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 underwater, 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.  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 cowardly 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 some one 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.
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 fleshly, 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 improving
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.  But
nothing could divert him from his aim in life; his remedy in
care was the same as his delight in prosperity; it was with
pleasure, and with pleasure only, that he sought to drive out
sorrow; and, whether he was jealous of his wife or skulking
from a bailiff, he would equally take refuge in the theatre.
There, if the house be full and the company noble, if the
songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the play diverting,
this odd hero of the secret Diary, this private self-adorer,
will speedily be healed of his distresses.

Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a
tune upon the fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was
pleased yet more by the beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the
mere scenic attitude in life of his fellow-creatures.  He
shows himself throughout a sterling humanist.  Indeed, he who
loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of
knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his
neighbours.  And perhaps it is in this sense that charity may
be most properly said to begin at home.  It does not matter
what quality a person has: Pepys can appreciate and love him
for it.  He "fills his eyes" with the beauty of Lady
Castlemaine; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought
of her for years; if a woman be good-looking and not painted,
he will walk miles to have another sight of her; and even
when a lady by a mischance spat upon his clothes, he was
immediately consoled when he had observed that she was
pretty.  But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs.
Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James: "a
poor, religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing
but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that
mightily pleased me."  He is taken with Pen's merriment and
loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of
Coventry.  He is jolly with a drunken sailor, but listens
with interest and patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to
the story of a Quaker's spiritual trials and convictions.  He
lends a critical ear to the discourse of kings and royal
dukes.  He spends an evening at Vauxhall with "Killigrew and
young Newport - loose company," says he, "but worth a man's
being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner
of talk and lives."  And when a rag-boy lights him home, he
examines him about his business and other ways of livelihood
for destitute children.  This is almost half-way to the
beginning of philanthropy; had it only been the fashion, as
it is at present, Pepys had perhaps been a man famous for
good deeds.  And it is through this quality that he rises, at
times, superior to his surprising egotism; his interest in
the love affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is
filled with concern for my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only
knows by sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with her
in her successes; and it is not untrue, however strange it
seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved his maid Jane
because she was in love with his man Tom.

Let us hear him, for once, at length: "So the women and W.
Hewer and I walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep
was; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw
in my life.  We found a shepherd and his little boy reading,
far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him; so
I made the boy read to me, which he did with the forced tone
that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty; and
then I did give him something, and went to the father, and
talked with him.  He did content himself mightily in my
liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most
like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life,
and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in
my mind for two or three days after.  We took notice of his
woolen knit stockings of two colours mixed, and of his shoes
shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great
nails in the soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty; and
taking notice of them, 'Why,' says the poor man, 'the downes,
you see, are full of stones, and we are faine to shoe
ourselves thus; and these,' says he, 'will make the stones
fly till they ring before me.'  I did give the poor man
something, for which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to
cast stones with his horne crooke.  He values his dog
mightily, that would turn a sheep any way which he would have
him, when he goes to fold them; told me there was about
eighteen score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four
shillings a week the year round for keeping of them; and Mrs.
Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the
prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life."

And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's
pleasuring; with cups of milk, and glowworms, and people
walking at sundown with their wives and children, and all the
way home Pepys still dreaming "of the old age of the world"
and the early innocence of man.  This was how he walked
through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and his hand, you
will observe, not shut; and thus he observed the lives, the
speech, and the manners of his fellow-men, with prose
fidelity of detail and yet a lingering glamour of romance.

It was "two or three days after" that he extended this
passage in the pages of his journal, and the style has thus
the benefit of some reflection.  It is generally supposed
that, as a writer, Pepys must rank at the bottom of the scale
of merit.  But a style which is indefatigably lively,
telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of
everyday experience, which deals with the whole matter of a
life, and yet is rarely wearisome, which condescends to the
most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the
forthright current of the narrative, - such a style may be
ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of
mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit.  The first and
the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed
throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be
childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed and
assimilated by his unfeigned interest and delight.  The gusto
of the man speaks out fierily after all these years.  For the
difference between Pepys and Shelley, to return to that half-
whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not one of
degree; in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the
true prose of poetry - prose because the spirit of the man
was narrow and earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly
alive.  Hence, in such a passage as this about the Epsom
shepherd, the result upon the reader's mind is entire
conviction and unmingled pleasure.  So, you feel, the thing
fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than
you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, a homely touch
of Bunyan's, or a favoured reminiscence of your own.

There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not
one.  The tang was in the family; while he was writing the
journal for our enjoyment in his comely house in Navy
Gardens, no fewer than two of his cousins were tramping the
fens, kit under arm, to make music to the country girls.  But
he himself, though he could play so many instruments and pass
judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur.  It
is not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some
greater power to understand.  That he did not like
Shakespeare as an artist for the stage may be a fault, but it
is not without either parallel or excuse.  He certainly
admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on
the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not
to be" by heart.  Nor was he content with that; it haunted
his mind; he quoted it to himself in the pages of the Diary,
and, rushing in where angels fear to tread, he set it to
music.  Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the heroic
quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig
chose out to marry with his own mortal strains.  Some gust
from brave Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as
he sat tuning his sublime theorbo.  "To be or not to be.
Whether 'tis nobler" - "Beauty retire, thou dost my pity
move" - "It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O Rome;" - open
and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the
sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no timid,
spirit that selected such a range of themes.  Of "Gaze not on
Swans," I know no more than these four words; yet that also
seems to promise well.  It was, however, on a probable
suspicion, the work of his master, Mr. Berkenshaw - as the
drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young ladies'
seminary are the work of the professor attached to the
establishment.  Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in
his pupil.  The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist,
some leaven of the world still clogging him; and we find
Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the man who taught him
composition.  In relation to the stage, which he so warmly
loved and understood, he was not only more hearty, but more
generous to others.  Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, "a
man," says he, "who understands and loves a play as well as
I, and I love him for it."  And again, when he and his wife
had seen a most ridiculous insipid piece, "Glad we were," he
writes, "that Betterton had no part in it."  It is by such a
zeal and loyalty to those who labour for his delight that the
amateur grows worthy of the artist.  And it should be kept in
mind that, not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced to
recognise his betters.  There was not one speck of envy in
the whole human-hearted egotist.


RESPECTABILITY.


When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present
degraded meaning of the word, they are usually suspected of a
taste for clay pipes and beer cellars; and their performances
are thought to hail from the OWL'S NEST of the comedy.  They
have something more, however, in their eye than the dulness
of a round million dinner parties that sit down yearly in old
England.  For to do anything because others do it, and not
because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own
right, is to resign all moral control and captaincy upon
yourself, and go post-haste to the devil with the greater
number.  We smile over the ascendency of priests; but I had
rather follow a priest than what they call the leaders of
society.  No life can better than that of Pepys illustrate
the dangers of this respectable theory of living.  For what
can be more untoward than the occurrence, at a critical
period and while the habits are still pliable, of such a
sweeping transformation as the return of Charles the Second?
Round went the whole fleet of England on the other tack; and
while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely
course by the stars and their own private compass, the cock-
boat, Pepys, must go about with the majority among "the
stupid starers and the loud huzzas."

The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause
as by a positive need for countenance.  The weaker and the
tamer the man, the more will he require this support; and any
positive quality relieves him, by just so much, of this
dependence.  In a dozen ways, Pepys was quite strong enough
to please himself without regard for others; but his positive
qualities were not co-extensive with the field of conduct;
and in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful
precision, in the footprints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy.
In morals, particularly, he lived by the countenance of
others; felt a slight from another more keenly than a
meanness in himself; and then first repented when he was
found out.  You could talk of religion or morality to such a
man; and by the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy
and apprehension, he could rise, as it were dramatically, to
the significance of what you said.  All that matter in
religion which has been nicknamed other-worldliness was
strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that should make a
man rudely virtuous, following right in good report and ill
report, was foolishness and a stumbling-block to Pepys.  He
was much thrown across the Friends; and nothing can be more
instructive than his attitude towards these most interesting
people of that age.  I have mentioned how he conversed with
one as he rode; when he saw some brought from a meeting under
arrest, "I would to God," said he, "they would either
conform, or be more wise and not be catched;" and to a Quaker
in his own office he extended a timid though effectual
protection.  Meanwhile there was growing up next door to him
that beautiful nature William Pen.  It is odd that Pepys
condemned him for a fop; odd, though natural enough when you
see Pen's portrait, that Pepys was jealous of him with his
wife.  But the cream of the story is when Pen publishes his
SANDY FOUNDATION SHAKEN, and Pepys has it read aloud by his
wife.  "I find it," he says, "so well writ as, I think, it is
too good for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious
sort of book, and NOT FIT FOR EVERYBODY TO READ."  Nothing is
more galling to the merely respectable than to be brought in
contact with religious ardour.  Pepys had his own foundation,
sandy enough, but dear to him from practical considerations,
and he would read the book with true uneasiness of spirit;
for conceive the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen
were to convert him!  It was a different kind of doctrine
that he judged profitable for himself and others.  "A good
sermon of Mr. Gifford's at our church, upon 'Seek ye first
the kingdom of heaven.'  A very excellent and persuasive,
good and moral sermon.  He showed, like a wise man, that
righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and
villainy."  It is thus that respect. able 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
so 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 pounds; 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.  She was violent, threatening him with the tongs;
she was careless of his honour, driving him to insult the
mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to discard;
worst of all, she was hopelessly inconsequent, in word and
thought and deed, now lulling him with reconciliations, and
anon flaming forth again with the original anger.  Pepys had
not used his wife well; he had wearied her with jealousies,
even while himself unfaithful; he had grudged her clothes and
pleasures, while lavishing both upon himself; he had abused
her in words; he had bent his fist at her in anger; he had
once blacked her eye; and it is one of the oddest particulars
in that odd Diary of his, that, while the injury is referred
to once in passing, there is no hint as to the occasion or
the manner of the blow.  But now, when he is in the wrong,
nothing can exceed the long-suffering affection of this
impatient husband.  While he was still sinning and still
undiscovered, he seems not to have known a touch of penitence
stronger than what might lead him to take his wife to the
theatre, or for an airing, or to give her a new dress, by way
of compensation.  Once found out, however, and he seems to
himself to have lost all claim to decent usage.  It is
perhaps the strongest instance of his externality.  His wife
may do what she pleases, and though he may groan, it will
never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left but
tears and the most abject submission.  We should perhaps have
respected him more had he not given way so utterly - above
all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an
insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet;
but somehow I believe we like him better as he was.

The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have
stamped the impression of this episode upon his mind.  For
the remaining years of his long life we have no Diary to help
us, and we have seen already how little stress is to be laid
upon the tenor of his correspondence; but what with the
recollection of the catastrophe of his married life, what
with the natural influence of his advancing years and
reputation, it seems not unlikely that the period of
gallantry was at an end for Pepys; and it is beyond a doubt
that he sat down at last to an honoured and agreeable old age
among his books and music, the correspondent of Sir Isaac
Newton, and, in one instance at least the poetical counsellor
of Dryden.  Through all this period, that Diary which
contained the secret memoirs of his life, with all its
inconsistencies and escapades, had been religiously
preserved; nor, when he came to die, does he appear to have
provided for its destruction.  So we may conceive him
faithful to the end to all his dear and early memories; still
mindful of Mrs. Hely in the woods at Epsom; still lighting at
Islington for a cup of kindness to the dead; still, if he
heard again that air that once so much disturbed him,
thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him to
his wife.



CHAPTER IX - JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN



I. - THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT FEMALE RULE.


WHEN first the idea became widely spread among men that the
Word of God, instead of being truly the foundation of all
existing institutions, was rather a stone which the builders
had rejected, it was but natural that the consequent havoc
among received opinions should be accompanied by the
generation of many new and lively hopes for the future.
Somewhat as in the early days of the French Revolution, men
must have looked for an immediate and universal improvement
in their condition.  Christianity, up to that time, had been
somewhat of a failure politically.  The reason was now
obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the
body politic traced at last to its efficient cause.  It was
only necessary to put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to
set themselves strenuously to realise in life the Holy
Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities would surely pass
away.  Thus, in a pageant played at Geneva in the year 1523,
the world was represented as a sick man at the end of his
wits for help, to whom his doctor recommends Lutheran
specifics. (1)  The Reformers themselves had set their
affections in a different world, and professed to look for
the finished result of their endeavours on the other side of
death.  They took no interest in politics as such; they even
condemned political action as Antichristian: notably, Luther
in the case of the Peasants' War.  And yet, as the purely
religious question was inseparably complicated with political
difficulties, and they had to make opposition, from day to
day, against principalities and powers, they were led, one
after another, and again and again, to leave the sphere which
was more strictly their own, and meddle, for good and evil,
with the affairs of State.  Not much was to be expected from
interference in such a spirit.  Whenever a minister found
himself galled or hindered, he would be inclined to suppose
some contravention of the Bible.  Whenever Christian liberty
was restrained (and Christian liberty for each individual
would be about coextensive with what he wished to do), it was
obvious that the State was Antichristian.  The great thing,
and the one thing, was to push the Gospel and the Reformers'
own interpretation of it.  Whatever helped was good; whatever
hindered was evil; and if this simple classification proved
inapplicable over the whole field, it was no business of his
to stop and reconcile incongruities.  He had more pressing
concerns on hand; he had to save souls; he had to be about
his Father's business.  This short-sighted view resulted in a
doctrine that was actually Jesuitical in application.  They
had no serious ideas upon politics, and they were ready, nay,
they seemed almost bound, to adopt and support whichever
ensured for the moment the greatest benefit to the souls of
their fellow-men.  They were dishonest in all sincerity.
Thus Labitte, in the introduction to a book (2) in which he
exposes the hypocritical democracy of the Catholics under the
League, steps aside for a moment to stigmatise the
hypocritical democracy of the Protestants.  And nowhere was
this expediency in political questions more apparent than
about the question of female sovereignty.  So much was this
the case that one James Thomasius, of Leipsic, wrote a little
paper (3) about the religious partialities of those who took
part in the controversy, in which some of these learned
disputants cut a very sorry figure.

(1) Gaberel's EGLIST DE GENEVE, i. 88.
(2) LA DEMOCRATIE CHEZ LES PREDICATEURS DE LA LIGUE.
(3) HISTORIA AFFECTUUM SE IMMISCENTIUM CONTROVERSIAE DE
GYNAECOCRATIA.  It is in his collected prefaces, Leipsic,
1683.

Now Knox has been from the first a man well hated; and it is
somewhat characteristic of his luck that he figures here in
the very forefront of the list of partial scribes who trimmed
their doctrine with the wind in all good conscience, and were
political weathercocks out of conviction.  Not only has
Thomasius mentioned him, but Bayle has taken the hint from
Thomasius, and dedicated a long note to the matter at the end
of his article on the Scotch Reformer.  This is a little less
than fair.  If any one among the evangelists of that period
showed more serious political sense than another, it was
assuredly Knox; and even in this very matter of female rule,
although I do not suppose any one nowadays will feel inclined
to endorse his sentiments, I confess I can make great
allowance for his conduct.  The controversy, besides, has an
interest of its own, in view of later controversies.

John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as
minister, jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English
refugees.  He and his congregation were banished from England
by one woman, Mary Tudor, and proscribed in Scotland by
another, the Regent Mary of Guise.  The coincidence was
tempting: here were many abuses centring about one abuse;
here was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by
one anomalous power.  He had not far to go to find the idea
that female government was anomalous.  It was an age, indeed,
in which women, capable and incapable, played a conspicuous
part upon the stage of European history; and yet their rule,
whatever may have been the opinion of here and there a wise
man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the great
bulk of their contemporaries.  It was defended as an anomaly.
It, and all that accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside
as a single exception; and no one thought of reasoning down
from queens and extending their privileges to ordinary women.
Great ladies, as we know, had the privilege of entering into
monasteries and cloisters, otherwise forbidden to their sex.
As with one thing, so with another.  Thus, Margaret of
Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one,
seemingly, saw fit to call her conduct in question; but
Mademoiselle de Gournay, Montaigne's adopted daughter, was in
a controversy with the world as to whether a woman might be
an author without incongruity.  Thus, too, we have Theodore
Agrippa d'Aubigne writing to his daughters about the learned
women of his century, and cautioning them, in conclusion,
that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a
middling station, and should be reserved for princesses. (1)
And once more, if we desire to see the same principle carried
to ludicrous extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in
God the Abbot of Brantome, claiming, on the authority of some
lord of his acquaintance, a privilege, or rather a duty, of
free love for great princesses, and carefully excluding other
ladies from the same gallant dispensation. (2)  One sees the
spirit in which these immunities were granted; and how they
were but the natural consequence of that awe for courts and
kings that made the last writer tell us, with simple wonder,
how Catherine de Medici would "laugh her fill just like
another" over the humours of pantaloons and zanies.  And such
servility was, of all things, what would touch most nearly
the republican spirit of Knox.  It was not difficult for him
to set aside this weak scruple of loyalty.  The lantern of
his analysis did not always shine with a very serviceable
light; but he had the virtue, at least, to carry it into many
places of fictitious holiness, and was not abashed by the
tinsel divinity that hedged kings and queens from his
contemporaries.  And so he could put the proposition in the
form already mentioned: there was Christ's Gospel persecuted
in the two kingdoms by one anomalous power plainly, then, the
"regiment of women" was Antichristian.  Early in 1558 he
communicated this discovery to the world, by publishing at
Geneva his notorious book - THE FIRST BLAST OF THE TRUMPET
AGAINST THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN. (3)

(1) Oeuvres de d'Aubigne, i. 449.
(2) Dames Illustres, pp. 358-360.
(3) Works of John Knox, iv. 349.

As a whole, it is a dull performance; but the preface, as is
usual with Knox, is both interesting and morally fine.  Knox
was not one of those who are humble in the hour of triumph;
he was aggressive even when things were at their worst.  He
had a grim reliance in himself, or rather in his mission; if
he were not sure that he was a great man, he was at least
sure that he was one set apart to do great things.  And he
judged simply that whatever passed in his mind, whatever
moved him to flee from persecution instead of constantly
facing it out, or, as here, to publish and withhold his name
from the title-page of a critical work, would not fail to be
of interest, perhaps of benefit, to the world.  There may be
something more finely sensitive in the modern humour, that
tends more and more to withdraw a man's personality from the
lessons he inculcates or the cause that he has espoused; but
there is a loss herewith of wholesome responsibility; and
when we find in the works of Knox, as in the Epistles of
Paul, the man himself standing nakedly forward, courting and
anticipating criticism, putting his character, as it were, in
pledge for the sincerity of his doctrine, we had best waive
the question of delicacy, and make our acknowledgments for a
lesson of courage, not unnecessary in these days of anonymous
criticism, and much light, otherwise unattainable, on the
spirit in which great movements were initiated and carried
forward.  Knox's personal revelations are always interesting;
and, in the case of the "First Blast," as I have said, there
is no exception to the rule.  He begins by stating the solemn
responsibility of all who are watchmen over God's flock; and
all are watchmen (he goes on to explain, with that fine
breadth of spirit that characterises him even when, as here,
he shows himself most narrow), all are watchmen "whose eyes
God doth open, and whose conscience he pricketh to admonish
the ungodly."  And with the full consciousness of this great
duty before him, he sets himself to answer the scruples of
timorous or worldly-minded people.  How can a man repent, he
asks, unless the nature of his transgression is made plain to
him?  "And therefore I say," he continues, "that of necessity
it is that this monstriferous empire of women (which among
all enormities that this day do abound upon the face of the
whole earth, is most detestable and damnable) be openly and
plainly declared to the world, to the end that some may
repent and be saved."  To those who think the doctrine
useless, because it cannot be expected to amend those princes
whom it would dispossess if once accepted, he makes answer in
a strain that shows him at his greatest.  After having
instanced how the rumour of Christ's censures found its way
to Herod in his own court, "even so," he continues, "may the
sound of our weak trumpet, by the support of some wind (blow
it from the south, or blow it from the north, it is of no
matter), come to the ears of the chief offenders.  BUT
WHETHER IT DO OR NOT, YET DARE WE NOT CEASE TO BLOW AS GOD
WILL GIVE STRENGTH.  FOR WE ARE DEBTORS TO MORE THAN TO
PRINCES, TO WIT, TO THE GREAT MULTITUDE OF OUR BRETHREN, of
whom, no doubt, a great number have heretofore offended by
error and ignorance."