Another book which Bunyan had read was Luther's Commentary on the Galatians. The present writer possesses a copy of that volume dated 1786, at the close of which there are fourteen pages, on which long lists of names are printed. The names are those of weavers, shoe-makers, and all sorts of tradesmen in the western Scottish towns of Kilmarnock, Paisley, and others of that neighbourhood, who had subscribed for a translation of the commentary that they might read it in their own tongue. This curious fact reminds us that the book had among the pious people of our country an audience almost as enthusiastic as Bunyan himself was. Another of his books, and the only one quoted by name in the Pilgrim's Progress or Grace Abounding, with the exception of Luther on Galatians, is Foxe's Book of Martyrs, traces of which are unmistakable in such incidents as the trial and death of Faithful and in other parts.

In these few volumes may be summed up the entire literary knowledge which Bunyan is known to have possessed. He stands apart from mere book-learning, and deals with life rather through his eyes and ears directly than through the medium of books. But then those eyes and ears of his were no ordinary organs; and his imagination, whose servants they were, was quick to enlist every vital and suggestive image and idea for its own uses. Thus the rich store of observation which he had already laid up through the medium of puppet plays, fragments of song and popular story, was all at his disposal when he came to need it. Further, even in his regenerate days, there was no dimming of the imaginative faculty nor of the observant. The whole neighbourhood in which he lived was an open book, in which he read the wonderful story of life in many tragic and comic tales of actual fact; and in the prison where he spent twelve years, he must often have heard from his fellow-prisoners such fragments as they knew and remembered, with which doubtless they would beguile the tedium of their confinement. That would be for the most part in the first and second imprisonments, extending from the years 1660 to 1672. The third imprisonment was a short affair of only some nine months, spent in the little prison upon the bridge of Bedford, where there would be room for very few companions. The modern bridge crosses the river at almost exactly the same spot; and if you look over the parapet you may see, when the river is low, traces of what seem to be the foundations of the old prison bridge.

When we would try to estimate the processes by which the great allegory was built up, the first fact that strikes us is its extreme aloofness from current events which must have been very familiar to him. In others of his works he tells many stories of actual life, but these are of a private and more or less gossiping nature, many of them fantastic and grotesque, such as those appalling tales of swearers, drunkards, and other specially notorious sinners being snatched away by the devil—narratives which bear the marks of crude popular imagination in details like the actual smell of sulphur left behind. In the whole Pilgrim's Progress there is no reference whatever to the Civil War, in which we know that Bunyan had fought, although there are certain parts of it which were probably suggested by events of that campaign. The allegory is equally silent concerning the Great Fire and the Great Plague of London, which were both fresh in the memory of every living man. The only phrase which might have been suggested by the Fire, is that in which the Pilgrim says, "I hear that our little city is to be destroyed by fire"—a phrase which obviously has much more direct connection with the destruction of Sodom than with that of London. The only suggestions of those disastrous latter years of the reign of Charles the Second, are some doubtful allusions to the rise and fall of persecution, few of which can be clearly identified with any particular events.

There are several interesting indications that Bunyan made use of recent and contemporary secular literature. The demonology of the Pilgrim's Progress is quite different from that of the Holy War. It used to be suggested that Bunyan had altered his views in consequence of the publication of Milton's Paradise Regained, which appeared in 1671. That was when it was generally supposed that he had written the Pilgrim's Progress in his earlier imprisonment. If, as is now conceded, it was in the later imprisonment that he wrote the book, this theory loses much of its plausibility, for Milton published his Paradise Regained before the first edition of the Pilgrim's Progress was penned. It is, of course, always possible that between the Pilgrim's Progress and the Holy War Bunyan may have seen Milton's work, or may have been told about it, for he certainly changed his demonology and made it more like Milton's. Again, there are certain passages in Spenser's Faerie Queene which bear so close a resemblance to Bunyan's description of the Celestial City, that it is difficult not to suppose that either directly or indirectly that poem had influenced Bunyan's creation; while in at least one of his songs he approaches so near both the language and the rhythm of a song of Shakespeare's as to make it very probable that he had heard it sung.[2]

These suppositions are not meant in any way to detract from the originality of the great allegory, but rather to link the writer in with that English literature of which he is so conspicuous an ornament. They are no more significant and no less, than the fact that so much of the geography of the Pilgrim's Progress seems not to have been created by his imagination, but to have been built up from well-remembered landscapes. From his prison window he could not but see the ruins of old Bedford Castle, which stood demolished upon its hill even in his time. This, together with Cainhoe Castle, only a few miles away, may well have suggested the Castle of Despair in Bypath Meadow near the River of God. Again, memories of Elstow play a notable part in the story. A cross stood there, at the foot of which, when he was playing the game of cat upon a certain Sunday, the voice came to his soul with its tremendous question, "Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to hell?" There stood the Moot Hall as it stands to-day, in which, during his worldly days, he had danced with the rest of the villagers and gained his personal knowledge of Vanity Fair. There, as he tells us expressly, is the wicket gate, the rough old oak and iron gate of Elstow parish church. Close beside it, just as you read in the story, stands that great tower which suggested a devil's castle beside the wicket gate, whence Satan showered his arrows on those who knocked below. Not only so, but there was a special reason why for Bunyan that ancient church tower may well have been symbolic of the stronghold of the devil; for it had bells in it, and he was so fond of bell-ringing that it got upon his conscience and became his darling sin. It is easy to make light of his heart-searchings about so innocent an employment, but doubtless there were other things that went along with it. We have all seen those large drinking-vessels, known as bell-ringers' jugs; and these perhaps may suggest an explanation of the sense of sin which burdened his conscience so heavily. Anyhow, there the tower stands, and in the Gothic doorway of it there are one or two deeply cut grooves, obviously made by the ropes of the bell-ringers when, instead of standing below their ropes, they preferred the open air, and drew the ropes through the archway of the door, so as to cut into its moulding. The little fact gains much significance in the light of Bunyan's own confession that he was so afraid that the bell would fall upon him and kill him as a punishment from God, that he used to go outside the door to ring it. Then again there was the old convent at Elstow, where, long before Bunyan's time, nuns had lived, who were known to tradition as "the ladies of Elstow." Very aristocratic and very human ladies they seem to have been, given to the entertainment of their friends in the intervals of their tasteful devotion, and occasionally needing a rebuke from headquarters. Yet it seems not improbable that there is some glorified memory of those ladies in the inhabitants of the House Beautiful, which house itself appears to have been modelled upon Houghton House on the Ampthill heights, built by Sir Philip Sidney's sister but a century before. The silver mine of Demas might seem to have come from some far-off source in chap-book or romance, until we remember that at the village of Pulloxhill, which had been the original home of the Bunyan family, and near which Bunyan was arrested and brought for examination to the house of Justice Wingate, there are the actual remains of an ancient gold mine whose tradition still lingers among the villagers.

All these things seem to indicate that the great allegory is by no means so remote from the earth as has sometimes been imagined; and perhaps the most touching commentary upon this statement is the curious and very unlovely burying-ground in Bunhill fields, cut through by a straight path that leads from one busy thoroughfare to another. A few yards to the left of that path is the tomb and monument of John Bunyan, while at an equal distance to the right lies Daniel Defoe. The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe are perhaps the two best-known stories in the world, and they are not so far remote from one another as they seem.

Nor was it only in the outward material with which he worked that John Bunyan had much in common with the romance and poetry of England. He could indeed write verses which, for sheer doggerel, it would be difficult to match, but in spite of that there was the authentic note of poetry in him. Some of his work is not only vigorous, inspiring, and full of the brisk sense of action, but has an unconscious strength and worthiness of style, whose compression and terseness have fulfilled at least one of the canons of high literature. Take, for example, the lines on Faithful's death—

"Now Faithful, play the man, speak for thy God: Fear not the wicked's malice, nor their rod: Speak boldly, man, the truth is on thy side; Die for it, and to life in triumph ride."

Or take this as a second example, from his Prison Meditations—

"Here come the angels, here come saints, Here comes the Spirit of God, To comfort us in our restraints Under the wicked's rod.

This gaol to us is as a hill, From whence we plainly see Beyond this world, and take our fill Of things that lasting be.

We change our drossy dust for gold, From death to life we fly: We let go shadows, and take hold Of immortality."

This whole poem has in it not merely the bright march of a very vigorous mind, but also a great many of the elements which long before had built up the ancient romances. In it, and in much else that he wrote, he finds a congenial escape from the mere middle-class respectability of his time, and ranges himself with the splendid chivalry both of the past and of the present. There is an elfin element in him as there was in Chaucer, which now and again twinkles forth in a quaint touch of humour, or escapes from the merely spiritual into an extremely interesting human region.

In Grace Abounding he very pleasantly tells us that he could have written in a much higher style if he had chosen to do so, but that for our sakes he has refrained. He does, however, sometimes "step into" his finer style. There is some exquisite pre-Raphaelite work that comes unexpectedly upon the reader, in which he is not only a poet, but a writer capable of seeing and of describing the most highly coloured and minute detail: "Besides, on the banks of this river on either side were green trees, that bore all manner of fruit...." "On either side of the river was also a meadow, curiously beautified with lilies; and it was green the year long." At other times he affrights us with a sudden outburst of the most terrifying imagination, as in the close of the poem of The Fly at the Candle—

"At last the Gospel doth become their snare, Doth them with burning hands in pieces tear."

His imagination was sometimes as quaint and sweet as at other times it could be lurid and powerful. Upon a Snail is not a very promising subject for a poem, but its first lines justify the experiment—

"She goes but softly, but she goeth sure; She stumbles not, as stronger creatures do."

He can adopt the methods of the stately poets of nature, and break into splendid descriptions of natural phenomena—

"Look, look, brave Sol doth peep up from beneath, Shews us his golden face, doth on us breathe; Yea, he doth compass us around with glories, Whilst he ascends up to his highest stories, Where he his banner over us displays, And gives us light to see our works and ways."

Again in the art of childlike interest and simplicity he can write such lines as these—

OF THE CHILD WITH THE BIRD ON THE BUSH

"My little bird, how canst thou sit And sing amidst so many thorns? Let me but hold upon thee get, My love with honour thee adorns.

'Tis true it is sunshine to-day, To-morrow birds will have a storm; My pretty one, come thou away, My bosom then shall keep thee warm.

My father's palace shall be thine, Yea, in it thou shalt sit and sing; My little bird, if thou'lt be mine, The whole year round shall be thy spring.

I'll keep thee safe from cat and cur, No manner o' harm shall come to thee: Yea, I will be thy succourer, My bosom shall thy cabin be."

The last line might have been written by Ben Jonson, and the description of sunrise in the former poem might almost have been from Chaucer's pen.

Yet the finest poetry of all is the prose allegory of the Pilgrim's Progress. English prose had taken many centuries to form, in the moulding hands of Chaucer, Malory, and Bacon. It had come at last to Bunyan with all its flexibility and force ready to his hand. He wrote with virgin purity, utterly free from mannerisms and affectations; and, without knowing himself for a writer of fine English, produced it.

The material of the allegory also is supplied from ancient sources. One curious paragraph in Bunyan's treatise entitled Sighs from Hell, gives us a broad hint of this. "The Scriptures, thought I then, what are they? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings price. Alack! what is Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on Horseback or Bevis of Southampton. Give me some book that teaches curious Arts, that tells old Fables." In The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven there is a longer list of such romances as these, including Ellen of Rummin, and many others. As has been already stated, these tales of ancient folklore would come into his hands either by recitation or in the form of chap-books. The chap-book literature of Old England was most voluminous and interesting. It consisted of romances and songs, sold at country fairs and elsewhere, and the passing reference which we have quoted proves conclusively, what we might have known without any proof, that Bunyan knew them.

George on Horseback has been identified by Professor Firth with the Seven Champions of England, an extremely artificial romance, which may be taken as typical of hundreds more of its kind. The 1610 edition of it is a very lively book with a good deal of playing to the gallery, such as this: "As for the name of Queen, I account it a vain title; for I had rather be an English lady than the greatest empress in the world." There is not very much in this romance which Bunyan has appropriated, although there are several interesting correspondences. It is very courtly and conventional. The narrative is broken here and there by lyrics, quite in Bunyan's manner, but it is difficult to imagine Bunyan, with his direct and simple taste, spending much time in reading such sentences as the following: "By the time the purple-spotted morning had parted with her grey, and the sun's bright countenance appeared on the mountain-tops, St. George had rode twenty miles from the Persian Court." On the other hand, when Great-Heart allows Giant Despair to rise after his fall, showing his chivalry in refusing to take advantage of the fallen giant, we remember the incident of Sir Guy and Colebrand in the Seven Champions.

"Good sir, an' it be thy will, Give me leave to drink my fill, For sweet St. Charity, And I will do thee the same deed Another time if thou have need, I tell thee certainly."

St. George, like Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, traverses an Enchanted Vale, and hears "dismal croakings of night ravens, hissing of serpents, bellowing of bulls, and roaring of monsters."[3] St. Andrew traverses a land of continual darkness, the Vale of Walking Spirits, amid similar sounds of terror, much as the pilgrims of the Second Part of Bunyan's story traverse the Enchanted Ground. And as these pilgrims found deadly arbours in that land, tempting them to repose which must end in death, so St. David was tempted in an Enchanted Garden, and fell flat upon the ground, "when his eyes were so fast locked up by magic art, and his waking senses drowned in such a dead slumber, that it was as impossible to recover himself from sleep as to pull the sun out of the firmament."

Bevis of Southampton has many points in common with St. George in the Seven Champions. The description of the giant, the escape of Bevis from his dungeon, and a number of other passages show how much was common stock for the writers of these earlier romances. There is the same rough humour in it from first to last, and the wonderful swing and stride of vigorous rhyming metre. Of the humour, one quotation will be enough for an example. It is when they are proposing to baptize the monstrous giant at Cologne, whom Bevis had first conquered and then engaged as his body-servant. At the christening of Josian, wife of Bevis, the Bishop sees the giant.

"'What is,' sayde he, 'this bad vysage?' 'Sir,' sayde Bevys, 'he is my page— I pray you crysten hym also, Thoughe he be bothe black and blo!' The Bysshop crystened Josian, That was as white as any swan; For Ascaparde was made a tonne, And whan he shulde therein be done, He lept out upon the brenche And sayde: 'Churle, wylt thou me drenche? The devyl of hel mot fetche the I am to moche crystened to be!' The folke had gode game and laughe, But the Bysshop was wrothe ynoughe."

There is a curious passage which is almost exactly parallel to the account of the fight with Apollyon in the Pilgrim's Progress, and which was doubtless in Bunyan's mind when he wrote that admirable battle sketch—

"Beves is swerde anon upswapte, He and the geaunt togedre rapte; And delde strokes mani and fale, The nombre can i nought telle in tale. The geaunt up is clubbe haf, And smot to Beves with is staf, But his scheld flegh from him thore, Three acres brede and somedel more, Tho was Beves in strong erur And karf ato the grete levour, And on the geauntes brest a-wonde That negh a-felde him to the grounde. The geaunt thoughte this bataile hard, Anon he drough to him a dart, Throgh Beves scholder he hit schet, The blold ran doun to Beves' fet, The Beves segh is owene blod Out of his wit he wex negh wod, Unto the geaunt ful swithe he ran, And kedde that he was doughti man, And smot ato his nekke bon; The geant fel to grounde anon."

It is part of his general sympathy with the spirit of the romances that Bunyan's giants were always real giants to him, and he evidently enjoyed them for their own sake as literary and imaginative creations, as well as for the sake of any truths which they might be made to enforce. Despair and Slay-Good are distinct to his imagination. His interest remains always twofold. On the one hand there is allegory, and on the other hand there is live tale. Sometimes the allegory breaks through and confuses the tale a little, as when Mercy begs for the great mirror that hangs in the dining-room of the shepherds, and carries it with her through the remainder of her journey. Sometimes the allegory has to stop in order that a sermon may be preached on some particular point of theology, and such sermons are by no means short. Still the story is so true to life that its irresistible simplicity and naturalness carry it on and make it immortal. When we read such a conversation as that between old Honest and Mr. Standfast about Madam Bubble, we feel that the tale has ceased to be an allegory altogether and has become a novel. This is perhaps more noticeable in the Second Part than in the First. The First Part is indeed almost a perfect allegory; although even there, from time to time, the earnestness and rush of the writer's spirit oversteps the bounds of consistency and happily forgets the moral because the story is so interesting, or forgets for a moment the story because the moral is so important. In the Second Part the two characters fall apart more definitely. Now you have delightful pieces of crude human nature, naive and sparkling. Then you have long and intricate theological treatises. Neither the allegorical nor the narrative unity is preserved to anything like the same extent as on the whole is the case in Part I. The shrewd and humorous touches of human nature are especially interesting. Bunyan was by no means the gentle saint who shrank from strong language. When the gate of Doubting Castle is opening, and at last the pilgrims have all but gone free, we read that "the lock went damnable hard." When Great-Heart is delighted with Mr. Honest, he calls him "a cock of the right kind." The poem On Christian Behaviour, which we have quoted, contains the lines—

"When all men's cards are fully played, Whose will abide the light?"

These are quaint instances of the way in which even the questionable parts of the unregenerate life of the dreamer came in the end to serve the uses of his religion.

There are many gems in the Second Part of the Pilgrim's Progress which are full of mother-wit and sly fun. Mr. Honest confesses, "I came from the town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of Destruction." Then there is Mr. Fearing, that morbidly self-conscious creature, who is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass. He is a man who can never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company with his illimitable and anxious introspection. Yet, in Vanity Fair, when practical facts have to be faced instead of morbid fancies and inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple, Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of the way and become as they."

Every now and then these natural touches of portraiture rise to a true sublimity, as all writing that is absolutely true to the facts of human nature tends to do. Great-Heart says to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, "Let me see thy sword," and when he has taken it in his hand and looked at it for awhile, he adds, "Ha! it is a right Jerusalem blade." That sword lingers in Bunyan's imagination, for, at the close of Valiant's life, part of his dying speech is this "My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles."

Bunyan is so evidently an idealist and a prince of spiritual men, that no one needs to point out this characteristic of the great dreamer, nor to advertise so obvious a thing as his spiritual idealism. We have accordingly taken that for granted and left it to the reader to recognise in every page for himself. We have sought in this to show what has sometimes been overlooked, how very human the man and his work are. Yet his humanism is ever at the service of the spirit, enlivening his book and inspiring it with a perpetual and delicious interest, but never for a moment entangling him again in the old yoke of bondage, from which at his conversion he had been set free. For the human as opposed to the divine, the fleshly as the rival of the spiritual, he has an open and profound contempt, which he expresses in no measured terms in such passages as that concerning Adam the First and Madam Wanton. These are for him sheer pagans. At the cave, indeed, which his pilgrim visits at the farther end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we read that Pope and Pagan dwelt there in old time, but that Pagan has been dead many a day. Yet the pagan spirit lives on in many forms, and finds an abiding place and home in Vanity Fair. As Professor Firth has pointed out, Ben Jonson, in his play Bartholomew Fair, had already told the adventures of two Puritans who strayed into the Fair, and who regarded the whole affair as the shop of Satan. There were many other Fairs, such as that of Sturbridge, and the Elstow Fair itself, which was instituted by the nuns on the ground close to their convent, and which is held yearly to the present day. Such Fairs as these have been a source of much temptation and danger to the neighbourhood, and represent in its popular form the whole spirit of paganism at its worst.

All the various elements of Bunyan's world live on in the England of to-day. Thackeray, with a stroke of characteristic genius, has expanded and applied the earlier conception of paganism in his great novel whose title Vanity Fair is borrowed from Bunyan. But the main impression of the allegory is the victory of the spiritual at its weakest over the temporal at its mightiest. His descriptions of the supper and bed chamber in the House Beautiful, and of the death of Christiana at the end of the Second Part, are immortal writings, in the most literal sense, amid the shows of time. They have indeed laid hold of immortality not for themselves only, but for the souls of men. Nothing could sum up the whole story of Bunyan better than the legend of his flute told by Mr. S.S. M'Currey in his book of poems entitled In Keswick Vale. The story is that in his prison Bunyan took out a bar from one of the chairs in his cell, scooped it hollow, and converted it into a flute, upon which he played sweet music in the dark and solitary hours of the prison evening. The jailers never could find out the source of that music, for when they came to search his cell, the bar was replaced in the chair, and there was no apparent possibility of flute-playing; but when the jailers departed the music would mysteriously recommence. It is very unlikely that this legend is founded upon fact, or indeed that Bunyan was a musician at all (although we do have from his pen one touching and beautiful reference to the finest music in the world being founded upon the bass), but, like his own greater work, the little legend is an allegory. The world for centuries has heard sweet music from Bunyan, and has not known whence it came. It has seemed to most men a miracle, and indeed they were right in counting it so. Yet there was a flute from which that music issued, and the flute was part of the rough furniture of his imprisoned world. He was no scholar, nor delicate man of belles lettres, like so many of his contemporaries. He took what came to his hand; and in this lecture we have tried to show how much did come thus to his hand that was rare and serviceable for the purposes of his spirit, and for the expression of high spiritual truth.



LECTURE VI

PEPYS' DIARY

It is doubtful whether any of Bunyan's contemporaries had so strong a human interest attaching to his person and his work as Samuel Pepys. There is indeed something in common to the two men,—little or nothing of character, but a certain naivete and sincerity of writing, which makes them remind one of each other many times. All the more because of this does the contrast between the spirit of the two force itself upon every reader; and if we should desire to find a typical pagan to match Bunyan's spirituality and idealism, it would be difficult to go past Samuel Pepys.

There were, as everybody knows, two famous diarists of the Restoration period, Pepys and Evelyn. It is interesting to look at the portraits of the two men side by side. Evelyn's face is anxious and austere, suggesting the sort of stuff of which soldiers or saints are made. Pepys is a voluptuous figure, in the style of Charles the Second, with regular and handsome features below his splendid wig, and eyes that are both keen and heavy, penetrating and luxurious. These two men (who, in the course of their work, had to compare notes on several occasions, and between whom we have the record of more than one meeting) were among the most famous gossips of the world. But Evelyn's gossip is a succession of solemnities compared with the racy scandal, the infantile and insatiable curiosity, and the incredible frankness of the pagan diarist.

Look at his face again, and you will find it impossible not to feel a certain amount of surprise. Of all the unlikely faces with which history has astonished the readers of books, there are none more surprising than those of three contemporaries in the later seventeenth century. Claverhouse, with his powerful character and indomitable will, with his Titanic daring and relentless cruelty, has the face of a singularly beautiful young girl. Judge Jeffreys, whose delight in blood was only equalled by the foulness and extravagance of his profanity, looks in his picture the very type of spiritual wistfulness. Samuel Pepys, whose large oval eyes and clear-cut profile suggest a somewhat voluptuous and very fastidious aristocrat, was really a man of the people, sharp to a miracle in all the detail of the humblest kind of life, and apparently unable to keep from exposing himself to scandal in many sorts of mean and vulgar predicament.

Since the deciphering and publication of his Diary, a great deal has been written concerning it. The best accounts of it are Henry B. Wheatley's Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in, and Robert Louis Stevenson's little essay in his Short Studies of Men and Books. The object of the present lecture is not to give any general account of the time and its public events, upon which the Diary touches at a thousand points, but rather to set the spirit of this man in contrast with that of John Bunyan, which we have just considered. The men are very typical, and any adequate conception of the spirit of either will give a true cross-section of the age in which he lived. Pepys, it must be confessed, is much more at home in his times than Bunyan ever could be. One might even say that the times seem to have been designed as a background for the diarist. There is as little of the spirit of a stranger and pilgrim in Pepys, even in his most pathetic hours, as there is in John Bunyan the spirit of a man at home, even in his securest. It was a very pagan time, and Pepys is the pagan par excellence of that time, the bright and shining example of the pagan spirit of England.

His lot was cast in high places, to which he rose by dint of great ability and indomitable perseverance in his office. He talks with the King, the Duke of York, the Archbishop, and all the other great folks of the day; and no volume has thrown more light on the character of Charles the Second than his. We see the King at the beginning kissing the Bible, and proclaiming it to be the thing which he loves above all other things. He rises early in the morning, and practises others of the less important virtues. We see him touching all sorts of people for the King's evil, a process in which Pepys is greatly interested at first, but which palls when it has lost its novelty. Similarly, the diarist is greatly excited on the first occasion when he actually hears the King speak, but soon begins to criticise him, finding that he talks very much like other people. He describes the starvation of the fleet, the country sinking to the verge of ruin, and the maudlin scenes of drunkenness at Court, with a minuteness which makes one ashamed even after so long an interval. However revolting or shameful the institution may be, the fact that it is an institution gives it zest for the strange mind of Pepys. He is, however, capable also of moralising. "Oh, that the King would mind his business!" he would exclaim, after having delighted himself and his readers with the most droll accounts of His Majesty's frivolities. "How wicked a wretch Cromwell was, and yet how much better and safer the country was in his hands than it is now." And often he will end the bewildering account with some such bitter comment as the assertion "that every one about the Court is mad."

In politics he had been a republican in his early days, and when Charles the First's head fell at Whitehall, he had confided to a friend the dangerous remark that if he were to preach a sermon on that event he would choose as his text the words, "The memory of the wicked shall rot." The later turn of events gave him abundant opportunities for repenting of that indiscretion, and he repents at intervals all through his Diary. For now he is a royalist in his politics, having in him not a little of the spirit of the Vicar of Bray, and of Bunyan's Mr. By-ends.

The political references lead him beyond England, and we hear with consternation now and again about the dangerous doings of the Covenanters in Scotland. We hear much also of France and Holland, and still more of Spain. Outside the familiar European lands there is a fringe of curious places like Tangier, which is of great account at that time, and is destined in Pepys' belief to play an immense part in the history of England, and of the more distant Bombain in India, which he considers to be a place of little account. Here and there the terror of a new Popish plot appears. The kingdom is divided against itself, and the King and the Commons are at drawn battle with the Lords, while every one shapes his views of things according as his party is in or out of power.

Three great historic events are recorded with singular minuteness and interest in the Diary, namely, the Plague, the Dutch War, and the Fire of London.

As to the Plague, we have all the vivid horror of detail with which Defoe has immortalised it, with the additional interest that here no consecutive history is attempted, but simply a record of daily impressions of the streets and houses. On his first sight of the red cross upon a door, the diarist cries out, "Lord, have mercy upon us," in genuine terror and pity. The coachman sickens on his box and cannot drive his horses home. The gallant draws the curtains of a sedan chair to salute some fair lady within, and finds himself face to face with the death-dealing eyes and breath of a plague-stricken patient. Few people move along the streets, and at night the passenger sees and shuns the distant lights of the link-boys guiding the dead to their burial. A cowardly parson flies upon some flimsy excuse from his dangerous post, and makes a weak apology on his first reappearance in the pulpit. Altogether it is a picture unmatched in its broken vivid flashes, in which the cruelty and wildness of desperation mingle with the despairing cry of pity.

The Dutch War was raging then, not on the High Seas only, but at the very gates of England; and Pepys, whose important and responsible position as Clerk of the Acts of the Navy gave him much first-hand information, tells many great stories in his casual way. We hear the guns distinctly and loud, booming at the mouth of the Thames. The press-gang sweeps the streets, and starving women, whose husbands have been taken from them, weep loudly in our ears. Sailors whose wages have not been paid desert their ships, in some cases actually joining the Dutch and fighting against their comrades. One of the finest passages gives a heartrending and yet bracing picture of the times. "About a dozen able, lusty, proper men came to the coach-side with tears in their eyes, and one of them that spoke for the rest began, and said to Sir W. Coventry, 'We are here a dozen of us, that have long known and loved, and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Mings, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any other to offer after him, and in revenge of him. All we have is our lives; if you will please to get His Royal Highness to give us a fire-ship among us all, here are a dozen of us, out of all which, choose you one to be commander; and the rest of us, whoever he is, will serve him; and, if possible, do that which shall show our memory of our dead commander, and our revenge.' Sir W. Coventry was herewith much moved, as well as I, who could hardly abstain from weeping, and took their names, and so parted."

Perhaps, however, the finest work of all is found in the descriptions of the Fire of London. From that night when he is awakened by the red glare of the fire in his bedroom window, on through the days and weeks of terror, when no man knew how long he would have a home, we follow by the light of blazing houses the story of much that is best and much that is worst in human nature. The fire, indeed, cleanses the city from the last dregs of the plague which are still lingering there, but it also stirs up the city until its inhabitants present the appearance of ants upon a disturbed ant-hill. And not the least busy among them, continually fussing about in all directions, is the diarist himself, eagerly planning for the preservation of his money, dragging it hither and thither from hiding-place to hiding-place in the city, and finally burying it in bags at dead of night in a garden. Nothing is too small for him to notice. The scrap of burnt paper blown by the wind to a lady's hand, on which the words are written, "Time is, it is done," is but one of a thousand equally curious details.

His own character, as reflected in the narrative of these events, is often little to his credit, and the frank and unblushing selfishness of his outlook upon things in general is as amusing as it is shameful. And yet, on the other hand, when most men deserted London, Pepys remained in it through the whole dangerous time of the plague, taking his life in his hand and dying daily in his imagination in spite of the quaint precautions against infection which he takes care on every occasion to describe. Through the whole dismal year, with plague and fire raging around him, he sticks to his post and does his work as thoroughly as the disorganised circumstances of his life allow. If we could get back to the point of view of those who thought about Pepys and formed a judgment of him before his Diary had been made public, we should be confronted with the figure of a man as different from the diarist as it is possible for two men to be. His contemporaries took him for a great Englishman, a man who did much for his country, and whose character was a mirror of all the national and patriotic ideals. His public work was by no means unimportant, even in a time so full of dangers and so critical for the destinies of England. Little did the people who loved and hated him in his day and afterwards dream of the contents of that small volume, so carefully written in such an unintelligible cipher, locked nightly with its little key, and hidden in some secure place. When at last the writing was deciphered, there came forth upon us, from the august and honourable state in which the Navy Commissioner had lain so long, this flood of small talk, the greatest curiosity known to English literature. Other men than Pepys have suffered in reputation from the yapping of dogs and the barn-door cackle that attacked their memories. England blushed as she heard the noise when the name of Carlyle became the centre of such commotion. But if Samuel Pepys has suffered in the same way he has no one to thank for it but himself; for, if his own hand-writing had not revealed it, no one could possibly have guessed it from the facts of his public career. Yet what a rare show it is, that multitude of queer little human interests that intermingle with the talk about great things! It may have been quite wrong to translate it, and undoubtedly much of it was disreputable enough for any man to write, yet it will never cease to be read; nor will England cease to be glad that it was translated, so long as the charm of history is doubled by touches of strange imagination and confessions of human frailty.

Pepys' connection with literature is that rather of a virtuoso than of a student in the strict sense of the term. He projected a great History of the Navy, which might have immortalised him in a very different fashion from that of the immortality which the Diary has achieved. But his life was crowded with business and its intervals with pleasures. The weakness of his eyes also militated against any serious contribution to literature, and instead of the History, for which he had gathered much material and many manuscripts, he gave us only the little volume entitled Memoirs of the Navy, which, however, shows a remarkable grasp of his subject, and of all corresponding affairs, such as could only have been possessed by a man of unusually thorough knowledge of his business. He collected what was for his time a splendid library, consisting of some three thousand volumes, now preserved in his College (Magdalene College, Cambridge), very carefully arranged and catalogued. We read much of this library while it is accumulating—much more about the mahogany cases in which the books were to stand than about the books themselves, or his own reading of them. The details of their arrangement were very dear to his curious mind. He tells us that where the books would not fit exactly to the shelves, but were smaller than the space, he had little gilded stilts made, adjusted to the size of each book, and placed under the volumes, which they lifted to the proper height. Little time can have been left over for the study of at least the stiffer works in that library, although there are many notes which show that he was in some sense a reader, and that books served the same purpose as events and personalities in leading him up and down the byways of what he always found to be a curious and interesting world.

But the immortal part of Pepys is undoubtedly his Diary. Among others of the innumerable curious interests which this man cultivated was that of studying the secret ciphers which had been invented and used by literary people in the past. From his knowledge of these he was enabled to invent a cipher of his own, or rather to adopt one which he altered somewhat to serve his uses. Having found this sufficiently secret code, he was now able to gratify his immense interest in himself and his inordinate personal vanity by writing an intimate narrative of his own life. The Diary covers nine and a half years in all, from January 1660 to May 1669. For nearly a century and a half it lay dead and silent, until Rev. J. Smith, with infinite diligence and pains, discovered the key to it, and wrote his translation. A later translation has been made by Rev. Mynors Bright, which includes some passages by the judgment of the former translator considered unnecessary or inadvisable.

Opinions differ as to the wisdom, and indeed the morality, of forcing upon the public ear the accidentally discovered secrets which a dead man had guarded so carefully. There is, of course, the possibility that, as some think, Pepys desired that posterity should have the complete record in all its frankness and candour. If this be so, one can only say that the wish is evidence of a morbid and unbalanced mind. It seems much more probable that he wrote the Diary for the luxury of reading it to himself, always intending to destroy it before his death. But a piece of work so intimate as this is, in a sense, a living part of the man who creates it, and one can well imagine him putting off the day of its destruction, and grudging that it should perish with all its power of awakening old chords of memory and revitalising buried years. For his own part he was no squeamish moralist and if it were only for his own eyes he would enjoy passages which the more fastidious public might judge differently.

So it comes to pass that this amazing omnium gatherum of a book is among the most living of all the gifts of the past to the present, telling everything and telling it irresistibly. His hat falls through a hole, and he writes down all about the incident as faithfully as he describes the palace of the King of France, and the English war with Holland. His nature is amazingly complicated, and yet our judgment of it is simplified by his passion for telling everything, no matter how discreditable or how ignoble the detail may be. He is a great man and a great statesman, and he is the liveliest of our English crickets on the hearth. One set of excerpts would present him as the basest, another set as the pleasantest and kindliest of men; and always without any exception he is refreshing by his intense and genial interest in the facts of the world. Of the many summaries of himself which he has given us, none is more characteristic than the following, with which he closes the month of April of the year 1666: "Thus ends this month; my wife in the country, myself full of pleasure and expence; in some trouble for my friends, and my Lord Sandwich, by the Parliament, and more for my eyes, which are daily worse and worse, that I dare not write or read almost anything." He is essentially a virtuoso who has been forced by circumstances into the necessity of being also a public man, and has developed on his own account an extraordinary passion for the observation of small and wayside things. At the high table of those times, where Milton and Bunyan sit at the mighty feast of English literature, he is present also: but he is under the table, a mischievous and yet observant child, loosening the neckerchiefs of those who are too drunk, and picking up scraps of conversation which he will retail outside. There is something peculiarly pathetic in the whole picture. One remembers Defoe, who for so many years lived in the reputation of honourable politics and in the odour of such sanctity as Robinson Crusoe could give, until the discovery of certain yellow papers revealed the base political treachery for which the great island story had been a kind of anodyne to conscience. So Samuel Pepys would have passed for a great naval authority and an anxious friend of England when her foes were those of her own household, had he only been able to make up his mind to destroy these little manuscript volumes.

Why did he write them, one still asks? Readers of Robert Browning's poems, House and Shop, will remember the scorn which that poet pours upon any one who unlocks his heart to the general public. And these narrations of Pepys' are certainly of such a kind that if he intended them to be read by any public in any generation of England, he must be set down as unique among sane men. Stevenson indeed considers that there was in the Diary a side glance at publication, but the proof which he adduces from the text does not seem sufficient to sustain so remarkable a freak of human nature, nor does the fact that on one occasion Pepys set about destroying all his papers except the Diary, appear to prove very much one way or another. Stevenson calls it inconsistent and unreasonable in a man to write such a book and to preserve it unless he wanted it to be read. But perhaps no writing of diaries is quite reasonable; and as for his desire to have it read by others than himself, we find that his Diary was so close a secret that he expresses regret for having mentioned it to Sir William Coventry. No other man ever heard of it in Pepys' lifetime, "it not being necessary, nor maybe convenient, to have it known."

Why, then, did he write it? Why does anybody write a diary? Probably the answer nearest to the truth will be that every one finds himself interesting, and some people have so keen an interest in themselves that it becomes a passion, clamorous to be gratified. Now as Bacon tells us, "Writing maketh an exact man," and the writing of diaries reduces to the keenest vividness our own impressions of experience and thoughts about things. Pepys was, above all other men, interested in himself. He was intensely in love with himself. The beautiful, jealous, troublesome, and yet inevitable Mrs. Pepys was but second in her husband's affections after all. He was his own wife. One remembers fashionable novels of the time of Evelina or the Mysteries of Udolpho, and recollects how the ladies there speak lover-like of their diaries, and, when writing them, feel themselves always in the best possible company. For Pepys, his Diary does not seem to have been so much a refuge from daily cares and worries, nor a preparation for the luxury of reading it in his old age, as an indulgence of intense and poignant pleasure in the hour of writing.

His interest in himself was quite extraordinary. When his library was collected and his books bound and gilded they were doubtless a treasured possession of which he was hugely proud. But this was not so much a possession as it was a kind of alter ego, a fragment of his living self, hidden away from all eyes but his own. No trifle in his life is too small for record. He cannot change his seat in the office from one side of the fireplace to another without recording it. The gnats trouble him at an inn in the country. His wig takes fire and crackles, and he is mighty merry about it until he discovers that it is his own wig that is burning and not somebody else's. He visits the ships, and, remembering former days, notes down without a blush the sentence, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in." Any one could have written the Diary, so far as intellectual or even literary power is concerned, though perhaps few would have chosen precisely Pepys' grammar in which to express themselves. But nobody else that ever lived could have written it with such sheer abandonment and frankness. He has a positive talent, nay, a genius for self-revelation, for there must be a touch of genius in any man who is able to be absolutely true. Other men have struggled hard to gain sincerity, and when it is gained the struggle has made it too conscious to be perfectly sincere. Pepys, with utter unconsciousness, is sincere even in his insincerities. Some of us do not know ourselves and our real motives well enough to attempt any formal statement of them. Others of us may suspect ourselves, but would die before we would confess our real motives even to ourselves, and would fiercely deny them if any other person accused us of them. But this man's barriers are all down. There is no reserve, but frankness everywhere and to an unlimited extent. There is no pose in the book either of good or bad, and it is one of the very few books of which such a statement could be made. He has been accused of many things, but never of affectation. The bad actions are qualified by regrets, and the disarmed critic feels that they have lost any element of tragedy which they might otherwise have had. The good actions are usually spoiled by some selfish addendum which explains and at the same time debases them. Surely the man who could do all this constantly through so many hundreds of pages, must be in his way a unique kind of genius, to have so clear an eye and so little self-deception.

The Diary is full of details, for he is the most curious man in the world. One might apply to him the word catholicity if it were not far too big and dignified an epithet. The catholicity of his mind is that of the Old Curiosity Shop. The interest of the book is inexhaustible, because to him the whole world was just such a book. His world was indeed

So full of a number of things He was sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Like Chaucer's Pardoner he was "meddlesome as a fly." Now he lights upon a dane's skin hung in a church. Again, upon a magic-lantern. Yet again upon a traitor's head, and the prospect of London in the distance. He will drink four pints of Epsom water. He will learn to whistle like a bird, and he will tell you a tale of a boy who was disinherited because he crowed like a cock. He will walk across half the country to see anything new. His heart is full of a great love of processions, raree-shows of every kind, and, above all, novelty. His confession that the sight of the King touching for the evil gave him no pleasure because he had seen it before, applies to most things in his life. For such a man, this world must indeed have been an interesting place.

We join him in well-nigh every meal he sits down to, from the first days when they lived so plainly, on to the greater times of the end, when he gives a dinner to his friends, which was "a better dinner than they understood or deserved." He delights in all the detail of the table. The cook-maid, whose wages were L4 per annum, had no easy task to satisfy her fastidious master, and Mrs. Pepys must now and then rise at four in the morning to make mince-pies. Any new kind of meat or drink especially delights him. He finds ortolans to be composed of nothing but fat, and he often seems, in his thoughts on other nations, to have for his first point of view the sight of foreigners at dinner. But this is only part of the insatiable and omnivorous interest in odds and ends which is everywhere apparent. The ribbons he has seen at a wedding, the starving seamen who are becoming a danger to the nation, the drinking of wine with a toad in the glass, a lightning flash that melted fetters from the limbs of slaves, Harry's chair (the latest curiosity of the drawing-rooms, whose arms rise and clasp you into it when you sit down), the new Messiah, who comes with a brazier of hot coals and proclaims the doom of England—these, and a thousand other details, make up the furniture of this most miscellaneous mind.

Everything in the world amuses him, and from first to last there is an immense amount of travelling, both physical and mental. With him we wander among companies of ladies and gentlemen walking in gardens, or are rowed up and down the Thames in boats, and it is always exciting and delightful. That is a kind of allegory of the man's view of life. But nothing is quite so congenial to him, after all, as plays at the theatre. One feels that he would never have been out of theatres had it been possible, and in order to keep himself to his business he has to make frequent vows (which are generally more or less broken) that he will not go to see a play again until such and such a time. When the vow is broken and the play is past he lamentably regrets the waste of resolution, and stays away for a time until the next outburst comes. The plays were then held in the middle of the day, and must have cut in considerably upon the working-time of business men; although, to be sure, the office hours began with earliest morning, and by the afternoon things were growing slacker. The light, however, was artificial, and the flare of the candles often hurt his eyes, and gave him a sufficient physical reason to fortify his moral ones for abstention. His taste in the dramatic art would commend itself to few moderns. He has no patience with Shakespeare, and speaks disparagingly of Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Othello; while he constantly informs us that he "never saw anything so good in his life" as the now long-forgotten productions of little playwrights of his time. He would, we suspect, prefer at all times a puppet show to a play; partly, no doubt, because that was the fashion, and partly because that type of drama was nearer his size. Throughout the volumes of the Diary there are few things of which he speaks with franker and more enthusiastic delight than the enjoyment which he derives from punchinello.

Next to the delight which he derived from the theatre must be mentioned that which he continually found in music. He seems to have made an expert and scientific study of it, and the reader hears continually the sound of lutes, harpsichords, violas, theorbos, virginals, and flageolets. He takes great numbers of music lessons, but quarrels with his teacher from time to time. He praises extravagantly such music as he hears, or criticises it unsparingly, passing on one occasion the desperate censure "that Mrs. Turner sings worse than my wife."

His interest in science is as curious and miscellaneous as his interest in everything else. He was indeed President of the Royal Society of his time, and he is immensely delighted with Boyle and his new discoveries concerning colours and hydrostatics. Yet so rare a dilettante is he, in this as in other things, that we find this President of the Royal Society bringing in a man to teach him the multiplication table. He has no great head for figures, and we find him listening to long lectures upon abstruse financial questions, not unlike the bimetallism discussions of our own day, which he finds so clear, while he is listening, that nothing could be clearer, but half an hour afterwards he does not know anything whatever about the subject.

Under the category of his amusements, physic must be included; for, like other egoists, he was immensely interested in his real or imaginary ailments, and in the means which were taken to cure them. On some days he will sit all day long taking physic. He derives an immense amount of amusement from the process of doctoring himself, and still more from writing down in all their detail both his symptoms and their treatment. His pharmacopoeia is by no means scientific, for he includes within it charms which will cure one of anything, and he always keeps a hare's foot by him, and will sometimes tell of troubles which came to him because he had forgotten it.

He is constantly passing the shrewdest of judgments upon men and things, or retailing them from the lips of others. "Sir Ellis Layton is, for a speech of forty words, the wittiest man that ever I knew in my life, but longer he is nothing." "Mighty merry to see how plainly my Lord and Povy do abuse one another about their accounts, each thinking the other a fool, and I thinking they were not either of them, in that point, much in the wrong." "How little merit do prevail in the world, but only favour; and that, for myself, chance without merit brought me in; and that diligence only keeps me so, and will, living as I do among so many lazy people that the diligent man becomes necessary, that they cannot do anything without him." "To the Cocke-pitt where I hear the Duke of Albemarle's chaplain make a simple sermon: among other things, reproaching the imperfection of humane learning, he cried, 'All our physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is not able to number the days of a man'—which, God knows, is not the fault of arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing." "The blockhead Albemarle hath strange luck to be loved, though he be, and every man must know it, the heaviest man in the world, but stout and honest to his country." "He advises me in what I write to him, to be as short as I can, and obscure." "But he do tell me that the House is in such a condition that nobody can tell what to make of them, and, he thinks, they were never in before; that everybody leads and nobody follows." "My Lord Middleton did come to-day, and seems to me but a dull, heavy man; but he is a great soldier, and stout, and a needy Lord." A man who goes about the world making remarks of that kind, would need a cipher in which to write them down. His world is everything to him, and he certainly makes the most of it so far as observation and remark are concerned.

If Pepys' curiosity and infinitely varied shrewdness and observation may be justly regarded as phenomenal, the complexity of his moral character is no less amazing. He is full of industry and ambition, reading for his favourite book Bacon's Faber Fortunae, "which I can never read too often." He is "joyful beyond myself that I cannot express it, to see, that as I do take pains, so God blesses me, and has sent me masters that do observe that I take pains." Again he is "busy till night blessing myself mightily to see what a deal of business goes off a man's hands when he stays at it." Colonel Birch tells him "that he knows him to be a man of the old way of taking pains."

This is interesting in itself, and it is a very marked trait in his character, but it gains a wonderful pathos when we remember that this infinite taking of pains was done in a losing battle with blindness. There is a constantly increasing succession of references in the Diary to his failing eyesight and his fears of blindness in the future. The references are made in a matter-of-fact tone, and are as free from self-pity as if he were merely recording the weather or the date. All the more on that account, the days when he is weary and almost blind with writing and reading, and the long nights when he is unable to read, show him to be a very brave and patient man. He consults Boyle as to spectacles, but fears that he will have to leave off his Diary, since the cipher begins to hurt his eyes. The lights of the theatre become intolerable, and even reading is a very trying ordeal, notwithstanding the paper tubes through which he looks at the print, and which afford him much interest and amusement. So the Diary goes on to its pathetic close:—"And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my Journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear; and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be anything, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand.

"And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!—S.P."

It is comforting to know that, in spite of these fears, he did not grow blind, but preserved a certain measure of sight to the end of his career.

In regard to money and accounts, his character and conduct present the same extraordinary mixture as is seen in everything else that concerns him. Money flows profusely upon valentines, gloves, books, and every sort of thing conceivable; yet he grudges the price of his wife's dress although it is a sum much smaller than the cost of his own. He allows her L30 for all expenses of the household, and she is immensely pleased, for the sum is much larger than she had expected. The gift to her of a necklace worth L60 overtops all other generosity, and impresses himself so much that we hear of it till we are tired. A man in such a position as his, is bound to make large contributions to public objects, both in the forms of donations and of loans; but caution tempers his public spirit. A characteristic incident is that in which he records his genuine shame that the Navy Board had not lent any money towards the expenses caused by the Fire and the Dutch War. But when the loan is resolved upon, he tells us, with delicious naivete, how he rushes in to begin the list, lest some of his fellows should head it with a larger sum, which he would have to equal if he came after them. He hates gambling,—it was perhaps the one vice which never tempted him,—and he records, conscientiously and very frequently, the gradual growth of his estate from nothing at all to thousands of pounds, with constant thanks to God, and many very quaint little confessions and remarks.

He was on the one hand confessedly a coward, and on the other hand a man of the most hasty and violent temper. Yet none of his readers can despise him very bitterly for either of these vices. For he disarms all criticism by the incredibly ingenious frankness of his confessions; and the instances of these somewhat contemptible vices alternate with bits of real gallantry and fineness, told in the same perfectly natural and unconscious way.

His relations with his wife and other ladies would fill a volume in themselves. It would not be a particularly edifying volume, but it certainly would be without parallel in the literature of this or any other country for sheer extremity of frankness. Mrs. Pepys appears to have been a very beautiful and an extremely difficult lady, disagreeable enough to tempt him into many indiscretions, and yet so virtuous as to fill his heart with remorse for all his failings, and still more with vexation for her discoveries of them. But below all this surface play of pretty disreputable outward conduct, there seems to have been a deep and genuine love for her in his heart. He can say as coarse a thing about her as has probably ever been recorded, but he balances it with abundance of solicitous and often ineffective attempts to gratify her capricious and imperious little humours.

These curious mixtures of character, however, are but byplay compared with the phenomenal and central vanity, which alternately amazes and delights us. After all the centuries there is a positive charm about this grown man who, after all, never seems to have grown up into manhood. He is as delighted with himself as if he were new, and as interested in himself as if he had been born yesterday. He prefers always to talk with persons of quality if he can find them. "Mighty glad I was of the good fortune to visit him (Sir W. Coventry), for it keeps in my acquaintance with him, and the world sees it, and reckons my interest accordingly." His public life was distinguished by one great speech made in answer to the accusations of some who had attacked him and the Navy Board in the House of Commons. That speech seems certainly to have been distinguished and extraordinarily able, but it certainly would have cost him his soul if he had not already lost that in other ways. Every sentence of flattery, even to the point of being told that he is another Cicero, he not only takes seriously, but duly records.

There is an immense amount of snobbery, blatant and unashamed. A certain Captain Cooke turns out to be a man who had been very great in former days. Pepys had carried clothes to him when he was a little insignificant boy serving in his father's workshop. Now Captain Cooke's fortunes are reversed, and Pepys tells us of his many and careful attempts to avoid him, and laments his failure in such attempts. He hates being seen on the shady side of any street of life, and is particularly sensitive to such company as might seem ridiculous or beneath his dignity. His brother faints one day while walking with him in the street, on which his remark is, "turned my head, and he was fallen down all along upon the ground dead, which did put me into a great fright; and, to see my brotherly love! I did presently lift him up from the ground." This last sentence is so delightful that, were it not for the rest of the Diary, it would be quite incredible in any human being past the age of short frocks. All this side of his character culminates in the immense amount of information which we have concerning his coach. He has great searching of heart as to whether it would be good policy or bad to purchase it. All that is within him longs to have a coach of his own, but, on the other hand, he fears the jealousy of his rivals and the increased demands upon his generosity which such a luxury may be expected to bring. At last he can resist no longer, and the coach is purchased. No sooner does he get inside it than he assumes the air of a gentleman whose ancestors have ridden in coaches since the beginning of time. "The Park full of coaches, but dusty, and windy, and cold, and now and then a little dribbling of rain; and what made it worse, there were so many hackney coaches as spoiled the sight of the gentlemen's."

A somewhat amazing fact in this strange and contradictory character is the constant element of subtlety which blends with so much frankness. He wants to do wrong in many different ways but he wants still more to do it with propriety, and to have some sort of plausible excuse which will explain it in a respectable light. Nor is it only other people whom he is bent on deceiving. Were that all, we should have a very simple type of hypocritical scoundrel, which would be as different as possible from the extraordinary Pepys. There is a sense of propriety in him, and a conscience of obeying the letter of the law and keeping up appearances even in his own eyes. If he can persuade himself that he has done that, all things are open to him. He will receive a bribe, but it must be given in such a way that he can satisfy his conscience with ingenious words. The envelope has coins in it, but then he opens it behind his back and the coins fall out upon the floor. He has only picked them up when he found them there, and can defy the world to accuse him of having received any coins in the envelope. That was the sort of conscience which he had, and whose verdicts he never seems seriously to have questioned. He vows he will drink no wine till Christmas, but is delighted to find that hippocras, being a mixture of two wines, is not necessarily included in his vow. He vows he will not go to the play until Christmas, but then he borrows money from another man and goes with the borrowed money; or goes to a new playhouse which was not open when the vow was made. He buys books which no decent man would own to having bought, but then he excuses himself on the plea that he has only read them and has not put them in his library. Thus, along the whole course of his life, he cheats himself continually. He prefers the way of honour if it be consistent with a sufficient number of other preferences, and yet practises a multitude of curiously ingenious methods of being excusably dishonourable. On the whole, in regard to public business and matters of which society takes note, he keeps his conduct surprisingly correct, but all the time he is remembering, not without gusto, what he might be doing if he were a knave. It is a curious question what idea of God can be entertained by a man who plays tricks with himself in this fashion. Of Pepys certainly it cannot be said that God "is not in all his thoughts," for the name and the remembrance are constantly recurring. Yet God seems to occupy a quite hermetically sealed compartment of the universe; for His servant in London shamelessly goes on with the game he is playing, and appears to take a pride in the very conscience he systematically hoodwinks.

It is peculiarly interesting to remember that Samuel Pepys and John Bunyan were contemporaries. There is, as we said, much in common between them, and still more in violent contrast. He had never heard of the Tinker or his Allegory so far as his Diary tells us, nor is it likely that he would greatly have appreciated the Pilgrim's Progress if it had come into his hands. Even Hudibras he bought because it was the proper thing to do, and because he had met its author, Butler; but he never could see what it was that made that book so popular. Bunyan and Pepys were two absolutely sincere men. They were sincere in opposite ways and in diametrically opposite camps, but it was their sincerity, the frank and natural statement of what they had to say, that gave its chief value to the work of each of them. It is interesting to remember that Pepys was sent to prison just when Bunyan came out of it, in the year 1678. The charge against the diarist was indeed a false one, and his imprisonment cast no slur upon his public record: while Bunyan's charge was so true that he neither denied it nor would give any promise not to repeat the offence. Pepys, had he known of Bunyan, would probably have approved of him, for he enthusiastically admired people who were living for conscience' sake, like Dr. Johnson's friend, Dr. Campbell, of whom it was said he never entered a church, but always took off his hat when he passed one. On the whole Pepys' references to the Fanatiques, as he calls them, are not only fair but favourable. He is greatly interested in their zeal, and impatient with the stupidity and brutality of their persecutors.

In regard to outward details there are many interesting little points of contact between the Diary and the Pilgrims Progress. We hear of Pepys purchasing Foxe's Book of Martyrs; Bartholomew and Sturbridge Fairs come in for their own share of notice; nor is there wanting a description of such a cage as Christian and Faithful were condemned to in Vanity Fair. Justice Keelynge, the judge who condemned Bunyan, is mentioned on several occasions by Pepys, very considerably to his disadvantage. But by far the most interesting point that the two have in common is found in that passage which is certainly the gem of the whole Diary. Bunyan, in the second part of the Pilgrim's Progress, introduces a shepherd boy who sings very sweetly upon the Delectable Mountains. It is the most beautiful and idyllic passage in the whole allegory, and has become classical in English literature. Yet Pepys' passage will match it for simple beauty. He rises with his wife a little before four in the morning to make ready for a journey into the country in the neighbourhood of Epsom. There, as they walk upon the Downs, they come "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.... 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."

Such is some slight conception, gathered from a few of many thousands of quaint and sparkling revelations of this strange character. Over against the "ingenious dreamer," Bunyan, here is a man who never dreams. He is the realist, pure and unsophisticated; and the stray touches of pathos, on which here and there one chances in his Diary, are written without the slightest attempt at sentiment, or any other thought than that they are plain matters of fact. He might have stood for this prototype of many of Bunyan's characters. Now he is Mr. Worldly Wiseman, now Mr. By-ends, and Mr. Hold-the-World; and taken altogether, with all his good and bad qualities, he is a fairly typical citizen of Vanity Fair.

There are indeed in his character exits towards idealism and possibilities of it, but their promise is never fulfilled. There is, for instance, his kindly good-nature. That quality was the one and all-atoning virtue of the times of Charles the Second, and it was supposed to cover a multitude of sins. Yet Charles the Second's was a reign of constant persecution, and of unspeakable selfishness in high places. Pepys persecutes nobody, and yet some touch of unblushing selfishness mars every kindly thing he does. If he sends a haunch of venison to his mother, he lets you know that it was far too bad for his own table. He loves his father with what is obviously a quite genuine affection, but in his references to him there is generally a significant remembrance of himself. He tells us that his father is a man "who, besides that he is my father, and a man that loves me, and hath ever done so, is also, at this day, one of the most careful and innocent men of the world." He advises his father "to good husbandry and to be living within the bounds of L50 a year, and all in such kind words, as not only made both them but myself to weep." He hopes that his father may recover from his illness, "for I would fain do all I can, that I may have him live, and take pleasure in my doing well in the world." Similarly, when his uncle is dying, we have a note "that he is very ill, and so God's Will be done." When the uncle is dead, Pepys' remark is, "sorry in one respect, glad in my expectations in another respect." When his predecessor dies, he writes, "Mr. Barlow is dead; for which God knows my heart, I could be as sorry as is possible for one to be for a stranger, by whose death he gets L100 per annum."

Another exit towards idealism of the Christian and spiritual sort might be supposed to be found in his abundant and indeed perpetual references to churches and sermons. He is an indomitable sermon taster and critic. But his criticisms, although they are among the most amusing of all his notes, soon lead us to surrender any expectation of escape from paganism along this line. "We got places, and staid to hear a sermon; but it, being a Presbyterian one, it was so long, that after above an hour of it we went away, and I home, and dined; and then my wife and I by water to the Opera." This is not, perhaps, surprising, and may in some measure explain his satisfaction with Dr. Creeton's "most admirable, good, learned, and most severe sermon, yet comicall," in which the preacher "railed bitterly ever and anon against John Calvin, and his brood, the Presbyterians," and ripped up Hugh Peters' preaching, calling him "the execrable skellum." One man preaches "well and neatly"; another "in a devout manner, not elegant nor very persuasive, but seems to mean well, and that he would preach holily"; while Mr. Mills makes "an unnecessary sermon upon Original Sin, neither understood by himself nor the people." On the whole, his opinion of the Church is not particularly high, and he seems to share the view of the Confessor of the Marquis de Caranen, "that the three great trades of the world are, the lawyers, who govern the world; the Churchmen who enjoy the world; and a sort of fellows whom they call soldiers, who make it their work to defend the world."

It must be confessed that, when there were pretty ladies present and when his wife was absent, the sermons had but little chance. "To Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective glass up and down the church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till sermon was done." Sometimes he goes further, as at St. Dunstan's, where "I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and, at last, I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again—which, seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design."

He visits cathedrals, and tries to be impressed by them, but more interesting things are again at hand. At Rochester, "had no mind to stay there, but rather to our inne, the White Hart, where we drank." At Canterbury he views the Minster and the remains of Beckett's tomb, but adds, "A good handsome wench I kissed, the first that I have seen a great while." There is something ludicrously incongruous about the idea of Samuel Pepys in a cathedral, just as there is about his presence in the Great Plague and Fire. Among any of these grand phenomena he is altogether out of scale. He is a fly in a thunderstorm.

His religious life and thought are an amazing complication. He can lament the decay of piety with the most sanctimonious. He remembers God continually, and thanks and praises Him for each benefit as it comes, with evident honesty and refreshing gratitude. He signs and seals his last will and testament, "which is to my mind, and I hope to the liking of God Almighty." But in all this there is a curious consciousness, as of one playing to a gallery of unseen witnesses, human or celestial. On a fast-day evening he sings in the garden "till my wife put me in mind of its being a fast-day; and so I was sorry for it, and stopped, and home to cards." He does not indeed appear to regard religion as a matter merely for sickness and deathbeds. When he hears that the Prince, when in apprehension of death, is troubled, but when told that he will recover, is merry and swears and laughs and curses like a man in health, he is shocked. Pepys' religion is the same in prosperous and adverse hours, a thing constantly in remembrance, and whose demands a gentleman can easily satisfy. But his conscience is of that sort which requires an audience, visible or invisible. He hates dissimulation in other people, but he himself is acting all the time. "But, good God! what an age is this, and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation."

Thus his religion gave him no escape from the world. He was a man wholly governed by self-interest and the verdict of society, and his religion was simply the celestial version of these motives. He has conscience enough to restrain him from damaging excesses, and to keep him within the limits of the petty vices and paying virtues of a comfortable man—a conscience which is a cross between cowardice and prudence. We are constantly asking why he restrained himself so much as he did. It seems as if it would have been so easy for him simply to do the things which he unblushingly confesses he would like to do. It is a question to which there is no answer, either in his case or in any other man's. Why are all of us the very complex and unaccountable characters that we are?

Pepys was a pagan man in a pagan time, if ever there was such a man. The deepest secret of him is his intense vitality. Here, on the earth, he is thoroughly alive, and puts his whole heart into most of his actions. He is always in the superlative mood, finding things either the best or the worst that "he ever saw in all his life." His great concern is to be merry, and he never outgrows the crudest phases of this desire, but carries the monkey tricks of a boy into mature age. He will draw his merriment from any source. He finds it "very pleasant to hear how the old cavaliers talk and swear." At the Blue Ball, "we to dancing, and then to a supper of French dishes, which yet did not please me, and then to dance and sing; and mighty merry we were till about eleven or twelve at night, with mighty great content in all my company, and I did, as I love to do, enjoy myself." "This day my wife made it appear to me that my late entertainment of this week cost me above L12, an expence which I am almost ashamed of, though it is but once in a great while, and is the end for which, in the most part, we live, to have such a merry day once or twice in a man's life."

The only darkening element in his merriment is his habit of examining it too anxiously. So greedy is he of delight that he cannot let himself go, but must needs be measuring the extent to which he has achieved his desire. Sometimes he finds himself "merry," but at other times only "pretty merry." And there is one significant confession in connection with some performance of a favourite play, "and indeed it is good, though wronged by my over great expectations, as all things else are." This is one of the very few touches of anything approaching to cynicism which are to be found in his writings. His greed of merriment overleaps itself, and the confession of that is the deepest note in all his music.

Thus all the avenues leading beyond the earth were blocked. Other men escape along the lines of kindliness, love of friends, art, poetry, or religion. In all these avenues he walks or dances, but they lead him nowhere. At the bars he stands, an absolute worldling and pagan, full of an insatiable curiosity and an endless hunger and thirst. There is no touch of eternity upon his soul: his universe is Vanity Fair.



LECTURE VII

SARTOR RESARTUS

We now begin the study of the last of the three stages in the battle between paganism and idealism. Having seen something of its primitive and classical forms, we took a cross section of it in the seventeenth century, and now we shall review one or two of its phases in our own time. The leap from the seventeenth century to the twentieth necessarily omits much that is vital and interesting. The eighteenth century, in its stately and complacent fashion, produced some of the most deliberate and finished types of paganism which the world has seen, and these were opposed by memorable antagonists. We cannot linger there, however, but must pass on to that great book which sounded the loudest bugle-note which the nineteenth century heard calling men to arms in this warfare.

Nothing could be more violent than the sudden transition from Samuel Pepys, that inveterate tumbler in the masque of life, whose absurdities and antics we have been looking at but now, to this solemn and tremendous book. Great in its own right, it is still greater when we remember that it stands at the beginning of the modern conflict between the material and spiritual development of England. Every student of the fourteenth century is familiar with two great figures, typical of the two contrasted features of its life. On the one hand stands Chaucer, with his infinite human interest, his good-humour, and his inexhaustible delight in man's life upon the earth. On the other hand, dark in shadows as Chaucer is bright with sunshine, stands Langland, colossal in his sadness, perplexed as he faces the facts of public life which are still our problems, earnest as death. There is no one figure which corresponds to Chaucer in the modern age, but Carlyle is certainly the counterpart of Langland. Standing in the shadow, he sends forth his great voice to his times, now breaking into sobs of pity, and anon into shrieks of hoarse laughter, terrible to hear. He, too, is bewildered, and he comes among his fellows "determined to pluck out the heart of the mystery"—the mystery alike of his own times and of general human life and destiny.

The book is in a great measure autobiographical, and is drawn from deep wells of experience, thought, and feeling. Inasmuch as its writer was a very typical Scotsman, it also was in a sense a manifesto of the national convictions which had made much of the noblest part of Scottish history, and which have served to stiffen the new races with which Scottish emigrants have blended, and to put iron into their blood. It is a book of incalculable importance, and if it be the case that it finds fewer readers in the rising generation than it did among their fathers, it is time that we returned to it. It is for want of such strong meat as this that the spirit of an age tends to grow feeble.

The object of the present lecture is neither to explain Sartor Resartus nor to summarise it. It certainly requires explanation, and it is no wonder that it puzzled the publishers. Before it was finally accepted by Fraser, its author had "carried it about for some two years from one terrified owl to another." When it appeared, the criticisms passed on it were amusing enough. Among those mentioned by Professor Nichol are, "A heap of clotted nonsense," and "When is that stupid series of articles by the crazy tailor going to end?" A book which could call forth such abuse, even from the dullest of minds, is certainly in need of elucidation. Yet here, more perhaps than in any other volume one could name, the interpretation must come from within. The truth which it has to declare will appeal to each reader in the light of his own experience of life. And the endeavour of the present lecture will simply be to give a clue to its main purpose. Every reader, following up that clue for himself, may find the growing interest and the irresistible fascination which the Victorians found in it. And when we add that without some knowledge of Sartor it is impossible to understand any serious book that has been written since it appeared, we do not exaggerate so much as might be supposed on the first hearing of so extraordinary a statement.

The first and chief difficulty with most readers is a very obvious and elementary one. What is it all about? As you read, you can entertain no doubt about the eloquence, the violent and unrestrained earnestness of purpose, the unmistakable reserves of power behind the detonating words and unforgettable phrases. But, after all, what is it that the man is trying to say? This is certainly an unpromising beginning. Other great prophets have prophesied in the vernacular; but "he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men but unto God; for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries." Yet there are some things which cannot convey their full meaning in the vernacular, thoughts which must coin a language for themselves; and although at first there may be much bewilderment and even irritation, yet in the end we shall confess that the prophecy has found its proper language.

Let us go back to the time in which the book was written. In the late twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century a quite exceptional group of men and women were writing books. It was one of those galaxies that now and then over-crowd the literary heavens with stars. To mention only a few of the famous names, there were Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, and the Brownings. It fills one with envy to think of days when any morning might bring a new volume from any one of these. Emerson was very much alive then, and was already corresponding with Carlyle. Goethe died in 1832, but not before he had found in Carlyle one who "is almost more, at home in our literature than ourselves," and who had penetrated to the innermost core of the German writings of his day.

At that time, too, momentous changes were coming upon the industrial and political life of England. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened, and in 1832 the Reform Bill was passed. Men were standing in the backwash of the French Revolution. The shouts of acclamation with which the promise of that dawn was hailed, had been silenced long ago by the bloody spectacle of Paris and the career of Napoleon Buonaparte. The day of Byronism was over, and polite England was already settling down to the conventionalities of the Early Victorian period. The romantic school was passing away, and the new generation was turning from it to seek reality in physical science. But deep below the conventionality and the utilitarianism alike there remained from the Revolution its legacy of lawlessness, and many were more intent on adventure than on obedience.

It was in the midst of this confused melee of opinions and impulses that Thomas Carlyle strode into the lists with his strange book. On the one hand it is a Titanic defence of the universe against the stage Titanism of Byron's Cain. On the other hand it is a revolt of reality against the empire of proprieties and appearances and shams. In a generation divided between the red cap of France and the coal-scuttle bonnet of England Carlyle stands bareheaded under the stars. Along with him stand Benjamin Disraeli, combining a genuine sympathy for the poor with a most grotesque delight in the aristocracy; and John Henry Newman, fierce against the Liberals, and yet the author of "Lead, kindly Light."

The book was handicapped more heavily by its own style than perhaps any book that ever fought its way from neglect and vituperation to idolatrous popularity. There is in it an immense amount of gag and patter, much of which is brilliant, but so wayward and fantastic as to give a sense of restlessness and perpetual noise. The very title is provoking, and not less so is the explanation of it—the pretended discovery of a German volume upon "Clothes, their origin and influence," published by Stillschweigen and Co., of Weissnichtwo, and written by Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh. The puffs from the local newspaper, and the correspondence with Hofrath "Grasshopper," in no wise lessen the odds against such a work being taken seriously.

Again, as might be expected of a Professor of "Things in General," the book is discursive to the point of bewilderment. The whole progeny of "aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial devils" breaks loose upon us just as we are about to begin such a list of human apparel as never yet was published save in the catalogue of a museum collected by a madman. A dog with a tin kettle at his tail rushes mad and jingling across the street, leaving behind him a new view of the wild tyranny of Ambition. A great personage loses much sawdust through a rent in his unfortunate nether garments. Sirius and the Pleiades look down from above. The book is everywhere, and everywhere at once. The asides seem to occupy more space than the main thesis, whatever that may be. Just when you think you have found the meaning of the author at last, another display of these fireworks distracts your attention. It is not dark enough to see their full splendour, yet they confuse such daylight as you have.

Yet the main thesis cannot long remain in doubt. Through whatever amazement and distraction, it becomes clear enough at last. Clothes, which at once reveal and hide the man who wears them, are an allegory of the infinitely varied aspects and appearances of the world, beneath which lurk ultimate realities. But essential man is a naked animal, not a clothed one, and truth can only be arrived at by the most drastic stripping off of unreal appearances that cover it. The Professor will not linger upon the consideration of the lord's star or the clown's button, which are all that most men care to see: he will get down to the essential lord and the essential clown. And this will be more than an interesting literary occupation to him, or it will not long be that. Truth and God are one, and the devil is the prince of lies. This philosophy of clothes, then, is religion and not belles lettres. The reason for our sojourn on earth, and the only ground of any hope for a further sojourn elsewhere, is that in God's name we do battle with the devil.

The quest of reality must obviously be wide as the universe, but if we are to engage in it to any purpose we must definitely begin it somewhere. A treatise on reality may easily be the most unreal of things—a mere battle in the air. So long as it is a discussion of theories it has this danger, and the first necessity is to bring the search down to the region of experience and rigorously insist on its remaining there. For this end the device of biography is adopted, and we see the meaning of all that apparent byplay of the six paper bags, and of the Weissnichtwo allusions which drop as puzzling fragments into Book I. The second book is wholly biographical. It is in human life and experience that we must fight our way through delusive appearances to reality; and Carlyle constructs a typical and immortal biography.

To the childless old people, Andreas and Gretchen Futteral, leading their sweet orchard life, there comes, in the dusk of evening, a stranger of reverend aspect—comes, and leaves with them the "invaluable Loan" of the baby Teufelsdroeckh. Thenceforward, beside the little Kuhbach stream, we watch the opening out of a human life, from infancy to boyhood, and from boyhood to manhood. The story has been told a million times, but never quite in this fashion before. For rough delicacy, for exquisitely tender sternness, the biography is unique.

From the sleep of mere infancy the child is awakened to the consciousness of creatorship by the gift of tools with which to make things. Tales open up for him the long vistas of history; and the stage-coach with its slow rolling blaze of lights teaches him geography, and the far-flung imaginative suggestiveness of the road; while the annual cattle-fair actually gathers the ends of the earth about his wondering eyes, and gives him his first impression of the variety of human life.

Childhood brings with it much that is sweet and gentle, flowing on like the little Kuhbach; and yet suggests far thoughts of Time and Eternity, concerning which we are evidently to hear more before the end. The formal education he receives—that "wood and leather education"—calls forth only protest. But the development of his spirit proceeds in spite of it. So far as the passive side of character goes, he does excellently. On the active side things go not so well. Already he begins to chafe at the restraints of obedience, and the youthful spirit is beating against its bars. The stupidities of an education which only appeals to the one faculty of memory, and to that mainly by means of birch-rods, increase the rebellion, and the sense of restraint is brought to a climax when at last old Andreas dies. Then "the dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open; the pale kingdoms of Death, with all their innumerable silent nations and generations, stood before him; the inexorable word NEVER! now first showed its meaning."