It is hard to deal fairly by Samuel Pepys, and that because he has dealt so fairly by himself. You cannot even put that amazing candour of his down to his credit, for reasons which grow upon you as you read. If he was candid it was to please himself, and, as one must suppose, nobody else in the world. Whatever his motive was, it certainly was not to read a moral lesson to mankind. But that he is all in his Diary, the whole of him, inside and out, is evident upon any prolonged perusal of it. He has neither been blind to himself, nor kind; he never excuses himself, and rarely accuses. He pities himself, when he has been found out, and hugs himself when he has made a good deal, or played the fortunate gallant; but he rarely indeed pities anybody else, and if he hugs other persons, always mentions it. Though we cannot impute his honesty to righteousness, nevertheless it seems rather hard that he should have to suffer for it.
Anyhow, his merits would have transpired without a diary. State papers exist to testify to them; his mounting credit is its own record. Evelyn liked him, so did the King and his brother, so did Sir William Coventry. Undoubtedly he was an able Clerk of the Acts, and by the standard of any times but some which are still modern history, an honest public servant. Had he lived in the golden age of the Civil Service, an age which only ended a few years ago, he would not have taken any commissions at all. As things arenow, he took very few; as they were in his day, what he took was negligible. I feel sure that the Crown did uncommonly well by him. Then, socially, he was a brisk, companionable creature, with an infectious laugh, a taste for languages, the drama, parlour-science and chamber-music. He had curiosity, which always makes a man good company; he was both dilettante and connoisseur; he was affable with all sorts and conditions, gave himself no airs, had vanity, but little conceit. Women liked him; he had a way with him. And then he liked them. I cannot imagine Pepys for five minutes in a woman’s company without her knowing all that she need about him, and about it. Morally, he was a beast, without pity or scruple, or personal shame, or courage, or honour. He was depraved, and knew it, and didn’t care so long as no one else knew it. He was the slave of public opinion, and in moments of apprehension what that might be, sacrificed his companion in his dealing without a thought. And yet women liked him, and suffered him. Psychologically, he is, so far, an unsolved problem. Nobody has found out why on earth he wrote himself down what he did write down; I have seen no account which satisfies. To that I should add that no attempt to explain him seems to have been made since we received all that we ever can receive of his Diary.
R. L. Stevenson’s exegesis was based upon Minors Bright, who is now superseded by Wheatley. It is elaborate, and I think fanciful. I doubt if it could have been accepted upon the then available evidence: it is clean out of date now. Shortly,it was that Pepys, taking (as he did) infinite pleasure in the minutiæ of memory, was careful to make a hoard of such things for his after-needs. But even when that theory was propounded we knew that Pepys recorded his shames and humiliations, and it is difficult to allow that he might have looked forward to recalling those towards his latter end. Now, however, we know the worst that Pepys could say of himself, and lack nothing but the literal details of his acts. We know how he glorifies and how he humiliates himself—for he writes down all his failures along with his triumphs; we can see him splash in the bagnio, and afterwards get rolled in the gutter. It can be no question of remembrance. What is it, then? Any man may conceive, and many will do the things which Pepys did: but not record them, complacently, with the grin of relish. Why on earth did he do that? I have a suggestion to make, though I am not certain that it meets the whole case. My first opinion was that he derived that cerebral excitation out of his details which it is to be supposed the lad may who defaces walls with a stump of pencil, or the lover who, writing about kisses, or craving them as he writes, ends up his letter with a pullulation of little crosses—paraphrases of his passion. Reading him again, I see that that is not all. It is part of the truth; it is true of the middle of the Diary. But it is not the whole truth—not true of the beginning, not true of the end. I now believe that he originally intended his entries of delinquency as an act of penance or humiliation—and that is supported by the accounts he gives of all his shifts and turnsunder the screw of jealousy—but that out of that act he found himself obtaining a perverse pleasure, which overlaid his first intention and supplanted it. In the earlier diary you will find him expressing his relief over lapses avoided or temptations withstood; from 1663 onwards that is exceedingly rare; then, at the very end, when he has been found out and has lost conceit in his delight, his reflections are as contrite as you please. For the moment that explanation satisfies me.
Pepys’s Diary covers ten years of his life, his twenty-seventh to his thirty-eighth. They would be critical years in the life of any married man, particularly when, as was the case, they coincided with the Restoration and the sudden unlocking of all doors. When he began to record he had been married five years, to a woman seven years younger than himself, a diligent, handsome, thrifty, responsive little French girl, whom he ruled, evidently, upon a theory; for he says more than once that he found it desirable to give way when she showed a knowledge of what her rights were. Being, as she was, exceedingly alive to them in one essential matter, so long as those were observed she was easy about others. Therefore, for the first two recorded years, Pepys had very much of his own way. He kept her short of money, stinted her in clothes and fal-lals[3]; and left her much alone while he pursued business and pleasure abroad. All that she took in good part, until her eyes were opened to what was going on. She didnot, for instance, mind his going to the theatre three or four times a week, until she found out what he did when he was there. But when she became aware of Mrs. Knipp and Mrs. Pierce and Mrs. Gwynne, and of relations which were not scenic, there was great trouble at home. After it she insisted on going with him, and he hardly dared show his nose in a playhouse without her. But that was later on: for for the first three years of the diary, beyond a little kissing, or staying up “playing the fool with the lass of the house” when he was on a jaunt, there was little for Mrs. Pepys to worry over. Kissing, indeed, of the ceremonial kind, she did not mind in the least. It was the English habit, as it still is in one class of life at least. Pepys himself was advised to put up with it when his wife was so distinguished. “So to Mrs. Hunt, where I found a Frenchman, a lodger of hers, at dinner, and just as I came in was kissing my wife, which I did not like, though there could not be any hurt in it.” Surely not.
But Pepys himself was not content with kisses of ceremony, nor did he select proper objects of ceremony for his attentions of the sort—that is, when once he was fairly on the primrose path. At first it was, “God forgive me! what a mind I had to her, but did not meddle with her.” That did not last. In September of that very year—it was 1662—he both had the mind and the opportunity; he followed his inclination; and though he recorded his first total lapse with great contrition, he was past praying for, and with increasing frequency past writing about. Vivacious man of pleasure as he was, and as his portrait shows him,he discovers himself to us as voracious too. He cast a wide net, and took all fish that came, gentle and simple, mistress and maid, mother and daughter. Not a shop that had a handsome woman in it, not a tavern with a pretty maid, between Fish Street Hill and Westminster Hall, but he drew it regularly, like a covert. I am sure he was no worse than his superiors; I think he may have been a good deal better than most of them; he was never a corsair, like Rochester, Sedley, Jermyn; he was in too small a way for that. But we can only guess at the whole of their malpractice by adding two to two, and we know all about his; therefore our gorges rise. Even his peculiar depravity was probably not peculiar at all.
“Yet to our buzzards overfedVirtue was Pandarus to Vice;A maiden was a maidenhead,A maidenhead a matter of price....”
“Yet to our buzzards overfedVirtue was Pandarus to Vice;A maiden was a maidenhead,A maidenhead a matter of price....”
“Yet to our buzzards overfedVirtue was Pandarus to Vice;A maiden was a maidenhead,A maidenhead a matter of price....”
“Yet to our buzzards overfed
Virtue was Pandarus to Vice;
A maiden was a maidenhead,
A maidenhead a matter of price....”
That was the foible of a hateful age, and it was Pepys’s. He preyed upon modesty. He must overcome virtue. He could not tire of that, and wrought in his way incurable mischief. In short, he was a middle-class Minotaur, a devourer of virgins.
I shall not follow him in his hateful bird-netting except just as far as may be necessary to relate the manner of his discomfiture. It is sufficient to say that, given time to spread his lures, he succeeded often enough. His office and patronage were favourite decoys of his. So Mrs. Bagwell, who pleased him as “a virtuous modest woman,” became something else by his leading her to suppose that he would get her husband a good job,he being a carpenter in Deptford Yard. So it was with other unfortunate creatures who courted his dispensing of places to their men. But he had an easier prey, a natural prey nearer home, in his wife’s maids. It lay among their duties, it seems, to assist him at his levee and coucher: he certainly had a way with him—so what were the poor girls to do? They had no chance. It does not appear that any one of them escaped altogether, though, thanks to his lively fear of Mrs. Pepys, no one of them found Mrs. Bagwell’s fate. That was not their fault, poor things; they were mostly as wax under his hands. But Mercer, Mary Mercer, faced him and got off with nothing worse than a little fondling. She was a girl with both wit and courage; remained on friendly terms with the household afterwards, visiting terms; and, when once she had shown him her mind, was not chased by the destroyer. But she, who came of good people—“a decayed tradesman’s daughter”—was an accomplished young woman, with a singing-voice which had been well trained, and plenty ofsavoir faire. Really, I think, Pepys, taught by a rebuff, came to respect Mercer. In August 1665 he noted of her in his jargon that he had his head combed “by my little girle, to whom I confess que je sum demasiado kind ... mais il faut que je leave it lest it bring me to alcum major inconvenience.” That was just what it did lead to. Mercer left the house on the day the Fire of London broke out, and for the best Pepys could do did not choose to return. The Fire gave him other and healthier thoughts for a time: presently when he met her in church,she refused to look at him. So she escaped, slightly chipped; and afterwards, when, as I say, she came to be on visiting terms with Mrs. Pepys, there are signs that she came and went unmolested. But to her succeeded by-and-by Deb Willett, the last victim of the Minotaur of Axe Yard. It was the addition of this girl to his harvest which upset his load of Hesperian apples.
He was disposed to her on hearsay, before he saw her; for Mrs. Pepys had been light-minded enough to declare the engagement of a pretty girl—the very thing to set him on fire. So presently, on the 27th September 1667, “while I was busy at the office, my wife sends for me to come home, and what was it but to see the pretty girl which she is taking to wait upon her: and though she seems not altogether so great a beauty as she had before told me, yet indeed she is mighty pretty; and so pretty that I find I shall be too pleased with it.... She seems, by her discourse, to be grave beyond her bigness and age, and exceeding well bred as to her deportment, having been a scholar in a school at Bow these seven or eight years. To the office again, my head running on this pretty girl.” It certainly did, if we may trust the Diary. She kept him awake at night; and when she came, brought by Mr. Batelier, he was more than smitten with her, he was impressed. “So grave as I never saw a little thing in my life,” he says. “Indeed, I think her a little too good for my family, and so well carriaged as I hardly ever saw.” His next recorded sentiment is, “I wish my wife may use her well.” How are you to deal with a man like that—except by remembering that all men are like that?
She accompanied her employers to Brampton and gave satisfaction at least to one of them. By the middle of October that had been observed by the other, for he writes of that day that they had been to see “The Coffee House” at the Duke’s Theatre; and “here, before the play began, my wife begun to complain of Willett’s confidence in sitting cheek by jowl by us, which was a poor thing; but I perceive she is already jealous of my kindness to her, so that I begin to fear this girl is not likely to stay long with us.” She stayed too long for her comfort, or for his. On December 22nd Pepys “first did give her a little kiss, she being a very pretty humoured girle, and so one that I do love mightily.” In January she is promoted to be “Deb” in the Diary; in March she is kissed, and more than kissed. Then comes the last volume.
By the time that was reached, Pepys’s weakness had become a mania. His apple-cart, so to speak, was full to overflowing, Deb Willett, though he had no suspicion of it, the last fruit he was to add to it. His work suffered, his mind suffered; there were omens of dirty weather. June 18th, 1668: “At noon home to dinner, where my wife still in a melancholy, fusty humour, and crying, and do not tell me plainly what it is; but I by little words find that she hath heard of my going to plays, and carrying people abroad every day in her absence; and that I cannot help [fearing] but the storm will break out, I think, in a little time.” At night it was no better: “My wife troubled all night, and about one o’clock goes out of bed to the girl’s bed, which did trouble me, shecrying and sobbing, without telling me the cause.” That ought to have warned him, if he had not gone too far. But he had. He pursued his course unabated; and then, October 25th, came the crash. It was Sunday. He rose, “discoursing with my wife about our house and the many new things we are doing of”; he went to church, saw Jack Fenn and his wife, “a pretty black woman”; he dined at home, had his wife and the boy to read to him; at night “W. Batelier comes and sups with us”—all well so far. And then—thunder, out of a clear sky, pealing about his ears. “After supper, to have my head combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl....” (sic).
A comic scene, but humiliating to all three. “I was,” he says, “at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girle also, and I endeavoured to put it off, but my wife was struck mute, and grew angry, and so her voice come to her, grew quite out of order, and I to say little, but to bed.” To bed, but not to sleep. At two in the morning the storm which had been massing itself in the heart and mind of Mrs. Pepys broke over his head, at first in tears and a secret. That—and it was a shrewd hit—was that “she was a Roman Catholic, and had received the Holy Sacrament.” Pepys, who had always been a Puritan at heart, was very much disturbed, yet dared no reproaches, so that the blow failed of its mark. She went on, then, “from one thing to another,” until “at last it appears plainly her trouble was at what she saw.” Yes, but what had she seen? “I did not know howmuch she saw, and therefore said nothing to her.” Towards morning “a little sleep.” If he thought that the end of it, he was to find it only the beginning. Mrs. Pepys, outraged on her tenderest side, grew from strength to strength; and as for her deplorable spouse, for the first time in his Diary, if not in his days, he really felt something which reads like remorse. His mind, he says of it next day, “was mightily troubled for the poor girle, whom I fear I have undone by this, my wife telling me that she would turn her out of doors.” That threat was not at once executed. Deb was treated with severe clemency for the better part of a month, allowed to visit her friends and suit herself with a new situation; made to feel, however, that she was in disgrace, and definitely cut off from any further assistance at her master’s toilette. The miserable man hardly dared look at her; not a word seems to have passed between them, though after a while, forced to take a line of conduct by his wife’s reiterated attacks, Pepys “did by a little note ... advise her (Deb) that I did continue to deny that ever I kissed her, and so she might govern herself.” Deb read it and threw it back again as he bade her; but she could not “govern herself.” The very next day Mrs. Pepys examined her, and everything came out. Pepys had to dine alone that night, for his wife kept her room, and when he went up to see her, blazed out upon him his infidelity and perjury together. To make it all the worse for him, she then told him of temptations which had been put in her own way—by Captain Ferrers, Lord Sandwich and other friends of his.A la guerre comme à la guerre.All which “I did acknowledge, and was troubled for, and wept.”
Without a leg to stand on, he must do as he was told. On the 12th November, therefore, he must call Deb to his chamber in the presence of his wife, “and there did, with tears in my eyes, which I could not help, discharge her, and advise her to be gone as soon as she could, and never to see me, or let me see her more while she was in the house, which she took with tears too.” She had found herself a place, and went to it; and Pepys looked forward now to a peace which he had not known, he says, for twenty days. He did not get it, because he was both knave and fool. Which this shows him to be I don’t pretend to decide. He writes on the very day the girl left: “The truth is, I have a good mind to have the maidenhead of this girl, which I should not doubt to have if je could get time para be con her.” The Italians used to call the compound of inclination and abilityil talento, a word which our language lacks. Under the spur ofil talentothis incurable rascal hunted London to find Deb’s whereabouts. He had reason for suspecting Holborn, and quartered that; then Whetstone Park seemed probable, in the service of one Dr. Allbon. Not known there. In Eagle Court, off the Strand, he presently found out that “this Dr. Allbon is a kind of poor broken fellow that dare not show his head, nor to be known where he is gone.” Nevertheless, he did finally run down his doctor in Fleet Street or thereby, even met a man in his employ, bribed him to take a message “to a little gentlewoman, one Mrs. Willett, that is with him,” and waitedin the court of Somerset House for an answer. He did not have it till after dark. She was well, and he might see her if he would, “but no more.” That was enough for Pepys. Off he went in a coach, “it being now dark,” and “she come into the coach to me, and je did baiser her....” Then the real, the incredible Pepys: “I did nevertheless give her the best council I could, to have a care of her honour, and to fear God, and suffer no man para avoir to do con her as je have done, which she promised.” The advice was sound and, from him, infallible. To-morrow was to prove that much to him. I must afford myself the morrow’s entry.
“19th. Up and at the office all the morning, with my heart full of joy to think in what a safe condition all my matters now stand between my wife and Deb and me, and at noon, running upstairs to see the upholsterers, who are at work hanging my best room ... I find my wife sitting sad in the dining-room; which enquiring into the reason of, she begun to call me all the false, rotten-hearted rogues in the world, letting me understand that I was with Deb yesterday, which, thinking it impossible for her ever to understand, I did a while deny, but at last did, for the ease of my mind and hers, and for ever to discharge my heart of this wicked business, I did confess all, and above stairs in our bed chamber there I did endure the sorrow of her threats and vows and curses all the afternoon.... So with most perfect confusion of face and heart, and sorrow and shame, in the greatest agony in the world I did pass this afternoon, fearing that it willnever have an end; but at last I did call for W. Hewer, who I was forced to make privy now to all, and the poor fellow did cry like a child, and obtained what I could not, that she would be pacified upon condition that I would give it under my hand never to see or speak with Deb while I live, as I had before with Pierce and Knipp, and which I did also, God knows, promise for Deb too, but I have the confidence to deny it to the perjury of myself.”
It is extraordinary that Pepys, who could face with sangfroid committees of Lords and Commons, marshal his facts and figures and come off with credit, could be such a poltroon in this domestic inquest as to deny what was obviously within his wife’s knowledge. But when to terror you add a sense of guilt, a man will tell you anything. It is still more incredible that that did not finish the story—but it did not. The next day, what must he do but send W. Hewer off to Deb, “to tell her that I had told my wife all of my being with her the other night, so that if my wife should send she might not make the business worse by denying it.” The alert Mrs. Pepys made it her business to find out the whole of that, no doubt from W. Hewer himself; so that when Pepys came home the whole thing began all over again, and this time with violence. She “did fall to revile me in the bitterest manner in the world, and could not refrain to strike me and pull my hair, which I resolved to bear with, and had good reason to bear it.” He was driven to call in Hewer again as intermediary; but this time the conditions were terrible. Nothing would suit Mrs.Pepys but a letter conceived in the most insulting and outrageous terms to the girl, who was not what it styled her, from Pepys, who had done his best to make her so. Even he was shocked at it, and once wrote it out without the word. Mrs. Pepys tore it up. Then, on a wink passing from Hewer, he wrote it down, and domestic fury was satisfied. It was handed to Hewer to deliver, with “a sharp message” from Mrs. Pepys. That was the climax. No man could be more deeply degraded than that; and to do Pepys credit, he knew it, and could hardly bear himself. Hewer, on his own motion, it would seem, delivered but half of the letter; the other, the injurious half, was brought back to the unfortunate sinner. Deb never knew the worst of him, and, so far as the Diary reveals, never saw him again.
Love will lead a man any lengths, and justify itself, at least to himself; but not lust. That is a sensitive plant, and shrivels in the cold. Pepys, it will have been seen, was not prepared to go a yard out of his prosperous way in pursuit or defence of the favourites of his whim. If it is to his credit that he reports at length his humiliating rebuffs, that is all that can be said for him. If he affords a disagreeable spectacle, luckily it is also exceedingly ridiculous, and the only thing about it difficult to understand is that hedoesafford it. To me it is much more interesting to speculate upon the attitude of his victims towards these amorous advances. Concerned they must have been; but were they interested, amused, embarrassed, or bored? Did they take it as all in the day’s work; had they resentment and fearedto show it; or were they, poor children, led to take him seriously? I am not thinking of the Knipps and Pierces, Betty Lanes and half-dozen Nells—hardy perennials—but of his fresh young Mercer, “decayed tradesman’s daughter,” or grave young Deb, carefully educated at Bow, come also of a good Bristol family, with established aunts and uncles, and all the rest of it—girls who certainly came new to the kind of thing. Is it possible that Deb thrilled to a possible romance? And how did she accept the discovery of what in fact it was? With the one exception of Mercer, they are almost lay figures in the Diary, mute and passive under his greedy hands. Some were baggages, no doubt, or baggages-elect. They cannot all have been baggages. Deb, with her gravity and measured speech, what was she? There’s no telling. I don’t commend her for having seen him again, certainly not for sitting with him in the coach. Then I remember that she was barely twenty years old. She escaped, however, with some smirches, and one may hope that she found a good husband.Bocca baciata non perde ventura.
[3]In 1665, for instance, he laid out, at one blow, £55 on his own, and £12 on her clothes.
There are writers upon the roll of whom nobody demands, “How begot, how nourishéd”—not many, but one or two. Milton, for instance: does anyone try to derive Milton? Or Cowper? Or Wordsworth? Others, nearly all the others, abide our question, and no wonder. Is not all creative effort the agony of recalling? Is not the brain a sponge? Is there anything new except arrangement? Very well—then Defoe must have been a borrower, though he seems stark new. We know that Charles Lamb picked up words, phrases, cadences as a magnet steel-filings; but his latest and best biographer now goes further and seeks to lay his mental habit to somebody. He has devoted an essay to deriving his whimsicality, as he calls it, for want of a more comprehensive term, which shall include the freakish humour which is peculiarly Lamb’s, and the “unreluctant egoism” which he thinks Lamb was the first of us to signalise. I could quarrel with him there, “if I had the mind,” being very sure that Lamb was not the first egoist in English Literature by a very long way. If he was, then Mr. Lucas must devote another essay dealing with the claims of Sterne, Colley Cibber, Sir Thomas Browne, Cowley, Pepys, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to name no more. However, let that go. Lamb’s cast of humour, a glancing, many-faceted thing, as wayward as the wind, but like the wind, from whatever airt it blow, bringing upon it the scent of what gardenplots, hedgerows, beanfields and thymy uplands it may have crossed—thatMr. Lucas has been driven, seeing that he must needs buckle it to his egoism, to obtain from the mild mock-epic of Cowper, which does seem to me a wide cast to have made, with a small fry netted for his pains. When I came upon and had read that essay, in Mr. Lucas’sGiving and Receiving, I gazed for a few minutes thoughtfully into the fire, then got up and took down from the shelf the second volume of theLifeof Charles by the same hand. In a useful Appendix III, upon “Charles Lamb’s Books,” I found what I wanted.
Before I say what it was I wanted, and what found, I ought to acknowledge that Mr. Lucas draws a proper distinction between the Essays of Elia and the Letters of Charles Lamb, one, however, which he might not have drawn if the Letters of Cowper had not been published long after Lamb began to write letters. That being the fact, he has to derive Lamb’s Letters from Cowper’s Poems, and Elia’s Essays from Cowper’s Letters, rather achassez-croisezpiece of work. Except for that necessity I think he might have gone as near as Mr. Saintsbury does (inA Letter Book) to fining the difference between Essays and Letters to one of “full dress” and “undress.” To me the difference is much greater, is precisely, indeed, the difference between Charles Lamb and Elia. Lamb’s alias was not (like Sterne’s) a stalking-horse; it was a mask and domino. With the name he put on the thing signified, or as much of it as he cared for, gave himself Lincolnshire ancestry, shifted at ease his own relatives, his earlyloves, the haunts of his youth, and used them the more freely for his occasions. Yet he treated his form with respect, neither let it run down, nor stepped out of character. Elia sometimes borrowed from Lamb. The “Convict” letter to Barron Field yielded its bitter-sweet to an essay, but was transformed in the taking. Not to speak profanely, there was an Assumption of the Lamb. In the Letters whim is master: Lamb is Will o’ the Wisp. From essay to essay Elia may change like Harlequin, but each single essay is ruled by one mood. Elia was evidently, if not avowedly, a debtor. Whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne, of Addison, Burton, Shakespeare, Montaigne (or Florio) float up from the page as you read. So they do in Lamb’s Letters. But there is one very signally in Lamb, not so evident in Elia, and it was that which I looked for in Mr. Lucas’s Appendix III, where, sure enough, among Lamb’s books I found:
Howell (James),Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 1645-55.
There, beyond doubt, is the source of more than a little of Lamb’s whimsicality.
James Howell, who was born in 1593, third of the many children of the Reverend Thomas Howell, curate of Llangammarch and other places in Brecknockshire, was a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, a good deal of a scholar (able, as he boasted, to say his prayers in a different language on every day of the week and in all of them on Sundays), something of an adventurer, much of a traveller, and a man who never lost a job for lack of asking for it. He was variously employed, commercially in France and Italy, diplomatically in Spain(where he was when Prince Charles would, and did, a-wooing go), in Germany also, and the North of England: a traveller to better purpose than Coryat, who slightly preceded him. He returned from each country he visited set up in its language, and able to discourse reasonably upon its politics, religion and economics. None the less, as I suppose, he was idle, for he never made money or kept an employment. He was perpetually scribbling, if you can call that an employment; the bibliographical list of his “Works” contains something like seventy numbers. Many of them are pamphlets, political, controversial, allegorical and what not. If there had been any journals he would have been a journalist—for that, out of due time, was he born. He wrote much on philology, and pretty well; he wrote a deal of poetry too, and very badly. I shall only inflict two specimens upon the reader. This is the opening of a “small hymn” for Christmas Day:
“Hail holy TydeWherein a Bride,A Virgin (which is more)Brought forth a Son,The lyke was doneNe’er in this world before—;”
“Hail holy TydeWherein a Bride,A Virgin (which is more)Brought forth a Son,The lyke was doneNe’er in this world before—;”
“Hail holy TydeWherein a Bride,A Virgin (which is more)Brought forth a Son,The lyke was doneNe’er in this world before—;”
“Hail holy Tyde
Wherein a Bride,
A Virgin (which is more)
Brought forth a Son,
The lyke was done
Ne’er in this world before—;”
and this is the beginning of an elegy upon the Earl of Dorset,
“But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack,And will not all the Elements wear black?”
“But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack,And will not all the Elements wear black?”
“But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack,And will not all the Elements wear black?”
“But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack,
And will not all the Elements wear black?”
and this the middle,
“Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verseOn this renownéd heroe and his herse,”
“Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verseOn this renownéd heroe and his herse,”
“Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verseOn this renownéd heroe and his herse,”
“Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verse
On this renownéd heroe and his herse,”
and this the end,
“In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut,And to my Elegy a period put—”
“In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut,And to my Elegy a period put—”
“In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut,And to my Elegy a period put—”
“In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut,
And to my Elegy a period put—”
on which the only commentary I feel able to make is, Oh!
He wrote in all the languages he had. “I would have you know,” he writes to his friend Young, “that I have, though never married, divers children already, some French, some Latin, one Italian, and many English; and though they be but poor brats of the brain, yet are they legitimate, and Apollo himself vouchsafed to co-operate in their production.” It may be doubted whether any of them survived their father except hisFamiliar Letters, those Epistolae Ho-Elianae which were published and republished in his lifetime, and many times afterwards, have survived even to this day, been favourites with Thackeray as well as Charles Lamb; and are in fact the first of our private letters to each other to enter an admitted chapter of our Literature. If we could hope to see ourselves abreast of France it would be by means of Howell that we should get there. Exactly at the time when Guy Patin was writing his vivacious, very modern letters to his confrère in Lyons, here was our man, quite as brisk and even more modern in tone. Unfortunately for us, France had her Balzac, well under way, and writing in a prose as easy and reasonable as Renan’s. But Howell is strikingly modern compared, say, with Donne or Milton. He reports,for example, that the Prince Palatine has got together “a jolly considerable army”; and to a poetical friend he avows his ambition (on what pretence we have seen) to become a “Lord of Parnassus,” and to be the choice of “those nice girls,” the Muses! It has been said by more than one critic, that not all Howell’s bullets found, or were intended to find, their billets, that in fact letters addressed to Sir K. D., to the Lord Sa., and more explicitly to the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Clare and so on, were really addressed to the air, or the public. It may be so. Others were certainly real enough. There is little doubt, though, that he wrote with an eye to publication. Some of the longest of them are less letters than treatises, and good as they are of their kind, contain none of the additaments which make a letter a much better thing than a library of treatises. By far the greater part are real letters, and excellent letters too. Howell was something of a pedant, something perhaps of a coxcomb. Thackeray called him a prig. Certainly, to address a long letter containing many anecdotesad hocand a “Gradual Hymn tending to the honour of the holy name of God” to a ship’s captain upon his “frailty” of “swearing in all his discourses deep and far-fetched oaths,” is the act of prig or coxcomb—but I think Howell was the latter. A prig believes that he can do you good, and the coxcomb desires to air his talents. That was Howell’s simple design, and so I am sure the captain took it. But I should like to know how Ben Jonson, of whose tribe at the Devil Tavern Howell professed himself, took a similar reproof.The burly poet had hurt the feelings of Inigo Jones by putting him in a play as Vitruvius Hoop: whereupon Howell addressed his “Father Ben” as follows:
“You know,Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner, as you have done lately. Some give it out that there was a hair in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal architect.”
“You know,
Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner, as you have done lately. Some give it out that there was a hair in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal architect.”
Of his whimsicality I find examples enough to drown in. There is his pleasant tale to a cousin just off to the Dutch wars, of the soldier who had been there and returned, and being asked what exploits he had done, answered, That he had cut off a Spaniard’s legs. “Reply being made that that was no great matter, it had been something if he had cut off his head; O, said he, you must consider his head was off before.” And the other, truly excellent, of that Earl of Kildare who, arraigned before the Lord-Deputy for having set fire to, and burned down, the Church of Cashel, excused himself by saying that he would never have done such a thing had he not understood that the Bishop was inside. But here is from a letter a piece so exactly in Lamb’s vein when he is turning a whimsical notion about and about, and at each turn enhancing it, that I feel sure Howellaut diabolusmust have taught it him:
First, the theme—“I was according to your desire to visit the late new-married couple more than once, and to tell you true, I never saw such a disparity between two that were made one flesh in all my life; he handsome outwardly, but of odd conditions; she excellently qualified, but hard-favoured; so that the one may be compared to a cloth of tissue doublet cut upon coarse canvas, the other to a buckram petticoat lined with satin.”
Then, like Lamb, he begins to hang up his conceits:
“I thinkClothohad her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the Lord deliver you.”
“I thinkClothohad her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the Lord deliver you.”
Phisnomy, or visnomy, is a word which Lamb has made his own.
How often has Lamb held this vein too. “The French are a free and debonair, accostable people, both men and women.... Whereas the old rule was that there could be no true friendship without comessation of a bushel of salt, one may have enough there before he eat a spoonful with them. I like that Friendship which by soft gentle passes steals upon the affection and grows mellow with time by reciprocal offices and trials of love.” And here is an example of pictorial quality which I must not leave out. In the stress of Civil Warhe writes to a friend in Amsterdam, “While you adorn your churches, we destroy them here. Among others, poor Paul’s looks like a great skeleton, so pitifully handled that you may tell her ribs through her skin. Her body looks like the hulk of some huge Portugal Carake that having crossed the line twelve times and made three voyages to the East Indies, lies rotting upon the Strand.... You know that once a stable was made a temple, but now a temple is become a stable.”
Lamb, we all know, had a love of tags and proverbs, and could string them with anyone. Not more surely than Howell could, who has a long letter of advice to a friend, upon marriage, consisting entirely of them. As thus:
“Sir, although I am none of those that love to have an oar in everyone’s boat, or such a busybody as deserves to be hit in the teeth, yet you and I having eaten a peck of salt together, and having a hint that you are upon a business that will make or mar you, for a man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife, I would wish you to look before you leap, and make more than two words to a bargain.”
“Sir, although I am none of those that love to have an oar in everyone’s boat, or such a busybody as deserves to be hit in the teeth, yet you and I having eaten a peck of salt together, and having a hint that you are upon a business that will make or mar you, for a man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife, I would wish you to look before you leap, and make more than two words to a bargain.”
He keeps it up with immense zest for two full sheets, and ends all with “yours to the altar.” If Lamb knew that, he would never have forgotten it—and I believe he never did.
This year, it deserves to be recorded, the first crocus and the first primrose flowered together on January 18th. I know not when this article will appear; it may well be that Spring will have set in with its usual severity, in other words, that in mid-March we may be snowbound, and in mid-winter, as is now customary, before my record can be read. That is as may be, but my duty is clear. For the moment, and until we have become used to the new procession of Seasons, a first crocus and first primrose on the 18th of January constitute an event in South Wilts, if they do not in the rest of England. And lest any caviller should arise, as assuredly he will, and tell me that my primrose was the last, not the first, I may as well nip him in the bud of his endeavour by declaring that leaf and flower are alike new growth. It is true that many primulas have a second flowering—myjaponicasalways do. But I do not observe that they make new leaf twice a year. Here, the primrose, which is comparatively rare even in the woods, and unknown in the hedges, disappears altogether, like the cowslip, until new growth begins. The cowslip is our only native primula.
Such things—I don’t mean the early flowering, but the flowering of such things at all—are events in the garden, red-letter days in its year. The flowers themselves, to some one of them, to some another, are vocal; for there is a real language of flowers, very different from that made out of them by the love-sick. It has no syntax, and isincommunicable by speech. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard ...! So with flower-language. The first wild crocus talks to me immediately of Greece, where on the top of rugged Chelmos I saw it in perfection burning its way into the snow. I had climbed up there to see Homer’s Στυγὁς ὑδατος ἁιπἁ ῥἑεθρα, a sight, I am bound to say, not at all remarkable. Charon could have hopped over it. It was the crocuses that I remarked: the orange, called, I think,bulbo-codium, and a white striped with brown, which I have always known as the Scotch crocus, but which in botany is namedbiflorus. It is no use my saying that that is the way to grow them. It is Nature’s way, but cannot be ours, unless they will seed themselves, as some will. So far as I know, those two will not. They will increase otherwise; but by seeding flowers alone will you get the happy accidents which make a natural wild garden. They tell me, by the by, that you can hardly now obtain that most beautiful of all crocus, the blueImperati, an autumn flower. I don’t know whether I am singularly favoured—I hope not; but at any rate, I can obtain, within reason, as muchImperati—not as I want, for that could never be, but as is good for me. I put some few dozen into a rock-garden which I then had, some fifteen years ago, and it has increased a hundredfold. So have some other species of crocus.Imperatigrows very large and, unfortunately, very lax. Heavy rain in September will beat it down to a purple jelly. But when fair weather lasts out that loveliest month of the year crocusImperatiis a theme for poets.
As for the nurseryman’s crocus, colour is its real point; and it should be grown in masses for that alone; in masses where it can get the sun, and the bees can getit. Unfortunately it has many enemies. In London it lures the sparrows into Bacchic orgies; obscenely they tear it petal from petal. In the country field-mice seek it in the bud and eat the embryo flower. I have tried everything, Stockholm tar and sand mixed in layers in the barrow; read lead and paraffin; strawberry netting, soot and such like. I owe my best remedy to the discovery I have made that, much as mice like crocuses, they like toasted cheese yet more. One or two traps with that for a bait will save vast numbers of crocuses, for it is a mistake to suppose that many mice are involved. A pack of field-mice is a terrible thought, but only a nightmare happily. One mouse, with the whole night before him, will ruin a border.
The primrose is vocal of my childhood and the Kentish woodlands. There they used to grow marvellously, though now I daresay that Lord Beaconsfield and his League have made an end of them. Wherever the axe had been there were they, in sheets, in a galaxy, even to the scent of milk in the spicy air. I remember now, whenever I see my first primrose of the year, the almost fainting rapture with which we used to see, smell, taste, and handle them again—on some still warm April day—after the waiting through the long winter. For winters really were long, and wintry, then—or I think so. One used to wake in the morning and find the water-bottle frozen solid, the sponge like a brick. One used to learn to skate(for which now we go to Switzerland and catch influenza in a super-heated hotel), make snowmen, blow on one’s fingers to fasten one’s shirt-collar. But I have lived in the West of England this twenty years, and can only remember one snowy Christmas. Ah, and how many warm Aprils? Perhaps as many.
But the primrose is not common here. You will find it over the hills in the greensand, and again just over the Dorset border, in Cranborne Chace: not in this valley. I make it grow, importing it, because I can’t do without it; and so do the villagers, for the same reason. But they like it coloured, and have a rooted belief that if you plant a primrose upside down it will come up with red flowers. I tell them that it is Cruelty to Primroses. They point me out red-flowering roots which have been obtained in this way; and I end the inconsequent argument by saying, Well, anyhow, I don’t want it—village logic.
As I said just now, wild gardening, by which I mean the garden use of wild flowers, is to be confessed a failure unless you can induce the flowers to seed themselves. Once you can do that, you may talk about your wild garden. Once I saw a corner of a man’s garden, where there was a waterfall, andramondiagrowing as it does in the Pyrenees. That was a memorable sight. I have had my own moderate successes of the sort. Anemoneblandahas become as common as groundsel; butapenninarefuses to seed. The Widow iris,tuberosa, which started in life in a dry ditch under Vesuvius, and came to South Wilts in a sponge bag, is another weed. I left a garden with more of thatgrowing in it than anybody can want. Fritillary is not a native, but seeds freely in my water meadow; colchicum, another alien, increases like coltsfoot. Both the cyclamens, the Neapolitan and the Greek, have large families, which can never be too large—and so on. Such are some of my little triumphs, of which I dare not boast lest I be rebuked as once I was by a high lady in garden society. It was not kind of her, though no doubt she did it for my good. It was a time when I was growing cushion irises, with enormous pains and exiguous results. However, one fine Spring I did induceIris ibericato utter its extraordinary flowers—six of it, to be exact. Of that feat, meeting her at a party, I vaunted to the high lady. I can still see the glimmering of her eyelids, hear her dry voice commenting, “Ihad four hundred.” It may have been good for me, but was it good for her? If I had known then, as I knew afterwards, that she had flowered her four hundred at Aix-les-Bains, I think I might have rebuked her—so far as high ladies can be rebuked—by telling her that she could have had four thousand on such terms. But I knew nothing of it. There she had me.
I would not now give twopence forIris ibericaunless it would increase in my plot. I have come to make that the staple of good gardening, and would set no bounds to feats of the kind. Certainly, I am not with the purists who say—or said—that it is inartistic to grow foreign things in wild spaces. The Reverend William Mason, in the eighteenth century, who turned Capability Brown into poetry, was plainly of that opinion.It may be inartistic, but it is very jolly. I am experimenting just now with some of the plants and shrubs from Tibet which poor Farrer gave us before he died. I find that most of them grow like Jack’s beanstalk, but care very little about flowering. I have a briar-rose, a grey-leafed, bushy, spiky thing rather likeRosa Willmottia, which gives me canes tree-high, but so far no flowers. Farrer’s behymnedViburnun fragransgrows apace: its fragrance has yet to be tested. He said that it was like heliotrope, and I hope that it may prove so. Then I have a Spiraea from Tibet, which came to me from Wisley in a thumb-pot, marked “Rosa-species,” but is unmitigated Spiraea. You may practically see the thing grow if, like it, you have nothing else to do. It is now as big as a bamboo-clump, and impervious to frost. So far as it is concerned, this might be the valley of Avilion. Once only has the vast affair considered flowering. Two years ago buds showed themselves at the end of August and, with a leisureliness for which the stock had not prepared me, were ready to expand by the middle of October. They then looked as much like bunches of bananas as anything else, and if all had gone well, would no doubt have been the talk of the county. But, as you might suppose, by the time they were ready,