If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or

create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In

short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us,

how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts,

blind--how many lost days--and man's life is but a paltry three score

years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.

Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the

fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal

reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of

my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of

the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind--that sacred

glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated.

Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless

growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I

have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business

correspondents and yet can't remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes:

what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to

nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed

even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to

Timbuctoo, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.

_December_ 21.

This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me--as I look back over

these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily

writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war....

Yesterday I had a move on. To-day life wearies me. I am sick of myself

and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me

restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as

full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. "My soul," I said to them at

breakfast with a sardonic grin, "is like a greyhound in the slips. I

shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have

such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you

tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an

adventure out of Baron Munchausen." With a gasconnade of contempt, I

should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched

world at once.

_December_ 22.

_Gibbon's Autobiography_

This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan

inwardly. "I am at a loss," he says, referring to the _Decline and

Fall_, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the

vanity of the writer.... My book was on every table and almost on every

toilette." It makes me bite my lips. Rousseau and his criticism of "I

sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son," and Gibbon on his dignity in

reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. "...

that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less

precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a

stranger!" Oh my giddy Aunt! Isn't this _rich_? Still, I am glad you did

not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de Staël, Madam Necker's

daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.

"After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I

wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between

tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a

game of cards." How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage

reminds me of the Rev. Mr. Collins saying:

"Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song,

for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with

the profession of a clergyman."

"When I contemplate the common lot of mortality," Gibbon writes, "I must

acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life," and he

goes on to count up all his blessings with the most offensive

delight--his wealth, the good fortune of his birth, his ripe years, a

cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, health, sound and peaceful

slumbers from infancy, his valuable friendship with Lord Sheffield, his

rank, fame, etc., etc., _ad nauseam_. He rakes over his whole life for

things to be grateful for. He intones his happiness in a long recitative

of thanksgiving that his lot was not that of a savage, of a slave, or a

peasant; he washes his hands with imaginary soap on reflecting on the

bounty of Nature which cast his birth in a free and civilised country,

in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank and

decently endowed with the gifts of fortune--sleek, complacent,

oleaginous and salacious old gentleman, how I would love to have bombed

you out of your self-satisfaction!

_Masefield's "Gallipoli"_

It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of _In

the Daffodil Fields_ emphasises 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.

"A swear word in a city slum

A simple swear word is to some--

To Masefield something more."

MAX BEERBOHM.

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.

_December_ 23.

To be cheerful this Xmas would require a _coup de théâtre_--some sort of

psychological sleight of hand.

I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a

soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand--thro' the

newspapers, the world of life thro' the halfpenny _Daily News_, and the

world of books thro' the _Times Literary Supplement_. For the rest I

listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look

into the fire to see the pictures there....

_December_ 24.

Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic

the world is.

Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and

deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look

right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs

stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of

ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few

Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage

perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a

clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me

rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever

expected to be again.

_December_ 26.

"In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms

that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was

under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery--"

(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I

am going out for a walk in the fog.)

_December_ 31.

_Reminiscences_

For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of

retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times--remote,

inaccessible, prehistoric--before ever this Journal was begun, when I

myself was but a jelly without form and void--that is, before I had

developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a

passion for Natural History.

One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my

collection, induced me to "swop" them for his collection of birds' eggs

which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a

cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little

realised--nor did I--the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat

dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out

the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his

face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the

deal.

I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds' eggs, but

for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country

myself and collect them,--I just _swopped,_ until one day our errand

boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his

feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, "I will sh-how you how

to find Birds' n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods." So one

Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled,

he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank,

where he--my good and beneficent angel--presently showed me a Thrush's

nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The

sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up

the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass,

in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of

real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a

moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them--in trying to

blow them, schoolboy fashion.

Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds

and Birds' eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of

Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, plants, Birds' wings,

Birds' claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the _Boy's Own Paper_, taught

me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the

latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them

up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable

backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a

mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle

of 45°. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I

read Sir John Lubbock's _Ants, Bees and Wasps_, and constructed an

observation Ants' nest (though the Ants escaped).

In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary

ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we

lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the

middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature

Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent

paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British

Birds; for my father's only interest was in politics. I can remember

coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen--like a tiny

Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a

little Pied Wagtail.

The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had

absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my

egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring,

or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more

engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled

up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush's nest and eggs seized hold

of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I

kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and

Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because

I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the

observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats

indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work

--Barrett-Hamilton's _Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland_. The

published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other

naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the

first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several

natural history books, to

"W.N.P. BARBELLION, ESQ.,

Naturalist,

Downstable,"

and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the

saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still

remains.

After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with

me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us

for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and--what was strange in a

country girl--she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and

Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard

into Martha's kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes

catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard.

"Lor'!" would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it

back to its aquarium, "can't 'em travel?" Martha had an eye for

character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at

length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because

he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. "A chuff old feller, 'idden

'ee?" Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. "He purrs

in broad Devon," I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of

his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha

knew if no one else did that every spring "Pore 'Duke," underneath his

fur, used to come out in spots. "'Tiz jus' like a cheel 'e gets a bit

spotty as the warm weather cums along." Starlings on the washhouse roof,

regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight. "Don' 'em

let it down, I zay?" In later years, when I was occupied in the top

attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would

sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust

her head up the attic stairs and enquire, "'Ow be 'ee gettin' on then?"

Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real

pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and

explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or

a Frog's heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She,

in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing

meat for dinner--anecdotes about the "maw" of an old Fowl, or the great

"pipe" of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say,

"I must be off or I shall be all be'ind like the cow's tail." Now the

dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.

By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic

errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once

played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the

B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after

years of separation.

[1] So it proved. See September 26 _et seq._

[2] In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).

[3] See September 3 (next entry), "_A Jolt_," and September 24

(_infra_).

[4] The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and

so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.

[5] This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his

friend Brown.

[6] Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at

Putney.

1917

_January_ 1.

The New Year came in like a thief in the night--noiselessly; no bells,

no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been

more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this--seeing what the

year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.

_January_ 20.

I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body,

even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I

am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this

is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete

horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away

my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of

the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set

up a post in the garden for the clothes' line. As soon as I saw the post

I said "gibbet"--it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the

malefactor. Last night while E---- was nursing the baby I most

delightfully remarked: "What a little parasite--why you are Cleopatra

affixing the aspic--'Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we

are for the dark.'"

The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how

rotten to the core I am.

... The advent of the Baby was my _coup de grâce._ The little creature

seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than

once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in

exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I

find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on

the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a

suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers

is new and without a single blemish or misfortune.... Moreover, she

makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.

_January_ 21.

_Death_

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 farm-yards in ---- birdsnesting, 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 raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees

and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over _Parker and

Haswell_ and 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--the first time

I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating

into the fastnesses of my El Dorado--Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon

the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's

_Principles of Human Understanding_ (what a soul-shaking epoch that

was!), and the first time I kissed her! 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.

_January_ 26.

Out of doors to-day it's like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed

in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate

song, and the sky was torn to ribbons. It is cold enough to freeze the

nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and

squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on. I sit writing

this by the fire and am thoroughly scourged and purified by this great

castigating wind.... I think I will stick it out--I will sit quite still

in my chair and defy this sculking footpad--let the paralysis creep into

every bone, I will hang on to the last and watch it skulking with my

most hideous grimace.

_January_ 27.

Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, tho' I was

tired and hobbling badly, decided to walk up the lane even if it meant

crawling home on hands and knees.

The sky was a quick-change artist to-day. Every time you looked you saw

a different picture. From the bottom of the hill I looked up and saw

above me--it seemed at an immense and windy height--a piece of blue,

framed in an irregular edge of white woolly cloud seen thro' the crooked

branches of an Oak. It was a narrow crooked lane, sunk deep in the soil

with large smooth surfaces of stone like skulls bulging up in places

where the rain had washed away the soil.

Further on, the sun was lying low almost in the centre of a

semi-circular bend in the near horizon. It frosted the wool of a few

sheep seen in silhouette, and then slowly disappeared in mist. On the

right-hand side was a cottage with the smoke being wrenched away from

the chimney top, and on the left a group of stately Firs, chanting a

requiem like a cathedral choir.

_January_ 28.

Still blowing and bitterly cold. Along the path fields in the Park I

stopped to look at a thick clump of Firs standing aloof on some high

ground and guarded by an outside ring of honest English Oaks, Ashes and

Elms. They were a sombre mysterious little crowd intent, I fancied, on

some secret ritual of the trees. The high ground on which they stood

looked higher and more inaccessible than it really was, the clump was

dark green, almost black, and in between their trunks where all was

obscurity, some hardy adventurer might well have discovered a Grand Lama

sitting within his Penetralia. But I had no taste for any such

profanity, and even as I looked the sun came out from behind a cloud

very slowly, bringing the picture into clearer focus, chasing away

shadows and bringing out all the colours. The landscape resumed its

homely aspect: an English park with Firs in it.

_January_ 29.

Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and

peeped out. Just below the densely black projecting gable of the house I

saw the crescent moon lying on her back in a bed of purple sky, and I

saw our little white frosted garden path curving up towards the garden

gate. It was a delicious _coup d'œil_, and I shewed it to E----.

_January_ 31.

Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or

spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would

in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and

sent driving along the road with the dust.

My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farm-house. Home to

toasted tea-cakes and a pinewood fire, with my wife chattering prettily

to the baby. After tea, enchanted by the reading of a new book--_Le

Journal de Maurice de Guérin_--or rather the introduction to it by

Sainte-Beuve. I devoured it! I have spent a devouring day; under a calm

exterior I have burnt up the hours; all of me has been athrob; every

little cell in my brain has danced to its own little tune. For to-day,

Death has been an impossibility. I have felt that anyhow to-day I could

not die--I have laughed at the mere thought of it. If only this mood

would last! If I could feel thus always, then I could fend off Death for

an immortality of life.

But suddenly, as now, the real horror of my life and future comes on me

in a flash. For a second I am terrified by the menace of the future, but

fortunately only for a second. For I've learnt a trick which I fear to

reveal; it is so valuable and necessary to me that if I talked of it or

vulgarised it my secret might be stolen away. Not a word then!

_Later_. I have just heard on the gramophone, some Grieg, and it has

charged my happiness with disrupting voltage of desire. Oh! if only I

had health, I could make the welkin ring! I shall leave so little behind

me, such a few paltry pages beside what I have it in me to do. It

shatters me.

_February_ 1.

Looking back, I must say I like the splendid gusto with which I lived

thro' yesterday: that mettlesome fashion in which I took the lane, and

at the top, how I swung around to sweep my gaze across to the uplands

opposite with snow falling all the time. Then in the evening, the almost

complete absorption in the new book when I forgot everything _pro tem_.

It was quite like the old days.

_February_ 2.

_Crowd Fever_

After four months' sick leave, returned to work and London.

An illness like mine rejuvenates one--for the time being! A pony and

jingle from the old "Fox and Hounds Inn" took me to the Station, and I

enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In

the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On

the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which

the "Metro" trains glide into the Station. I had quite forgotten this.

Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of

penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the

child's satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all

grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations

are.

This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world

intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the

crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger

for a fuller life, that centrifugal elan in which I feared for the

disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I

lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my

enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was

alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with

how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy

and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was

about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden

disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death....

I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great

Bear's hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise,

all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the

morning of the announcement of world famine and world war!...

* * * * *

To-night, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the

fireside. All the multitude have disappeared from my view. I have lost

them, every one. I have lost another day of my life and so have they,

and we have lost each other. Meanwhile the great world spins on

unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small

stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my

scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself

out of my feeble grasp.

_February_ 3.

This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist's

shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another.

"Have you any morphia tabloids?" I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking,

smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at

me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphi

nomaniacs.

"Yes, plenty of them," he said, fencing. And then waited.

"Can you supply me?" I asked, feeling very conscious of myself.

He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the

Defence of the Realm Act.

I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said:

"Of course, it is only a palliative."

With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered:

"Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes," and I walked out of

the hateful shop discomfited.

_February_ 6.

Am busy re-writing,[1] editing and bowdlerising my journals for

publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all

flesh. No one else would prepare it for publication if I don't. Reading

it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written. If only

they will publish it!

_February_ 7.

_Chinese Lanterns_

The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow

moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated

beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another

moon--the full moon itself--yellow likewise, but setting. It was the

strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another

planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of

yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.

In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a

little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little

pony picked out her way so carefully in little

strides--pat-pat-pat--wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the

Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature's merits.

It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud

appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full

moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed

to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to "carry on" in a

world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel

that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not

ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few

of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these

days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall

into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be

then?

_February_ 28.

_The Strangeness of my Life_

Consider the War: and the current adventures of millions of men on land,

sea and air; and the incessant labours of millions of men in factory and

workshop and in the field; think of the hospitals and all they hold, of

everyone hoping, fearing, suffering, waiting--of the concentration of

all humanity on the one subject--the War. And then think of me, poor

little me, deserted and forgotten, a tiny fragment sunk so deep and

helplessly between the sheer granite walls of my environment that scarce

an echo reaches me of the thunder among the mountains above. I read

about the War in a ha'penny paper, and see it in the pictures of the

_Daily Mirror_. For the rest, I live by counting the joints on insects'

legs and even that much effort is almost beyond my strength.

That is strange enough. But my life is stranger still by comparison. And

this is the marvel: that every day I spend by the waters of Babylon,

weeping and neglected among enthusiasts, enthusiastically counting

joints, while every evening I return to Zion to my books, to Hardy's

poems, to Maurice de Guérin's Journals, to my own memoirs. Mine is a

life of consummate isolation, and I frequently marvel at it.

The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and _ipso facto_, an

enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they

want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man's existence was ever

quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a

day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk

with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew!

How scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how

resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!

I find it very irksome to keep up this farce of concealment. I would

love to declare myself. I loathe, hate and detest the secrecy of my real

self: the continuous restraint enforced on me ulcerates my heart and

makes harmonious social existence impossible with those who do not know

me thoroughly. "On dit qu'au jugement dernier le secret des consciences

sera révélé à tout l'univers; je voudrais qu'il en fut ainsi de moi dès

aujourd'hui et que la vue de mon âme fut ouvert à tous venants." Maurice

de Guérin.

_March_ 1.

It is curious for me to look at my tubes and microscope and realise that

I shall never require them again for serious use. Life is a dreadful

burden to me at the Museum. I am too ill for any scientific work so I

write labels and put things away. I am simply marking time on the edge

of a precipice awaiting the order, "Forward."

It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious days of my

life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let

me die in peace, and with fitting decorum. It is so ignoble to be

tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to

be reflecting on life and death.

I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such

circumstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were

normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the

sake of the others. Yet that is no reason why in my own inward parts I

should not at times indulge in a little relaxation. It is a relief to

put off the mailed coat, to sit awhile by the green-room fire and have

life as it really is, all to myself. But the necessity of living will

not let me alone. I must be always mumming.

My life has been all isolation and restriction. And it now appears even

my death is to be hedged around with prohibitions. Drugs for

example--how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine!

and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried

a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as

come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of

E---- clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying.

But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in

a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.

_March_ 2.

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 I

_hope_ for 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.

_A Potted Novel_

(1)

He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love

with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. "She is

_capable_ of tragedy, too," he said, which was a high encomium.

But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love.

"Marriage," said he sententiously, "is an economic trap." And then, a

little wistfully: "If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more

beautiful she would be quite irresistible."

(2)

But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and

lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. _She_ waited.

Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.

(3)

Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes

and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.... "Too late," she said.

"Once perhaps ... but now...." His eyes opened again, and in a second

Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money

changers.

(4)

So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made

a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his

ultimate fame?

Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from

his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.... Stars and staggers!! So

it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did

she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism

and superlative conceit!

(5)

Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew

more obvious. Did she know?... The question dazed him.

Well, she _did_ know, and had married him for love, nevertheless,

against every friendly counsel, the Doctor's included.

(6)

And now the invalid's gratitude is almost cringeing, his admiration

boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect _rapprochement_

between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in

the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct,

almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.

_Finis_

_March_ 5.

At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my

nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone ... no

emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear

than fever or pain.... To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am

slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.

_March_ 6.

An affectionate letter from H---- that warmed the cockles of my

heart--poor frozen molluscs. A---- has written only once since August.

_March_ 7.

I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature ... yet even an

infantry subaltern has a chance....

My dear friend ---- has died and a _Memorial_ Exhibition of his pictures

is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever

met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming

woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And

now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.

_March_ 8.

_Death_

Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge's _Raymond_. I do not deny that I am

curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and

always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death

and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I

consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical

purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden

to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed

the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my

waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would

move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some

specially selected moment--at midnight or high noon--just when the

spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great

Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the

place, and the manner of one's exit. For what disturbs me in particular

is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a

fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an

artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer's day, with an

open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and

Miall and Denny's _Cockroach._ It would be stage-managing my own demise

and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!

I think it was De Quincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the

summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old

bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard

seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first

evening after the funeral.

_March_ 10.

Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up.

Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall

soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley's chewing

gum will be our only comfort.

* * * * *

When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater

regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In

the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.

To-day I read down the column of to-morrow's preachers with the most

ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St. Paul's

and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster

Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists,

the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton

Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these

adventures I intended one day to make.... It is not much fun ticking off

things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get

more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides,

Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Ayres, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are

out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo--these

names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to

outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.

_March_ 11.

_The Graph of Temperament_

In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph

of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up

and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get

here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often

contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the

varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I. I snap at

any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or

quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the

day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to

invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I

am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my

simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of

peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole

personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some

time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a

pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, "Oh! I

expect he read it in a book."

I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any

bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held

up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In

conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my

intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, "Yes ... yes ... yes,"

to nausea, when it ought to be "No ... no ... no." I become my own

renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to

have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble

presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character

hynotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find

myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only

later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed

and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.

But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren

even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous

fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.

_Cynicism_

For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful

confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I

brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting,

credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much

better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my

disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can't

believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And

strange to say it is the "good" people above all who most bitterly

disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he

arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good,

the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood's beliefs.... I am a

cynic then, but not a reckless cynic--a careworn unhappy cynic without

the cynic's pride. "It is easy to be cynical," someone admonished me.

"Unfortunately it is," I said.

We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men

of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a

poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the

Englishman's reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am

afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others.

And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I

dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting

me to the quick. "To the pure all things are pure," whence I should

conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not

tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's

motes.

_March_ 12.

_Archæopteryx and Mudflats_

Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save

them up. They were more than that--they were pangs, and pangs that

twanged.

(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)

One was when I saw the well-known figure of the _Archæopteryx_ remains

in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an

illustrated encyclopædia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and

I thought of the wide estuary of the T----, its stretches of mudflats

and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:

"What's that?"

"_Archæopteryx_," said I.

"Whatever is _Archæopteryx_?"

"An extinct bird," I answered mournfully.

Like an old amour, my love of palæontology and anatomy, and all the high

hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned

over the page quickly.

But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not

explain. I was tongue-tied.

"I used to get very muddy," I remarked lamentably, "in the old days when

stalking birds on the mudflats."

And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as

those beautiful sights and sounds of zostera-covered mud-banks,

twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles

and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.

To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch,

no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain.

Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has

some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no

other descriptions by either pen or brush.

_March_ 15.

How revolting it is to see some barren old woman love-sick over a baby,

bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly

intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the "little language," and

hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.

_May_ 5.

The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty

much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and

sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the

Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there

are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-peckers, Moorhens, calling from across the

park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an

extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and

length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to

his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his

hooting.

What I do (goodness knows what E---- does), is to drug my mind with

print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the

_Daily News_, the Bible, the _Labour Leader, Joseph Vance_, etc., etc.

Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly

acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a

surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which

gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to

go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as

likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian

resignation. Joubert said, "Patience and misfortune, courage and death,

resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to

life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it"--how

cynical that sounds.

_May_ 8.

This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer

in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and

moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a

perfect uproar in their solitary confinement--although no one hears it.

And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of

these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous

combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus

hoist upon his own petard.

_June_ 1.

We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It

is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E---- says widows' weeds

have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won't go into deep

mourning. "But you'll wear just one weed or two for me?" I plead, and

then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise,

she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the

young fellow at once, so as to put him thro' his paces--shew him where

the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.

You will observe what a relish I have for my own _macabre_, and how

keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not

making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman's beard.

Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.

_June_ 15.

I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet

from it to my chair in the morning--and wait. The assignation is

certain. "Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me, Too sure of the

amour."

_July_ 5.

It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with

her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a non-combatant atom

like me down such a labyrinthine side-track. It is odd to find her

determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness--one would

have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why

this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for

the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I

gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life

willingly--it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the

pilfering with lamentable eyes.

I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.

_July_ 7.

My hand gets a little better. But it's a cat and mouse game, and so

humiliating to be the mouse.

... Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt,

they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old

people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I

seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months

old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen thro' the window

rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my

youth, birds' eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such

raptures I could never tell it to you adequately.... I am too tired to

write more.

_July_ 23.

Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was "gold dusty from tumbling among the

stars," Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the

other frightened. I like Pascal's prostration before the infinities of

Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than

the uplift afforded him by religion.

_July_ 25.

I don't believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of

men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and

simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced

off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think

that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my

vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it

for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to

wear as a pledge--we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a

signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once

occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a

great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.

_July_ 26.

As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink

into this diary!

I am amusing myself by reading the _Harmsworth Encyclopædia_ in 15

volumes, _i.e._, I turn over the pages and read everything of interest

that catches my eye.

I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue

striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing.

E---- comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights

my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.

From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and

beyond, tall trees--one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a

Beefeater's head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree

next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants,

Wild Parsley and tall grass--getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers

of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across--they go

over in coveys of four or five at a time--I counted 50 in five minutes,

which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers

seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white

aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures

thro' the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as

they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker

after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they

prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every

wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in

order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am

appreciating things a little more the last few days.

_August_ 1.

_A Jeremiad_

When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to

give up. But I know. Tho' if I say what I know no one is compelled to

believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether

what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few

intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to

say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am

prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or

leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest

zoologists in the place--but my ability was always muffled by the

inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December

was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever

issued from the institution--I do not say the most important. It was

trivial--my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy

department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as

primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that

as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts

then vacant--one, work on the Cœlenterates and another on _Vermes_,

both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training.

Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose

powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own.

Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole

Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no

adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less

provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly

styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented

with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which

on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and

microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.

So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last

year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I

should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the

anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R---- in the _American

Naturalist_ was a rare _jeu d'esprit_, and my most important scientific

work.

* * * * *

In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article

appeared at the age of 15 over my father's name, my motive being not so

much modesty as cunning--if the literary world (!) ragged it

unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.

My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a

story in the _Academy_ after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every

other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and

no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer's

errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter

was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote

again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But--screams of

silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future

printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands

and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as

it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.

A more recent affair I had with the American _Forum,_ which delighted me

by publishing my article, but did not pay--tho' the Editor went out of

his way to write that "payment was on publication." I did not venture to

remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also

printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary

ambition has never flagged.[2] I have for years past received my

rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from

_Punch_ to the _Hibbert Journal_. At one time I used to file their

rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I

decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the

ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me--the half-crown Reviews

and the sixpenny Weeklies--to seek out at a library some obscure

publication--a Parish Magazine or the local paper--anything was grabbed

as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the

_Westminster Review_ and immediately plied them with a manuscript and

the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again

and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a

similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and

to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to

call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my

departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the

publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor

return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I

could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it

was not the custom to disclose the editor's name, the following address

would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd's Bush.

I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed

that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and

the book-sellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again

to the address--this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said

I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save

her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes'

walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept

putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until

one evening as I was casually reading the _Star_ coming home in the

'bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had

recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a

poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes,

and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it

ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable

_Westminster Review_.

Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude

towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent

quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called

forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in _Public Opinion_,

which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come

too late.

* * * * *

If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else.

A---- regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told

him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I

am secretly very nettled too because E---- treated the whole matter very

indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's

critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to

friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed

out of her mind.

Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some

drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to

Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his

photo into the picture papers--a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it

impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite

forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in

the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully

refused. (And so did I.)

But what a queer woman!... [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with

wormwood and gall.]

_August_ 6.

E---- and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual

and complete--parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if

they knew.... You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers.

_Voilà_!... I hate all reticence and concealment.... There is a good

deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.

_August_ 7.

_My Gastrocnemius_

I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed

I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby

_gastrocnemius_ swung suspended from the _tibia_ like a gondola from a

Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it

oscillated.

_August_ 17.

My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed

holiday.

_August_ 27.

My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least

for one year's salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for

several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I

am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret

I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E---- and dear

R---- and one or two others--the rest of the people I know I hate _en

bloc_. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to

themselves without getting my own back.

_August_ 31.

My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I

know is that I _do_ love you, and beyond measure. Why do _you_ love

me--surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever

knows. "The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of." We

love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try

to explain it by recapitulating one another's characters just as a man

forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.

What delights me is to recall that our love has _evolved._ It did not

suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed

slowly to perfection--it was forged in the white heat of our

experiences. That is why it will always remain.

_September_ 1.

Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly

beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It

is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours

disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human

love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who

is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying,

"God is Love," scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not

think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say),--I

should hate not to be taken for an infidel--and you must not be

surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should

believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire

to love has in many instances[3] been baulked by my own idealising yet

also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always

finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my

malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an

Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside--that

seat of the affections!--but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and

quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.

_September_ 2.

But am I dying? I have no presentiments--no conviction--like the people

you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love? "I dote yet doubt;

suspect yet strongly love." It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard

and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and

difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E----, that, at

least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.

_September_ 3.

My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the

other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if

possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum,

which Mrs. ---- told me she found the other day in a box--a relic of the

time when ---- had to take it to relieve pain.

I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees

to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned

it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I

sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12

steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising

myself up to the next one with my hands.

Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search

first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro' the bathroom by

the easiest route to the small door--there are two. The handles of all

the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that

only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor.

This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I

had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully

pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the

handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door

locked on the inside.

I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the

bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled

around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to

the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two

drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door

lock and E---- entered with ---- and gave her usual whistle.

I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear

E---- say in a startled voice to her mother: "Who's that upstairs?" I

whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which

passed at that time all right.

Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer,

and I think she knows.

_September_ 4.

I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye

Journal--only for a time perhaps.

* * * * *

Have read this blessed old Journal out to E----. It required some

courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.

_September_ 5.

_Leap-frog_

Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog

in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I

never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple

pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by

the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in

comparison.

_Liebestod_

A perfect autumn morning--cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse

and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning!

I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further

and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to

the very last, until a Robin's notes relieved the nervous tension and

helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the

Liebestod in "Tristan," with the Robin taking the part of the harp.

For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes,

not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a

time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous,

noble, angry, or murderous--you could measure them with a stop-watch.

Hell's phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as

quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp

spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk

thro' the path-fields to the uplands.

_September_ 7.

My 28th birthday.

Dear old R---- (the man I love above all others) has been in a military

hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse

almost completely cut off.

Dear old Journal, I love you! Good-bye.

_September_ 29.

I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet

I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition

God knows.... It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.[4] I

cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be

sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How

amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I

should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly

stifled.

_Later. (In E.'s handwriting.)_

Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other

one, and situated about two miles further out from the village.... A

wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a

"camouflaged" cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it

contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present

sorrow-laden world.

_September_ 30.

Last night, E---- sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my

fault. "I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point."

Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.

I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. "People who

cry in novels," E---- observed with detachment, "never blow their noses.

They just weep." ... But the thunder clouds soon come up again.

_October_ 1.

The immediate future horrifies me.

_October_ 2.

Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and

quite happy. It does me good to see him.

But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a

canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and

food always scarcer day by day. "Give us this day, our daily bread."

I want to be loved--above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I

grow maudlin and say petulantly, "Nobody loves me, nobody cares." I must

have more courage and more confidence in other people's good-nature.

Then I can love more freely.

_October_ 3.

I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from

under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden.

They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark

sang, but the Swallows--dear things--have gone. E---- picked two

Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies,

and Butterflies.

_October_ 6.

In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia,

Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.

_October_ 12.

It is winter--no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and

enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with

its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E---- knits warm garments

for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice

(with variations) on a mouth-organ, called "The Angels' Choir," and made

in Germany.... You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless,

paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your

face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running

good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own

torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really

lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless

desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your

absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.

Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the

toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your

flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my

present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny

bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God

that I am not as some other men are.

I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a

tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have

wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I

shall be content to die.

_ October_ 14 _to_ 20.

Miserable.

_October_ 21.

Self-disgust.

FINIS.

[Barbellion died on December 31.]

[1] John Wesley _rewrote_ his journals from entries in rough draft.

[2] I once received from an editor a very encouraging letter which gave

me a great deal of pleasure and made me hope he was going to open the

pages of his magazine to me. But three weeks after he committed suicide

by jumping out of his bedroom window.

[3] The Egoist explains himself again.

[4] Writing difficult to decipher.

SYNOPSIS

PART I: AT HOME

Rambles and bathes, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 20, 37, 45, 46, 48, 49

Natural History and Zoology, 9, 12, 13, 20, 29

Leaves school, 10

Newspaper reporting, 17, 19

Ambition, 8, 10, 13, 26, 29

Calf-love, 8, 12, 23, 28

The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist, 18

Conversation with Prof. Herdman, 46

Ill-health, 10, 24, 25, 35, 42, 48 (Jul. 31)

Heart attacks, 33, 36

On Death, 33, 38, 43, 44

Sits for British Museum exam., 29

Failure, 30, 31, 32

Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth, 32

Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic," 29, 33

Self-consciousness, 27, 40

The Poppy, 43

Appointment resigned and his father's illness, 34

His father's death, 50, 51

Success and appointment to B.M., 55

A youthful Passion, 56, 57

PART II: IN LONDON

Disillusionment, 59, 61, 93, 94, 132, 178, 185

Life in a boarding-house, 63, 78, 79, 94, 99, 107

Ambition, 71, 73, 109

An affair in a taxicab, 75

Self-disgust, 77

In love, 78, 96, 107

Conversations: (a) with E., 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 79, 95, 96, 99,

104, 151, 152

(b) with H., 82, 83

(c) with R., 131, 140, 141, 142, 154, 155, 165,

Ill-health, 59, 62, 69, 72, 74, 100, 107, 110, 114, 134-5, 153, 156

On Death, 62, 63, 84, 88

Heart attacks, 71, 72, 120, 122

Nervous breakdown, 80, 81, 82

Meets an old love, 86, 87

Holidays: (_a_) at C----, by the sea in North ----, 65, 66, 67

(_b_) at home, 82

(_c_) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (_riding a pony_), 97

Life in rooms, 102, 107, 108, 114, 138, 148, 149, 153

His brother, 121, 206

Discussions on marriage, 123, 124

In his sitting-room, 162

The fascination of London, 74, 142-145

(_a_) Petticoat Lane, 163

(_b_) Rotten Row, 176

Goes to concerts, 127, 161, 172

A lovers' quarrel, 126

He struggles with himself, 135, 137, 138

Engaged, 150, 158

Fears his inconstancy, 159, 185

Self-analysis, 167 _et seq_., 182, 183

Day-dreams: Life a dream, 178, 179, 188

The War, 182

Holidays: (_a_) on a Buckinghamshire farm, 191-205

(_b_) at the Lakes, 215-217

Should a husband keep a private journal? 210

Marriage, 205, 209, 215

PART III: MARRIAGE

Zeppelin raid and influenza, 222

Living in the country, 223, 227, 228

Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office, 225, 238

Self-disgust, 223, 224, 225, 247, 250 (_nude_), 267

Mental agony, 226, 227

Conversations: with R., 229

with Scarabees, 230, 239, 243

Halcyon days, 233, 235, 238

A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands, 240

Tension, 250, 252

The War, 237 (_Jutland_), 242, 247, 248, 249

Another nervous breakdown, 253

How E. knew all the time, 255, 256

Self-compassion, 251, 304

Home ill, 257 ("_in the doldrums_"), 259, 265

Returns to work, 278

Ill again, 285

From an invalid's view-point, 292, 293 (_by his bedroom window_)

Post-mortem affairs, 291

Resigns appointment, 294, 299

Self-consciousness and self-dramatization, 255, 265, 267

A badly articulated skeleton, 274

Cold weather in January, 276, 277, 278

On Death, 275, 283, 286, 291

His phosphorescent Journals, 291

Morphia and laudanum, 280, 300

Great misery, 303, 305

INDEX OF NAMES

A----, 21, 51, 82, 97, 98, 121, 158, 206, 285, 298

_"Academy," The_, 23, 24, 106, 296

_Adventure in Search of Health, An_, 260

A Kempis, Thomas, 28

_Albert Hall, Hag, The_, 147

_Ambition_, 29

"_American Naturalist_," 295

_American Neighbour, An_, 251

_Apologia pro mea vita_, 145

_Archæopteryx and Mudflats_, 289

_Aristotle's Lantern_, 19

_At a Public Dinner_, 175

_At C----, a tiny little village by the Sea in N_----, 65

_At Home_, 82

_At the Albert Hall_, 127

Austen, Jane, 268

_Average Day, An_, 172

B----, 102, 107, 114, 118, 119

_Baby-Girl, A_, 263

_Bad Listener, A_, 246

Baring, Maurice, 188

_Bathing_, 60

Baudelaire, 60, 62, 173, 183, 197, 198, 258

Beerbohm, Max, 269

_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_, 161, 186

Benson, A.C., 249

Bergson, 47, 55, 78, 183, 198

Berkeley, 275

Blind Mathilde, 139

Boeltzig, R., 103

Bradford, Sir John Rose, 54

Brieux, 162

_"Brilliant Career," A_, 62

British Museum, 26, 29, 49, 57, 59, 61, 79, 94, 132, 174, 178,

225, 274, 282, 283, 295

_British Museum Reading Room, The_, 100

Brooke, Rupert, 266

Browne, Sir Thomas, 146, 183, 238

Buchanan, Robert, 251

Bunyan, 166

Burke, 2

Burlington House, 29

Burton, 125

Butler, Samuel, 143, 171, 185, 291

_Buxom Rogue in Earthenware, A_, 216

_By the Sea_, 61

Byron, 266

_Camping out at S---- Sands_, 91

Carlyle, 120, 171

Cassell's _Natural History_, 13

_Chalcidoidea, The_, 221

_Character, A_, 39

_Chinese Lanterns_, 280

_Chipples_, 220

_Chopin_, 157

_Clever Young Man, The_, 207

Coleridge, 266

_Confession, A_, 74

Conrad, 50, 223

_Crowd Fever_, 278

_Cynicism_, 288

D----, 69, 180

Darwin, 6, 55

_Day in Autumn, A_, 51

_Death_, 33, 84, 275, 286

Debussy, 161, 162, 167

De Goncourt, 227, 228

De Guérin, 200, 277, 282

De Maupassant, Guy, 63, 266

_Depression_, 89

De Quincey, 10, 42, 126, 187, 196, 286

Devonshire Club, 32

_Dinosaurs_, 129

Disraeli, 258

_Dr. Spurgeon_, 90

Dostoieffsky, 132, 163, 167, 187

Duke, Mr., K.C., 17

E----, 68, 78, 79, 107, 171, 191, 192, 193, 194, 201, 209, 220, 223, 226,

228, 233, 235, 236, 238, 240, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260,

261, 263, 274, 277, 283, 291, 292, 294, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303,

304

_Early Boughies_, 66

_Empress of Ireland_, 127

_English Review_, 101, 105, 142

_Equilibrium Restored_, 245

_Entomological Society, The_, 110

Father, 34, 50, 51, 137

_Finis_, 225, 285

_Fire Bogey, The_, 170

_Foolish Bird, A_, 118

"_Fortnightly_," 61

"_Forum_," 296

Foster, Sir Michael, 209

_From one Maiden Lady to another (authentic)_, 37

G----, 78, 197, 215

_Gardening_,83

Gaskel, 23, 55

Gibbon, 129, 258

_Gibbon's Autobiography_, 268

Gissing, George, 32

Goethe, 146

_Graph of Temperament, The,_ 287

H----, 7, 8, 13, 38, 51, 60, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 89, 92,

94, 114, 180, 196, 206, 218, 285

Haeckel, 23, 300

_Harmsworth Encyclopædia_, 294

Harmsworth _Self-Educator_, 10

Hardy, 24, 282

_Hardy's Poetry_, 264

_Hearing Beethoven_, 172

Hegel, 146

Henley, 208, 209

Herdman, Prof., 46

Hervey, 170

Horton, Max Kennedy, 141

_Housefly Problem, The_--1916, 231

_Humble Confession, A_, 115

Huxley, 37, 163

"_Illustrated London News_," 53

_In a Crowd_, 184

_In London_, 59

_In London again_, 93, 99

J----, 78, 263

James, 163, 166

Jefferies, Richard, 44, 233

_Jeremiad, A_, 294

Johnson, 2, 10, 180, 181, 196, 230

_Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_, 181

_Jolt, A_, 247

Jonson, Ben, 171

Joubert, 291

_Justifiable Mendacity_, 52

K----, 80, 99, 138, 225

Kant, 257

Keats, 10, 145, 146, 258

L----, 1, 3, 4, 43, 98

Lacépède, 146

Lamb, Charles, 13, 120, 227, 230

Landor, W.S., 265

La Rochefoucauld, 31

_Leap-frog_, 302

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 286

_Liebestod_, 302

_Lice or "Creeping Ferlies_," 213

_Looking for Lice at the Zoo_, 177

Lubbock, 7

_Ludo_, 104

_Lupus_, 125

_Luxury of Lunacy, The_, 195

M----, 12, 20, 62, 69, 70, 80, 81, 96, 105, 106, 134, 140, 156,

222, 225, 226, 255, 250, 259, 260

Macaulay, 30

Maeterlinck, 42

Malpighi, 171

_Marie Bashkirtseff_, 139, 163, 175, 238

Mary, 8, 23, 28

_Masefield's "Gallipoli,"_ 269

_Measuring Lice_, 125

Moffat, 161

Moore, Tom, 173

_More Irony_, 105

Mosenthal, 13

Mother, 34, 50, 51, 59, 93, 95, 97, 137

Mozart, 161

_My Gastrocnemius_, 208

_My Nightmare_, 105

_My Sense of Touch_, 91

N----, 29, 78, 121, 122, 257, 261

_Naming Cockroaches_, 184

Natural History Museum, 6, 54

_New Pile in the Pier, A_, 88

Newton, 171

Nietzsche, 137, 156

_Old Diaries_, 44

_Omniscience_, 239

_On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette,_ 119

_On Lundy Island_, 21

_On the N. Downs_, 68

_Our Simian Ancestry_, 27

P----, 76, 78, 79, 80

_Pachmann_, 234

Pascal, 293

_Petticoat Lane_, 163

Piers Plowman, 221

Plymouth Marine Laboratory, 29, 32,47, 79

_Pool: a Retrospect, The_, 189

_Potted Novel, A_, 284

_Prawning_, 17

_Preparing a Snake's Skull_, 50

"_Punch_," 296

_Punch and Judy Show, The,_ 180

R----, 81, 99, 101, 104, 107, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124,

127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 148,

151, 154, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 182, 197, 205,

207, 208, 209, 215, 2l6, 217, 227, 228, 229, 230, 239, 240,

241, 295, 299, 303

_Raemakers_, 186

_Railway Travel_, 41

_Raleigh, Sir Walter_, 129, 196

_Reading Nietzsche_, 156

_Reminiscences_, 270

_Renunciation_, 85

_Resignation_, 141

_Restlessness of the Sea, The,_ 90

Richepin, 57

Richelieu, Cardinal, 155

_Rigor Bordis_, 148

_Rodin_, 103, 157, 160

Romney, 169

Rousseau, 63, 181, 268

Ruskin, 30, 190, 208, 216

S----, 1, 3

Saintsbury, Prof. Geo., 126

Sainte-Beuve, 200, 277

Schäfer, 110

Schopenhauer, 34

Schubert, 173, 174

_Scots Fir, A_, 111

Scott, 75, 153

_Service_, 264

Shakespeare, 264

Shaw, Bernard, 59, 150, 166, 249

Shelley, 196, 266, 293

_Sir Henry Wood conducting_, 159

_Sleep_, 206

_Small Red Viper, A_, 16

Smiles, Samuel, 14

Smollett, 291

_Sollas's "Ancient Hunters,"_ 72

Southey, 16

Spallanzani, 47, 71, 112

Spinoza, 16

_Spring in the Woods_, 15

_Staying by the Sea_, 43

_Stagnancy_, 84

_Stagnant Day, A_, 111

Stevenson, 63, 106, 161, 208, 209

_Stockbroker, The_, 252

_Strangeness of my Life, The,_ 281

Strindberg, 139

Susan, 254

_Sunset in Kensington Gardens_, 130

Swift, 230

Swinburne, 61, 290

T----, 14, 171, 246

"_T.P.'s Weekly_," 41

Tennyson, 154, 264

_Test for True Love, The_, 157

_Test of Happiness, A_, 185

Thompson, Francis, 266

Thoreau, 181

_Too Late_, 144

_Tschaikovsky_, 161, 162

Turner, J.M.W., 154, 167

_Two Adventures_, 212

_Two Months' Sick Leave_, 80

_Two People I hate in particular,_ 186

_Two Young Men Talking_, 60

_Une Caractère_, 53

Verlaine, 60

Villon, Francois, 173

Voltaire, 63, 163

Wagner, 166

Wallace, 23, 37

Walton, Isaac, 8

Wasmann, Father, 47

Waterton, 159

Wells, H.G., 291

Whistler, 222

White, Gilbert, 159

Whitman, Walt, 189, 253

Wilde, Oscar, 76, 143, 152, 175, 258

_Windy Ash_,35

_Wiedersheim_, 106, 145, 159, 257

_Woman and a Child, A_, 146

Wood, Sir Henry, 157, 159, 172, 201

Woodward, Dr. Smith, 145

_Yellow Cat, A_, 241

Zola, 17