Part 4

St. Paul’s Walk and its varied interests would keep our young man occupied till the hour of dinner, a meal of which he would probably partake in the bustle and excitement of the ordinary. The ordinary—the forerunner of the modern restaurant and _table d’hôte_—was then a novel institution, and as such enjoyed immense popularity among the gilded youth. Three grades were commonly recognized—the aristocratic ordinary, for which, to judge from a remark in Middleton’s “Trick to Catch the Old One,” about two shillings would be charged; the twelvepenny ordinary, frequented by tradesmen, professional people, and middle-class citizens; and the threepenny, to which flocked only the lowest and most questionable characters. The first-named of the three, Dekker tells us, was the great resort of all the court gallants. There friends and acquaintances met, ate, gossiped, laughed, and not infrequently quarrelled, together; there braggarts, like Lafeu in “All’s Well that Ends Well,” “made vent of their travel”; there the latest intelligence was circulated, the latest scandal discussed, the latest fads of fashion displayed in all their grotesqueness. A good picture of the ordinary during the dinner hour will be found in the twelfth chapter of Scott’s “Fortunes of Nigel”; but the genuine atmosphere is best caught in such a contemporary piece of writing as the “Gull’s Horn Book.”

Dinner over, with its customary game of primero, there were many ways in which our gallant could kill time. There was the theatre, with its more intellectual attractions; the bull-ring and the cockpit; the juggler’s booth and the tennis-court; the shops along Cheapside and about St. Paul’s, among which the connoisseur in letters, jewellery, and kickshaws would find it easy enough to while away an afternoon. But however he might pass the hours between dinner and supper, he would probably appear in full time for the latter meal, for which he might repair to “The Devil,” in Fleet Street, or “The Mitre,” in Cheap, or “The Mermaid,” in Bread Street; at which last-named place he might peradventure catch snatches of the conversation and laughter of a little group of men in one corner, among whom we should recognize, though he might not, the burly form and surly face of rare old Ben, and the serene countenance and deep, clear eyes of one who is more to all of us to-day than any other Englishman who ever lived—Will Shakspere, playwright and actor. After that would not improbably follow the wildest episodes of the day, which likely enough would end in deep carousal behind the flaming red doors of a tavern, or at the gambling-table, or even in more doubtful places of resort. When in Heywood’s “Wise Woman” old Chartley is looking for his son, he bids his servants “inquire about the taverns, ordinaries, bowl-alleys, tennis-courts, and gaming-houses, for there I fear he will be found,” a direction which gives us a fair idea of the favorite haunts of the young men of the day. Gambling particularly, in all its forms, was one of the prevalent manias of the time, and was often carried to such an extent that men would stake their very clothes, and even their beards, which might be used to stuff tennis-balls. In “Greene’s Tu Quoque” will be found a wonderfully realistic scene of a quarrel following a dispute over the cards and dice, and ending in a challenge for a duel. Then when the time came for him to reel homeward through the darkness with one sleepy page to light his way with a torch, our gallant would be either uproariously cheerful, or contentious, or maudlin, as his habit might be when in his cups. He would bellow out loose songs upon the night air, molest straggling by-passers, come sometimes into conflict with the watch, and once in a while, when luck went against him, might find himself lodged for the night in one of the prisons of the metropolis. So the day would end; and with it must close this part of our study. But, after all, very inadequate justice can be done to such a theme in so brief and rapid a sketch. We must go straight to the pages of Dekker, Greene, Nash, and Peele, if we would gain any adequate conception of the wilder aspects of Elizabethan social life.

* * * * *

In such a paper as the present, there is always danger lest the final impression left should be, if not a false, at any rate an inadequate one; for the temptation is strong to seize only the picturesque traits, and to pay such undue attention to grouping, color, and general effect, that we fail in preserving proper perspective, and throw portions of our description into unnatural relief. The risk of doing this is, of course, increased when, as in our own case, we take the point of view of the playwright and the popular writer, and study the world of men and affairs mainly through the medium of their pages. I trust none the less, that we have not erred on the side of painting life in Shakspere’s London in too bright or seductive colors. Yet, to tone down our picture, let us say a closing word about its darker aspects; for these were many, and they were very dark indeed.

As Mr. Swinburne has pointed out, one of the most difficult problems meeting the student of the Elizabethan drama, is that of reconciling the elements of lofty thought and gross passion, of high idealism and coarse savagery, which lie so close together, which are indeed bound up inextricably, in the very woof and texture of the plays of Shakspere’s time. The literature of the stage shows us with startling distinctness how in the world of the playwright there frequently went, along with the deepest and most original thought a revolting ferocity of manners, and along with a lofty sense of the beautiful and the pure a crude love of violence, a revelling in blood, a thirst for wanton outrage and low excitement. All these diverse elements are, separately, prominent enough in modern letters, as in modern civilization; what seems so strange and puzzling in our great romantic drama is the way in which they constantly blend in the most intimate association.

Now, these extraordinary incongruities are not alone to be found in the world of the playwright; they penetrated the life of Elizabethan society. To some phases of the coarse brutalism which formed one aspect of the complex spirit of the English Renaissance incidental reference has more than once been made. Did space permit, we might here add much corroborative testimony. But as space does not permit, I will content myself with accentuating very briefly the difference in temper between the age of Elizabeth and our own, as exemplified in one very crucial matter—in the treatment of the large criminal class.

We who are privileged to live in an epoch of growing humanity may well be startled and shocked at many of the facts brought to light by even a casual inquiry in this direction. Executions, be it remembered, were almost invariably public, and formed, as we have seen, not infrequent distractions in the monotonous round of life. Felons were hanged, drawn, and quartered; pirates were hanged on the seashore at low water; and capital punishment was in use for an enormous number of petty offences, including even theft from the person above the value of one shilling. The mere circumstance that we read of seventy-four persons being sentenced to death in one county in a single year, itself speaks volumes. Indeed, the severity of punishments was held something to boast of, and men were still of the opinion of Fortescue, who, in the reign of Henry the Sixth, had proudly proclaimed that “more men are hanged in England in one year than in France in seven, because the English have better parts.” Public malefactors of position were usually beheaded, and their heads exposed in prominent places, as on London Bridge or Temple Bar. On the tower of the former, Hentzner “counted above thirty” placed “on iron spikes.”[1] Witches were burnt alive; a horrible fate also reserved for women who killed their husbands, which crime stood on the statute-books not as murder, but as petty treason. Heretics, too, were frequently burnt. Perjury was punished by the pillory and branding, and rogues and vagabonds, irrespective of age and sex, were sent to the public stocks and whipping-post.

“In London, and within a mile, I ween, There are of jails and prisons full eighteen, And sixty whipping-posts, and stocks, and cages,”

writes Taylor, the Water Poet. Scolds were ducked, and many minor offences were rewarded by burning the hand, cropping the ears, and similar mutilations. Finally, felons refusing to plead were subjected to the _peine forte et dure_, notwithstanding the proud and oft-repeated boast that torture has always been unknown to the English law.

Footnote 1:

Allusions to the continuance of this revolting practice are numerous as late as the eighteenth century. See, _e. g._, Pope’s “Essay on Man,” iv., 251-252, and the famous anecdote of Johnson and Goldsmith (Boswell, _anno_ 1773).

Surely it is needless for us to go farther than all this, unless it be to add the striking fact that, despite such brutal severity in punishment, crimes and outrages of every description remained alarmingly common throughout the whole of the period with which we have been concerned. Enough has been said to throw in some of the heavier shadows necessary to complete the slight sketch we have been trying to furnish of the social life and every-day manners of Shakspere’s time.

* * * * *

With this as our last word, then, we take leave of “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” and become once more denizens of our own century. And here it would be easy, of course, to fall into the cheap Macaulay-vein of moralizing; to strike a contrast between present and past, point out all the manifold and magnificent achievements of modern civilization, and end with rhetorical rhapsodies over our “wondrous, wondrous age.” It would be easy, I say, to do this; and I doubt not that it would be effective. But when in my study of the literature of any bygone generation I make myself at home for a time among dead things and long-forgotten people, I do not, I must confess, find myself in any mood for brass-band celebrations. The feeling left with me is a vaguer and sadder one. For, as I turn back into our own world, I remember that this past was once verily and actually the present; that these dead things, these long-forgotten people, were once intensely alive; that the tragedy and the comedy of existence went on then as it goes on to-day; and that in the breasts of men and women fashioned like ourselves beat human hearts, after all, very like our own. Hope and disappointment, joy and despair; the memory of yesterday, the expectation of the morrow; the hunger and thirst of the spirit; the lust of the eye; the pride of life; the “ancient sorrow of man,”—all that goes to make up the sum total of our little earthly lot,—was their portion, too, as it will presently be the portion of the countless generations by which we in our turn shall be replaced. And thus, musing, I think of the nameless young men and maidens of that dim, far-off age, who repeated the sweet old story of love, as their fathers and mothers had done before them, as their distant descendants do to-day, while there was confusion in high places, and storm and struggle about the land. I think of the tears that were shed as gentle hearts broke in anguish; of the brave deeds wrought; of the tales of the faith of sturdy manhood and the trust of womanly devotion, which will never be retold. I think of the lives that ran their placid course; of the children that came as years went by, bringing “hope with them and forward-looking thoughts”; of mothers weeping over empty cradles; of tiny graves, long since obliterated, where many a bright promise found “its earthly close.” I think of lives that were successful, and of lives that were failures; of prophecies unfulfilled; of splendid ambitions realized only to bring the inevitable disillusion; of sordid aims accomplished; of vile things said and done. The whole dead world seems to take form and flesh in my imagination; the men and women start from the pages of the book I have been reading—a mad world, my masters, and a strange one; but behold, a world singularly, almost grotesquely, like our own. And then my thought takes a sudden spin; and this age of ours seems to slip some three centuries back into the past, and becomes weird, and phantasmal, and unreal. And I find myself peering across the misty years into this throbbing world of multitudinous enterprise and activity from the standpoint of an era when you and I will be long since forgotten—when no one will know how we toiled and suffered and loved and died, when no one will care where we lie at rest. How curious to think of it all in this way! And with what tempered enthusiasms and sobered judgments must we needs go back to take up again the burden of life knowing that the deep, silent current of time is sweeping us slowly into the great darkness, and that hereafter the tale will be told of us as it has been told generation after generation since the world began: Lo, their glory endured but for a season, and the fashion of it has passed away forever!

Pepys and His Diary

Pepys and His Diary

I have undertaken to talk to you this evening about a singular book—a book that holds a place practically by itself on our library shelves,—the Diary of Samuel Pepys.[2] The writer of this book was not a great man, or a strong man, or in any way a man of transcendent mental or moral characteristics. The work itself has none of those qualities by virtue of which a piece of literature will, in the average of cases, be found to survive the lapse of time and the changes of fashions and tastes. With the acknowledged masterpieces of autobiographic narration—with the “Confessions” of St. Augustine or Rousseau, for example, or the “Memoirs” of Benvenuto Cellini or Gibbon, or the “Dichtung und Wahrheit” of Goethe, or the “Journal” of Amiel, we should never think of comparing it; for Pepys’s garrulous pages have no eloquence, no literary quality, no magic of style—they record no intense spiritual struggles, reveal no deep upheavals of thought and feeling, flash no new light upon the dark places or into the mysterious recesses of motive and character. What, then, is the secret of Pepys’s enduring fascination? Wherein lies the curious spell, the undeniable vitality of his work? Why do we continue to read this chaotic chronicle of his, when, in the pressure of modern affairs, so many books of the past—better books, wiser books, nobler books—are left to slumber in serenity in those vast mausoleums of genius, our public libraries, undisturbed, all but forgotten?

Footnote 2:

As the pronunciation of our diarist’s name is often under discussion, I subjoin, for the reader’s guidance in the matter, some clever verses, originally published a few years ago in the London “Graphic”:—

“There are people, I’m told,—some say there are heaps,— Who speak of the talkative Samuel as Peeps; And some, so precise and pedantic their step is, Who call the delightful old diarist, Pepys; But those I think right, and I follow their steps, Ever mention the garrulous gossip as Peps!”

I say nothing now about the historic value of Pepys’s journal—for historic value may have no kind of relationship with broad popular interest; and it is with the popular interest, and not with the special significance of the work before us, that we are at present concerned. And therefore my question, concretely put, is just this: How is it that you and I, who may care little or nothing for the information that Pepys gives us about the degraded politics and miserable court intrigues of the Restoration, may still find in his daily capricious jottings a charm which, as literature goes, is almost, if not absolutely, unique?

For any one who has ever dipped into the Diary at all, the answer to this question is not far to seek. Pepys’s memoranda have lasting interest for us on account of their naïve frankness, their plain and simple spontaneity, their transparent honesty of self-expression. As we read, we realize that, for once at least, we are brought into the closest, the most vital contact with a living man, and that this man speaks to us, who, by the irony of fate, chance to overhear his unconsidered utterances, without disguise, without reticence or reserve, of the things which stand nearest to his heart. The reader of Pepys’s Diary knows Pepys himself better than his acquaintances knew him at the office, in the coffee-house, at the street-corner; better than his friends knew him at the social board, spite of the truth that there is in wine; better even than his wife knew him in the intercourse of the home. To us he lays bare without sophistication or guile thoughts and impulses, desires and disappointments, concealed from them beneath the conventional wrappings of daily manners and life—personal criticisms and private experiences which, living, he confided to none. Does this strike you as a small matter? Then, pause for a moment and ask yourselves of what other man whose written words have ever come into the fierce white glare of publication such statements as these could truthfully be made? Autobiographies, memoirs, journals, confessions, letters we have, of course, without number, and the value of these as human documents may in most cases be great, in some cases inestimable. But do we, after all, accept literature of this character as the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth? Do we not rather know that, as a matter of course, such literature must almost always be, in varying degrees, forced, unreal, overwrought, theatrical? The moment a man begins to talk about himself, the dramatic instinct inevitably comes into play; the least vain of mortals colors his own experiences, the least self-conscious manipulates his motives and transfigures his feelings. That which we ought to know best—our own heart—is precisely that which of set purpose we are forever debarred from describing with more than an approximation to the stern and solid fact. You remember the famous words in which Rousseau announced his intention of writing the plain, unvarnished story of his life: “I enter upon an undertaking which never had an example, the execution of which will never have an imitation. I desire to show my fellow-creatures a man in all the truth of his nature—and this man will be myself.” And with this rhetorical exordium, the great sentimentalist proceeds, as Mr. Lowell happily phrased it, to throw “open his waistcoat, and make us the confidants of his dirty linen.” The very condition of deliberate self-revelation places an embargo on perfect candor and unconsciousness; an autobiographer, as George Sand said, always makes himself the hero of his own novel, even if he be a hero of the dirty vagabond type, as in the case just referred to. Here, then, is the ultimate secret of Pepys’s peculiar charm. Beside him, Rousseau is a mere _poseur_, and the rest are nowhere. “Is not,” asks Mr. Lowell, “is not old Samuel Pepys, after all, the only man who spoke to himself of himself with perfect simplicity, frankness, and unconsciousness?” That he should have done this is no trifling thing. He remains, seemingly for all time, “a creature unique as the dodo, a solitary specimen, to show that it was possible for nature once in the centuries to indulge in so odd a whimsey.”

In speaking of the difficulties inherent in autobiographical writing, I lay stress, it will be observed, on the set purpose, the deliberate intention, generally characterizing it. No small part of the secret of Pepys’s success as a diarist is to be found in the simple fact that with him the set purpose, the deliberate intention, and the resultant disturbing self-consciousness are almost entirely absent. Pepys did not write for the public eye, or for any glance save his own; he recorded his impressions and enterprises, his pleasures, anxieties, ambitions, aims, and passing fancies because he found satisfaction in thus summing up “the actions of the day each night before he slept”; and not at all because he proposed to draw a full-length portrait of himself for the benefit of his contemporaries or the amusement of posterity. It has been suggested by one of the wiseacres who can never leave a simple fact alone, that Pepys regarded his Diary as material towards a fully developed autobiography. Possibly so. But we may be certain that had such autobiography ever been written, the self-delineation of its pages would have differed in many important particulars—in details put in, and even more seriously in details left out—from that contained in the journal itself. As it is, we have an odd and uncomfortable sense, when we first open the Diary, of intruding where we have no proper business, of breaking in upon the privacy of a man’s life, and surprising him in the undress which he might wear for himself, but in which he would not willingly be caught by even his closest friend. For remember that the six small volumes which contain the manuscript diary are filled with densely packed short-hand, peppered with occasional words and phrases from the French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek; and that it was only after immense labor that the script was transliterated, and the secrets which poor Pepys had, as he fondly supposed, buried there forever, given to an impertinent and unsympathetic world.[3] Writing thus for himself, and for himself alone, and guarding himself by every means within his power against the possibility of exposure, our chronicler was enabled to make his narrative the luminous, because free and spontaneous, expression of his innermost life. A man may be honest with himself in cipher for whom long-hand, to say nothing of the thought of subsequent publication, would bring the inevitable and fatal temptations to sophistication. Could Pepys have foreseen the ultimate fate of his journal, it is safe to say that it would never have been written, or, once written, would have been discreetly burned. Poor fellow! His sense of complete security, of inviolable self-concealment, made possible such confidences as otherwise would never have been committed to paper.

Footnote 3:

A curious circumstance in connection with the first reading of the Diary is worth mentioning. An indefatigable student, it is said, toiled at its decipherment from twelve to fourteen hours a day for the space of three or four years. All the while—such is the strange untowardness of earthly things—Pepys had left in his library a long-hand transcript of his short-hand account of Charles the Second’s escape, and this, had it been known at the time, would have served the purpose of the required key.