Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the
Diary by the picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the
number of those who can "surprise the manners in the face." Here we have
a mouth pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet
apt for weeping too; a nose great alike in character and dimensions; and
altogether a most fleshy, melting countenance. The face is attractive by
its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word _greedy_, but the
reader must not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred
one of _hungry_, for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better
things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face
of an artist; it is the face of a _viveur_--kindly, pleased and
pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the
shifting versatility of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly
to be called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may
balance and control another. The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida. Wherever he went, his steps were winged with the most eager expectation;
whatever he did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An
insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets
of knowledge filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported
him in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never
happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in
Holland he was "with child" to see any strange thing. Meeting some
friends and singing with them in a palace near the Hague, his pen fails
him to express his passion of delight, "the more so because in a heaven
of pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all famous
executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced
"with a broad wound," he says, "that makes my hand now shake to write of
it." He learned to dance, and was "like to make a dancer." He learned to
sing, and walked about Gray's Inn Fields "humming to myself (which is
now my constant practice) the trillo." He learned to play the lute, the
flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his
intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned
to compose songs, and burned to give forth "a scheme and theory of music
not yet ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle like a
bird exceeding well," he promised to return another day and give an
angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, "I took the Bezan back
with me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the
Hope, taking great pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing
when they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin
grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of
Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before
it had received the name. Boyle's "Hydrostatics" was "of infinite
delight" to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible
concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and
Aristotle. We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the
measurement of timber; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing
cordage; mathematics and accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships
from a model; and "looking and informing himself of the (naval) stores
with"--hark to the fellow!--"great delight." His familiar spirit of
delight was not the same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him
through life! He is only copying something, and behold, he "takes great
pleasure to rule the lines, and have the capital words wrote with red
ink"; he has only had his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold,
"it do please him exceedingly." A hog's harslett is "a piece of meat he
loves." He cannot ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must
exclaim, with breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When he is
bound for a supper-party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure." When he
has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear
carrying it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times." To go to Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other
birds, hear fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here
laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the
nightingales, I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again
"with great pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to
Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke through. He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two
agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's
tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled
tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty
moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the
time by playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in
the book of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest
women. When he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile
the way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets
of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to
be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures,
etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy
story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved
to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought
himself unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how
to eat alone"; pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and
ear must be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content. He
had no zest in a good dinner when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street
and in a periwig-maker's house"; and a collation was spoiled for him by
indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman's
service in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he
mentions that he went to bed "weary, _which I seldom am_"; and already
over thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it
is never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career,
as in all others, it is failure that kills. The man who enjoys so
wholly, and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is
just the man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his
right to fiddle on the leads, or to be "vexed to the blood" by a
solecism in his wife's attire; and we find in consequence that he was
always peevish when he was hungry, and that his head "aked mightily"
after a dispute.