FICTION.
A DIARY OF THE GREAT WARR.*
PREYS has often been imitated, but seldom with a greater measure of success, than by the ingenious anonymous writer of this Diary of the Great Warr. For it is one thing to copy Pepyes shorthand, homely style and to introduce his favourite ejaculations and phrases ; it is another and a far harder to impersonate him in modern surroundings, to repro- duce that strange mixture of shrewdness and simplicity, of kindliness, tolerance, and self-indulgence, which, with his inexhaustible curiosity, renders him so entertaining and illuminating a commentator. In regard to style, the author has had the good sense not to overdo things ; he has met the difficulty of employing medernisms frankly enough, and not been at pains to coin laborious archaisms for "taxi" and "motor" and so forth, while retaining the essential turn of phrase. But it is in the spirit of his narrative that his chief success has been achieved. The new. Pepys is a man of about fifty, retired from the Admiralty, with a flighty wife ; he is a clubman with many friends, a company director, devoted to golf and the theatre ; he is also a Unionist, a churchgoer, and a devoted supporter of the Monarchy. He is at once patriotic and pleasure-seeking, satirical and susceptible, easily elated and easily depressed. To illustrate our author's skill in preserving the traits of the real Pepys in his latest literary reincarnation we cannot do better than quote the following entry :— " These two days at Penzance, whither we did journey from Plymouth, halting only at Truro for refreshing ourselves and seeing the cathedral, which is a very noble cathedral, only as notable for its being so new as Exeter cathedral for its being so old. We lying in Penzance at the -Queen's Hotel, a very good house, being to face the sea, and a moat splendid prospect of the Mount's Bay. This day- I awoke -is. a queasy humour, come, I believe, of the sea air and so much thunder in it ; so 1 oz. Epsum salte before breaking my fast. Reading this morning many news-sheets from London, which I have not done since my quitting town. It seems that the Russians be still most hardly pressed by the Germans, but nevertheless do stand upon the Bugge with a great force. Another attaque of ayr-ships on our east coast, and divers people murdered, for the most part women and children. God rest them ! But what did most of all interest me was to read of a certain serjeant that was reported killed in Turkey ; but by and by one comes to his home, and says he is the serjeant returned, so the serjeent's wife receives him for her man. But after a time some say ho is not the serjeant, and presently the woman doubts that he be her true husband. So now the man is charged before the justices for that he Neely pretends to be the serjeant ; which is as odde a thing as over I heard tell of, that a woman should- not know whether a man is her husband or noe, and do make me fear lest my wife, being, the sad fool she is, fall into a like errour."
There within a brief compass you have an excellent picture of the artist, the valetudinarian, the curious student of humanity, and the suspicious philanderer. The varying phases of public opinion during the first eighteen months of the war are reflected in the club gossip of which the new Pepys is a most aaeiduous chronicler. Next to the diarist himself, the most entertaining personages are his friends General Pirple- toe and Admiral Topper, in whom the prejudices and foibles of the retired and fossilized warrior are very happily hit off. The legendary and fabulous side of the war is recalled to us in many anecdotes, diverting and disconcerting. To take only one example :--
" I heard from one at our club, who is lately come out of Denmark, that the reason of the Germans being so fierce against us is their being run short of sausage skins through the warn Their Emperour will award 50,000 marks (25001 of our money) to any man that shall invent synthetiok pig-guts for holding saneage meat. Whereat all their chymists and mechaniciens to make experiment with gutta-percha, paper fibres, and skins of rafts and small animals ; but as yet all in vain, for either the skins be so tough that none can cut them, or so frail that they hold not the meat, or, if of any service, do cost vastly more than pig-guts, me thought in Copenhagen that, unless the lack of pig-guts be supplied betimes, the enemy must needs sue for peace."
The newspaper cabals and campaigns, and all the attempts to en- throne Press government, afford matter for much quiet satire. But the personality of the diarist dominates the whole. He is no more heroic than his prototype, but he is as honest in setting down his own failings and indiscretions as in recording those of his friends. Ho acquiesces is the demand for domestic thrift, but finds the practice irksome, and readily devises excuses for deviation from the rules • 4 Diary of Us Gnat Warr. Bysamad Peires,Janr. Londe*: John Lana 1514
which ha lays down for his household. He becomes a special constable, but promptly avails himself of the convenient warnings of en accommodating doctor. Ho is an inveterate hedonist, but he loves his country and grieves for her sufferings. He is always writing to the papers proffering suggestions for rendering motor- 'buses bomb-proof or recipes for " toe-plaisters " for footsore soldiers. He is, in short, by turns sane and childish, credulous and critical, as so many men of the world have proved themselves of late.
Nothing in the diary shows the adroitness of the author better than his deft handling of the episode of the Polish Countess, a siren who excites the misgivings of Mrs. Pepys, and finally turns the tables on her admirer by a masterly letter to the suspicious wife, which, by leaving her husband in the awkward quandary of avowing himself either a fool or a knave, reduces him to inevitable silence. In fine, though this is not a work of creative imagination, it reveals quite unusual skill in the art of inventing new and appropriate variations on an old theme.
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