The Art of Letters | Page 4

in our graves (as
Shakespeare resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such dreams
as this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of death, as we are
this plague time.
He praises this dream at the same time as "the best that ever was
dreamt." Mr. Pepys's idea of Paradise, it would be seen, was that
commonly attributed to the Mohammedans. Meanwhile he 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."
* * * * *
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