W. N. P.BARBELLION26

Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually, and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing classes—merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness will be greater, but it will certainly—it and the sum of human dullness—be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of the community. She would be twenty years old,having just finished her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their licence to employ. There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which survives to-day.

Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while they were elsewhere—and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said "Sarah, your master wishes——" or Mr. Smith said "Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether——" I am well aware that the very title of this essay jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service in its old form depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.

Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all, worth saving?—a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly so ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile of yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid's light brisk tread in the corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman's shoulders as he noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good. But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well enough, no doubt. I myself am old enough to have known two or three servants of the old school—later editions of Ruskin's Anne. With them there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much—a fine mellowness, the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing the same things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from deep roots, and where they were you had always the sense of standing under great wide branches. One especially would I recall, who—no, personally I admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much indeed, but I never was of that kind, and it's too late to begin to be so now. For a type of old-world servant Iwould recall rather some more public worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout old hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. He stands there no more, and the hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort. Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as indigenous as the pond there—that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to Highgate. It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking, and on Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he wanted to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very loyal to that village. In the course of his life he had "bin down to London a matter o' three or four times," he would tell me, "an' slep' there once." He knew me to be a native of that city, and (for he was the most respectful of men) did not make any adverse criticism of it. But clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and—horses rather than cities were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of men. But he did—and this was a great thrill for me—did, after some pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when he was a boy, "a gen'leman with summut long hair, settin' in a small cart, takin' a pictur'." To me Ford Madox Brown's "Work" is of all modern pictur's the most delightful in composition and strongest in conception, the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great pride in having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend himself set little store on anything that had befallen him in days before he was "took on as stable-lad at the Castle."Hispride was in the Castle, wholly.

Part of his charm, like Hampstead's, was in the surprise one had at finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger; and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and stout. At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that followed they were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of the past decades was undone: butlers were suddenly as old and stout as ever they were, and so they still are. But this, I take it, was only a temporary set-back. Since peace came, butlers have reappeared as they were in 1915, and maybe will soon be losing height and weight too, till they shall have become bright-eyed children, with pattering feet. Or will their childhood be of a lessgracious kind than that? I fear so. I have seen, from time to time, butlers who had shed all semblance of grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a manifesto of contempt for their calling and of devotion to the Spirit of the Age. I have seen a butler in a well-established household strolling around the diners without the slightest droop, and pouring out wine in an off-hand and quite obviously hostile manner. I have seen him, towards the end of the meal, yawning. I remember another whom, positively, I heard humming—a faint sound indeed, but menacing as the roll of tumbrils.

These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was "a flame of old-world fealty all bright." Were these but the finer comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch in a merely æsthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his movements were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control. Baldness at the temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth face. It is more than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a long period I saw him often, both in town and country. Against the background of either house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be that. Brett's supremacy was in the sense he gave one that he was, after all, human—that he had a heart, in which he had taken the liberty to reserve a corner for any true friend of his master and mistress. I remember well the first time he overstepped sheer formality in relation to myself. It was one morning in the country, when my entertainers and my fellow guests had gone out in pursuit of some sport at which I was no good. I was in the smoking room, reading a book. Suddenly—no, Brett never appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett appeared, paused at precisely the right speaking distance, and said in a low voice, "I thought it might interest you to know, sir, that there's a white-tailed magpie out on the lawn. Very rare, as you know, sir. If you look out of the window you will see the little fellow hopping about on the lawn." I thanked him effusively as I darted to the window, and simulated an intense interest in "the little fellow." I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett, having done his to perfection.

What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over himself—but did hereallylose it? There were only four people at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for drollery) and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had turned on early marriages. "I," said the young man presently, "shall not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of seventeen." His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, "Oh, Tom, what a perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn'tbornyet!""No," said the young man, "but I have my eye on her mother." At this, Brett, who was holding a light for his master's cigarette, turned away convulsively, with a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His breakdown touched and pleased all four beholders. But—was it a genuine lapse? Or merely a feint to thrill us?—the feint of an equilibrist so secure that he can pretend to lose his balance?

If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might be in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that he was gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one glimpse of him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out late to visit some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and sound; for Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time. Not so much horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the populous quiet streets and squares. One square was less quiet than others, because somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I saw the whistler silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep from an open door, and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he bent out into the dark night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a great tensity—even of agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate evening cloak. Brett's back must have conveyed to her in every curve his surprise, his shame, that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry in her behalf was such as Burke's for Marie Antoinette—little had he dreamed that he should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. He had thought ten thousand taxis must have leaped from their stands, etc. The whistle that at first sounded merely mechanical and ear-piercing had become heart-rending and human when I saw from whom it proceeded—a very heart-cry that still haunts me. Butwasit a heart-cry? Was Brett, is Brett, more than a mere virtuoso?

He is in any case what employers call a treasure, and to any one who wishes to go forth and hunt for him I will supply a chart showing the way to that doorstep on which last I saw him. But I myself, were I ever so able to pay his wages, should never covet him—no, nor anything like him. Perhaps we are not afraid of menservants if we looked out at them from the cradle. None was visible from mine. Only in later years and under external auspices did I come across any of them. And I am as afraid of them as ever. Maidservants frighten me less, but they also—except the two or three ancients aforesaid—have always struck some degree of terror to my soul. The whole notion of domestic service has never not seemed to me unnatural. I take no credit for enlightenment. Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of one jewel: the sense of order. When I became a schoolboy, I greatly disliked being a monitor's fag. Other fags there were who took pride in the quality of the toast they made for the breakfasts and suppers of their superiors. My own feeling was that I would rather eat it myself, and that if I mightn't eat it myself I would rather it were not very good. Similarly, whenI grew to have fags of my own, and by morning and by evening one of them solemnly entered to me bearing a plate on which those three traditional pieces of toast were solemnly propped one against another, I cared not at all whether the toast were good or bad, having no relish for it at best, but could have eaten with gusto toast made by my own hand, not at all understanding why that member should be accounted too august for such employment. Even so in my later life. Loth to obey, loth to command. Convention (for she too frightens me) has made me accept what servants would do for me by rote. But I would liefer have it ill-done than ask even the least mettlesome of them to do it better, and far liefer, if they would only be off and not do it at all, do it for myself. In Italy—dear Italy, where I have lived much—servants do still regard service somewhat in the old way, as a sort of privilege; so that with Italian servants I am comparatively at my ease. But oh, the delight when on the afternoon of some localfestathere is no servant at all in the little house! Oh, the reaction, the impulse to sing and dance, and the positive quick obedience to that impulse! Convention alone has forced me to be anywhere a master. Ariel and Caliban, had I been Prospero on that island, would have had nothing to do and nothing to complain of; and Man Friday on that other island would have bored me, had I been Crusoe. When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave, I promptly freed you.

Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased—short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those things, and I should be glad were there no more of it.

26The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Enjoying Life and Other Essays.By W. N. P. Barbellion. Chatto & Windus. 6s.net each.

By EDWARD SHANKS

WHENThe Journal of a Disappointed Manwas first published in March, 1919, the suspicious circumstances that it contained an introduction by Mr. H. G. Wells, and purported to be written by a young assistant in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, immediately produced the impression that it was a fictitious work, composed by Mr. Wells himself. He was known at that time, from other books acknowledged to be his, to be feeling a particular interest in the philosophical problem of human suffering; he had done something of the kind before, and many readers, it may be conjectured, unconsciously found it a relief to suppose that this almost unbearably tragic history had been invented. But the impression could not long survive a careful study of the book. The author's identity was soon guessed at by a few persons who knew him and suspected by some who had heard of him; and presently Mr. Wells wrote to a newspaper to say that the only fictitious details in the Journal were the author's name and the date of his death, there given as December 31st, 1917. This date was in fact incorrect by nearly two years. Bruce Frederick Cummings lived until October 30th, 1919, that is to say for seven months after the publication of his diary.

Thus it comes about that the later part of it, which has not yet been printed, contains many references to his critics, in whose opinions he was deeply and frankly interested. He remarks again and again on the ordinary incompetence of reviewers, the usual complaint of an author, but especially poignant here. He mentions, once in a letter and once in the diary, an imbecile who thought that he was "a social climber"; and he welcomes with joy the first writer who seemed to him to have read the book carefully. But among all these references to his work there is none more illuminating than the last entry he ever made:

Friends and relatives say I have not drawn my true self. But that's because I've taken my clothes off and they can't recognise me stark! The Book is a self-portrait in the nude.

Thus, with this final self-explanation, he ends his work. The last two words stand alone at the top of a left-hand page, and opposite them in the book lies the blotting-paper he used. He had often before said farewell to his Journal. Once it was in a fit of disgust with it and himself, and he took itup again to record the discovery that he was suffering from an incurable disease. Once again, owing to the paralysis of his right hand, writing became too painful for him, and he thought this the hardest and shrewdest stroke of fate to deprive him of his secret consolation. Last, under the date May 25th, 1919, he made an entry of four pages, chiefly supplementing earlier entries, and concluded with the words, large and scrawled, but legible: "This is the end. I am not going to keep a diary any more." Then on June 1st, without explanation, he made a long entry, recalling an experience of early life, and on June 3rd the very last, which I have quoted. He desired that at the end should be written, "The rest is silence," for an inscription on the base of his "self-erected monument." Genuine self-portraits in the nude occur very rarely in the history of literature. This is a picture of a man of genius superbly drawn by himself. It is an astonishing book about an astonishing man.

Barbellion was born on September 7th, 1889, and was the third son of a reporter employed by a newspaper in a Devonshire town. He was able to remember the first time a bird's nest was ever shown to him; but a passion for natural history became very early the most important part of his life. He was articled as a boy to his father's unattractive and uncongenial profession. He nevertheless continued to pursue his passion with an extraordinary energy and strength of will, and was determined to secure somehow or other an entrance into the desired career. He was otherwise and exactingly occupied and he was entirely self-taught; and in 1910, just when by great good fortune he had been offered, and had accepted, a post in the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, his father's health broke down altogether, compelling him to renounce this dazzling but ill-paid opportunity. But in the following year he won in open competition an appointment in the Natural History Museum, which justified the abandonment of journalism.

In 1909 there first appears in the diary the definite indication of a theme which was soon to rival natural history in importance and at last most horribly to overwhelm it.

Feeling ill—like a sloppy tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan magazines in the Library and occasionally rink—with palpitation of the heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness and uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.

After this the subject of his health is rarely absent for many pages together. The deaths of his father and mother deepened the preoccupation, and Barbellion's symptoms and dreads were almost infinite in their variety. He suffered from intermittent action of the heart, from nervous weakness, and from dyspepsia; he feared now paralysis, now blindness, now consumption. The thought of death was constantly with him, but until the end he could not be sure in what form it would come. Sometimes he longed for it to finish his sufferings, sometimes he hoped it would linger enough to allow him to complete the work he had in hand.

Meanwhile, amid the unescapable and agonising reflections which this condition induced, another side of his nature was being developed. In 1910 there is an entry which again is like the first tentative introduction of a musical theme in a symphony:

I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park, in the dark, kissing her, I was testing and experimenting with a new experience.

He was not, of course, by any means so callous and inhuman as this brief note might make him appear; but he was immensely curious about himself and about other people, and immensely greedy for new sensations. He dabbled a good deal in love-making, and his dabbling was prompted partly by the natural pressure of the senses, partly by curiosity. At last he fell in love, could not make up his mind whether he wanted to marry, made it up and was rejected, felt relieved, then unhappy, renewed his suit and was accepted. In September, 1915, he was married. A few weeks before, during a holiday at Coniston, boisterously prosecuted with his usual reckless disregard of his weak health, he had fallen and jarred his spine, and this had brought on a partial paralysis which filled him with the gloomiest thoughts and seemed to suggest the cancellation of all his plans. But his doctor made light of the matter and the marriage took place.

In the following November, having formally presented himself for recruitment, he was led by curiosity to read the sealed certificate written by his own doctor, not supposing that its being sealed had any particular significance. Thus he discovered, while sitting in a railway-carriage, that eighteen months before he had shown the first symptoms of a terrible and incurable disease and that this had been concealed from him, though it had been communicated to his relatives. He found later that it had been known to his wife before their marriage and also that his fall at Coniston had reawakened activity among the bacteria and hastened the end. In 1916 his daughter was born, and in July of the following year his rapidly failing strength compelled him, after ineffectual periods of sick leave, to resign his appointment at the Museum. His health varied; he grew worse and recovered a little, but never recovered what he had lost. He prepared his diary for publication, but the publishers who had accepted it became afraid of it when it was partly set up in type and asked to be relieved of the undertaking. Another publisher was found. The book appeared, and its reception did something to soften the miseries of his last months.

How profound and unremitting were these miseries, and how he bore them, is shown in the last section of the diary. His disease was painful and the end certain. He had a wife, who was often fatigued and ill, and a child, and he had next to no money. The strain of witnessing his sufferings, as well as the necessity of earning her living, made it imperative that his wife should spend long periods of time away from him. In 1919 there was an idea that a certain prolonged and troublesome treatment might possibly, though only possibly, effect an improvement. But he did not care to beexperimented with then. He was already dead, he said, it was too late, he could not bear the burden of a fresh hope. He continued to be tortured by the long-drawn-out agony of his dissolution, by the defeat of all his ambitions, and by the black prospects of his wife and child. But the success of his book brings a curiously sweeter and gentler note into the diary, a note most poignant to the reader who could understand his refusing to be grateful for anything.

I am still miserable [he writes], especially on E.'s account—that dear, brave woman. But I have suffered achange. My whole soul is sweetened by the love of those near and dear to me, and by the sympathy of those reading my book.

Grants were made to him out of various funds, and, just before his death, a committee of distinguished literary men was formed to see that his wife and child did not want. This in particular touched him to gratitude, and he died proud and happy in the thought that those who should have been dependent on him had so many good friends to serve them instead. A few hours before the end he said to his brother, "You will soon be able to blow the trumpets and bang the brasses"; but his eyes were full of a pathetic desire to have it denied.

It is not difficult to understand the complaint made by his friends and relatives that he had drawn a misleading portrait of himself, any more than it is difficult to understand his own protest that he had drawn himself with the clothes off. Both points of view are exceedingly natural, and perhaps it is possible for a disinterested observer to see in the diary the whole truth which could not be immediately obvious either to himself or to those who were closely connected with him. We need not involve ourselves very deeply in the theories of psycho-analysis to make the point that a man who keeps a journal will use it very largely to put down what he can say nowhere else, and to express that side of him which cannot be expressed in the ordinary world. Why else indeed should he keep a journal? It is thus that arise apparent contradictions between the outward appearance and the confession. On one occasion Barbellion says:

I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail often before stupid but overbearing persons who consequently never realise my contempt of them.... Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at mydouble-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life—to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming—then this Journal would be quite unnecessary.

No man who is a hero to himself stands a very good chance of seeming a hero to other people. But in this passage Barbellion not only shows thedifference between his appearance and his self-portraiture, but also directs attention to one of the factors which make his diary so extraordinary a document. He was aware of the contrast between what he allowed the world to see and the rest of his nature; but this contrast remained profoundly mysterious to himself. He understood himself enough to be able to describe himself, but not so thoroughly that the knowledge could remove all curiosity; and, in fact, while he knew much of his own character that no one else knew, there was left something over of which he was ignorant.

He once said:

I am apparently a triple personality: (1) The respectable youth. (2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic. (3) The real but unknown I. Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement.

One might also say that the reader of the diary discovers another triple personality: (1) Barbellion as he must have seemed to others. (2) Barbellion as he thought he seemed to others. (3) The real Barbellion, not fully known even to himself, yet, between his appearance and his confessions, for ever unconsciously betraying himself. In actual fact, he was, it is agreed by all who knew him, a man of enormous, almost dæmonic force of character. I have already alluded to the reckless vigour with which he drove his failing body through all manner of tasks and difficulties, and this trait in him gives a fair idea of his spirit. From boyhood onward he was weakened by continual ill-health. The diary is full of medical observations and forebodings, but no one, not even his family, realised how constantly the fear of sickness and death attended him. He never mentioned his health save in a tone of cheerful cynicism: he never pampered himself or allowed himself to be pampered. In spite of his palpitating heart, he exposed himself to fatigues and performed feats of endurance which a sound man might well have avoided. He worked furiously and unceasingly. He kept his balance and his courage under staggering blows of ill-fortune. Never was there so impossible an ambition as that of this sickly youth in a provincial town, already chained to the dreary work of a reporter, who desired, without any help, without even any decent opportunities for self-instruction, to obtain a scientific appointment. Yet he overcame these obstacles and his ambition was fulfilled. And when this was taken from him, when nothing was left but a few painful months of life and his Journal, when it was infinite labour even to trace a few words on the page, he continued the self-portrait which had become his last ambition as long as he could hold a pen at all. The straggling, irregularly-formed letters which sprawl across the paper are the last witnesses of his invincible courage.

And to others this timid and cowardly young man seemed strong, masterful, difficult to manage, frightening, sometimes savage and bitter in conversation, but always magnetic and fascinating. "I know," he says, "I am not prepossessing in appearance—my nose is crooked and my skin is blotched." In reality his height, his distinction of bearing and fine hairproduced an immediate effect of good looks—which, with the emaciation of his final days, changed into an austere and painful beauty. He had particularly beautiful hands, and his photographs certainly represent him as being not only noticeable but also attractive. The disparity between what he says of himself and what others thought of him involves no real contradiction. He is writing of the hidden and secret personality whom no one else knew, and the fact that no one else could know this personality, save by his own deliberate act of revelation, is another proof of his strength. He is describing the other side of the moon.

His ambition was the one part of his secret life which was too great and too violent for even him to hide altogether. He might doubt his own qualities, but he could not conceal from himself or from others what he desired to be and to do. His ambitions were, he thought, very soon and very easily defeated, but the title he gave to his book, a catchpenny title, as he owned, and something wanting in sincerity, confessed to a graver defeat than he actually sustained. His achievements were not great in bulk. His scientific triumph was the triumph of reaching a self-proposed aim in spite of almost impossible obstacles; but it was worth less in itself than as a witness to character. He might have become one of the greatest of English biologists; but promise is only promise, and this, besides, is promise of a kind with which we are not concerned here. "In time," he once said, "I should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology." But he was not allowed time, and his scientific observations will be amplified, superseded, heaped under at last by an accumulation of the work of his successors. In literature his position is very different.

When his book was being prepared for publication and while he was still ignorant what reception it would have he remarked without hesitation that he "liked to look at himself posthumously as a writer"; and it appears from the introduction toEnjoying Lifethat his friends had long before expected him to turn his whole attention to literature. Even here his work is comprised in small space. It consists of three things: the publishedJournal of a Disappointed Man, containing extracts from his diaries between 1903 and 1917, the posthumous volume,Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains, containing, together with a number of essays and articles, long passages omitted for the sake of space from the previous book, and the still unpublished diary from the beginning of 1918 onwards. Even from this certain deductions must be made. The scientific articles in the second volume were only just worth reprinting; and the essays on journal-writers and the two short stories, though they are promising, are yet no more than the experiments of a man who was considering giving himself formally to the profession of literature. But when all these deductions are made there is a residue which is unique in value.

In the introduction to the first volume Mr. Wells very comprehensively lays stress on the circumstances of Barbellion's fate. He represents the diarist as saying, "You shall have at least one specimen carefully displayedand labelled. Here is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square with this." This is, of course, an aspect of the matter which no reader could manage to overlook, even if he desired (as he might conceivably desire) to do so. It would be a pity, however, if we were to consider it to the exclusion of every other aspect. Barbellion was not essentially aspecimenwho by good luck had the ability to display and label himself. If his circumstances had been quite other than they were, he would still have been a remarkable man and would almost certainly have done remarkable work. His disease and death ought to play the same part in our conception of him that they do in our conception of Keats, with whom, besides, he had certain affinities which he half-consciously recognised. We do not know what part disease played in creating or forcing or conditioning Keats's genius; we only know that it infuses a poignancy and a colour into our picture of his life. He does not appear to us as the diseased poet, but as a poet who, as it happened, was stricken with disease. So with Barbellion: he had a personality and a gift for describing his experiences; and, since it fell out that his experiences were tragic, therefore the story he tells is a tragedy. But the tragedy is not interesting only as such. It is interesting because the principal figure in it is Barbellion.

The comparison with Keats is natural, is suggestive, and can be supported by a number of particulars, both accidental and essential. "Since the fateful November 27th," says Barbellion, "my life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys." Keats writes in his last letter, from Rome, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence." But there is a closer similarity between them than the superficial parallel suggested by their use of the same word. Barbellion himself made the comparison more than once, and once in a very significant context.

You can search all history [he exclaims] for an ambition more powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor Wilhelm II., nor Keats.

And this uncontrollable ambition in both of them was one manifestation of the innermost ruling characteristic which they had in common, the passion for life in all its shapes and forms, for all the sensations life can bring, which inspires Barbellion's Journal as surely as it inspires Keats's poetry and letters.

The title of Barbellion's second book was not, as it might seem, intended in irony. He enjoyed life to a terrifying degree and could abandon himself to the ecstasy which it produced in him.

As you say [he writes in a letter, referring to a review of the Journal] the rest of the notice distinguishing Marie Bashkirtseff from me by her zest for life is an astonishing and ludicrous misreading. Why, even since I became bedridden, as you will see one day, my zest for life took a devil of a lot of killing—like a sectioned worm with all the parts still wriggling....

In the last part of the diary his assertion is amply proved. Here the zest forlife, in a man who could no longer indulge it save in memory, is sublimated to a piercing but sweet lyrical cry, which is one of the most moving utterances in literature. Before, when he was in possession of all his faculties, when the shadow of illness could sometimes be forgotten, it is a rapturous and boisterous expression of infinite energy, high spirits and gusto. Almost any paragraph in the essay calledEnjoying Lifewould serve to demonstrate this:

"Dans littérature," said M. Taine, "j'aime tout." I would shake his hand for saying that, and add: "In life, Monsieur, as well." All things attract me equally. I cannot concentrate. I am ready to do anything, go anywhere, think anything, read anything. Wherever I hitch my waggon I am confident of an adventurous ride. Somebody says, "Come and hear some Wagner." I am ready to go. Another, "I say, they are going to ring the bull"—and who wants to complete his masterpiece or count his money when they are going to ring the bull? I will go with you to Norway, Switzerland, Jericho, Timbuctoo. Talk to me about the Rosicrucians or the stomach of a flea and I will listen to you. Tell me that the Chelsea Power Station is as beautiful as the Parthenon at Athens and I'll believe you. Everything is beautiful, even the ugly—why did Whistler paint the squalor of the London streets, or Brangwyn the gloom of a steam-crane? To subscribe to any one particular profession, mode of life, doctrine, philosophy, opinion, or enthusiasm, is to cut oneself off from all the rest—I subscribe to all. With the whole world before you, beware lest the machinery of education seizes hold of the equipotential of your youth and grinds you out the finished product! You were a human being to start with—now, you are only a soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor. Leonardo da Vinci, racked with frustrate passion after the universal, is reported to have declared that only to do one thing and only to know one thing was a disgrace, no less.

Crying for the Moon, the essay which follows, also extracted from the Journal, is the obverse of the same coin:

I am passing through the world swiftly and have only time to live my own life. I am cut off by my own limitations and environment from knowing much or understanding much. I know nothing of literature and the drama; I have but little ear for music. I do not understand art. All these things are closed to me. I am passing swiftly along the course of my life with many others whom I shall never meet. How many dear friends and kindred spirits remain undiscovered among that number? There is no time for anything. Everything and everyone is swept along in the hustling current. Oh! to sun ourselves awhile in the water meadows before dropping over the falls! The real tragedies in this world are not the things which happen to us, but the things which don't happen.

There are critics who would trace the source of such outbursts as these and of the joy in life that constantly appears in Keats to the effects of bacterial disease. We cannot contradict the conclusion, which may have a certain truth. We can only point out that the same cause does not always produce the same effect, and we must therefore deduce a particular genius in those in whom this spirit manifests itself. Barbellion was, from one point of view, a case of pathology, but he was not, any more than was Keats, nothing but that. He had a fine temperament which he expressed very finely.

There is a temptation when one is considering the Journal, to which Barbellion's work must eventually be reduced, to consider it as so much rawmaterial and to speculate how, if he had lived, he would have used the many talents he displays in it. He began it as a record of a naturalist's observations, and it developed only very gradually into a self-portrait and a repository for all his reflections and impressions. He was still, when his last illness overtook him, a professional scientist, scribbling in his diary at night for a hobby. But he was thinking of going over to literature; and one cannot help asking whether, if he had done so, he would not have turned his genius to some more formal and less miscellaneous method of expression. It is easy to discern in him any number of capacities. He might have become a critic—a statement which can be proved by a few examples taken at random:

I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.... All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.It amuses me to discover the evident relish with which the author ofThe Daffodil Fieldsemphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield's great excitement.... Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable book—a work of genius.... James Joyce'sPortrait of the Artist—one of those books which the mob will take fifty years to discover but once discovered will again neglect.

It amuses me to discover the evident relish with which the author ofThe Daffodil Fieldsemphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield's great excitement.... Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable book—a work of genius.

... James Joyce'sPortrait of the Artist—one of those books which the mob will take fifty years to discover but once discovered will again neglect.

He might have been a psychological or a satirical novelist, a metaphysician, a casual essayist. He might have been a poet of nature. His diaries are studded with the most exquisite descriptions of landscapes and living things, which grow only more vivid and moving as the end approaches and they become transcripts from memory instead of recent impressions. The last long entry in the Journal is one of them, and it is so good and so characteristic that it insists on being quoted:

Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up!—rock pools, gobies, Blennies, anemones (crassicon, dahlia—oh! I forget). And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the morning when I put some sanded opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the sea, into a glass collecting jar and to my amazement and delight they turned into Ctenophors—alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap-bubble, from its North or to its South Pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat on the water.

But I think that this way of looking on Barbellion's work, excusable as it might be, would nevertheless be mistaken. Every author writes the bookthat it is given to him to write, and Barbellion's book was the Journal. If, as seems very likely, he had developed altogether into a writer, he might still not have abandoned this form which had become by a gradual process peculiarly his own. Goethe said that all his works were the fragments of a great confession, and this is true, in a greater or lesser degree, of most authors. Barbellion would have differed from the rest only in that his works would have been ostensibly and formally, as well as actually, his confessions.

And this view is supported by the fact that up to the last he was improving the flexible and accommodating method of literary expression which his diary had become. The last eighteen months of it seem to me to show an advance on the third part of the published Journal almost as striking as the advance of that third part on the first. The form fitted very closely to Barbellion's many-sided and individual temperament; and, as time went on and he understood better what he was doing, he made it fit more closely still. It was a frame into which he could put with perfect ease all that his roving perceptions picked up in life: an impression of a landscape or an animal, a conversation overheard in the street, a suddenly flashing truth about himself or some other person, a general reflection upon humanity. As a journal-writer he is not, of course, alone; but, being a strongly-marked personality, he is unique even among journal-writers. His intense interest in his own consciousness does not, as it did with Amiel, blind him to the actual outside world; he has more humour, more gusto in concrete detail than Marie Bashkirtseff, a vein of sheer poetry that we do not find in Pepys. This is not intended to rank him above the writers with whom he loved to compare himself, but rather to emphasise his individuality among them.

We find ourselves at last wondering not how he would have employed the gifts he displays in the Journal, but to what pitch of excellence he might have brought the Journal itself. The last entries are admirably full of matter and admirably worded. The passage I have quoted on the Ctenophors is of almost perfect lyrical beauty—not a random jotting, but an impression seized and made permanent with all the proportion and balance of a sonnet by Hérédia. Over against it there might be quoted passages on the old village nurse who attended him for months, closely and humorously observed and set down without the waste of a syllable. Or there are pages of reflections like this:

The Icons.Every man has his own icon.Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably with great respect, by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and subsists. In the self-righteous man's bosom, it is a molten image of a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egotist's, an ideal loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the truth-seeker preserves his image in clay, covered in damp rags—a working hypothesis.A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered its heart's treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare refer to his own—it is bad form—so that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirls around each one's personality, a man remains sound-tight and insulated.The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person—as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.Heavens! what a toy shop it will be at the Last Day! When all our little effigies are taken from their cupboards, undraped, and ranged along beside us, nude and shivering. In that Day how few will be able to say that they ever cried"God be merciful to me a sinner," or "a fool," or "a humbug."The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man's life is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and the real—the image (or the man's mistaken idea of himself)—like anignis fatuusleading him through devious paths into the morass of failure, or worse—of sheer, laughing-stock silliness. The moral is:γνῶθι σεαυτόν {gnôthi seauton}(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life.)

Every man has his own icon.

Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably with great respect, by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and subsists. In the self-righteous man's bosom, it is a molten image of a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egotist's, an ideal loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the truth-seeker preserves his image in clay, covered in damp rags—a working hypothesis.

A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered its heart's treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare refer to his own—it is bad form—so that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirls around each one's personality, a man remains sound-tight and insulated.

The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person—as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.

Heavens! what a toy shop it will be at the Last Day! When all our little effigies are taken from their cupboards, undraped, and ranged along beside us, nude and shivering. In that Day how few will be able to say that they ever cried

"God be merciful to me a sinner," or "a fool," or "a humbug."

The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man's life is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and the real—the image (or the man's mistaken idea of himself)—like anignis fatuusleading him through devious paths into the morass of failure, or worse—of sheer, laughing-stock silliness. The moral is:

γνῶθι σεαυτόν {gnôthi seauton}

(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life.)

The mellowness and sweetness of these lines are worth noting as characteristic of a transformation which is obviously taking place through all the last pages of the diary. This transformation adds something in the nature of a rounding and a completion to the whole work, which might otherwise have been merely an interrupted record. It enlarges too our conception of the author's character and capacities and fills in, most graciously, our picture of him.

Barbellion was accustomed to accuse himself of being an egotist; but, on his own definition, he was a truth-seeker. His portrait of himself was not immutable. It grew clearer as he understood himself better and it changed as he changed. It was not complete when he died because his own development was not complete. But he carried it as far as he could and made of it a singular picture. His Journal is a book of an enduring sort, not merely because it is an accurate and candid self-portrait, but also because of the inherent attractions of its subject. Barbellion was a poet, a humorist, an observer, a philosopher, as well as a truthful, passionate, and extraordinarily courageous man. In drawing a picture of the last he also made a picture of the world as it seemed to the first four and thus captured in it poetry, humour, observation, and philosophy. The subject is still too fresh, and, by the vividness of its presentment, too painful, for any attempt at a final valuation to be made. A few months ago Barbellion was still alive, suffering and hoping; and, with the best will in the world, no critic can avoid being influenced by this fact. But his book is a fair topic for prophecy; and it is not very rash to predict that, as it loses the sharpness and painfulness of a record of fact, so its qualities as a work of literature will come more into prominence and we shall realise that Barbellion was not only a genius untimely overwhelmed by an evil fate, but a genius who, before he was overwhelmed, hadopportunity to do some at least of his appointed work. Then, whatever may be the theoretical views we hold on the connection between disease and genius, we shall be able to think less of Barbellion as a "case" and more of him as a writer. We shall, perhaps, not think that we have a complete portrait of him in his Journal any more than we have a complete portrait of Keats in the Odes or even in the Letters. The greatest of artists cannot entirely disclose himself in his work. Barbellion did so no more than others. But he was an artist, and, between what he wrote of himself and what was otherwise revealed, it is possible to form a picture of an extraordinary personality.

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