Rambling Round Evelyn
Should you
wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three hundred years
hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary. Only first be
certain that you have the courage to lock your genius in a private book and
the humour to gloat over a fame that will be yours only in the grave. For
the good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so
distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive.
For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint.
Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in
conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even;
and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you
off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the
first ladies in the land.
The diary, for
whose sake we are remembering the three hundredth anniversary of the birth
of John Evelyn,
is a case in point. It is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes
jotted down like a calendar; but he never used its pages to reveal the
secrets of his heart, and all that he wrote might have been read aloud in
the evening with a calm conscience to his children. If we wonder, then, why
we still trouble to read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good
man we have to confess, first that diaries are always diaries, books, that
is, that we read in convalescence, on horseback, in the grip of death;
second, that this reading, about which so many fine things have been said,
is for the most part mere dreaming and idling; lying in a chair with a book;
watching the butterflies on the dahlias; a profitless occupation which no
critic has taken the trouble to investigate, and on whose behalf only the
moralist can find a good word to say. For he will allow it to be an innocent
employment; and happiness, he will add, though derived from trivial sources,
has probably done more to prevent human beings from changing their religions
and killing their kings than either philosophy or the pulpit.
It may be
well, indeed, before reading much further in Evelyn's book, to decide where
it is that our modern view of happiness differs from his. Ignorance,
surely, ignorance is at the bottom of it; his ignorance and our comparative
erudition. No one can read the story of Evelyn's foreign travels without
envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in the second his
activity. To take a simple example of the difference between us--that
butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles his
barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with the shadow of a rake, and
off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a
butterfly sees but does not hear; and here no doubt we are much on a par
with Evelyn. But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and with that
knife dissecting a Red Admiral's head, as Evelyn would have done, no sane
person in the twentieth century would entertain such a project for a
second. Individually we may know as little as Evelyn, but collectively we
know so much that there is little incentive to venture on private
discoveries. We seek the encyclopędia, not the scissors; and know in two
minutes not only more than was known to Evelyn in his lifetime, but that the
mass of knowledge is so vast that it is scarcely worth while to possess a
single crumb. Ignorant, yet justly confident that with his own hands he
might advance not merely his private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind,
Evelyn dabbled in all the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten
years, gazed with unflagging gusto upon hairy women and rational dogs, and
drew inferences and framed speculations which are now only to be matched by
listening to the talk of old women round the village pump. The moon, they
say, is so much larger than usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow,
and the carpenter's wife will be brought to bed of twins. So Evelyn, Fellow
of the Royal Society, a gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence,
carefully noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sinister omen when
a whale came up the Thames. In 1658, too, a whale had been seen. "That
year died Cromwell." Nature, it seems, was determined to stimulate the
devotion of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence and
eccentricity from which she now refrains. There were storms, floods, and
droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a cat so
much as kittened in Evelyn's bed the kitten was inevitably gifted with eight
legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.
But to return
to happiness. It sometimes appears that if there is an insoluble difference
between our ancestors and ourselves it is that we draw our happiness from
different sources. We rate the same things at different values. Something
of this we may ascribe to their ignorance and our knowledge. But are we to
suppose that ignorance alters the nerves and the affections? Are we to
believe that it would have been an 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 ready 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. Perhaps it is that
we catch them unawares. 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 M. Saladine; on M. Saladine's
daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva to make love to M. 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.
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