The Art of Letters | Page 2

me.
With these words the great book ends--the diary of one of the godliest
and most lecherous of men.
In some respects Mr. Pepys reminds one of a type that is now
commoner in Scotland, I fancy, than elsewhere. He himself seems at
one time to have taken the view that he was of Scottish descent. None
of the authorities, however, will admit this, and there is apparently no
doubt that he belonged to an old Cambridgeshire family that had come
down in the world, his father having dwindled into a London tailor. In
temperament, however, he seems to me to have been more Scottish
than the very Scottish Boswell. He led a double life with the same
simplicity of heart. He was Scottish in the way in which he lived with
one eye on the "lassies" and the other on "the meenister." He was
notoriously respectable, notoriously hard-working, a judge of sermons,
fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty. He had all the virtues of a K.C.B.
He was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you might find nowadays
crowing over his sins in Chelsea. He lived, so far as the world was
concerned, in the complete starch of rectitude. He was a pillar of
Society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have accepted
its orthodoxy. He was as grave a man as Holy Willie. Stevenson has
commented on the gradual decline of his primness in the later years of
the Diary. "His favourite ejaculation, 'Lord!' occurs," he declares, "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." As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys's use of the expression
"Lord!" has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists. His

primness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him. We
discover this even in the story of his relations with women. In 1665, for
instance, he writes with surprised censoriousness of Mrs. Penington:
There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered me
to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long.
Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as a man
mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she could have
suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and
I know not what.
It is a sad world for idealists.
Mr. Pepys's Puritanism, however, was something less than Mr. Pepys.
It was but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan. Mr.
Pepys was an appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen
have been since Chaucer. He was a walking appetite. And not an
entirely ignoble appetite either. He reminds one in some respects of the
poet in Browning's "How it strikes a Contemporary," save that he had
more worldly success. One fancies him with the same inquisitive
ferrule on the end of his stick, the same "scrutinizing hat," the same eye
for the bookstall and "the man who slices lemon into drink." "If any
cursed a woman, he took note." Browning's poet, however, apparently
"took note" on behalf of a higher power. It is difficult to imagine Mr.
Pepys sending his Diary to the address of the Recording Angel. Rather,
the Diary is the soliloquy of an egoist, disinterested and daring as a bad
boy's reverie over the fire.
Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by the
question whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its ultimate
publication. This seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working
of the human mind.
Those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys
wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant
no other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains
unnecessarily. Pepys was not the first human being to make his
confession in an empty confessional. Criminals, lovers and other

egoists, for lack of a priest, will make their confessions to a stone wall
or a tree. There is no more mystery in it than in the singing of birds.
The motive may be either to obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or
a desire to save and store up the very echoes and last drops of pleasure.
Human beings keep diaries for as many different reasons as they write
lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy, the main motive was a simple
happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure. The fact that so much of his
pleasure had to be