For in the Diary we
can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism; as when
he explains that his candle is going out, "which makes me write thus
slobberingly"; or as in this incredible particularity, "To my study,
where I only wrote thus much of this day's passages to this *, and so
out again"; or lastly, as here, with more of circumstance: "I staid up
till the bellman came by with his bell under my window, as _I was
writing of this very line_, and cried, 'Past one of the clock, and a
cold, frosty, windy morning.'" Such passages are not to be
misunderstood. The appeal to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable. He desires that dear, though unknown, gentleman keenly to realise his
predecessor; to remember why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall
(let us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the
early, windy morning, and the very line his own romantic self was
scribing at the moment. The man, you will perceive, was making
reminiscences--a sort of pleasure by ricochet, which comforts many in
distress, and turns some others into sentimental libertines: and the
whole book, if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work
of art to Pepys's own address. Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable attitude preserved by him
throughout his Diary, to that unflinching--I had almost said, that
unintelligent--sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. He
was not unconscious of his errors--far from it; he was often startled
into shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But
whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still
that entrancing _ego_ of whom alone he cared to write; and still sure of
his own affectionate indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and
the writer come to read what he had written. Whatever he did, or said,
or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a character of
his career; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or
than Alexander, so all should be faithfully set down. I have called his
Diary a work of art. Now when the artist has found something, word or
deed, exactly proper to a favourite character in play or novel, he will
neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act
mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness
of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither
disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his
adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and
enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part
of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he
has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty,
that I am ashamed to name them. It may be said that we all of us write
such a diary in airy characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a
distinction to be made; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an
account of our daily fortunes and behaviour, we too often weave a tissue
of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass
and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more
cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too
timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw
clearly and set down unsparingly. It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same
single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he
must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work
he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books
were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that someone might
ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains
and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and the thought,
although discouraged, must have warmed his heart. He was not such an
ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives,
the gun-cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let
some contemporary light upon the Journal, and Pepys was plunged for
ever in social and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of his
terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth,
he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy;
but in 1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his
tongue out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one
so grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts
I think we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not
acquiesced in, the thought of a far-distant publicity. The first is of
capital importance: the Diary was not destroyed. The second--that he
took unusual precautions to confound the cipher in "rogueish"
passages--proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other
reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were admiring the
"greatness of his behaviour" at the approach of death, he may have had a
twinkling hope of immortality. _Mens cujusque is est quisque_, said his
chosen motto; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and
foible in the pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind
him was indeed himself. There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable
of the desire of man for publicity and an enduring name. The greatness
of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also;
and, while contemporaries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity
with the news that his periwig was once alive with nits. But this
thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor
his deepest; it did not colour one word that he wrote; and the Diary,
for as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a private
pleasure for himself. It was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all
his pleasures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn
words, when he closed that confidant for ever: "And so I betake myself
to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the
grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being
blind, the good God prepare me." A LIBERAL GENIUS

Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic,
composing "a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own
to be) to all studies and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but the
Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his
portrait by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright's edition,
is a confirmation of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his
business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost
breaking his neck "to have the portrait full of shadows," and draping
him in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was
preoccupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the
essence of the man.