The Common Reader
intolerable penance for us to live familiarly with the Elizabethans?
Should we have found it necessary to leave the room because of
Shakespeare’s habits, and to have refused Queen Elizabeth’s invitation
to dinner? Perhaps so. For Evelyn was a sober man of unusual refinement,
and yet he pressed into a torture chamber as we crowd to see the lions
fed.
. . . they first bound his wrists with a strong rope or small cable, and
one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall about four feet from
the floor, and then his feet with another cable, fastened about five
feet farther than his utmost length to another ring on the floor of the
room. Thus suspended, and yet lying but aslant, they slid a horse of
wood under the rope which bound his feet, which so exceedingly stiffened
it, as severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort, drawing him out at
length in an extraordinary manner, he having only a pair of linen
drawers upon his naked body . . .
And so on. Evelyn watched this to the end, and then remarked that “the
spectacle was so uncomfortable that I was not able to stay the sight of
another”, as we might say that the lions growl so loud and the sight of
raw meat is so unpleasant that we will now visit the penguins. Allowing
for his discomfort, there is enough discrepancy between his view of pain
and ours to make us wonder whether we see any fact with the same eyes,
marry any woman from the same motives, or judge any conduct by the same
standards. To sit passive when muscles tore and bones cracked, not to
flinch when the wooden horse was raised higher and the executioner
fetched a horn and poured two buckets of water down the man’s throat, to
suffer this iniquity on a suspicion of robbery which the man denied—all
this seems to put Evelyn in one of those cages where we still mentally
seclude the riff-raff of Whitechapel. Only it is obvious that we have
somehow got it wrong. If we could maintain that our susceptibility to
suffering and love of justice were proof that all our humane instincts
were as highly developed as these, then we could say that the world
improves, and we with it. But let us get on with the diary.
In 1652, when it seemed that things had settled down unhappily enough,
“all being entirely in the rebels’ hands”, Evelyn returned to England
with his wife, his Tables of Veins and Arteries, his Venetian glass and
the rest of his curiosities, to lead the life of a country gentleman of
strong Royalist sympathies at Deptford. What with going to church and
going to town, settling his accounts and planting his garden—“I planted
the orchard at Sayes Court; new moon, wind west”—his time was spent
much as ours is. But there was one difference which it is difficult to
illustrate by a single quotation, because the evidence is scattered all
about in little insignificant phrases. The general effect of them is
that he used his eyes. The visible world was always close to him. The
visible world has receded so far from us that to hear all this talk of
buildings and gardens, statues and carving, as if the look of things
assailed one out of doors as well as in, and were not confined to a few
small canvases hung upon the wall, seems strange. No doubt there are a
thousand excuses for us; but hitherto we have been finding excuses for
him. Wherever there was a picture to be seen by Julio Romano, Polydore,
Guido, Raphael, or Tintoretto, a finely-built house, a prospect, or a
garden nobly designed, Evelyn stopped his coach to look at it, and
opened his diary to record his opinion. On August 27 Evelyn, with Dr.
Wren and others, was in St. Paul’s surveying “the general decay of that
ancient and venerable church”; held with Dr. Wren another judgement from
the rest; and had a mind to build it with “a noble cupola, a form of
church building not as yet known in England but of wonderful grace”, in
which Dr. Wren concurred. Six days later the Fire of London altered
their plans. It was Evelyn again who, walking by himself, chanced to
look in at the window of “a poor solitary thatched house in a field in
our parish”, there saw a young man carving at a crucifix, was overcome
with an enthusiasm which does him the utmost credit, and carried
Grinling Gibbons and his carving to Court.
Indeed, it is all very well to be scrupulous about the sufferings of
worms and sensitive to the dues of servant girls, but how pleasant also
if, with shut eyes, one could call up street after street of beautiful
houses. A flower is red; the apples rosy-gilt in the afternoon sun; a
picture has charm, especially as it displays the character of a
grandfather and dignifies a family descended from such a scowl; but
these are scattered fragments—little relics of beauty in a world that
has grown indescribably drab. To our charge of cruelty Evelyn might well
reply by pointing to Bayswater and the purlieus of Clapham; and if he
should assert that nothing now has character or conviction, that no
farmer in England sleeps with an open coffin at his bedside to remind
him of death, we could not retort effectually offhand. True, we like the
country. Evelyn never looked at the sky.
But to return. After the Restoration Evelyn emerged in full possession
of a variety of accomplishments which in our time of specialists seems
remarkable enough. He was employed on public business; he was Secretary
to the Royal Society; he wrote plays and poems; he was the first
authority upon trees and gardens in England; he submitted a design for
the rebuilding of London; he went into the question of smoke and its
abatement—the lime trees in St. James’s Park being, it is said, the
result of his cogitations; he was commissioned to write a history of the
Dutch war—in short, he completely outdid the Squire of “The Princess”,
whom in many respects he anticipated—
A lord of fat prize oxen and of sheep,
A raiser of huge melons and of pine,
A patron of some thirty charities,
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter sessions chairman abler none.
All that he was, and shared with Sir Walter another characteristic which
Tennyson does not mention. He was, we cannot help suspecting, something
of a bore, a little censorious, a little patronising, a little too sure
of his own merits, and a little obtuse to those of other people. Or what
is the quality, or absence of quality, that checks our sympathies
partly, perhaps, it is due to some inconsistency which it would be harsh
to call by so strong a name as hypocrisy. Though he deplored the vices
of his age he could never keep away from the centre of them. “The
luxurious dallying and profaneness” of the Court, the sight of “Mrs.
Nelly” looking over her garden wall and holding “very familiar
discourse” with King Charles on the green walk below, caused him acute
disgust; yet he could never decide to break with the Court and retire to
“my poor but quiet villa”, which was of course the apple of his eye and
one of the show-places in England. Then, though he loved his daughter
Mary, his grief at her death did not prevent him from counting the
number of empty coaches drawn by six horses apiece that attended her
funeral. His women friends combined virtue with beauty to such an extent
that we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain. Poor Mrs.
Godolphin at least, whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching
biography, “loved to be at funerals” and chose habitually “the dryest
and leanest morsels of meat”, which may be the habits of an angel but do
not present her friendship with Evelyn in an alluring light. But it is
Pepys who sums up our case against Evelyn; Pepys who said of him after
a long morning’s entertainment: “In fine a most excellent person he is
and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well
be so, being a man so much above others”. The words exactly hit the
mark, “A most excellent person he was”; but a little conceited.
Pepys it is who prompts us to another reflection, inevitable,
unnecessary, perhaps unkind. Evelyn was no genius. His writing is opaque
rather than transparent; we see no depths through it, nor any very
secret movements of mind or heart. He can neither make us hate a
regicide nor love Mrs. Godolphin beyond reason. But he writes a diary;
and he writes it supremely well. Even as we drowse, somehow or other the
bygone gentleman sets up, through three centuries, a perceptible tingle
of communication, so that without laying stress on anything in
particular, stopping to dream, stopping to laugh, stopping merely to
look, we are yet taking notice all the time. His garden for example—how
delightful is his disparagement of it, and how acid his criticism of the
gardens of others! Then, we may be sure, the hens at Sayes Court laid
the very best eggs in England, and when the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow
through his hedge what a catastrophe it was, and we can guess how Mrs.
Evelyn dusted and polished, and how Evelyn himself grumbled, and how
punctilious and efficient and trustworthy he was, how prone to give
advice, how ready to read his own works aloud, and how affectionate,
withal, lamenting bitterly but not effusively, for the man with the
long-drawn sensitive face was never that, the death of the little
prodigy Richard, and recording how “after evening prayers was my child
buried near the rest of his brothers—my very dear children.” He was not
an artist; no phrases linger in the mind; no paragraphs build themselves
up in memory; but as an artistic method this of going on with the day’s
story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be mentioned
again, leading up to crises which never take place, introducing Sir
Thomas Browne but never letting him speak, has its fascination. All
through his pages good men, bad men, celebrities, nonentities are coming
into the room and going out again. The greater number we scarcely
notice; the door shuts upon them and they disappear. But now and again
the sight of a vanishing coat-tail suggests more than a whole figure
sitting still in a full light. They have struck no attitude, arranged no
mantle. Little they think that for three hundred years and more they
will be looked at in the act of jumping a gate, or observing, like the
old Marquis of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. Our
eyes wander from one to the other; our affections settle here or
there—on hot-tempered Captain Wray, for instance, who was choleric, had
a dog that killed a goat, was for shooting the goat’s owner, was for
shooting his horse when it fell down a precipice; on Mr. Saladine; on
Mr. Saladine’s beautiful daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva
to make love to Mr. Saladine’s daughter; on Evelyn himself most of all,
grown old, walking in his garden at Wotton, his sorrows smoothed out,
his grandson doing him credit, the Latin quotations falling pat from his
lips, his trees flourishing, and the butterflies flying and flaunting on
his dahlias too.
[Footnote 5: Written in 1920.]
_Defoe_[6]
The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should find
himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell its
approaching dissolution is not only absent in the case of _Robinson
Crusoe_ but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It may be true that
_Robinson Crusoe_ is two hundred years of age upon the twenty-fifth of
April 1919, but far from raising the familiar speculations as to whether
people now read it and will continue to read it, the effect of the
bi-centenary is to make us marvel that _Robinson Crusoe_, the perennial
and immortal, should have been in existence so short a time as that. The
book resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race itself
rather than the effort of a single mind; and as for celebrating its
centenary we should as soon think of celebrating the centenaries of