Chapter IX: Eugénie De Guérin 177 (3)

The queen and princesses were, indeed, kind to her; but their hangers-on were not, or not all of them. She had been born free, had grown up in freedom, had been accustomed to indulge her fancies, to have them indulged by others, limiting them only by love and the affectionate wish to comply with the fancies of those dear to her. Now she was cramped in every movement, what was far worse, in every thought. To do servant’s work for a servant’s stipend was hateful. To run at bell-call for an idle bidding was more hateful. But these were nothing compared to having no home, no time, no life, of one’s own. To move by the clock, some one else’s clock, to be thrown into any quarters that could be spared from the needs of those higher, to dress and undress at stated times in stated fashions, to be never, never Dr. Burney’s daughter, but always the handmaid of the queen—what a change from the caresses of Johnson and the compliments of Burke! Even pastimes not unwelcome in themselves become so in such surroundings. What a wail does she utter over the daily infliction of piquet with the tyrannous Mrs. Schwellenberg: “And—O picquet—life hardly hangs on earth during its compulsion, in these months succeeding months, and years creeping, crawling after years.”

And then another change, quite as violent as the preceding. Miss Burney’s health fails under the strain, she leaves the court, is thrown among a group of French _émigrés_, meets General D’Arblay, marries him, and settles down in a quiet country cottage, with a bit of an income and a garden full of cabbages. No Burkes or Johnsons here, no kings or queens or saucy gentlemen in waiting; just quiet. One would think she would miss it all, even what was hateful. Charles Lamb sighed to be rid of his India House slavery, and when he was rid of it, could not tell what to do with his freedom. So it is apt to be with all of us. But Madame D’Arblay apparently knew when she was well off. She adored her husband. She was absorbed in her son. She wrote another novel, “Camilla,” less readable than the others, but well paid for. She entertained with perfect simplicity any friend who could come to her. She had but one dread—lest some call of military or political duty in France might draw away her husband and break up her Paradise. “Ah, if peace would come without, what could equal my peace within!”

The call of duty did come. Her husband went and she followed him, into other scenes, still totally different from what had gone before. She saw the France of the first Napoleon and Napoleon himself. She saw the restoration of the Bourbons. She was hurried along in the mad bustle of the flight from Paris. She waited in Brussels through the suspense of Waterloo. With husband and son, and alone, she had adventures and perils by land and sea. Surely she had need of a good stock of peace within, for peace without seemed very far away.

But the last act passed quietly at home in England. She was not fêted or flattered any more, as she had been. Yet enough of old glory clung about her to bring her a large price for one more very indifferent novel, “The Wanderer.” Her husband died, her son died. Not much was left to her but memories and these, when she was nearly eighty, she wove into a life of her father, which Macaulay condemned, but which has at least the merit of being sweet and sunshiny. To recall such a golden past, such a tangled web of fortune, at eighty, without a word of bitterness for the present, shows a heart worth loving, worth studying. Let us study Madame D’Arblay’s.

She will not help us so much as we could wish. “Poor Fanny’s face tells what she thinks, whether she will or no,” said Dr. Burney. Her face might. Her Diary does not. To be sure, she herself asserts repeatedly that she writes nothing but the truth. “How truly does this Journal contain my real, undisguised thoughts ... its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendation.” No doubt she believed so. No doubt she aimed to be absolutely veracious. No doubt she avoids false statements and perversion of fact. Her diary may be true, but it is not genuine. It is literary, artificial, in every line of it. She sees herself exactly as a man—or woman—sees himself in a mirror: the very nature of the observation involves unconscious and instinctive posing.

Macaulay, in his rhetorical fashion, draws a violent contrast between Madame D’Arblay’s Memoirs of her father and her Diary. The Diary, he says, is fresh and natural, the Memoirs tricked up with all the artifice of a perfumer’s shop. Neither is fresh and natural. The Memoirs are overloaded with Johnsonian ornament; but the simpler style of the Diary is not one bit more spontaneous or more genuine. It was impossible for the woman to look at herself from any but a literary point of view.

Take, for instance, the address to “Nobody,” with which the Diary opens. It sets the note at once. There is not the slightest suggestion of a sincere, direct effort to record the experiences of a soul; merely an airy, literary coquetting with somebody, everybody, under the Nobody mask.

A single breath of fresh air is enough to blast the artificiality of the whole thing. Turn from a page of the Diary to any letter of Mrs. Piozzi—some of them are given in the Diary itself. A coarse woman, a passionate woman, a jealous woman—but, oh, so genuine in every word. Her loud veracity sweeps through Fanny’s dainty nothings like a salt sea breeze. And do not misunderstand the distinction. Fanny could not have told a lie to save her life. Mrs. Piozzi probably tossed them about like cherries or bonbons. But Mrs. Piozzi, laughing or lying, was always herself, without thinking about herself. Fanny was always thinking—unconsciously, if one may say so—of how she would appear to somebody else.

Thus I cannot agree with Mr. Dobson that her Diary is to be classed with the great diaries. A page of Pepys is enough to put her out of the count. She may be more decorous, more varied, even more entertaining. As a portrayer of her own soul or of the souls of others, between her and Pepys there is no comparison.

Take the mere matter of conversations. In these Miss Burney is inexhaustible. She gives an evening’s talk of half a dozen personages, tricked out with the neatness of finished comic dialogue. She may keep the general drift of what was said. But who supposes her record can be exact? Exact enough, you say. In a sense, yes. Yet she turns humanity into literature. When Pepys quotes a sentence, you know you have the gross reality.

So, I repeat, our diarist helps us less than she ought. Yet even she cannot write two thousand pages, nominally about herself, without telling something. The very fact of such literary self-consciousness is of deep human interest. It is to be noted, also, that she does not conceal herself from any instinct of reserve. She is willing to drop pose and tell all, if she could; but she cannot. Such thoughtless self-confession as Pepys’s would have been impossible to her. I do not think that once, in all her volumes, does she show herself in an unfavorable light.

But we can detect what she does not show. We can read much, much that she did not mean us to read. And lights are thrown on her by others as well as by herself.

To begin with, how did she bear glory? For a girl of twenty-five to be thrown into such a blaze of it was something of an ordeal. She herself disclaims any excessive ambition. She could almost wish the triumph might “happen to some other person who had more ambition, whose hopes were more sanguine, who could less have borne to be buried in the oblivion which I even sought.” She records all the fine things that are said of her, the surmises of eager curiosity, the ardent outbursts of family affection, the really tumultuous enthusiasm of ripened critical judgment. But she is rather awed than inflated by it, at least, so she says. “I believe half the flattery I have had would have made me madly merry; but _all_ serves only to depress me by the fulness of heart it occasions.” “Steeped as she was in egotism,” is the phrase used of her by Hayward, the biographer of Mrs. Piozzi. If she was so steeped, it certainly did not appear in outward obtrusiveness, pretense, or self-assertion. She repeatedly complains of her own shyness; and others, who knew her in very various surroundings, bear witness to it as strongly. “She was silent, backward, and timid, even to sheepishness,” writes her father. “Dr. Burney and his daughter, the author of ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’ ... I always thought rather avoided than solicited notice,” says Wraxall. And Walpole, assuredly never inclined to minimize defects, speaks with an enthusiasm which is absolutely conclusive. Miss Burney “is half-and-half sense and modesty, which possess her so entirely, that not a cranny is left for pretense or affectation.”

No. The author of “Evelina” may, must, have reveled in the praise which was showered upon her in such intoxicating measure. But she kept her head, and few men or women ever lived who were less spoiled by flattery than she.

Indeed, her extreme shyness probably prevented her being brilliantly successful in general society. She herself disposes summarily of her qualifications in this regard. A hostess, she says, should provide for the intellectual as well as the material wants of her guests. “To take care of both, as every mistress of a table ought to do, requires practice as well as spirits, and ease as well as exertion. Of these four requisites I possess not one.”

This is the sort of thing one prefers saying one’s self to having others say it. There can be no doubt that Miss Burney had tact, grace, charm, and above all, that faculty of taking command of and saving a difficult situation which is one of the most essential of social requisites. There is character in the pretty little anecdote of her childhood. She and her playmates had soaked and ruined a crusty neighbor’s wig. He scolded. For a while Fanny—ten years old—listened with remorse and patience. Then she walked up to him and said. “What signifies talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be sure; but ’tis of no use to speak of it any more, because what’s done can’t be undone.”

Still, she was doubtless at her best in companies of three or four friends, where she felt at her ease. She loved society and conversation, but it was of the intimate, fireside order. How fine is her remark on this point. “I determined, however, to avoid all tête-à-têtes with him whatsoever, as much as was in my power. How very few people are fit for them, nobody living in trios and quartettos can imagine!” She studied her interlocutors and adapted herself to them. “As soon as I found by the looks and expressions of this young lady, that she was of a peculiar cast, I left all choice of subjects to herself, determined quietly to follow as she led.” She had also that charming gift for intimate society, the power—rather, the instinctive habit—of drawing confidences. Young and old, men and women, told her their hopes, their sorrows, their aspirations, and their difficulties. This, I think, does not commonly happen to persons steeped in egotism.

As it is delightful to turn from one trait in a character to another that seems quite incompatible with it, we must not assume that, because Miss Burney was shy and retiring, therefore she wanted spirits and gayety. On the contrary, she assures us, and the Diary and her other writings and her friends confirm it, that in good company she could carry laughter and hilarity to the pitch of riot. What a delicious picture does Crisp paint of her in childhood, dancing “Nancy Dawson on the grass-plot, with your cap on the ground, and your long hair streaming down your back, one shoe off, and throwing about your head like a mad thing.” She was always ready to dance Nancy Dawson, and eager in sympathy when others danced. In the lively parts of “Evelina” there is a Bacchic boisterousness almost Rabelaisian, and again and again throughout the Diary scenes of pure, wild fun diversify the literary gravity of Streatham and the dull decorum of the court of George the Third.

But if Miss Burney could mock her friends, she could also love them, and to study her friendships is to study the woman herself. Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi does, indeed, write of her young protégée in rather harsh terms. Like all the rest of the Streatham world, Fanny was bitterly opposed to the Piozzi marriage, and her attitude provoked her former hostess to indignant criticism. Even in the earlier days of ardent affection, Mrs. Thrale notes some flaws in the relationship. Fanny was independent. Mrs. Thrale was patronizing. Fanny accepted favors a little as her due. Mrs. Thrale showered them, but wished them recognized. “Fanny Burney has kept her room here in my house seven days, with a fever or something that she calls a fever; I gave her every medicine and every slop with my own hand; took away her dirty cups, spoons, etc.; moved her tables; in short, was doctor, nurse, and maid—for I did not like the servants should have additional trouble, lest they should hate her for it. And now, with the true gratitude of a wit, she tells me that the world thinks the better of me for my civility to her. It does? does it?”

Can you not understand how Fanny felt? And how Mrs. Thrale felt? And that they loved each other, nevertheless, as Mrs. Thrale indeed eagerly admits?

Then came the Piozzi trouble and the lady speaks harshly of “the treacherous Burneys.” Yet I do not think Fanny deserved it. She loved Dr. Johnson and she loved Mrs. Thrale. Between them her course was difficult. Also, she was undeniably conventional by nature and Mrs. Thrale’s irregularities shocked her. Yet she did the best she could.

“Treacherous,” said Mrs. Thrale. “True as gold,” said Queen Charlotte. The latter is much nearer the facts. Affection, loyal, devoted affection was the root of Miss Burney’s existence. She quotes Dr. Johnson’s saying to her, “Cling to those who cling to you,” and I am sure she was ready to carry it the one step further which real loyalty requires. Her friends stick by her and she by them. She defends them when they need it, even when they hardly deserve it. “All else but kindness and society has to me always been nothing.”

Especially charming is her devotion to her family. The Memoirs of her father are three volumes of long laudation. Almost equal is her affection for that singular figure, her other father, Samuel Crisp. Her sisters, Susan especially, are loved and praised with like ecstasy and when her husband appears, her letters to him and about him are as rapturous as was to be expected. One exception to these family ardors stands out by its oddity. Madame D’Arblay’s only son is, in youth, not what she would wish him to be—not dissipated, not vicious, but unsocial, unconventional—and she analyzes him to his father with a critical coldness which, in her, is startling. “When he is wholly at his ease, as he is at present, ... he is uncouth, negligent, and absent.... He exults rather than blushes in considering himself ignorant of everything that belongs to common life, and of everything that is deemed useful.... Sometimes he wishes for wealth, but it is only that he might be supine.... Yet, while thus open to every dupery, and professedly without any sense of order, he is so fearful of ridicule that a smile from his wife at any absurdity would fill him with the most gloomy indignation. It does so now from his mother.” And thus we get sudden glimpses into deep gulfs of human nature, where it is hardly meant we should.

It seems almost an irony that a person of Miss Burney’s social and conventional temper should have been forced into the excess of social convention—a court. She knew what was before her and hated it; for we like to indulge our failings in our own way. All the more, therefore, is one struck with the admirable qualities which such a trying experience calls out in her. To begin with, she maintains her dignity. Sensitive, shy, and timid as she was, it might be supposed that all court creatures would walk over her, from the king to the lowest lacquey, that in the busy struggle to climb she would be made a ladder-rung for every coarse or careless foot. No, it is clear she was not. She had no false pretensions, no whimsical assertion of pride in the wrong place. But she would not be imposed upon. How fine and straightforward is her statement of principle in the matter: “To submit to ill-humour rather than argue and dispute I think an exercise of patience, and I encourage myself all I can to practise it: but to accept even a shadow of an obligation upon such terms I should think mean and unworthy; and therefore I mean always, in a Court as I would elsewhere, to be open and fearless in declining such subjection.”

Even finer is the force of character with which she resists depression and brooding over being torn from her friends and cut off from all her favorite pursuits. “Now therefore I took shame to myself and _resolved to be happy_.” Happy she could not be, but such a resolution alters life, nevertheless, and shows an immense fund of character in the resolver. Similar resources she had shown before, when literary failure came to her as well as success. Accept the inevitable, resolutely control all thought of what cannot be helped, say nothing about it, and try something else. In short, she had a rich supply of that useful article, common sense. It is to be noted, also, that the heroines of her novels have it, for all their wild adventures.

With these various opportunities of human contact and with this natural shrewdness, Madame D’Arblay’s Diary should have been a mine of varied and powerful observation of life. It is not. She presents us with a vast collection of figures, vividly contrasted and distinguished in external details and little personal peculiarities; but rarely, if ever, does she get down to essentials, to a real grip on the deeper springs and motives of character. This is in large part due to the eternal literary prepossession which I have already pointed out. You feel that the painter is much more interested in making an effective picture than a genuine likeness. But Miss Burney’s deficiencies as an analyst of hearts go deeper than this technical artificiality and are bound up with one of the greatest charms of her personal temperament. For an exact observer of character she is altogether too amiable. I do not at all assert that a good student of men must hate them. Far from it.

There is a soul of goodness in things evil,
Would we observingly distil it out,—

is an excellent warning for the psychologist. But Miss Burney is really too full of the milk of human kindness. It oozes from every pore. She “tempers her satire with meekness,” said Mrs. Thrale. She does indeed. Occasionally, in a very elaborate portrait, like that of her fellow courtier, Mr. Turbulent, she makes what the French call a _charge_; but even these are the rallying of joyous good-nature, not the bitter caricature of the born satirist. When, by rare chance, she does bring herself to a bitter touch, she usually atones for it by the observing distillation of a soul of goodness, which transfers the subject to the sheep category at once.

It is thus that her really vast gallery of portraiture is cruelly disappointing. Turn from her to Saint-Simon or Lord Hervey, turn even to the milder Greville or Madame de Rémusat, and you will feel the difference. George the Third was not Louis the Fourteenth, nor Queen Charlotte Queen Caroline. But George and his wife were hardly the beatific spirits that appear in this Diary. Miss Burney cannot say enough about her dear queen, her good queen, her saintly queen. Mrs. Thrale remarks: “The Queen’s approaching death gives no concern but to the tradesmen, who want to sell their pinks and yellows, I suppose.” And this is really refreshing after so much distillation of soul perfumery.

In short, though she was far from a fool, Miss Burney’s views of humanity do more credit to her heart than to her head. If the paradox is permissible, she was exceedingly intelligent, but not very richly endowed with intelligence, that is, she was quick to perceive and reason in detail, but she had no turn for abstract thinking. The “puppy-men” at Bath complained to Mrs. Thrale that her young protégée had “such a drooping air and such a timid intelligence.” This was greatly to the credit of the puppy-mens’ discernment. Timid intellectually—not morally—Miss Burney certainly was. Such learning as she had she carefully disguised, and in this, no doubt, she had as fellows other eighteenth-century women much bigger than she. But when she gets hold of an attractive book, she waits to read it in company. “Anything highly beautiful I have almost an aversion to reading alone.” Here I think we have a mark of social instincts altogether outbalancing the intellectual.

As to religious opinions, we have no right to criticize Miss Burney’s reserve, because she tells us that it is of set purpose. At the same time it is noticeable how ready she is to look up to somebody else for her thinking. Her father, Crisp, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Locke, her husband, each in turn is an idol, a mainstay for the timid intelligence to cling to.

And as her intelligence was perhaps not Herculean, so I question whether her emotional life, just and tender and true as it indisputably was, had anything volcanic in it. She had certainly admirable control of her feelings; but in these cases we are never quite sure whether the force controlling is strong or the force controlled weak. Her love for her husband was rapturous—in words. Words were her stock in trade. It was also, no doubt, capable of supreme sacrifice; for her conscience was high and pure. Still, that “drooping air and timid intelligence” haunt me. She seems to approach all life, from God to her baby, with a delicious spiritual awe; so different from Miss Austen, who walks right up and lifts the veil of awe from everything. Miss Burney, indeed, stands as much in awe of herself as of everything else; and hence it is that, writing thousands of words about herself, she tells us comparatively little.

One thing is certain, she was a writer from her childhood to her death. Her own experiences and all others’ were “copy,” first and foremost. “I thought the lines _worth preserving_; so flew out of the room to write them.” She was always flying out of life to preserve it—in syrup. The minute detail with which she writes out—or invents—all the conversations of her first love affair is extraordinary enough. Still, as she had no feeling in the matter herself, it was less wonderful that she could describe—not analyze—the young man’s. But she did love her father. She did love her husband. That she could go from their deathbeds and note down last words and dying wishes, all the hopes and fears of those supreme moments, with cool artistic finish and posterity in her eye, is a fine instance of the scribbling mania.

It is, therefore, as an authoress that we must chiefly think of her. It is as the fêted, flattered, worshiped creatress of “Evelina” that her girlish figure gets its finest piquancy; and she herself, in old age, must have gone back again and again, through all the varied agitations of fifty years, to that glorious evening when Johnson and Burke vied with each other in enthusiastic praise of her books, and as she left them, intoxicated with glory, Burke quietly said to her, “Miss Burney, die to-night.”

V

MRS. PEPYS

CHRONOLOGY

Elizabeth Saint-Michel.
Born 1640.
Married Samuel Pepys December 1, 1655.
Died November 10, 1669.

V

MRS. PEPYS

The psychographer is apt to be hampered in his study of women by lack of material. Men of energy and vigor make themselves felt in the world at large. Even if they write little, they have a vast acquaintance, come into close contact with those who can write, and all their doings and sayings of importance are narrowly watched and minutely chronicled. In making their portraits one is more often embarrassed by the excess of material than by the lack of it.

With women this is not the case. Those who have public careers, historical figures, artists, writers especially, are approachable enough. And there is a great temptation to portray such mainly, if not exclusively. Yet so far from being all of the sex, they are not fairly representative of it, perhaps one may even say they are not normally representative. It is the quiet lives that count, the humble lives, the simple lives, lives perhaps of great achievement and of great influence, but of great influence through others, not direct. The richest and fullest and most fruitful of these lives often pass without leaving any written record, without a single trace that can be seized and followed to good purpose by the curious student. No doubt such women would prefer to be left in shadow, as they lived. But the loss to humanity in the study of their nobility and usefulness is very great. Above all, in portraying women of another type we should not forget these fugitive and silent figures who ought to be occupying the very first place in the history of their sex.

No one will maintain that Elizabeth, wife of Samuel Pepys, was an especially noble or heroic personage, or that her influence in the world, direct or indirect, was of a character to deserve any particular celebration. She appears, however, to have been thoroughly feminine and she is exceptional and interesting in this one point, at least, that she has not left posterity a single written line, yet she is known to us, from the Diary of her husband, with an intimacy and an accuracy of detail which we can hope to acquire with few characters who lived so long ago. George Sand remarked justly of Rousseau’s “Confessions,” that while he was without doubt at liberty to expose his own frailty, he had no right, in doing so, to expose the frailty of others. Right or wrong, Pepys certainly exposed his wife, in all her humanity, to the curious gaze of those who care to read. If we had a full volume of her letters, we could probably add something to certain phases of her experience, and more than anything else we should be glad to have her frank and daily comment on her husband. But, as it is, we know her as we know few of our living acquaintances and not all of our intimate friends.

When she first appears to us, she was twenty years old. Pepys married her at the early age of fifteen. It was a pure love match. He was poor and she was poor. Her father was a French Protestant. He was unsuccessful and unthrifty and Pepys helped the whole family, so far as he could. Of Elizabeth’s early life we know little, except that her Catholic friends tried to convert her. Of her married life before the Diary begins, in 1660, we know nothing.

She was eminently beautiful. Pepys assures us of that, and he was a connoisseur. Nor was this a lover’s illusion on his part. Years after his marriage, when too much friction had set in between them, he reiterates his opinion and notes with pride that she is not outdone by the greatest beauties of the time: “My wife, by my troth, appeared as pretty as any of them; I never thought so much before; and so did Talbot and W. Hewer, as they said, I heard, to one another.” The admiring husband does not attempt details, and perhaps it is as well. In the likenesses that have come down to us we do not discern any singular charm: a forehead rather full and prominent, eyebrows gracefully arched, a strongly marked nose, the mouth somewhat heavy, with lips, especially the upper, protruding.

That dress occupied a large place in Mrs. Pepys’s thoughts, as well as in her husband’s finances, goes without saying. He wishes her at all times to look well, but is not always eager about paying the bills. She follows the fashion, but not, it would seem, too curiously. Black patches, pendant curls, enhance, or disfigure, her natural charm. She cuts her dresses low in the neck, considerably to Pepys’s disgust, “out of a belief, but without reason, that it is the fashion.” When worldly prospects are favorable, she gets gifts,—for example, a new silk petticoat, “a very fine rich one, the best I did see there, and much better than she desires or expects.” On the other hand, if a speculation—or a dinner—goes awry, her adornments are viewed less amiably. The purchase of a costly pair of earrings “did vex me and brought both me and her to very high and very foule words from her to me.”

As this shows, she was in many ways a child; and what else should she have been? Married at fifteen, after a wandering and uncertain youth, how could she have attained solid training or any staid capacity? When she came to Pepys, she had apparently little education, but it is clear that she had a quick mother wit, so that with the passage of years she probably acquired as much as might decently justify the eulogy of her delightful epitaph, “_forma, artibus, linguis cultissima_.” Her husband was vexed by her false spelling, which must, therefore, have been indeed atrocious. But in his leisure hours he taught her arithmetic, geography, astronomy, and declares, in his patronizing way, that she made good profit.

She was a considerable reader, perhaps not of very solid literature, but at any rate of the poets and novelists. When obliged to remain at home, with a new Easter bonnet, on account of Pepys’s indisposition, she consoles him, if not herself, by reading Fuller’s “Worthies.” On other similar occasions she reads Du Bartas or Ovid. Her erudition at times even produces a great effect on her husband, as when she assures him that the plot of a popular play is taken from a novel, goes home and puts the passage before him, also when she laboriously copies out a letter on jealousy from the “Arcadia” and submits it to him for his edification. The romances that she loved she knew by heart, for her mentor finds occasion to check her for “her long stories out of Grand Cyrus, which she would tell, though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner.”

When she was married, she had not many accomplishments. But Pepys wanted a wife who would do him credit and took pains to teach her. Also, it must be added that music was one of the greatest pleasures of his life and he tried hard to share it with her. Sometimes he is encouraged. She really has quite a voice, if it were not that she has no ear. And even if she has no voice, she is so deft with her fingers that he is sure she will play the flageolet charmingly. Then it ends too often in the wail of the musical temperament over the temperament that is not musical and never can be. With drawing it is somewhat better. The lady makes progress; she decidedly outdoes Peg Penn, which is gratifying, and in one case, at least, her husband defers abjectly to her esthetic judgment. I “did choose two pictures to hang up in my house, which my wife did not like when I came home, and so I sent the picture of Paris back again.”

Mrs. Pepys’s enthusiasm for her artistic pursuits was so great as occasionally to bring reproach upon her for neglect of her household duties. But in general we may conclude that she was a faithful, a devoted, and an interested housekeeper. In a girl of twenty some slips were surely to be expected. “Finding my wife’s clothes lie carelessly laid up, I was angry with her, which I was troubled for.” The record, however, usually indicates both intelligence and energy. “My poor wife, who works all day at home like a horse,” remarks the not always appreciative husband. There are spurts of cleanliness, when the lady and her maids rise early and labor late, with a grim determination to rid their belongings of dirt, that monster of the world. Every woman will sympathize and will resent the unkindly comment of the observing cynic: “She now pretends to a resolution of being hereafter very clean. How long it will hold I can guess.”

Washing seems to have been done with a thoroughness which makes up for its rarity. Washing day upsets the whole household and with it Mr. Pepys’s temper, because he had invited friends to dinner and did not see how preparations could possibly be made to receive them. Nevertheless, I imagine the guests were received, and had no suspicions. A good housewife can work those miracles. At another time he goes to bed late and leaves mistress and maids still washing, washing.

The lady was a cook, too, and no doubt a good one. Many a dinner of her getting is minutely detailed and many more of her supervising. As has happened to others, her new oven bakes too quickly and burns her tarts and pies, but she “knows how to do better another time.” And this is a little touch of character, is it not?

But the sweetest picture of Mrs. Pepys at work is drawn by her husband’s memory, as he looks back from growing fortune on cottage days and simple love. “Talking with pleasure with my poor wife, how she used to make coal fires, and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch! in our little room at my Lord Sandwich’s; for which I ought for ever to love and admire her, and do; and persuade myself she would do the same thing again, if God should reduce us to it.”

Riches diminish some cares and swell others. In the little room at Lord Sandwich’s the servant problem was not serious. Afterwards it became so. A procession of sweet old English names, Nells and Janes and Nans and Debs, gleams and dances through the Diary, sometimes in tears, sometimes in laughter, sometimes trim, dainty, and coquettish, sometimes red-armed and tousle-headed. Some please master and mistress both, some please only the mistress, some, alas!—not the red arms and tousled heads—please only the master and fill that quaint and ancient Pepysian domesticity with tragedy and woe. Nothing, absolutely nothing, not even her children, tests a woman’s character so much as do her servants. From all that we read, it seems safe to assume that Mrs. Pepys showed judgment, common sense, and balance in the treatment of hers. If she flew out occasionally, we must remember that she was very young and that she lived with servants in very close intimacy. I fancy that her voice had deserved weight in the pretty little scene which took place in the garden and the moonlight. “Then it being fine moonshine with my wife an houre in the garden, talking of her clothes against Easter and about her mayds, Jane being to be gone, and the great dispute whether Besse, whom we both love, should be raised to be chamber-mayde or no. We have both a mind to it, but know not whether we should venture the making her proud and so make a bad chamber-mayde of a good-natured and sufficient cook-mayde.”

Probably the greatest wrecker of domestic peace is and always has been money. Was Mrs. Pepys a good economist? She was woman enough, human enough, to take delight in comfort and luxury. A new hanging, a new picture, a new bit of furniture enchanted her, as did a frock or a jewel. The purchase of the family coach was a matter of manifest rejoicing. Also, she was not perfect in her accounts, and when called to a stern audit by her source of supply, was forced to admit that she sometimes juggled with the figures, a confession truly horrible to one whose Philistine morality strained at a commercial gnat and swallowed a sexual camel. It “madded me and do still trouble me, for I fear she will forget by degrees the way of living cheap and under sense of want.” Nevertheless, her management is usually approved. After all, she costs less than other wives, a good many, and occasions of expense for her are not so frequent, all things considered. Even, in one felicitous instance, she receives praise, of that moderate sort which must often content the starved susceptibilities of matrimony. “She continuing with the same care and thrift and innocence, so long as I keep her from occasions of being otherwise, as ever she was in her life.”

One question that occurs frequently in regard to Mrs. Pepys is, had she friends? Apparently she had none. Perhaps her vague and troubled youth had kept her from contracting any of the rapturous intimacies of girlhood. If she had done so, they did not survive marriage. For Pepys was not the man to let his wife’s close companions pass without comment. He would have hated them—or loved them, and in either case made his house not over-pleasant to them. Perhaps he had done so before the Diary begins. At any rate, while Mrs. Pepys had many acquaintances, we do not see that she had one real confidante to whom she entrusted the many secrets that she obviously had to entrust. And in consequence she was lonely. The Diary shows it in touching fashion. Pepys recognizes it, but, with a certain cold-bloodedness, prefers having her lonely at home to having her dissipated abroad. So she is left to gossip and bicker with her maids, to pet her dogs and birds, and to quarrel with her husband. Even of her own family she sees little. Pepys did not seek their company, because they always wanted something. And they did not seek his, because they did not always get what they wanted, though with them, as with others, he was usually just and often generous.

It must not, however, be supposed that Mrs. Pepys was a Cinderella, or that the maids in the kitchen were her sole society. Pepys was proud of her, proud of his house, proud of his hospitality, which enlarged as riches came. He took her about with him often to the houses of his friends. Now and again they made a journey together with great peace of mind and curious content. Also, few weeks passed that he did not bring some one home with him, for dancing, or music, or general merriment, and in all these doings Mrs. Pepys’s share was greater or less. I think we can easily surmise her hand in that royal and triumphant festivity, the mere narrative of which breeds joy as well as laughter in any well-tempered disposition. “We fell to dancing, and continued, only with intermission for a good supper, till two in the morning, the music being Greeting, and another most excellent violin, and theorbo, the best in town. And so with mighty mirth, and pleased with their dancing of jigs afterwards several of them, and among others, Betty Turner, who did it mighty prettily; and, lastly, W. Batelier’s ‘Blackmore and Blackmore Mad’; and then to a country-dance again, and so broke up with extraordinary pleasure, as being one of the days and nights of my life spent with the greatest content; and that which I can but hope to repeat again a few times in my whole life. This done, we parted, the strangers home, and I did lodge my cozen Pepys and his wife in our blue chamber. My cozen Turner, her sister, and The., in our best chamber; Bab., Betty, and Betty Turner in our own chamber; and myself and my wife in the maid’s bed, which is very good. Our maids in the coachman’s bed; the coachman with the boy in his settle-bed, and Tom where he uses to lie. And so I did, to my great content, lodge at once in my house, with the greatest ease, fifteen, and eight of them strangers of quality.” And surely Mrs. Pepys was the queen of the feast, even though her name is but once mentioned.

Moreover, she had the social instinct, and gave her husband advice as to his conduct in the world, which he himself recognizes as excellent, and resolves to follow it. “I told all this day’s passages, and she to give me very good and rational advice how to behave myself to my Lord and his family, by slighting everybody but my Lord and Lady, and not to seem to have the least society or fellowship with them, which I am resolved to do, knowing that it is my high carriage that must do me good there, and to appear in good clothes and garbe.”

In one of Pepys’s diversions, which meant more to him than any except, perhaps, music, Mrs. Pepys was allowed to share to a considerable extent, and that was theatre-going. It would seem that she entered into it almost as heartily as did her husband and with quite as intelligent criticism. In one of his delightful spells of conscience-ache, he reproaches himself for going to a play alone, after swearing to his wife that he would go no more without her. But he sometimes permits her to go alone and very often enjoys her company and her enthusiasm. Occasionally she differs from him without shaking his judgment. But they agree entirely in their delight in Massinger’s “_Bondman_” and as entirely in their contempt for “_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.”

When one considers the frailties that resulted from Pepys’s social relations, one is tempted to ask how Mrs. Pepys was affected in this regard. So far as we can judge, it was not an age of very nice morality, at any rate among the upper classes. Wives as fair and as respectable as Pepys’s seem to have entertained the addresses of lovers more or less numerous. But I think we may assume that the lady we are concerned with was all that a wife should be. Pepys himself was undoubtedly of that opinion and he was an acute and a by no means partial judge. He does, indeed, have tempestuous bursts of jealousy. There was a certain dancing master, Pembleton by name, who caused a great deal of uneasiness. It is pretty evident that Mrs. Pepys coquetted with him, perhaps intentionally, and drove her husband at times to the verge of frenzy, perhaps intentionally. It “do so trouble me that I know not at this very minute that I now write this almost what either I write or am doing.” But it blows over with the clear admission that the parties had been nothing more than indiscreet.

Also, I divine a little malice in that pleasant incident of later date, when Mrs. Pepys appears with a couple of fine lace pinners, at first causing infinite disquiet by the suspicion that they were a present and then dispelling this disagreeable state of mind by another hardly less disagreeable. “On the contrary, I find she hath bought them for me to pay for them, without my knowledge.”

Under other aspects of morality, Mrs. Pepys perhaps impresses us less favorably. She would seem to have had faults of temper, faults of tongue, to be at times inclined to deception, at times to violence. Here again her age must be remembered, her age and her training. I imagine that in some moral points she was more practical than her husband, less inclined to hair-splitting nicety. I would give a good deal to know what she thought of his precious business of vows, his fine distinctions as to indulgence and abstinence, his forfeits, his pretexts and subterfuges. When he made up for a vow broken in an extra visit to the theatre by getting her to substitute one of her visits which she could not use, I can see her soothing agreement, “Oh, yes, Sam, of course, why not?” And I can see also the fine smile twitching the corners of her pretty mouth as she watched the departing Phariseeism of those sturdy English shoulders.

What religion she had back of her morals—or immorals—we do not know. Although, in the enthusiasm of first love, she announced that she had a husband who would help her out of popery, she doubtless soon found that there was not much spiritual comfort to be had from one who in good fortune boasted of sharing the utter irreligion of Lord Sandwich and, when things went wrong, dreaded abjectly that the Lord God would punish him for his sins. Curious depths of inward experience suggest themselves from the fact that Mrs. Pepys became a Catholic and received the sacrament, without a single suspicion on the part of her watchful inquisitor. Yet, after all, there may have been little spiritual experience, but merely a deft confessor and an unresponsive world.

So it is hard to find out whether Mrs. Pepys loved God and it is equally hard to find out what we are even more eager to know, whether she loved her husband. In considering the point, we must remember first that the world saw him quite other than we see him in the Diary. We see the lining of his soul, somewhat spotted and patched and threadbare. The world at large saw the outer tissue which was really imposing and magnificent. Not only was he a useful, prosperous, successful public servant and man of business, but he had more than the respect, the esteem and admiration, of the best men of his time, as a scholar and a gentleman. Here, therefore, was a husband to be proud of.

Pride does not make love, however. And we know well that folly and even vice often hold a woman’s heart closer and longer than well-laundered respectability. It would appear that Mr. Pepys might have combined all the desired qualifications with peculiar success. Yet as to the result, I repeat, we do not know. And it is strange that we do not. Every shade of the husband’s varying feelings is revealed to us, but what the wife felt he does not record, because, alas, he does not greatly care. Or, rather, may we say that he assumed that she worshiped him? And may we not go further and conclude that he was right in so assuming and that for one word of real affection she was ready to lay all her whims and errors and vagaries at his feet? Is not this attitude quite compatible with understanding him completely?

His family she did not love, nor they her. The case is not unprecedented. Very likely she tried her best. Very likely they tried their best. But she was young and fashionable and quick-witted. They were old, some of them, and all of them antique. Then they adored Sam, who was making the family. Well, so did she. But she knew Sam and did not care to have his Sunday attitudes and platitudes thrust upon her perpetually.

If they had only had children, how different it might all have been! Pepys as a father would have furnished one more delight to the civilized world. Mrs. Pepys as a mother would have come in for some bad half hours, but she would have been more cherished and even more interesting. There is little evidence that Pepys regretted his childless state, or that his wife did. But we can guess how it was with her.

I have said that Pepys’s feelings towards his wife can be seen in minute detail all through the Diary. The study of them is profoundly curious. That he was an ardent lover before marriage is manifest from many casual observations, notably from one of the most high-wrought and passionate entries in the entire record. “But that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind-musique when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife.”

The calm daylight of matrimonial domesticity paled these raptures to a very considerable extent. It has done so in other cases. The dull wear of duns and debts, the friction of household management, an ill-cooked dinner, an ill-dusted study—these things may not shatter the foundations of love, but they do a little tarnish its fresh trim and new felicity. Yet, though the husband is no longer made “almost sick” by the lover’s rapturous longing, there are plenty of instances of a solid habit of affection, growing firmer and more enduring with the passage of years. When she is away on a visit, his heart is heavy for the absence of his dear wife, all things seem melancholy without her, and he is filled with satisfaction at her return. When she is ill, suddenly and violently ill, his anxiety and distress prove to him his great love for her, though, when the crisis is past, his incomparable candor adds, “God forgive me! I did find that I was most desirous to take my rest than to ease her, but there was nothing I could do to do her any good with.” When the world goes wrong and life seems nothing but toil and trouble, he turns to her and gets her to comfort him.

It is true that that relentless Diary has scenes as painful as they are curious, scenes in which the estimable naval secretary and friend of Newton and Evelyn comports himself after a fashion that would be disgraceful in any station of life. There are outbursts of jealousy and fits of temper, kickings of furniture and trinkets smashed in spite, abuse, blows, and nose and ear pullings of intolerable indignity. The fault is confessed and temporarily forgotten, “Last night I was very angry, and do think I did give her as much cause to be angry with me.” Then, some wretched trifle, an ill-timed visit, a shilling mis-spent, a foolish fashion followed, sets all awry again. I do not know where in literature to find a fiercer or more cutting scene of domestic infelicity than that of the tearing of the old love letters. Mrs. Pepys had written a remonstrance as to some phases of ill-treatment. “She now read it, and it was so piquant, and wrote in English, and most of it true, of the retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was; that being wrote in English, and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was vexed at it, and desired her and then commanded her to tear it: when she desired to be excused, I forced it from her, and tore it, and withal took her other bundle of papers from her.... I pulled them out one by one and tore them all before her face, though it went against my heart to do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it, but such was my passion and trouble to see the letters of my love to her ... to be joyned with a paper of so much disgrace to me and dishonour, if it should have been found by anybody.”

Things like this, one would say, could never be forgotten. Yet they are. “After winter comes summer,” says the “Imitation,” “after the night the day, and after a storm a great calm.” Great calms came in the Pepys family also. “I home, and to writing, and heare my boy play on the lute, and a turne with my wife pleasantly in the garden by moonshine, my heart being in great peace, and so home to supper and to bed.” Truly, life is made up of delightful—and pitiful—contrasts.

The worst domestic troubles of the Pepyses were caused by the husband’s extreme susceptibility to feminine charm. “A strange slavery that I stand in to beauty,” he remarks, with that pleased amazement at himself which makes him so attractive.

The detail of these infatuations—how they were mildly resisted at first, and how they grew and developed to an extent hardly possible for such a man in a less scandalous age, how they were indulged, and then repented, and again indulged, and again repented—belongs to the history of Mr. Pepys—and of human nature. Mrs. Pepys knew little of them, though she divined much.