sweat till we drop, that our clothes may stand well upon us.” As we read such a passage as this in its original strange old spelling (which, for the sake of uniformity, we have not here reproduced), we have surely to acknowledge—though it goes much against the grain to do so—that our manners have at bottom changed less than our orthography.

* * * * *

And now we must leave the ranks of the citizens and trading folks to deal for a moment or two with the more fashionable world.

The society of the time, to employ the word which in modern parlance has assumed a highly specialized meaning, was artificial to an absurd and almost inconceivable extent. Affectations, indeed, made up the larger part of life; and yet beneath them all were a core of sound reality and a healthy element of spontaneity. Euphuism and Italianism had for the time being taken full possession of the whole aristocratic world. Yet Euphuism and Italianism were but external crazes; and it was one mission of the age to show that men could be heroes in the foolishest dress, and do great deeds with the most ridiculous of phrases upon their lips. We could not here enter upon the task of analyzing the life and aims of the men and women who surrounded the Queen at her court; but as an offset to the steady-going middle classes of whom we have had much to say, we must try to present, if only in rapidly sketched outline, the typical Elizabethan gallant, or fashionable young man about town, as we find him portrayed for us in the plays and pamphlets of the time.

The accomplishments of the young man of this description were numerous and varied enough; but they were all in keeping with the character of the perfect gentleman as set forth by Castiglione in his “Cortegiano,” a work which had been translated by Thomas Hoby in 1561, and had forthwith become a kind of text-book or Bible for the youthful fashionable world. He could dance, sing, and play the viol de gamba; fence, ride, and hunt; write verses, turn pretty compliments, and take his part in the exchange of witty repartees, stocking his memory with scraps of plays and stories, lest his own mother-sense should fail him. He could read the three languages of Portia’s summary of requirements in which Falconbridge was lacking—Latin, French, and Italian,—and was perfectly at home in what Jonson calls the “perfumed terms of the day”; he had some acquaintance with the poets in vogue; played cards, tennis, and other fashionable games, as a matter of course; and, last but not least, was learned in all matters connected with the drama, etiquette, and dress.

These were not great qualifications; but such a young man had little need of great qualifications, since he had no great aims or ideals. Let us read over his every day’s experiences and doings as we find them given in Dekker’s “Gull’s Horn Book” and other similar productions, and this statement will call for no further commentary.

He was not an early riser—for, wearied with his overnight exertions, he scarcely ever left his couch till the plebeian Londoner was already thinking seriously about his midday meal. Then began the first important task of the day—the toilet, which was so elaborate a matter that Lyly, in his “Midas,” speaks of its being almost “a whole day’s work to dress.” But when at length he stood erect in his scented doublet and gold-laced cloak, with the roses in his shoes, the bunch of toothpicks in his hat, the watch hung about his neck, his earrings, and his sword, he was ready to partake of a breakfast of meat and ale with such appetite as he could muster for the occasion, and then, jumping on his horse, with his page and horse-boy behind him, to sally forth upon the regular adventures of the day.

Curiously enough, as it may well seem to us, his first place of resort would very probably be St. Paul’s Cathedral. One may well ask what object could possibly take him thither. The answer lies in the fact that St. Paul’s Church in those days was the great place of rendezvous for all the gay and fashionable world. “Thus,” says Dekker, “doth my middle aisle show like the Mediterranean Sea, in which as well the merchant hoists sails to purchase wealth honestly as the rover to light upon prize unjustly. Thus am I like a common mart, where all the commodities (both the good and the bad) are to be bought and sold. Thus, while devotion kneels at her prayers, doth profanation walk under her nose, in contempt of religion.” Francis Osborne, writing as late as 1658, says that it was a fashion of the times for the principal gentry, lords, commons, and professions, to meet in St. Paul’s Church by eleven, and walk in the middle aisle till twelve, and after dinner from three till six, “during which time some discourse of business, others of news.” Many bustling scenes in the old comedies are laid in this same middle aisle, where, amid bills posted as advertisements, and crowds of servants looking out for places, of sharpers, like Jonson’s Shift, with a keen eye for prey, and of loafers, with nothing else to do, all sorts of people strolled about, with their hats on, chatting, laughing, and discussing finance or politics or scandal, till the whole place was alive with the hum of voices, the rustle of raiment, and the jingle of spurs. “I walked in St. Paul’s to see the fashions,” remarks a character in one of Middleton’s plays. There Face threatened to advertise Subtle’s misdeeds; and it is a matter of common history that Falstaff picked Bardolph up in the same spot. It was thus its reputation as a place of general convenience, and one in which to see and to be seen, that gave St. Paul’s the importance it undoubtedly possessed in the social life of the time.

St. Paul’s Walk and its varied interests would keep our young man occupied till the hour of dinner, a meal of which he would probably partake in the bustle and excitement of the ordinary. The ordinary—the forerunner of the modern restaurant and _table d’hôte_—was then a novel institution, and as such enjoyed immense popularity among the gilded youth. Three grades were commonly recognized—the aristocratic ordinary, for which, to judge from a remark in Middleton’s “Trick to Catch the Old One,” about two shillings would be charged; the twelvepenny ordinary, frequented by tradesmen, professional people, and middle-class citizens; and the threepenny, to which flocked only the lowest and most questionable characters. The first-named of the three, Dekker tells us, was the great resort of all the court gallants. There friends and acquaintances met, ate, gossiped, laughed, and not infrequently quarrelled, together; there braggarts, like Lafeu in “All’s Well that Ends Well,” “made vent of their travel”; there the latest intelligence was circulated, the latest scandal discussed, the latest fads of fashion displayed in all their grotesqueness. A good picture of the ordinary during the dinner hour will be found in the twelfth chapter of Scott’s “Fortunes of Nigel”; but the genuine atmosphere is best caught in such a contemporary piece of writing as the “Gull’s Horn Book.”

Dinner over, with its customary game of primero, there were many ways in which our gallant could kill time. There was the theatre, with its more intellectual attractions; the bull-ring and the cockpit; the juggler’s booth and the tennis-court; the shops along Cheapside and about St. Paul’s, among which the connoisseur in letters, jewellery, and kickshaws would find it easy enough to while away an afternoon. But however he might pass the hours between dinner and supper, he would probably appear in full time for the latter meal, for which he might repair to “The Devil,” in Fleet Street, or “The Mitre,” in Cheap, or “The Mermaid,” in Bread Street; at which last-named place he might peradventure catch snatches of the conversation and laughter of a little group of men in one corner, among whom we should recognize, though he might not, the burly form and surly face of rare old Ben, and the serene countenance and deep, clear eyes of one who is more to all of us to-day than any other Englishman who ever lived—Will Shakspere, playwright and actor. After that would not improbably follow the wildest episodes of the day, which likely enough would end in deep carousal behind the flaming red doors of a tavern, or at the gambling-table, or even in more doubtful places of resort. When in Heywood’s “Wise Woman” old Chartley is looking for his son, he bids his servants “inquire about the taverns, ordinaries, bowl-alleys, tennis-courts, and gaming-houses, for there I fear he will be found,” a direction which gives us a fair idea of the favorite haunts of the young men of the day. Gambling particularly, in all its forms, was one of the prevalent manias of the time, and was often carried to such an extent that men would stake their very clothes, and even their beards, which might be used to stuff tennis-balls. In “Greene’s Tu Quoque” will be found a wonderfully realistic scene of a quarrel following a dispute over the cards and dice, and ending in a challenge for a duel. Then when the time came for him to reel homeward through the darkness with one sleepy page to light his way with a torch, our gallant would be either uproariously cheerful, or contentious, or maudlin, as his habit might be when in his cups. He would bellow out loose songs upon the night air, molest straggling by-passers, come sometimes into conflict with the watch, and once in a while, when luck went against him, might find himself lodged for the night in one of the prisons of the metropolis. So the day would end; and with it must close this part of our study. But, after all, very inadequate justice can be done to such a theme in so brief and rapid a sketch. We must go straight to the pages of Dekker, Greene, Nash, and Peele, if we would gain any adequate conception of the wilder aspects of Elizabethan social life.

* * * * *

In such a paper as the present, there is always danger lest the final impression left should be, if not a false, at any rate an inadequate one; for the temptation is strong to seize only the picturesque traits, and to pay such undue attention to grouping, color, and general effect, that we fail in preserving proper perspective, and throw portions of our description into unnatural relief. The risk of doing this is, of course, increased when, as in our own case, we take the point of view of the playwright and the popular writer, and study the world of men and affairs mainly through the medium of their pages. I trust none the less, that we have not erred on the side of painting life in Shakspere’s London in too bright or seductive colors. Yet, to tone down our picture, let us say a closing word about its darker aspects; for these were many, and they were very dark indeed.

As Mr. Swinburne has pointed out, one of the most difficult problems meeting the student of the Elizabethan drama, is that of reconciling the elements of lofty thought and gross passion, of high idealism and coarse savagery, which lie so close together, which are indeed bound up inextricably, in the very woof and texture of the plays of Shakspere’s time. The literature of the stage shows us with startling distinctness how in the world of the playwright there frequently went, along with the deepest and most original thought a revolting ferocity of manners, and along with a lofty sense of the beautiful and the pure a crude love of violence, a revelling in blood, a thirst for wanton outrage and low excitement. All these diverse elements are, separately, prominent enough in modern letters, as in modern civilization; what seems so strange and puzzling in our great romantic drama is the way in which they constantly blend in the most intimate association.

Now, these extraordinary incongruities are not alone to be found in the world of the playwright; they penetrated the life of Elizabethan society. To some phases of the coarse brutalism which formed one aspect of the complex spirit of the English Renaissance incidental reference has more than once been made. Did space permit, we might here add much corroborative testimony. But as space does not permit, I will content myself with accentuating very briefly the difference in temper between the age of Elizabeth and our own, as exemplified in one very crucial matter—in the treatment of the large criminal class.

We who are privileged to live in an epoch of growing humanity may well be startled and shocked at many of the facts brought to light by even a casual inquiry in this direction. Executions, be it remembered, were almost invariably public, and formed, as we have seen, not infrequent distractions in the monotonous round of life. Felons were hanged, drawn, and quartered; pirates were hanged on the seashore at low water; and capital punishment was in use for an enormous number of petty offences, including even theft from the person above the value of one shilling. The mere circumstance that we read of seventy-four persons being sentenced to death in one county in a single year, itself speaks volumes. Indeed, the severity of punishments was held something to boast of, and men were still of the opinion of Fortescue, who, in the reign of Henry the Sixth, had proudly proclaimed that “more men are hanged in England in one year than in France in seven, because the English have better parts.” Public malefactors of position were usually beheaded, and their heads exposed in prominent places, as on London Bridge or Temple Bar. On the tower of the former, Hentzner “counted above thirty” placed “on iron spikes.”[1] Witches were burnt alive; a horrible fate also reserved for women who killed their husbands, which crime stood on the statute-books not as murder, but as petty treason. Heretics, too, were frequently burnt. Perjury was punished by the pillory and branding, and rogues and vagabonds, irrespective of age and sex, were sent to the public stocks and whipping-post.

“In London, and within a mile, I ween,
There are of jails and prisons full eighteen,
And sixty whipping-posts, and stocks, and cages,”

writes Taylor, the Water Poet. Scolds were ducked, and many minor offences were rewarded by burning the hand, cropping the ears, and similar mutilations. Finally, felons refusing to plead were subjected to the _peine forte et dure_, notwithstanding the proud and oft-repeated boast that torture has always been unknown to the English law.

Footnote 1:

Allusions to the continuance of this revolting practice are numerous
as late as the eighteenth century. See, _e. g._, Pope’s “Essay on
Man,” iv., 251-252, and the famous anecdote of Johnson and Goldsmith
(Boswell, _anno_ 1773).

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Surely it is needless for us to go farther than all this, unless it be to add the striking fact that, despite such brutal severity in punishment, crimes and outrages of every description remained alarmingly common throughout the whole of the period with which we have been concerned. Enough has been said to throw in some of the heavier shadows necessary to complete the slight sketch we have been trying to furnish of the social life and every-day manners of Shakspere’s time.

* * * * *

With this as our last word, then, we take leave of “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” and become once more denizens of our own century. And here it would be easy, of course, to fall into the cheap Macaulay-vein of moralizing; to strike a contrast between present and past, point out all the manifold and magnificent achievements of modern civilization, and end with rhetorical rhapsodies over our “wondrous, wondrous age.” It would be easy, I say, to do this; and I doubt not that it would be effective. But when in my study of the literature of any bygone generation I make myself at home for a time among dead things and long-forgotten people, I do not, I must confess, find myself in any mood for brass-band celebrations. The feeling left with me is a vaguer and sadder one. For, as I turn back into our own world, I remember that this past was once verily and actually the present; that these dead things, these long-forgotten people, were once intensely alive; that the tragedy and the comedy of existence went on then as it goes on to-day; and that in the breasts of men and women fashioned like ourselves beat human hearts, after all, very like our own. Hope and disappointment, joy and despair; the memory of yesterday, the expectation of the morrow; the hunger and thirst of the spirit; the lust of the eye; the pride of life; the “ancient sorrow of man,”—all that goes to make up the sum total of our little earthly lot,—was their portion, too, as it will presently be the portion of the countless generations by which we in our turn shall be replaced. And thus, musing, I think of the nameless young men and maidens of that dim, far-off age, who repeated the sweet old story of love, as their fathers and mothers had done before them, as their distant descendants do to-day, while there was confusion in high places, and storm and struggle about the land. I think of the tears that were shed as gentle hearts broke in anguish; of the brave deeds wrought; of the tales of the faith of sturdy manhood and the trust of womanly devotion, which will never be retold. I think of the lives that ran their placid course; of the children that came as years went by, bringing “hope with them and forward-looking thoughts”; of mothers weeping over empty cradles; of tiny graves, long since obliterated, where many a bright promise found “its earthly close.” I think of lives that were successful, and of lives that were failures; of prophecies unfulfilled; of splendid ambitions realized only to bring the inevitable disillusion; of sordid aims accomplished; of vile things said and done. The whole dead world seems to take form and flesh in my imagination; the men and women start from the pages of the book I have been reading—a mad world, my masters, and a strange one; but behold, a world singularly, almost grotesquely, like our own. And then my thought takes a sudden spin; and this age of ours seems to slip some three centuries back into the past, and becomes weird, and phantasmal, and unreal. And I find myself peering across the misty years into this throbbing world of multitudinous enterprise and activity from the standpoint of an era when you and I will be long since forgotten—when no one will know how we toiled and suffered and loved and died, when no one will care where we lie at rest. How curious to think of it all in this way! And with what tempered enthusiasms and sobered judgments must we needs go back to take up again the burden of life knowing that the deep, silent current of time is sweeping us slowly into the great darkness, and that hereafter the tale will be told of us as it has been told generation after generation since the world began: Lo, their glory endured but for a season, and the fashion of it has passed away forever!

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Pepys and His Diary

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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?

Footnote 2:

As the pronunciation of our diarist’s name is often under discussion,
I subjoin, for the reader’s guidance in the matter, some clever
verses, originally published a few years ago in the London “Graphic”:—

“There are people, I’m told,—some say there are heaps,—
Who speak of the talkative Samuel as Peeps;
And some, so precise and pedantic their step is,
Who call the delightful old diarist, Pepys;
But those I think right, and I follow their steps,
Ever mention the garrulous gossip as Peps!”

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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.

Footnote 3:

A curious circumstance in connection with the first reading of the
Diary is worth mentioning. An indefatigable student, it is said,
toiled at its decipherment from twelve to fourteen hours a day for the
space of three or four years. All the while—such is the strange
untowardness of earthly things—Pepys had left in his library a
long-hand transcript of his short-hand account of Charles the Second’s
escape, and this, had it been known at the time, would have served the
purpose of the required key.

-----

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.

* * * * *

The author of this extraordinary book, despite some rather aristocratic connections, was the son of a not very successful tailor, and was born, perhaps in London, perhaps in Brampton, Huntingdonshire, (the point remains unsettled,) on 23d February, 1632. He seems to have been at one time at school in Huntingdon; but he afterwards entered regularly as a scholar of St. Paul’s, London, passing thence, in 1650, to the University of Cambridge. Of his college career we know little; but we have the record of one incident, interesting as foreshadowing the convivial tendencies which come out so often and so strongly in the pages of the Diary. In the Regents’ Book of Magdalene College appears the following highly suggestive entry:—

“Oct 21, 1653. Mem. That Peapys and Hind were solemnly
admonished by myself and Mr. Hill for having been scandalously
overserved with drink y^e night before. This was done in the
presence of all the fellows then resident, in Mr. Hill’s
chamber.

“[Signed] JOHN WOOD, Registrar.”

Yet, notwithstanding this episode, and whatever it may be taken to stand for as an exemplification of Pepys’s way of life, as an undergraduate he became the good friend of some of the most industrious of his contemporaries, and, we have reason to believe, acquitted himself in his own studies, if not brilliantly, still with a very fair measure of success. At all events, he took his bachelor’s degree, in 1653—the very year, it will be observed, of his bacchanalian misadventure,—and received his mastership seven years later. Meanwhile, as we learn from a passing note in the Diary, made a long while after, he dabbled in literary composition to the extent of beginning a romance, called “Love a Cheat.” The manuscript of this he tore up and destroyed on 30th January, 1663, adding to his chronicle of the event: “I liked it very well, and wondered a little at myself, at my vein at that time, when I wrote it, doubting that I cannot do so well now if I would try.” Pepys may not have shown himself in every emergency of life a strong man or a brave; but thus to sacrifice the first heir of his invention, even on finding it, after all, rather better than he had imagined—let us recognize here resolution and courage not by any means to be sneered at.