Such was the account he gave of himself to his
contemporaries; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language:
giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public servant. We turn to
the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to
his descendants. The entry begins in the same key with the letter,
blaming the "madness of the House of Commons" and "the base proceedings,
just the epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House
of Lords"; and then, without the least transition, this is how our
diarist proceeds: "To the Strand, to my bookseller's, and there bought
an idle, rogueish French book, 'L'escholle des Filles,' which I have
bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound,
because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may
not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it
should be found." Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more
clearly apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable; but
what about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was
ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the
shame in the pages of his daily journal? We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we
address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and
acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another,
as befits the nature and demands of the relation. Pepys's letter to
Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp
which he signed by the pseudonym of _Dapper Dicky_; yet each would be
suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in
this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with
his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of
his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to
march through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable to
others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp
we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the Diary,
and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose? Had
he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in
the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we
should have made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal
the "disgrace" of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole
affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we
can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary. Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her
husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an
agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys
the tell-tale document; and then--you disbelieve your eyes--down goes
the whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It
seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a
private book to prove he was not. You are at first faintly reminded of
some of the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment's
thought the resemblance disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to
edify; it is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes,
for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often
follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are
of a very formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in
Pepys you come upon good, substantive misdemeanours; beams in his eye of
which he alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal
nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief
and often engage the sympathies. Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world,
sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till
nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the
spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of
sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of
twelve. In our tender years we still preserve a freshness of surprise at
our prolonged existence; events make an impression out of all proportion
to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past
adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental
interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys. Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was
the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his
father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
"King's Head" and eat and drink "for remembrance of the old house
sake." He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his
old walks, "where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I
had the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman's company,
discourse and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." He goes
about weighing up the _Assurance_, which lay near Woolwich under water,
and cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in,
in Captain Holland's time"; and after revisiting the _Naseby_, now
changed into the _Charles_, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to
myself to see the ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that
he was cut for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive
such gratitude for their assistance, that for years, and after he had
begun to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that
family to dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor
Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past, although at times
they might express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them
this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the
"Confessions," or Hazlitt, who wrote the "Liber Amoris," and loaded his
essays with loving personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied
egotism? For the two things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is
the first that makes the second either possible or pleasing. But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf
of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was--if, for
instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were
jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after
years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognise
myself across the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come upon them
now, and not be moved one tittle--which shows that I have comparatively
failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys.