The Zeitgeist
Although few people read the real John Evelyn’s diary these days, few of those would know the motto that was stamped on the cover of most of the books in his library: “Omnia explorate; meliora retinete” (“Explore everything; keep the best”). His contemporary, Samuel Pepys, generally managed to achieve both, turning the most serious of historical events into rather gossipy froth: “I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major- General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered. He is looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.” Pepys, like Evelyn, wrote a diary that deals in a few pages with the intensely trivial moments in his life, especially the passing of wind, and some of the major historical events of the later seventeenth century.
Evelyn was equally intimately involved with the history of this period, Peter the Great trashing his house at Saye and destroying his magnificent garden in a massive pissup that involved using the legs of Evelyn’s chairs to play rounders. Yet the danger of the diarist is, as the famous diarist of our day, the infamous and (for some) muchlamented, Alan Clark would say, they can be a little “economical with the verité”.
This belief in economy, one that affected Pepys a little more than Evelyn has, it is to be feared, passed onto Evelyn’s present and supposed amanuensis. Indeed, the modern descendants of Evelyn, at least in Oxford, appear to have learnt Harold Nicholson’s lesson about how to be a diarist: “To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty, sneaky mind.
These days the diary has fallen into disrepute, with obvious agendas dominating their writing, and the wit, subtlety and style of Pepys, Evelyn, Saint-Simon or even Sassoon, a thing of distant and fastfading memory. Indeed, when most diarists, including Evelyn’s descendants have forgotten his dictum, the diary like Hamlet in Evelyn’s day, has: “begun to disgust this refined age”.
1st Jun 2006