SAMUEL PEPYS

Evening Star, Issue 20057, 24 December 1928, Page 16

SAMUEL PEPYS

; ——■ , 1 ONE OF GREAT ENGLISH COMEDY FIGURES “AN ENGAGING HYPOCRITE" WICKEDNESS OE KING CHARLES’S DAYS. Mr Pepys lias long since taken liis place in the company, of' the Great English characters. He is in His own sphere as incomparable as Uncle Toby or Mr Micawber. It is not surprising that ho himself did not know that he was a comic character, but it is surprising that no one who knew him seems to have suspected him of being a comic character—one of' the great comic characters of all time, writes “Y.Y.” in the ‘Ne'w Statesman.’ To his contemporaries he was an efficient Civil servant, a man interested in music and the theatre, of an all-round curiosity, which was rewarded _ with Lho presidency of the Royal Society—a man at once respectable and likeable, who gave a dinner once a year to celebrate the day on which he had been first cut from the stone.

“He was,’.’ says Evelyn, in his diary, “universally beloved, hospital, generous, learned in many things,' skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men of wljom he had the conversation.” Pcpys’s .wife, if she had written of him, might have added some livelier strokes to the portrait and some for the women to whom he made loye might have added others livelier still But to the . mass of those who knew him he was, it seems likely, a man of many merits indeed, but not the delightfully eccentric scallywag wo know him as to-day. PEPYS THE DIARIST.

Mr Arthur Ponsonby, in his attractive volume, ‘Samuel Pepys,’, in the ‘ English Men of Letters ’ series, contends that “Pepys the punctilious official is just as much Pepys as Pepys the Diarist”; and we should certainly relish the comedy of Pepys the Diarist less if we did not keep in mind the punctilious official who, in secret, committed it to paper. For the comedy is the comedy of one of the most engaging hypocrites who ever lived. .Pepys is usually praised for his candour, and largely because it js the candour of a man who is, in no very base sense of the word, a hypocrite. Those Puritan preachers whose faith _ he shared in his boyhood would certainly, if they had known the secrets of his life, have denounced him as a whited sepulchre. And he himself always _ retained something of the Puritan in his bosom, which made him almost as capable of being shocked ns the preachers. He was shocked by the conduct of others, who behaved no worse than himself, and he mingled his own pleasure in Ins sins with prayers. Ho condemned King Charles for his “ horrid effeminacy,” meaning his love for women, and described him ns “ coming _ privately from my Lady Castlcmaine’s, which is a poor thing for a Prince to do.” ‘‘The King,” he wrote, “do still doat on his women even beyond all shame,” and again, “This lechery will never leave him,” and “Nothing almost but bawdry at Court irom top to bottom.” “He is,” as- Air Ponsonby says, “ genuinely shocked at Charles’s improper stories.” If the Eev. Elmer Gantry behaved like this wo should regard it as the last proof of his odious hypocrisy; but, though Pepys was undoubtedly a hypocrite, wo cannot somehow help looking on hypocrisy m him as a venial offence. ENGAGING WEAKNESS.

Nor wns it merely that ho condemned the King lor behaviour as lie himself behaved at almost every opportunity. He was capable of being shocked even by the_ behaviour of women who allowed Him to make love to them. There was Mrs Pcmngton, for instance, who permitted him to flirt with her “very wantonly.” “ Which,” comments Pepys, "methought was very strange, as 1 looked upon myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady; for 1 could not have thought she could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and J _ know not what.” It is as though Ids arm had slipped round Mrs Pcmngton without his knowledge, and, finding it there, he said to her, “Mrs Peningfon, I’m surprised at you.” It is a Puritanical attitude not without parallel in the long history of the relations between the sexes. If Mr Pepys had had a stronger sense _ of humour he would have laughed at himself for it. Luckily, ho had very little sense of humour, and described the incident in his diary with a seriousness which is supremely comic. Like Uncle Toby, he is all the more amusing because he himself docs not see how amusing lie is. • Mr Ponsonby protested that we shall get a false picture of Mr Pepys ii we confine out attention to those passages in his diary which .reveal “the weaknesses and moral lapses which were not observed by some of his contemporaries,.” and there is some truth in this. Wc should certainly know very little of Pepy.s if we did not read enough of Ids diary to realise that, whatever his faults, he was in a sense one of the most innocent human beings who ever lived. He preserves in a wicked world—in the wickedness of which ho himself to some extent-shared —something of the innocence of a child. His happiness is more often like the happiness of a child than of a man. “But Lord,” ho writes,' when he has been given a watch, “ tq coo hnw much of ray old folly and childishness hangs on me still that,l cannot forbear carrying my watch in ray hand in the coach all this afternoon and seeing what o’clock it is one hundred times.” There is childish _ innocence of a still more exquisite kind in half his pleasures. SIMPLE PLEASURE. Mr Ponsonby quotes the wonderful description of the Sunday meeting on Epsom Downs in which Pepys writes : “The women and W. Hewer and 1 walked upon tho Downes, where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever 1 saw in my life—-we find a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the

Bible; so I made the boy rend to mo, which'"ho did in the forced tone which children do usually rend, that was mighty pretty, and then, 1 did give him something.” It is probable that thousands of Englishmen have given, a child something as a reward for reading aloud a passage from the Bible, but it is doubtful if anv other Englishman ever enjoyed listening to a little boy reading the Bible with the Epicurean relish of Mr Pepys. His happiness on such occasions is the happiness of a child playing with a Noah’s Ark. He is a matt infinitely easily pleased, and a man who is easily pleased always,gives other people pleasure. Was Pepys not pleased even with the conversation of his Aunt Janes? and has ho not made his pleasures immortal in the sentence: “So to my brother’s, and there I found my Aunt - Janes, a poor, religions, well moaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me”?' JEALOUS AND FAITHLESS. At the same time, Mr Pcpys’s charm is, as is usual with people we love, a. many-sided charm. Wo have nob one reason, but a thousand, for liking Dr Johnson and Robert Burns; and, different, though he was, wc have almost as many for liking Mr Pepys. There is a certain wealth of character in them all—the pounds, shillings, and pence of virtues,. errors, and eccentricities. None of them can bo summed up in a single noun or adjective. There is something Protean in them that escapes definition. They are in no need of whitewashing, and those who would blacken them only show their ignorance of human nature. Such men are Nature’s wonders, and we would not have them other-than they arc. This is not to say that we set them on a pedestal, but merely that, in a world of ordinary mortals, these particular mortals have made lite more interesting lor us. We accept them as they are, as wo accept Hamlet and Falstaff, or the great characters in fiction. Pepys, the jealous husband, like Pepys the faithless husband, is now part of the world’s comedy. His foolish pangs, so candidly recorded in the diary, are the food of our pleasure. How delightful are those entries in which he tolls us—or rather, tells the paper—of his groundless jealousy of Pcmbleton, the dancing master: ... then by water (taking Pcmblcton with us) over the water to the Halfway House, where wo, played at ninepins, and then my damned jealousy took fire, he and my wife being of a side, and I seeing of him take her by the hand in play, though I now believe ho did (it) only in sport. TRUTHFULNESS OF A LIAR. Pepys at the ago of twenty-tWo had married a girl of fifteen, and the story of their married file has the same paradoxical quality as his character. It is the story of the devotion of a treacherous man, or, if you prefer it, oi the treachery of a devoted man. As Mr Ponsonby writes;— They quarrel over trivialities, over the dog, over cooking, over clothes, over jewels, over the accounts, and incessantly over servants. It always seems dangerously near permanent incoinpatability, specially when twice lie pulls her nose and gives her a bad blow on the eye. But in between the quarrels there are invariable notes oi appreciation, praise, and affection; the flare-up never lasts lor more than a dav or two. ' it, perhaps, shows a want oi sympathy with Mrs Pepys that wo should take her woes so lightly, but we should no more think of applying the standard of the Ten Commandments to the conduct of the respectable Civil Servant tlian to the conduct of a favourite cat. Industries, secretive, economical, amorous—“ Music and women,” ho confesses, “1 cannot but give _ way to whatever my business is -lie fights as a cat fights, and purrs as a cat purrs. If one calls him a hypocrite one docs so admiringly, and as though one wore calling him a pet name. Possibly it is bis prose— that ingenuous prose that is a butterfly net for every significant • in the day’s happenings—that disarms criticism. More probably it is ■ his truthfulness—the truthfulness of a liar who told the truth as thousands of honest men have tried to tell it, but in vain.