The Art of Letters | Page 4

did his best to turn London into an anticipatory harem. We get a pleasant picture of a little Roundhead Sultan in such a sentence as "At night had Mercer comb my head and so to supper, sing a psalm and to bed."
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It may seem unfair to over-emphasize the voluptuary in Mr. Pepys, but it is Mr. Pepys, the promiscuous amourist; stringing his lute (God forgive him!) on a Sunday, that is the outstanding figure in the Diary. Mr. Pepys attracts us, however, in a host of other aspects--Mr. Pepys whose nose his jealous wife attacked with the red-hot tongs as he lay in bed; Mr. Pepys who always held an anniversary feast on the date on which he had been cut for the stone; Mr. Pepys who was not "troubled at it at all" as soon as he saw that the lady who had spat on him in the theatre was a pretty one; Mr. Pepys drinking; Mr. Pepys among his dishes; Mr. Pepys among princes; Mr. Pepys who was "mightily pleased" as he listened to "my aunt Jenny, a poor, religious, well-meaning good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty"; Mr. Pepys, as he counts up his blessings in wealth, women, honour and life, and decides that "all these things are ordered by God Almighty to make me contented"; Mr. Pepys as, having just refused to see Lady Pickering, he comments, "But how natural it is for us to slight people out of power!"; Mr. Pepys who groans as he sees his office clerks sitting in more expensive seats than himself at the theatre. Mr. Pepys is a man so many-sided, indeed, that in order to illustrate his character one would have to quote the greater part of his Diary. He is a mass of contrasts and contradictions. He lives without sequence except in the business of getting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by Samuel Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure of Samuel Pepys, and had no doubt that it was good.

II.--JOHN BUNYAN
Once, when John Bunyan had been preaching in London, a friend congratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. "You need not remind me of that," replied Bunyan. "The Devil told me of it before I was out of the pulpit." On another occasion, when he was going about in disguise, a constable who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he knew that devil Bunyan. "Know him?" said Bunyan. "You might call him a devil if you knew him as well as I once did." We have in these anecdotes a key to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and a humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr. Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eye of the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in the ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of his hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them from orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot," he asked his followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent to the place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When he relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose and ungodly" woman, he begins the story: "One day, as I was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wonted manner, there sat within the woman of the house, who heard me." This passion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further on in Grace Abounding, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing but the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and nevertheless remained self-righteous and "ignorant of Jesus Christ," he introduces the next episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "But upon a day the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, talking about the things of God." That seems to me to