It is thus that
respectable people desire to have their Greathearts address them,
telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, and
be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome reflection;
and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, becomes a manual of
worldly prudence, and a handybook for Pepys and the successful merchant. The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He has no idea of truth
except for the Diary. He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but
appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has
seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought
liberal when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously
ostentatious. I say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have
been taken for a fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely
suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous
periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions, not
foppishly before, nor dowdily behind, the central movement of his age. For long he durst not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances, would
have been improper; but a time comes, with the growth of his fortune,
when the impropriety has shifted to the other side, and he is "ashamed
to be seen in a hackney." Pepys talked about being "a Quaker or some
very melancholy thing"; for my part, I can imagine nothing so
melancholy, because nothing half so silly, as to be concerned about
such problems. But such respectability and the duties of society haunt
and burden their poor devotees; and what seems at first the very
primrose path of life, proves difficult and thorny like the rest. And
the time comes to Pepys, as to all the merely respectable, when he must
not only order his pleasures, but even clip his virtuous movements, to
the public pattern of the age. There was some juggling among officials
to avoid direct taxation; and Pepys, with a noble impulse, growing
ashamed of this dishonesty, designed to charge himself with £1000; but
finding none to set him an example, "nobody of our ablest merchants"
with this moderate liking for clean hands, he judged it "not decent"; he
feared it would "be thought vain glory"; and, rather than appear
singular, cheerfully remained a thief. One able merchant's countenance,
and Pepys had dared to do an honest act! Had he found one brave spirit,
properly recognised by society, he might have gone far as a disciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make
him believe, against the testimony of his senses, that Pen's venison
pasty stank like the devil; but, on the other hand, Sir William Coventry
can raise him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is with
Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he care for
office or emolument? "Thank God, I have enough of my own," says he, "to
buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife." And
again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an ungrateful
country shall have dismissed them from the field of public service;
Coventry living retired in a fine house, and Pepys dropping in, "it may
be, to read a chapter of Seneca." Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued
zealous and, for the period, pure in his employment. He would not be
"bribed to be unjust," he says, though he was "not so squeamish as to
refuse a present after," suppose the King to have received no wrong. His
new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier, he tells us with honest
complacency, will save the King a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred
pounds a year--a statement which exactly fixes the degree of the age's
enlightenment. But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too
high. It was an unending struggle for the man to stick to his business
in such a garden of Armida as he found this life; and the story of his
oaths, so often broken, so courageously renewed, is worthy rather of
admiration that the contempt it has received. Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry's influence, we find him
losing scruples and daily complying further with the age. When he began
the Journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic; merry enough, to be
sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Magdalene ale and his
acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season
with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble;
and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's theory, the better things
that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict. Where
there was "tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he
felt "ashamed, and went away"; and when he slept in church he prayed God
forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping
each other awake "from spite," as though not to sleep in church were an
obvious hardship; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service,
looking about him, with a perspective-glass, on all the pretty women. His favourite ejaculation, "Lord!" occurs but once that I have observed
in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63;
after which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with
here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a whale among the shoal. He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a
marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's
mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of
mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,
become his natural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring
courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved
with Saturnalian manners and companions that he was shot almost
unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668. That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk
and conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in
a powder-magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim of a
hideous disaster. So with our pleasant-minded Pepys and his
peccadilloes. All of a sudden, as he still trips dexterously enough
among the dangers of a double-faced career, thinking no great evil,
humming to himself the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that
matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences
of his acts. For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although
not the constant lover, of his wife,--for a man, besides, who was so
greatly careful of appearances,--the revelation of his infidelities was
a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the indignities that he
endured, are not to be measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly
incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail of suffering.