The Art Of Letters Part 1

The Art of Letters.

by Robert Lynd.

TO J.C. SQUIRE

My Dear Jack,

You were G.o.dfather to a good many of the chapters in this book when they first appeared in the _London Mercury_, the _New Statesman_, and the _British Review_. Others of the chapters appeared in the _Daily News_, the _Nation_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Observer_, and _Everyman_. Will it embarra.s.s you if I now present you with the entire brood in the name of a friends.h.i.+p that has lasted many midnights?

Yours,

Robert Lynd.

Steyning,

30th August 1920

THE ART OF LETTERS

I.--MR. PEPYS

Mr. Pepys was a Puritan. Froude once painted a portrait of Bunyan as an old Cavalier. He almost persuaded one that it was true till the later discovery of Bunyan's name on the muster-roll of one of Cromwell's regiments showed that he had been a Puritan from the beginning. If one calls Mr. Pepys a Puritan, however, one does not do so for the love of paradox or at a guess. He tells us himself that he "was a great Roundhead when I was a boy," and that, on the day on which King Charles was beheaded, he said: "Were I to preach on him, my text should be--'the memory of the wicked shall rot.'" After the Restoration he was uneasy lest his old schoolfellow, Mr. Christmas, should remember these strong words.

True, when it came to the turn of the Puritans to suffer, he went, with a fine impartiality, to see General Harrison disembowelled at Charing Cross.

"Thus it was my chance," he comments, "to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross. From thence to my Lord's, and took Captain Cuttance and Mr. Shepley to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters." Pepys was a spectator and a gourmet even more than he was a Puritan. He was a Puritan, indeed, only north-north-west. Even when at Cambridge he gave evidence of certain susceptibilities to the sins of the flesh. He was "admonished" on one occasion for "having been scandalously overserved with drink ye night before." He even began to write a romance ent.i.tled _Love a Cheate_, which he tore up ten years later, though he "liked it very well."

At the same time his writing never lost the tang of Puritan speech.

"Blessed be G.o.d" are the first words of his shocking Diary. When he had to give up keeping the Diary nine and a half years later, owing to failing sight, he wound up, after expressing his intention of dictating in the future a more seemly journal to an amanuensis, with the characteristic sentences:

Or, if there be anything, which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb. are past, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand.

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good G.o.d prepare me.

With these words the great book ends--the diary of one of the G.o.dliest and most lecherous of men.

In some respects Mr. Pepys reminds one of a type that is now commoner in Scotland, I fancy, than elsewhere. He himself seems at one time to have taken the view that he was of Scottish descent. None of the authorities, however, will admit this, and there is apparently no doubt that he belonged to an old Cambridges.h.i.+re family that had come down in the world, his father having dwindled into a London tailor. In temperament, however, he seems to me to have been more Scottish than the very Scottish Boswell.

He led a double life with the same simplicity of heart. He was Scottish in the way in which he lived with one eye on the "la.s.sies" and the other on "the meenister." He was notoriously respectable, notoriously hard-working, a judge of sermons, fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty. He had all the virtues of a K.C.B. He was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you might find nowadays crowing over his sins in Chelsea. He lived, so far as the world was concerned, in the complete starch of rect.i.tude. He was a pillar of Society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have accepted its orthodoxy. He was as grave a man as Holy Willie. Stevenson has commented on the gradual decline of his primness in the later years of the Diary. "His favourite e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, 'Lord!' occurs," he declares, "but once that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63; after which the 'Lords' may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary 'd.a.m.ned,' as it were a whale among the shoal." As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys's use of the expression "Lord!" has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists. His primness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him. We discover this even in the story of his relations with women. In 1665, for instance, he writes with surprised censoriousness of Mrs. Penington:

There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and I know not what.

It is a sad world for idealists.

Mr. Pepys's Puritanism, however, was something less than Mr. Pepys. It was but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan. Mr. Pepys was an appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen have been since Chaucer. He was a walking appet.i.te. And not an entirely ign.o.ble appet.i.te either. He reminds one in some respects of the poet in Browning's "How it strikes a Contemporary," save that he had more worldly success.

One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick, the same "scrutinizing hat," the same eye for the bookstall and "the man who slices lemon into drink." "If any cursed a woman, he took note."

Browning's poet, however, apparently "took note" on behalf of a higher power. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Pepys sending his Diary to the address of the Recording Angel. Rather, the Diary is the soliloquy of an egoist, disinterested and daring as a bad boy's reverie over the fire.

Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by the question whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its ultimate publication. This seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working of the human mind.

Those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily.

Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty confessional. Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest, will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree. There is no more mystery in it than in the singing of birds. The motive may be either to obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up the very echoes and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries for as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy, the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure.

The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the safety of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! He remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his public carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must be admitted, entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare not confess in English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush.

In some instances the French may be for facetiousness rather than concealment, as in the reference to the ladies of Rochester Castle in 1665:

Thence to Rochester, walked to the Crowne, and while dinner was getting ready, I did then walk to visit the old Castle ruines, which hath been a n.o.ble place, and there going up I did upon the stairs overtake three pretty mayds or women and took them up with me, and I did _baiser sur mouches et toucher leur mains_ and necks to my great pleasure; but lord! to see what a dreadfull thing it is to look down the precipices, for it did fright me mightily, and hinder me of much pleasure which I would have made to myself in the company of these three, if it had not been for that.

Even here, however, Mr. Pepys's French has a suggestion of evasion. He always had a faint hope that his conscience would not understand French.

Some people have written as though Mr. Pepys, in confessing himself in his Diary, had confessed us all. They profess to see in the Diary simply the image of Everyman in his bare skin. They think of Pepys as an ordinary man who wrote an extraordinary book. To me it seems that Pepys's Diary is not more extraordinary as a book than Pepys himself is as a man. Taken separately, nine out of ten of his characteristics may seem ordinary enough--his fears, his greeds, his vices, his utilitarian repentances.

They were compounded in him, however, in such proportion as to produce an entirely new mixture--a character hardly less original than Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb. He had not any great originality of virtue, as these others had, but he was immensely original in his responsiveness--his capacity for being interested, tempted and pleased. The voluptuous nature of the man may be seen in such a pa.s.sage as that in which, speaking of "the wind-musique when the angel comes down" in _The Virgin Martyr_, he declares:

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.

Writing of Mrs. Knipp on another occasion, he says:

She and I singing, and G.o.d forgive me! I do still see that my nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all things, though yet in the middle of it, it has reluctances after my business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure. However, musique and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Within a few weeks of this we find him writing again:

So abroad to my ruler's of my books, having, G.o.d forgive me! a mind to see Nan there, which I did, and so back again, and then out again to see Mrs. Bettons, who were looking out of the window as I came through Fenchurch Streete. So that, indeed, I am not, as I ought to be, able to command myself in the pleasures of my eye.

Though page after page of the Diary reveals Mr. Pepys as an extravagant pleasure-lover, however, he differed from the majority of pleasure-lovers in literature in not being a man of taste. He had a rolling rather than a fastidious eye. He kissed promiscuously, and was not aspiring in his l.u.s.ts. He once held Lady Castlemaine in his arms, indeed, but it was in a dream. He reflected, he tells us,

that since it was a dream, and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeare resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of death, as we are this plague time.

He praises this dream at the same time as "the best that ever was dreamt."

Mr. Pepys's idea of Paradise, it would be seen, was that commonly attributed to the Mohammedans. Meanwhile he did his best to turn London into an antic.i.p.atory harem. We get a pleasant picture of a little Roundhead Sultan in such a sentence as "At night had Mercer comb my head and so to supper, sing a psalm and to bed."

It may seem unfair to over-emphasize the voluptuary in Mr. Pepys, but it is Mr. Pepys, the promiscuous amourist; stringing his lute (G.o.d forgive him!) on a Sunday, that is the outstanding figure in the Diary. Mr. Pepys attracts us, however, in a host of other aspects--Mr. Pepys whose nose his jealous wife attacked with the red-hot tongs as he lay in bed; Mr. Pepys who always held an anniversary feast on the date on which he had been cut for the stone; Mr. Pepys who was not "troubled at it at all" as soon as he saw that the lady who had spat on him in the theatre was a pretty one; Mr.

Pepys drinking; Mr. Pepys among his dishes; Mr. Pepys among princes; Mr.

Pepys who was "mightily pleased" as he listened to "my aunt Jenny, a poor, religious, well-meaning good soul, talking of nothing but G.o.d Almighty"; Mr. Pepys, as he counts up his blessings in wealth, women, honour and life, and decides that "all these things are ordered by G.o.d Almighty to make me contented"; Mr. Pepys as, having just refused to see Lady Pickering, he comments, "But how natural it is for us to slight people out of power!"; Mr. Pepys who groans as he sees his office clerks sitting in more expensive seats than himself at the theatre. Mr. Pepys is a man so many-sided, indeed, that in order to ill.u.s.trate his character one would have to quote the greater part of his Diary. He is a ma.s.s of contrasts and contradictions. He lives without sequence except in the business of getting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by Samuel Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and sn.o.bbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a grateful heart. He felt that G.o.d had created the world for the pleasure of Samuel Pepys, and had no doubt that it was good.

II.--JOHN BUNYAN

Once, when John Bunyan had been preaching in London, a friend congratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. "You need not remind me of that," replied Bunyan. "The Devil told me of it before I was out of the pulpit." On another occasion, when he was going about in disguise, a constable who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he knew that devil Bunyan. "Know him?" said Bunyan. "You might call him a devil if you knew him as well as I once did." We have in these anecdotes a key to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and a humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr.

Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eye of the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in the ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of his hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them from orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot," he asked his followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where G.o.d did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent to the place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When he relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose and unG.o.dly" woman, he begins the story: "One day, as I was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wonted manner, there sat within the woman of the house, who heard me." This pa.s.sion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further on in _Grace Abounding_, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing but the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and nevertheless remained self-righteous and "ignorant of Jesus Christ," he introduces the next episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "But upon a day the good providence of G.o.d called me to Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, talking about the things of G.o.d." That seems to me to be one of the most beautiful sentences in English literature. Its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes with which Bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next.

If he wrote the greatest allegory in English literature, it is because he was able to give his narrative the reality of a travel-book instead of the insubstantial quality of a dream. He leaves the reader with the feeling that he is moving among real places and real people. As for the people, Bunyan can give even an abstract virtue--still more, an abstract vice--the skin and bones of a man. A recent critic has said disparagingly that Bunyan would have called Hamlet Mr. Facing-both-ways. As a matter of fact, Bunyan's secret is the direct opposite of this. His great and singular gift was the power to create an atmosphere in which a character with a name like Mr. Facing-both-ways is accepted on the same plane of reality as Hamlet.

If Bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and character, his conception of life was none the less romantic. Life to him was a story of hairbreadth escapes--of a quest beset with a thousand perils. Not only was there that great dragon the Devil lying in wait for the traveller, but there was Doubting Castle to pa.s.s, and Giant Despair, and the lions. We have in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ almost every property of romantic adventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring home to us the fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as _Treasure Island_.

There may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt the action of the story as they interrupt the interest of _Grace Abounding_.

But the tedious pa.s.sages are extraordinarily few, considering that the author had the pa.s.sions of a preacher. No doubt the fact that, when he wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_, he was not definitely thinking of the edification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence of commonplace arguments and exhortations. "I did it mine own self to gratify," he declared in his rhymed "apology for his book." Later on, in reply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want to catch fish,