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, when I 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 local _festa_ there 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.
W. N. P. BARBELLION[26]
[26] _The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Enjoying Life
and Other Essays._ By W. N. P. Barbellion. Chatto &
Windus. 6_s._ net each.
By EDWARD SHANKS
When _The Journal of a Disappointed Man_ was 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 it up 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 be experimented 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 a _change_. 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 my _double-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
the difference 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 hair produced 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 to _Enjoying Life_ that 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 published _Journal 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
displayed and 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 a _specimen_ who 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 for life, 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
called _Enjoying Life_ would 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.