A Certain Charmer
The Letters of Samuel Pepys and his Family Circle. Edited by Helen Truesdell Heath. (The Clarendon Press, 30s.) Mr. Pepys and Nonconformity. By A. G. Matthews. (Independent Press, 8s. 6d.)
SAMUEL PEPYS is a certain charmer; he is the small beer in the social historian's bottle with the power that that beverage has to relax a brain congested with statistics. He has at least one other popular quality. He is so much of the world, so inseparable from
the small talk of his day, that the critical faculty must retire to judge him, and it does so largely convinced of its own superiority.
Therefore, Pepys is great game. His multifarious interests, incredible observation, and almost complete lack of self- consciousness, produced a tone .which is comic in its insularity; while (although one can't help being interested in what the eye at the keyhole saw, and amused by the situation of the onlooker) his uninhibited curiosity repels. 'Delightful as Pepys is,' said George Saintsbury, 'he is essentially mean'; and if this is a judgement which is not commonly held it is because what emerges from the diary, more than Pepys himself, is a devotion to detail and a humanly shifting sympathy.
Mrs. Heath's most scholarly edition of The Letters of Samuel Pepys and his Family Circle, with its partisanly Pepysian though comprehensive and equally scholarly introduction, supports this judgement. It is out of fairness to Pepys the man that one needs some record of his relationships which makes the civil servant and the diarist seem equally real, as they should do in the family contest. Two other elements are present here as well, dignity and style, which are mobilised around Pepys's organisation of his own defence when imprisoned on a charge of treason. And it is apparent from this section of the correspondence that the seven- teenth century worked towards other ends than gossip in Pepys. In adversity, he shows qualities in common with one so different as Bunyan:
In the mean time, pray desire my Father to give no way to any fears concerning me, for that I bless God I have liv'd so carefully in the discharge of my Duty to the King my Master and the Laws I live under both towards God, and towards men, that I have not one unjust deed or thought to answer for, and consequently neither am myselfe, nor would pray him to be under the least doubt or care what can befall me, it being no use to any man in my Place to think of supporting himselfe by any other means that has such an innocence as mine to relye on; and there, I bless God, lies my comfort, whatever befals me.
It is the language of this and like passages which help to establish a link which is the target of two essays in Mr. Matthew's book : that Pepys was sympathetic to Nonconformity as well as to Catholicism in the tolerance of the humanist, to which, although he supported the Establishment, curiosity and temperament alike joined him. The content of the letters in Mrs. Heath's edition may, however, disappoint the reader who is neither Pepysian nor historian. A short early section dovetails, but does not compete in interest, with the diary. In the bulk of the correspondence the Admiralty man is in charge. The matter conveys a circumspect attention to detail in family affairs, but is all the same a bore. And there remains for relief only the characterful eccentricity of Pepys's brother-in-law, Balty (Balthasar St. Michel). For Balty, every- thing is outweighed by his own suffering at the hand of misfortune. He begins one letter, 'Honoured Sir, Though my grievances, misseryes, Torments, and Disincouragements; bath been to such extremitie, passing the Expression of Tongue . . .,' before pro- ceeding to point out that these are incomparable beside the pain of Pepys's silence towards him.
CLIFFORD COLLINS
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