Why? What does it matter? Is not our limited time more precious than that we should spend it making these spidery marks on paper? What is the impulse to describe and record? Are we trying instinctively to stop time or outwit it? Are we building ourselves a monument? Like the most primitive sign, even the most primitive journal becomes more and more obscure in origin the more you look at it. There was the journal kept for some time by Jimmy Mason. He was about as simple a character as you could get. Mr Raleigh Trevelyan resurrected him, so to speak, from an Essex attic. Jimmy states his reason for writing in the first sentence. He thought someone was going to murder him.
If I should be poisoned at last, and this book is found, it will explain everything. What bad fellows Tommy took up with and encouraged him to poison his father and now trying to poison me.
Was he suffering from persecution mania then? So it might seem. Certainly he withdrew more and more from even the spare life of an Essex village. Father had been a martinet, a soldier of the queen, a sadist. His mother was almost as vague as her son. The causes of his possible madness are evident or as evident as the causes of madness sometimes are. But was someone trying to poison him? He was convinced he only escaped death by detecting the taste of poison in a pie his mother gave him. When he gave the rest of the pie to his spaniel it lay down and died. So where are we? Land was a key to a whole volume of interlocking greeds, fears and hates, for the Mason family had four acres. When Mr Trevelyan went into the matter he found himself stared into Cold Comfort Farm at ground or muck-level.
—the postman had said that Bacon killed himself by drink. Young Bacon was as bad. The parson had been obliged to turn him away from the Sacrament. They had to lock all the drink up at the Griffin, else if young Bacon got at it he would kill himself in a few days.
May 31st Friday
This morning T. said J. Sweeting had been found with his throat cut. Burial Monday.
These comments do seem to give a fair picture of village life. Allow me to quote once more from Mr Trevelyan's fascinating book on the subject. Hear what he discovered when he climbed one or two family trees where the Sukebind was a-blowing.
With other witnesses I found myself in the quicksands when I tried to probe the secrets of their own parentage. 'You see, my father and she had the same mother' someone said to me about a native of Puttock's End whom I had always supposed to be his mother. 'Then she was your aunt?' I asked. 'A suppose she was in a way, but my father's name being Y-, I've always called myself Y-; ain't I right? Someone lived with her; you see, he was her father and my father like.'
So whether the diary records the delusions of madness or the criminality of village life is wide open to question. There is another strand in all this. Though Jimmy withdrew so that no one could see him, he had a timid passion for little girls and spied on them through the hedge. Sometimes, if it was darkling, he would carry on a whispered conversation with this one or that and leave country presents for them at the gate—eggs or apples. He suffered from passionate jealousies enough to rock the reason of Othello.
A little past 2 o'clock Ednere gone by up hill with can as for milk. Was coming back in less than an hour. But she was riding in a fishmonger's cart with a young fellow, laughing and going on with him just the same as [she] did with the boy that came to Meril's 2 years ago the end of last July. She was packed in the cart so close to [the] man among fish hampers, laughing and talking and holding her hat to keep wind from blowing [it] off. The name of the cart was Woodley of Dunmow,
A fish cart never seen this way before—
The diary has now got away from Tommy and the poisoned spaniel. It is a record of what hurts. It is also a record of his rare and tenuous pleasures.
Fanny came [a]cross grass. Looked [a]cross pond and said goodbye several times. So good did seem.
She wispered goodbye 3 or 4 times.
& stop a little.
But like Fanny we must get on. Jimmy lost interest in poison and little girls and ended as what a great many of the diarists of the world would like to be—according to the Rector at any rate—'He was a gentle, lovable, old man, so shy he could hardly bear to look at other people. He kept bees, grew his few plants and read his Bible. That was his whole life.' When he was in his eighties and defenceless an elderly and one suspects insalubrious lady did a few odd household jobs for him. 'He was very religious‚' she said, 'and could pray lovely.' Someone claimed to have climbed a tree and seen Jimmy praying among the beehives with the bees climbing over his coat and face.
Observe then that the journal occupied only a few fearful and passionate years of Jimmy's life. He recorded what songs the Sirens sang to him but not what song he sang unto the Lord. Indeed, to find a journal that records more than a few years is exceptional. There is a passion somewhere which dies or fades, changes. Boredom sets in. Indeed, the diary of a whole life could not but be monotonous and repetitive. Ripeness is not all. It leads to a disinclination to keep on treating a personal life as worth recording. For we can see by Jimmy Mason's journal some of the elements that compel the pen. There is the awareness of important events—someone is trying to poison me! There is also the pleasure principal. Psychologists tell us that many people and it may be all, to some degree or other; increase the original pleasure by repeating it in their minds or even better, writing it down. That was why Jimmy makes so much of those timidly tender whisperings in the Essex dusk. They were all he had.
Certainly the pleasure principal will lead us on to the next and greater example. A particularly choice specimen started in the river Thames quite a time ago—though Time is almost circumvented in this case—aboard a large ship. There was a fleet which needed an admiral and got one. The admiral needed a secretary and engaged a young, distant kinsman of his who has left us a list of some of his baggage—a list in which we can see foreshadowed several, though not all, of the main interests of his life. He took two violins, a chest containing a quantity of money, warm clothing, blank commissions, pens, ink, sealing wax, his seal ring and the machinery which went with it and much writing paper. He also seems to have taken, though he does not say so, what his editors, Messrs Latham and Matthews, describe as 'an ordinary stationer's notebook which was blotted at the edges—but that of course was later—seven and a half inches tall, with five, raised bands.' The young secretary was Sam Pepys, Mr S. Pepys, Samuel Pepys esquire, who was to achieve fame in his own time as the principal secretary to the Navy but is known to us as the greatest diarist in the English language and possibly the world.
There was not much doubt about Pepys' sanity. He was, of all things, sane and sometimes like his contemporary, Evelyn, almost objectionably so. His editors in the latest and surely definitive edition of the diary attempt to solve the prime mystery of why he did it. He was mountainously ambitious. But he had a past that in those days might get him into trouble. He had been a catholic convert and his wife still was one. Now the extraordinary thing about Pepys is that for all his specific genius he was not a literary man. He tells us that he turned up the manuscript of a romance he wrote when young and how he admired his young self, feeling he could no longer write such a thing. Then he burnt the manuscript. I swear no literary man could have done that; or if a literary man had burnt the romance it would be in the expectation of writing another. Indeed, Pepys was unique. He is unique. You may dip into him at a free moment but only the deepening knowledge of a desultory acquaintance kept with him over a lifetime can bring you to the feeling of having met the man face to face. That stationer's notebook was to be joined by five others and bound sumptuously, after they had been filled by one and a quarter million words.
The suggestion that Pepys kept his diary because he wanted evidence of what an honest, hardworking member of the church of England he was does not bear close examination. He may have started with that intention but the diary soon became a record which he could never have dared to make public in its entirety. Authority might have winked at the astonishing record of how quickly his private fortune increased. But—and here one of his life's preoccupations appeared—persons of a lower station in the navy, if I read his diary aright, could get a favour done them if they made a pretty wife available. It seems to me the only interpretation to be placed on some passages. His own wife was understandably watchful and fiercely jealous. No. The record was always intended to be private.
Yet once begun, the record continues for nine years until eye-strain forced him to keep a less compromising journal. The compulsion was surely the word itself in the pursuit of the remembering pleasure—pleasure in gold coins heaped up, pleasure in women, clothes, books, music, scandal, personal achievement. Pepys was by nature not merely a talented and devoted civil servant. He was what the seventeenth and eighteenth century called a 'Virtuoso' or 'Vertuoso', meaning thereby something at once specific and general. A virtuoso was—and I quote—'One who has a special interest in or taste for the fine arts; a student or collector of antiquities, natural curiosities or rarities, etc; a connoisseur; frequently, one who carries on such pursuits in a dilettante or trifling manner.' Musical instruments, jewels, curios, splendid books, he collected them all. He was a natural recorder, too, feeling surely that the word is a thing to be treasured like an elegant coin. He heaped up facts like a jackdaw with glittering things, in petty cash books, letter books, memorandum books. Yet the six volumes of the diary we can see were not meant to be published or examined or even sighted. They were to become what has always been an aim of virtuosi, they were to become objets, objects of vertu. They were not written as was once thought in code but in a seventeenth-century form of shorthand. They were written as neatly as possible. Bound sumptuously with the Pepys' arms embossed they were a collector's treasure. They were intensely private. According to the privacy of a statement he would hide it to one degree or another. The books were locked in a glass-fronted bookcase—one of the earliest bookcases of that sort on record. The words in shorthand were much less understandable than a foreign language. Where the record touched on his frequent sexual adventures they were not only hidden in this way but concealed in a jargon of Latin, French, Spanish and Italian. There is no question but that here is an honest record of dishonesty, a self-revelation of what must be concealed. Here he could unlock, take down and repeat securely all the pleasure of nine busy years. He had, we must suppose, that 'Caucasian loop' in the brain which enables the possessor to think twice before acting, to look twice before leaping. Having leapt he is able to turn round and by remembering enjoy it all over again. Any teacher knows the assiduity with which children will at least begin the business of making their own version of a book. They will bring pictures and other addenda from wherever they can find them, turning an ordinary school exercise book into a childish and complicated mass which on that level has everything in common not merely with Pepys' diary but with his whole incunabula, his objets, even his library with its collection of broadsheets that no one else bothered to collect. His case of curios was not enough. He wanted everything he could lay his hands on; and words, words, words, beautiful words, page after page, book after book. His whole collection is an historical treasure; and since for all his lack of literary ambition he was brilliantly descriptive his diary lies like a jewel in the middle of it. It is a mirror not just for the seventeenth century but for all time, a mirror in which any man can see at least a little of himself and sometimes a lot and sometimes a whole rueful figure. His lesser contemporary, John Evelyn, produced a journal of great merit but it was buttoned up where Pepys' is unbuttoned and it was intended for publication. So really it could have been reconstructed by an historian of the century.
We come to a prime point of intimacy—a relation indeed so intimate that it has sometimes been defined as a man talking to himself. I mean the sense that men have of God. Pepys had been a convert. He must have had some kind of religious experience. Indeed, he knew shame but it was hardly the shame of a fallen man before his Maker. His drunkenness and whoring, his adultery and corruption troubled him indeed, but mostly, it appears, in the degree to which they stood over against the respectable, organized life of the good civil servant who knows where he will be at a quarter to ten next Thursday. He was worried by his attendance at the theatre—which indeed was sufficiently blue and had just adopted the French fashion of allowing real women to appear on the stage. He kept trying to stay away. He had some success in this, certainly more than he had in stopping his compulsion to follow any pretty face he caught sight of through the streets of London. But the intimate relation is a puzzle. A man trying to convince the world that he was a sincere member of the established church might go to church on Sunday. But Pepys was a sermon fancier. He collected them, you might say, the way he collected broadsheets. He often heard two and sometimes three in a day. How did he square one half of his life with the other? Come to that, how do any of us? What kind of private accommodation did he come to? Did he have a feeling that God was as Thomas Huxley said 'a gaseous invertebrate', a tenuity so indistinct as to be harmless and easily avoidable? Or did he think in a society of such personalized devotion from man to man—my servant, my master—that as one gentleman to another, God would not look? However it was and with whatever unease, he continued to enjoy sermons and any pretty woman who fell in his way. It must be a matter of temperament, for a somewhat later diarist, journalist, was not so lucky. Samuel Johnson's personal jottings ring with the anguish of a man who would be good, would be consistent, regular, moral in every conceivable way; but who by temperament could never possibly be so. Unless the wolf was right inside the door he was too indolent, too slothful to work. A lady once saw him pour himself a full tumbler of wine and gulp it down in a second or two. As Boswell says, Johnson could be abstinent but not temperate. Johnson recorded his struggles as if indulging the pleasure principal in reverse—what one might call the pain principal. He says of his sloth, for example, 'I propose to rise at eight, because though I shall yet not rise early it will be much earlier than I now rise, for I often lie till two; and will gain me much time, and tend to a conquest over idleness, and give time for other duties.' It was no good. He still stayed in bed. Where Pepys, that fairly well organized individual, was a churchgoer Johnson, who sometimes scribbled sermons for other people, had the greatest difficulty in getting himself there. He says, 'I have this year omitted church on most Sundays, intending to supply the deficiency in the week. So that I owe twelve attendances on worship.' We are familiar with the looming Johnson, that wise Johnson, the superb and complete Latinist, conversational Johnson, dictionary Johnson, Boswell's Johnson, Johnson of the Hebrides, Rasselas, The Lives of the Poets, of the Rambler. Most of all we know Johnson since we are in the business of intimate relations where virtue counts above everything as a man of real personal charity who kept others alive when he himself was near starvation. Yet listen to this.
When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendment which have, year after year, been made and broken either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption or morbid infirmity; when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry, by retrospection, scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try, because reformation is necessary and despair criminal; I try in humble hope of the help of God.
Here, surely, we find intimacy with Johnson if not with his Maker. You would think the heavy grief of his self-diagnosis would disarm criticism. Not a bit of it. The diary when it was published reached the poet, William Cowper, at Olney. Cowper was to die of religious depression and despair and the signs of it were already on him. He showed little understanding, however. He has this to say on the matter in a letter to a clergyman friend.
[Johnson's] prayers for the dead, and his minute account of the rigours with which he observed church fasts, whether he drank tea or coffee, whether with sugar or without, and whether one or two dishes of either, are the most important items to be found in this childish register of the great Johnson, supreme dictator in the chair of literature, and almost a driveller in his closet; a melancholy witness to testify how much of the wisdom of this world may consist with almost infantine ignorance of the affairs of a better.
I remember a good man at Huntingdon who, I doubt not, is now with God and he also kept a diary. After his death, through the neglect or foolish wantonness of his executors, it came abroad for the amusement of his neighbours. All the town saw it and all the town found it highly diverting. It contained much more valuable matter than [Dr Johnson's] journal seems to do; but it contained also a faithful record of all his deliverances from wind (for he was much troubled with flatulence) together with pious acknowledgements of the mercy. There is certainly a call for gratitude, whatsoever benefit we receive—but it would have been as well if neither my old friend had recorded his eructations, nor the doctor his dishes of sugarless tea, or the dinner at which he ate too much. I wonder indeed, that any man of such learned eminence as Johnson who knew that every word he uttered was deemed oracular, and that every scratch of his pen was accounted a treasure, should leave behind him what he would have blushed to exhibit while he lived.
The truth is that Johnson had a soul, in the greatness of which Cowper's own would have rolled around like a pea in a drum. I believe he would have replied to Cowper, 'Such a man I was and may God forgive me.'
The honesty in Johnson, in so far as it led him to an indifference to what other people might think of him, was part of his complex character and simple goodness. The indifference was the prerogative of a whole class of persons who were Johnson's contemporaries. I mean the aristocrats of the eighteenth century. God does not come into their relations at all though they were often enough intimate in another sense. It is worth while looking at the journal of a sea-faring aristocrat who, without knowing it, was a rationalist before his time. He was Admiral Hervey. The Herveys were an outstanding and outrageous example of social privilege—enjoyable in retrospect, perhaps, because they are so far away from us. The first one was a favourite of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and the title Earl of Bristol was revived for the family. The first Earl's children included the hermaphrodite or perhaps merely homosexual transvestite rather unfairly satirized by Alexander Pope as Sporus. He was John Hervey, whose goings-on contributed to the contemporary saying that there were three sorts of creature, men, women and Herveys. He left memoirs ticking like a time bomb since they were full of scandal. Another son is thought to have been the cuckolding father of Horace Walpole. Admiral Hervey's journal does not concern itself with the inner life at all. He was a successful politician, an extraordinarily brave seaman and a Casanova whose exploits make the furtive adventures of Pepys seem like Postman's Knock. He was an aristocrat in the best and worst sense of the word as it applied to the eighteenth century. At the age of twenty he was married off to a lady of his own class, a maid of honour, a woman of great beauty and easy virtue. The reason for the marriage was that Augustus's family thought the lady's financial prospects were good. She was Miss Elizabeth Chudleigh, as typical of her time and class as her young husband. As David Erskine, the editor of Augustus's journal, says of the marriage, 'It was the work of a third party who had procured the union of a bride of promiscuous habits with an impecunious youth about to spend the next two years abroad.'
During the next two years, they graced separate scenes and both had some adventures, Miss Chudleigh's being perhaps the more exciting and certainly the more profitable. We have a splendid account of her appearing at a fancy-dress ball as Iphigenia. Miss Elizabeth Montague wrote, 'Miss Chudleigh's dress or rather undress was remarkable; she was Iphigenia for the sacrifice but so naked the high priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim.'
Indeed, there was a kind of cheerful insouciance, a zest and indifference to criticism about the whole class of people, principally because it never occurred to them that they need fear criticism either from below or above. They were costly, destructive and creative. This might well have been illustrated in some eighteenth-century garden by a bust of Janus, the two-faced god looking in both directions at once and what we could now call the acceptable and unacceptable faces of privilege. Coming from this class when he joined the Navy Augustus Hervey did not have to bother about promotion or, as he would have called it, preferment. Unlike Pepys, who rose through merit, Augustus floated upward effortlessly. The Royal Navy was his oyster and he made a brilliant job of it as, it will annoy some of my listeners to hear, did many of the officers appointed through sheer influence. There is something ineffably boyish in his glee when it came to manoeuvring at sea and in his gusto with which he grabbed any prize, a female, a ship or prize money. His diary is less well known than Pepys' so it is perhaps worth quoting a bit here and there.
Being young and much about, it was not surprising I got hold of some things; the Galli and Camioni, both famous in their way on the stage, admitted my attentions. The latter was beautiful, and as she would accept nothing from me, being kept by the Count Hass Lang, I found it most suitable as well as most agreeable to stick to her, and only when I went away, gave her a diamond ring.
After all, noblesse obliges. However, Augustus treated the allegedly serious business of his profession in just such a cheerful fashion. We are all familiar—perhaps too familiar—with the solemn yo-hoing stuff of false colours, lights in tubs, hair-breadth escapes, boarding parties and the rest from Smollett to Hornblower and beyond. But in Hervey's journal, and it seems likely in fact, the war at sea becomes a huge rag.
The next morning I was off Peverel Point and saw a sail that I perceived was chasing me. I concluded him a French privateer, and therefore judged it best to decoy him. I therefore made from him and towed many things alongside to stop my sloop's way which succeeded; I hoisted a Dutch flag and he answered me with a Danish, I then spread a French ensign and pennant and fired a gun to leeward; then hoisted a jack at my gaffend and threw out a French signal of distress; he then bore right down to me, and as soon as ever I had him under my guns I spread my English colours; he then fired at me his broadside, but soon after mine he struck his colours and surrendered.
Now you would think, would you not, that he would go on from there to commend the crew for bravery, describe any damage or casualties, hint, in a manly and understated fashion, at his own coolness under fire et cetera. Not a bit of it. His very next sentence describes what happened to his prize.
She was sold the next day at Plymouth and Mr Morsehead came off and paid the people; my share £149 for her, each man has just one guinea.
It is true, as well, that he could show cool, personal bravery, not to say heroism, and not mind describing it himself. A ship caught fire in Leghorn harbour. She was crammed with gun powder and no one would go near her. Hervey went aboard, cut her cables, towed her out with his own clothes on fire. She was just clear when she blew up. Miraculously Hervey was unhurt, though scorched; and through his action no one else was hurt either. His brother, Sporus, when he heard of it asked his father to send Augustus a letter of commendation. The letter was sent; but the covering letter to Sporus was typical Hervey family.
I have sent you since you desire it of me, a letter to your brother Augustus though I found it a little against the grain as a parent to be paying where I owed nothing, having never heard from him but when he wanted money—
Augustus Hervey fought much for his country, spent much of his own and other people's money, enjoyed life with an expensive honesty that would have astonished Pepys. His battles, his politics, his debts and his amours can only be called blatant. As with Pepys, his journal occupies only a short period of his life and his time at the top of his profession was all to come. Meanwhile his no more than nominal marriage had come notoriously unstuck. Elizabeth had gone the rounds from one noble lover to another. Augustus's comment seems to me to be amusing and, for once, unconsciously. In December 1747 he returned to England and has this to say about her.
[I was] very much displeased with many things I heard of Miss Chudleigh's conduct, especially from her own relations, too, which put me out of humour, and made me mind several little circumstances that perhaps would otherwise have passed me as nothing.
They parted. Bribed, it is said, with sixteen thousand pounds Augustus deposed before an ecclesiastical court that Miss Chudleigh had never been his wife. She thought this made her free and immediately married the Duke of Kingston. It is alleged that Augustus himself was present, remarking that he had come to take a last look at his widow. However, an ecclesiastical court is not the same as a law court and Elizabeth was indicted for bigamy. She fled abroad and after an eccentric existence at various courts died, it is said, 'demented'.
It was a strange affair and worthy of the family. I cannot resist recounting one more story of them. Tom Hervey, Augustus's uncle, eloped with the young wife of his godfather. Then, from a safe distance, he carried on a debate in pamphlet form with the injured husband in the course of which he referred to the lady as 'our wife—for in heaven, whose wife shall she be?' Yet there was the acceptable Hervey face, notably a streak of generosity and a power to recognize merit which made them help the young, unknown and struggling Samuel Johnson who said afterwards in later life, 'If you call a dog "Hervey" I shall love him.'
The Herveys must have been impossible companions for most of the time though at this distance they have acquired the posthumous merit of providing a source of constant entertainment. Since, I have heard it whispered, the common requirement for a thesis is the detailed study of some eighteenth-century character, it seems to me that a young person could do no better than to examine an aspect of one of the Hervey family. For impossible as they may have been to live with, they can nevertheless keep their staider posterity in a state of shock and, be it said, hilarity.
Pepys was solidly middle-class. Augustus Hervey belonged to the aristocracy. If the relationship of Pepys in the privacy of his journal with God seems less than intimate, at least the observances of religion bulk large. Hervey seems never to have heard of them. The name of God may have occurred here and there in his journal and letters but only as an expletive, sedulously expurgated by a later and one guesses lesser Hervey. Augustus Hervey was a rationalist born before his time—a rationalist so rational that he did not bother even to formulate his rationalism, at least not to his written-down self. He was like Pepys an indefatigable pursuer of women and art objects. His was a material world in which one could be sure of some funning here and there. Not for him those gloomy excursions that sometimes set Pepys walking away from his misdeeds rather than sins when his Puritan ancestry tapped him on the shoulder. He would have agreed, had he read it, with an unforgettable sentence of Pepys, 'I am in a strange slavery to the beauty of women and music.' Yet Pepys's intimacy was, in the end, with himself. Augustus was sunnily at one and intimate with the whole of life, the whole of the world. There seems just as little reason for his journal as for Pepys's and we are reduced to the simplistic explanation that as a naval officer he was so habituated to the keeping of a log it had become natural.
All this has really revealed little about the act of recording when the soul faces the white paper. It seems to have little to do with the impulse to create, something with the impulse to collect, perhaps a little with the desire to be remembered, perhaps a little with them all; and yet that list is not inclusive.
We started, as far as the written word is concerned, at the bottom of the social scale with naive Jimmy Mason. We have ascended gradually both in the complexity of mind and in the social scale. We may now go to the top socially and take some of Jimmy Mason's naivety with us though certainly not his other qualities. Another diarist, who like Augustus was much concerned with the Royal Navy, has left us accounts of voyages and journeys. This diarist did not build ships like Pepys nor sail them like Hervey. She owned them. She owned them all, for it was the 'Queen's Navee' and when Victoria took her diary off in the Royal Yacht she was accompanied by the ship Pique 36 guns, the sloop Daphne 18 guns, the steam vessel Salamander with the carriages on board, the steam vessels Monkey, Shearwater, Black Eagle, Lightning and Fearless. If this seems a large escort for one young woman, her husband and children, it must be pointed out that times have changed. The young woman's eldest son, King Edward VII, once turned up incognito at Naples with an escort of twelve battleships.
The remarkable thing about Victoria's journal is that it is so colourless as to be almost invisible on the page. This is not entirely her fault as it was heavily edited, leaving in only what was proper for a young lady and queen. When extracts were published, concerned mostly with her family and their holidays in Scotland, the public were disappointed. It contained little but a series of royal bromides with everywhere the implied notice to the public of KEEP OUT. I believe we need not be quite so disappointed. We can get a glimpse here and there of Victoria's intimate relation with God and Prince Albert, the two later to be so deeply and inextricably mingled. In addition, we can gather a series of little pictures by the way that provide interest, not perhaps on the Hervey or Pepys scale but nevertheless sufficiently entertaining. Prince Albert figures prominently as indeed he ought. Albert, highly intelligent, humourless and if anything over-educated had recognized with resignation his fate come upon him. He was not popular. Highly educated people seldom are with the great mass of the British people. Albert saw that he would never be British however much the queen had him legally naturalized unless he conformed to the national custom and went out, every day, rain or fine, and shot something. I find Victoria's adoring accounts of his exploits delightfully and, I think, quite unconsciously funny. Albert was dutiful but not an enthusiastic hunter.
Albert set off immediately after luncheon deer stalking and I was to follow and wait below. We sat down on the ground, Lady Canning and I sketching and Sandy and Mr Oswald in Highland Costume. After waiting some time we were told in a mysterious whisper that 'they were coming' and indeed a great herd did appear on the brow of the hill when most provokingly two men who were walking on the road—which they had no business to have done—suddenly came in sight and then the herd ran back again and the sport was spoilt. My poor Albert had not even fired one shot for fear of spoiling the whole thing but had been running about a great deal.
Two days later Albert is out again all day with Victoria waiting for him, on a country road.
Meanwhile (she writes) I saw the sun sink, gradually, and I got quite alarmed lest we should be benighted and we called anxiously for Sandy, who had gone away for a moment, to give a signal to come back. As the sun went down the scenery became more and more beautiful, the sky crimson, golden-red and blue, and the hills looking purple and lilac, most exquisite, till at length it set and the hues grew softer in the sky and the outlines of the hills sharper. I never saw anything so fine. At length Albert met us and he told us he had waited all the time for us, as he knew how anxious I should be. He had been very unlucky and lost his sport for just when he could have shot some fine harts the rifle would not go off.
Perhaps the experience soured Albert somewhat for now we hear him hunting close to Balmoral.
When I came in at half-past six, Albert went out to try his luck with some stags which lay quite close in the woods but he was unsuccessful.
Albert was determined, indefatigable. Perhaps salmon were easier to come at? Victoria says, 'Though Albert stood in the water for some time he caught nothing; but the scene at this beautiful spot was exciting and picturesque in the extreme. I wished for Landseer's pencil.'
However, persistence must have its reward. There came the day when Albert justified his naturalized status and became a true Briton. Victoria was delighted.
We turned to the right when out on the moors where I got off and walked; and we seated ourselves behind a large stone, no one but Macdonald with us, who loaded the guns and gave notice when anything was to be seen as he lay upon the ground. The gentlemen were below in the road; the wood was beat, but nothing came, so we walked on and came down a beautiful thickly-wooded glen; and after a good deal of scrambling to get there and to get up the other side of the glen, we sat down again.
We then scrambled over to the opposite side where we again concealed ourselves; in this beat Albert shot a roe, and I think would have shot more had they not been turned back by the sudden appearance of an old woman who looked like a witch and came through the wood with two immense crutches and disturbed the whole thing. Albert killed the roe just as she was coming along and the shot startled her very much; she was told to come down which she did, and sat below in the glen having covered her head with her handkerchief. When two of the beaters were told to take up the roe, they first saw the old woman and started and stared with horror—which was very amusing to see.
Let us leave the scene with Albert triumphant. Victoria saw it.
Albert fired—the animal fell but rose again and went on and Albert followed. Very shortly after, however, we heard a cry and ran down and found Grant and Donald Stewart pulling up a stag with a very pretty head. Albert had gone on, Grant went after him, and I and Vicky remained with Donald Stewart, the stag, and the dogs. I sat down to sketch and poor Vicky unfortunately seated herself on a wasp's nest and was much stung. Donald Stewart rescued her for I could not, being myself too much alarmed. Albert joined us in twenty minutes, unaware of having killed the stag. What a delightful day!
But I have been led astray by my personal delight in this account and have lingered too long by a Scottish burn; only pausing to remark that neither Pepys nor Hervey nor Johnson nor any of our cast and comedy would have described a sunset as Victoria did. Dutifully—for had she not said at her accession that she would be good?—she sees the scene as contemporary artists were seeing it, with all its mountains, mists, heather and monarchs of the glen. Yet the diary, if it were possible, might have been written by one of those pretty little figures you see in antique shops, a figure surely of hard, white porcelain.
Nevertheless, the remarkable thing is that when we look for the particular intimate relation in the diary—one the editor and censor would pass—and view Victoria before her Maker, an extraordinary thing emerges. Not for her the indifference of a Hervey nor the accommodation whatever it was of a Pepys. We can find places where Victoria records her relationship with God and there is no deference. She expects God, like the rest of her retainers, to deliver a service. He is not gaseous or personal. He is a servant.
At the service the second prayer was very touching; his allusions to us were so simple, saying after his mention of us, 'Bless their children'. It gave me a lump in my throat as when he prayed for the dying, the wounded, the widows and orphans. Everyone came back delighted; and how satisfactory it is to come back from church with such feelings!
The Royal party's optimism and cheerfulness was vindicated only a few days later with splendid news from the battlefield in that most futile of all wars, the Crimean campaign. Victoria received a telegraphic despatch saying, 'Sevastopol is in the hands of the allies.' She describes what followed.
Immediately Albert and all the gentlemen in every species of attire sallied forth, followed by all the servants, and gradually by all the population of the village—keepers, ghillies, workmen—up to the top of the cairn. Ross playing his pipes and Grant and Macdonald firing off guns continually; while poor old Francois lighted a number of squibs below, the greater part of which would not go off. About three-quarters of an hour later, Albert came down and said the scene had been wild and exciting beyond anything. The people had been drinking healths in whisky and were in great extasy.
There we must leave the pretty little figure. It is a good place; for that figure was not to change. Only when Albert died the white porcelain cracked and fell apart.
It seems clear enough why Victoria kept a diary. She had been directed to do so when a girl and her sense of duty did the rest. But she has little to tell us, little to contribute to the quest for deep reasons for recording daily life. A more faithful portrait of any person emerges from their diary, if it is kept for long enough, than they are aware. What will stand out above all is a ruling passion. In Pepys, if that passion is really discernible, it must be the instinct to collect. In Victoria it was the instinct to possess—to possess people, then things, then in a way the whole world. The more we look, the more collecting and possession seem deeply rooted in a journal. Cobbett, that John Bull-like figure, rides about the countryside and in his journal seems to embrace and possess the very soil, not in a sentimental way but with a hard and passionate grasp. Had he any intimate relationship with anything but with the new, green blades showing their tips through the fertile earth?
The original question of why a diary, why a journal becomes more obscure the more of them we read. Journals of Wesley, Fox and Elizabeth Fry, of Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, and a dozen others try to lay the same kind of hard and passionate grasp on God. Novels and plays may be shaped into consistency. But the diary reveals not that to err is human but that to be mixed and mixed-up, to be inconsistent, irrational, clever and sensible is in general what we are. Fox, mad and hugely merciful and sane, Johnson, with his tics and jerks, his desperate war on his own nature, Pepys, in his own unforgettable sentence, 'in a strange slavery to the beauty of women and music'—they wear our own face, their heartbeat is ours. Once, at Plymouth I seem to remember, Elizabeth Fry saw Great Britain's huge concourse of warships, the old wooden walls lying at anchor. She was a Quaker and dedicated pacifist. Yet she burst into tears. They were hot and unwanted tears for part of them sprang from pride in her own country's power and the majesty of its fleet and she knew that pride was a sin but could not control it; and there was also compassion in those tears for she saw these ships, patched up and contradicting the elements, as a metaphor of the human condition, of the voyage we are all bound on whether we like it or not.
History, where trends and groups and parties are named, is like a landscape with figures that have the assiduity and anonymity of ants. Biography moves in closer and shows us a single human face, and one man's opinion of it. But in diaries people paint a careful, injudicious and often unconscious portrait of themselves. Year by year, date by date, the picture, the portrait builds up. It is not merely the closeness of the pen to the subject, it is the minuteness of the strokes. From Jimmy Mason up to Queen Victoria, and from Elizabeth Fry across to Augustus Hervey they cannot but, if I may be colloquial, 'give away their game.'
We have come a long way from the footprint in the pool and the hand prints on the cave wall. I have conducted a search through what material occurred to me to find a motive and believe I have failed; or if not failed, come up with a mixture of motives so wide as to be no motive at all. A journey without an end, then—but at least it has been fun.
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