Chapter 33

“I ask myself; what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But Ihopefor something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and, above all, for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.”

This, one might almost say, shows Barbellion at his best.

A power of fancy which is displayed in few other connections throughout the book made him say, during the same year,

“What a delightful thing the state of death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past—if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! If the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farmyards in——birdnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the rapturesof first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming overParker and Haswelland then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this; to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times.... My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.”

Nothing in the diaries illustrates more strikingly Barbellion's zest for living than these allusions to death. In the first decade of life, the average person gives no thought as to whether he will live or die; in the second decade he rarely becomes concerned with thoughts of death unless they are forced upon him by painful or persistent illness. In the third decade, when the fear of death is very common, Barbellion knew that he must soon die. This flair for life, which he must have possessed to a marked degree, is evidenced in his love of nature and in his appreciation of beauty and of literature to an immensely greater extent than in contact with his fellows. His pleasure in æsthetics was real and profound, and included an appreciation of sound, colour, and form, both in nature and in art. His capacity for the appreciation of beauty of sound was greater than for the beauty of colour or form. Although apparently he had never studied music, he said of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that it “always worked me up into an ecstasy”; and after listening to music by Tschaikovsky, Debussy, and others that, “I am chock-full of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write.”

Whether or not his suspicion that “my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me only distilled sensuality” was true, the appreciation was unquestionably genuine, as shown by his comment on Rodin's “The Prodigal Son” that it was “Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand—asuperb touch—what a frenzy of remorse!,” and on “The Fallen Angel” that “The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it—down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes—like the hind legs of some beautiful dead gazelle.”

Above his appreciation of æsthetic beauty, however, Barbellion realised, theoretically at least, that the topmost levels of pleasure and pain are constituted of qualities dependent upon achievements of the moral order—of duty well done, of happiness conferred, of services rendered, of benefits bestowed; or of the antithesis, of remorse for abstention and neglect of these or for active misdeeds. He says in “The Last Diary,”

“Under the lens of scientific analysis natural beauty disappears. The emotion of beauty and the spirit of analysis and dissection cannot exist contemporaneously. But just as man's scientific analysis destroys beauty, so his synthetic art creates it. And man creates beauty, nature supplying the raw materials. Because there is beauty in man's own heart, he naïvely assumes its possession by others and so projects it into nature. But he sees in her only the truth and goodness that are in himself. Natural beauty is everyone's mirror.”

Barbellion's strong sense of moral values was always coloured by his passion—which was almost a mania for receiving appreciation and applause. Although he denied wanting to be liked, respected, and admired, yet he clamoured for it. He displayed pain upon receiving the marks of disapprobation, and reproof he disliked and despised.

He was singularly free from spontaneous disorder of will; that is, of delay, vacillation, and precipitation. The only evidence he gave of vacillation was about his marriage, and that showed his good judgment. He was much more inclined to precipitation than to vacillation, and for a neurotic individual he was strangely without obsession—that is the morbid desire to do some act which the would-be performer discountenances and struggles not to do.

With all his sensitiveness, Barbellion seemed to have been not without an element of cruelty. This was of the refined, indirect sort and was chiefly noticeable in references to his wife. While he was contemplating a proposal of marriage he made an entry in his diary,

“I tried my best, I have sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are lamentable. Poor dear, how I love her! That is why I am so concerned about her thumbs.”

In speaking of his fiancée's letters, he once wrote,

“These letters chilled me. In reply I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless, formal notes, for I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote to me or how she expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my education and mental habits.”

Two years later he added to this entry “What a popinjay!” But then two years later he was a confirmed invalid and she was making great sacrifice to take care of him.

In another place he taunted her, after admitting her letters disappointed him with their coldness, and added, “Write as you would speak. You know I am not one to carp about a spelling mistake”; and at another time he recorded,

“My life here has quite changed its orientation. I am no longer an intellectual snob. If I were E. and I would have parted ere now. I never like to take her to the British Museum because there all the values are intellectual.”

Of his wife the diaries give a very vague picture. Once he exclaimed, “To think that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my vicious orbit!” but no information is given regarding this past. The idea of marriage was in his thoughts for several years, but his attitude was one of doubt and vacillation. In 1914 he wrote:

“I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself. The title of 'husband' scares me.”

When he finally recorded his marriage as having taken place at the Registry Office he added,

“It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts and fears.”

“The function of the private journal is one of observation, experiment, analysis, contemplation; the function of the essay is to provoke reflection,” wrote Amiel. Barbellion's observation was of himself and of nature; his experiment how to adjust himself to the world; his analysis almost exclusively of his ego; and his contemplation the mystery of life and death. A “sport” in the biological sense, that is, differing markedly from his immediate ancestors, he fell afoul of infection early in life. From the beginning it scarred and debilitated him.

He was an egotist and proud of it. He did not realise that the ego is a wall which limits the view rising higher with every emotional or intellectual growth. There is a certain degree of greatness from which, when a man reaches it, he can always look over the top of the wall of his egotism. Barbellion never reached it. He was a man above the ordinary, capable of originality and of learning from experience, clever at his profession, apt at forming general ideas, sometimes refined and sometimes gross; a solitary, full of contradictions, ironic or ingenuous by fits, tormented by sexual images and sentimental ideas, and possessed by the desire to become famous, but haunted by the fear that he would not live to see his desire accomplished.

He had the misfortune to be without faith or ability to acquire it, but in compensation he was given to an envious degree immunity to fear, and he endured disease and faced death with courage and resignation. If we contrast his thought andconduct with that of another egotist, Robert Louis Stevenson, after he came to know the number of days that remained for him, as thought and conduct are recorded in the “Vailima Letters,” Barbellion suffers from the comparison, for Stevenson was devoid of vanity and selfishness. But the comparison would not be a just one, for euphoria is a feature of the disease with which Stevenson contended, and despair of Barbellion's. Moreover, Stevenson was a Celt and had a sense of humour. Everyone likes to think that his distinguishing characteristic is a sense of humour. Barbellion believed he possessed it tremendously. He may have, but his books do not reveal it.

He forced himself without academic training upon a most conservative institution, a close corporation, archaically conventionalised, and he gave earnest that he could mount the ladder of preferment quickly and gracefully.

He saw himself with the lucidity of genius, but his admirers will not admit that he was the man he said he was. One admirer does.

Would that he had added to his litany:Defenda me, Dios, de me!—The Lord deliver me from myself. Had he done so, he would have accomplished to a greater degree the object of life: to be happy and to make others happy.

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