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A LAST DIARY 
 
BT THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE JOURNAL OF A 
 DISAPPOINTED MAN 
 Fifth impression. Crown 8vo, 
 63. net. 
 
 ENJOYING LIFE 
 AND OTHER LITERARY 
 
 REMAINS. Third impres- 
 sion. Crown 8vo. 6s, net. 
 
A Last Diary 
 
 BY W. N. P. BARBELLION .^^^t^ 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY 
 ARTHUR J. CUMMINGS 
 
 d^ 
 
 " We are in the power of no calamity while 
 Death is in our own." — Religio Medici. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
<7f<^?"! 
 
 
 '^\^fl'^ 
 
 0ift 
 
 A II rights reserved 
 
THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF 
 BARBELLION 
 
 The opening entry in A Last Dim^y was 
 made on March 21, 1918; the closing 
 sentence was written on June 3, 1919. In 
 The Journal of a Disappointed Man the 
 record ended on October 21, 1917, with the 
 one word " Self-disgust." An important 
 difference between the first diary and that 
 now pubhshed Ues in the fact that the first 
 embodies a carefully selected series of 
 extracts from twenty post-quarto volumes 
 of manuscript in which Barbellion had 
 recorded his thoughts and his observations 
 from the age of thirteen without any clearly 
 defined intention, except towards the end of 
 his life, of discovering them to any but one 
 or two of his intimate friends. He often 
 hinted to me that some parts of his diary 
 would " make good reading " if they could 
 be printed in essay form, and I think he 
 then had in mind chiefly those passages which 
 
vi LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 supplied the inspiration of Enjoying Life, \ 
 the volume of essays that revealed him more 
 distinctively in the character of " a naturalist 
 and a man of letters." Still, the diary was 
 primarily written for himself. It was his 
 means of self-expression, the secret chamber 
 of his soul into which no other person, how- 
 ever deep in his love and confidence, might 
 penetrate. More than once I asked him to 
 let me look at those parts which he thought 
 suitable for publication, but shyly he turned 
 aside the suggestion with the remark : "Some 
 day, perhaps, but not now." All I ever saw 
 was a part of the first essay in Enjoying 
 Life, and an account of his wanderings " in 
 a spirit of burning exultation " over the great 
 stretch of sandy " burrows " at the estuary 
 of that beautiful Devonshire river, the Taw, 
 where in long days of solitude he first taught 
 himself with the zeal and patience of the 
 born naturalist the ways of birds and fish 
 and insects, and learnt to love the sweet 
 harmony of the sunlight and the flowers ; 
 where, too, as a mere boy he first meditated 
 upon the mysteries of life and death. 
 
OF BARBELLION vii 
 
 The earlier Journal, then, was, generally- 
 speaking, spontaneous, not calculated for 
 effect, a part of himself He wrote down in- 
 stinctively and by habit his inmost thoughts, 
 his lightest impression of the doings of the 
 day, a careless jest that amused him, an irri- 
 tating encounter with a foolish or a stupid 
 person, something newly seen in the structure 
 of a bird's wing, a sunset effect. It was only 
 on rare occasions that he deliberately experi- 
 mented with forms of expression. But I 
 cannot help thinking that the diary contained 
 in the present volume, though in one sense 
 equally a part of himself, has a somewhat 
 different quality. It appears to bear internal 
 evidence of havdng been written with an eye 
 to the reader because of his settled intention 
 that it should be published in a book. He 
 has drawn upon the memories of his youth 
 for many of the most interesting passages. 
 He has smoothed the rough edges of his 
 style with the loving care of an author 
 anticipating criticism, and anxious to do his 
 best. Whether the last diary will be found 
 less attractive on that account is not for me 
 
viii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 to say. The circumstances in which it was 
 written explain the difference, if, as I suppose, 
 it is easy to detect. In the earher period 
 covered by A Last Diary the original 
 Journal was actually in the press ; in the 
 later period it had been published and 
 received with general goodwill. Barbellion 
 certainly did not expect to live to see the 
 Journal in print, and that is why he inserted 
 at the end its single false entry, " Barbellion 
 died on December 31 "—1917. A few of 
 the later reviewers, whose sense of propriety 
 was offended by this " twisting of the truth 
 for the sake of an artistic finish," rebuked 
 him for the trick played upon his readers. 
 But he refused to take the rebuke seriously. 
 " The fact is," he said with a whimsical smile, 
 " no man dare remain alive after writing such 
 a book." 
 
 A further difference between the present 
 book and its two predecessors is that both 
 the Jour7ial and Enjoying Life were pre- 
 pared by himself for publication, though the 
 latter appeared after his death, whereas A 
 Last Diary was still in manuscript when 
 
OF BARBELLION ix 
 
 he died. He left carefully written instruc- 
 tions as to the details of publication, and he 
 was extremely anxious that there should be 
 no " bowdlerising " of any part of the text. 
 He desired that at the end should be written 
 " The rest is silence." Nearly the whole of 
 the diary is in his own handwriting, which 
 in the last entries became a scarcely legible 
 scrawl, though in moments of exceptional 
 physical weakness he dictated to his wife 
 and sister. Up to the last his mind retained 
 its extraordinary strength and vigour. His 
 eyes never lost their curiously pathetic look 
 of questioning "liveness." In that feeble 
 form — " a badly articulated skeleton " he had 
 called himself long before — his eyes were 
 indeed the only feature left by which those 
 who loved him could still keep recognition 
 of his physical presence. His body was a 
 gaunt, white framework of skin and bone, 
 enclosing a spirit still so passionately alive 
 that it threatened to burst asunder the frail 
 bonds that imprisoned it. I think those 
 who read the diary will agree that while it 
 is mellower and more delicate in tone it 
 
X LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 shows no sign of mental deterioration or of 
 any decline in the quality and texture of his 
 thoughts, certainly no failure in the power 
 of literary expression. The very last long 
 entry, written the day before he laid down 
 his pen to write no more, is a little master- 
 piece of joyous description, in which with 
 the exact knowledge of the zoologist and 
 the subtle sense of the artist, he gives reasons | 
 why " the brightest thing in the world is a ! 
 Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun." 
 Mr. Edward Shanks, in an essay of singular 
 understanding, has quoted this particular 
 entry, a flashing remembrance of earlier days, 
 as a characteristic example of those " ex- 
 quisite descriptions of landscapes and living 
 things which grow more vivid and more 
 moving as the end approaches." The 
 appreciation written by Mr. Shanks appeared 
 in March of the present year in the London 
 Mercury, which also published in successive 
 numbers other extracts from the diary that 
 is now given in extenso. With the help of 
 my brother, H. R. Cummings, who has 
 been responsible for most of the work in- 
 volved in preparing the manuscript for the 
 
OF BARBELLION xi 
 
 press, I have made a few verbal changes and 
 corrections ; and certain passages have been 
 omitted which, now that BarbeUion's identity 
 is estabhshed, seem to refer too openly and 
 too intimately to persons still alive. Other- 
 wise the entries appear exactly as they were 
 made. 
 
 In recent months I have been asked by 
 various persons, many of whom I do not 
 know and have never seen, but who have 
 been profoundly interested in the personality 
 of Barbellion, to write a " straightforward " 
 account of his life. Some of these corre- 
 spondents seem to imagine that it holds a 
 strange mystery not disclosed in the frank 
 story of the Journal, while others suspect 
 that the events of his career, as he recorded 
 them, are a judicious blend of truth and 
 fiction. I can only say as emphatically as 
 possible that there is no mystery of any sort, 
 and that the facts of his life are in close 
 accordance with his own narrative. Obviously 
 the disconnected diary form must be in- 
 complete, and in some respects puzzling ; 
 and clearly he selected for treatment in a 
 book those entries of fact which were appro- 
 
xii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 priate to the scheme of his journal. They 
 were chosen, as I have already indicated, 
 from a great mass of material that accumu- 
 lated from week to week over a period of 
 about fifteen years. But they are neither 
 invented nor deliberately coloured to suit 
 his purpose. When he spoke of himself he 
 spoke the truth as far as he knew it ; when 
 he spoke of others he spoke the truth as far 
 as he knew it ; when he spoke of actual 
 events they had happened as nearly as 
 possible as he related them. 
 
 The accounts of his career, published at 
 the time of his death last year, were accurate 
 in their general outline. Bruce Frederick 
 Cummings (Barbellion's real name) was born 
 at the little town of Barnstaple in North 
 Devon, on September 7, 1889. He was 
 the youngest of a family of six — three boys 
 and three girls. His father was a journalist 
 who had achieved no mean reputation, local 
 though it was, as a pungent political writer, 
 and had created for himself what must have 
 been, even in those days, a peculiar position 
 for the district representative of a country 
 
OF BARBELLION xiii 
 
 newspaper. He was a shrewd but kindly 
 judge of men ; he had a quick wit, a facile pen, 
 and an unusual charm of manner that made 
 him a popular figure everywhere. In fact, 
 in the area covered by his activities he exer- 
 cised in his prime a personal influence 
 unique of its kind, and such as would be 
 scarcely possible under modern conditions of 
 newspaper work. Though they had little 
 in common temperamentally, there always 
 existed a strong tie of affection between my 
 father and Barbellion, and I believe there is 
 to be found among the latter's still un- 
 examined literary remains a sympathetic 
 sketch of the personality of John Cummings. 
 In his infancy Barbellion nearly died from 
 an attack of pneumonia, and from that early 
 illness, one is inclined to think, his subsequent 
 ill-health originated. He was a puny, under- 
 sized child, nervously shy, with a tiny white 
 face and large brown melancholy eyes. He 
 was so frail that he was rather unduly 
 coddled, and was kept at home beyond the 
 age at which the rest of us had been sent to 
 school. I taught him in my father's office- 
 
xiv LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 study to read and write, as well as the 
 rudiments of English history and English 
 literature, and a little Latin. Up to the age ' ^ 
 of nine, when he started to attend a large 
 private school in the town, he was slow of 
 apprehension, but of an inquiring mind, and 
 he rarely forgot what he had once learnt. 
 He was nearly twelve years old before his 
 faculties began to develop, and they developed 
 rapidly. He revealed an aptitude for mathe- 
 matics, and a really surprising gift of com- 
 position ; some of his school essays, both in 
 style and manner, and in the precocity ot 
 their thought, might almost have been 
 written by a mature man of letters. The 
 headmaster of the school, who had been a 
 Somersetshire County cricketer, and whose 
 educational outlook was dominated by his 
 sense of the value of sports and games, was 
 a little disconcerted by this strange, shy boy 
 and his queer and precise knowledge of out- 
 of-the-way things, but he had the acumen 
 to recognise his abilities and to predict for 
 him a brilliant future. He read all kinds of 
 books, from Kingsley to Carlyle, with an 
 
OF BARBELLION xv 
 
 .nsatiable appetite. It was about this time, 
 :oo, that he began those long tramps into 
 :he countryside, over the hills to watch the 
 staghounds meet, and along the broad river 
 marshes, that provided the beginnings and 
 the foundation of the diary habit, which 
 became in time the very breath of his inner 
 life. He loved the open air, and all that the 
 open air meant. After hours of absence, 
 we knew not where, he would return glowing 
 with happy excitement at some adventure 
 with a friendly fisherman, or at the identifi- 
 cation of a rare bird. Even now the wonder 
 of the world was gripping him in its bewitch- 
 ing spell. In later days he expressed its 
 power over him in words such as these, with 
 many variations ; 
 
 " Like a beautiful and terrible mistress, the world 
 holds me its devoted slave. She flouts me, but I 
 love her still. She is cruel, but still I love her. 
 My love for her is a guilty love — for the voluptuous 
 curves of the Devonshire moors, for the bland 
 benignity of the sun smiling alike on the just and 
 on the unjust, for the sea which washes in a 
 beautiful shell or a corpse with the same meditative 
 indifference," ' 
 
xvi LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 In these early years, I remember, the diary 
 took the outward form rf an old exercise book, 
 neatly labelled and numbered, and it reflected 
 all his observations on nature. The records, 
 some of which were reproduced from time to 
 time in The Zoologist, were valuable not 
 only in their careful exactitude, but for their 
 breadth of suggestion, and that inquiring 
 spirit into the why of things which proved 
 him to be no mere classifier or reporter. 
 They were the outcome of long vigils ot 
 concentrated watching. I have known him 
 to stay for two or three hours at a stretch in 
 one tense position, silently noting the torpid 
 movements of half a dozen bats withdrawn 
 from some disused mine and kept for experi- 
 ments in the little drawing-room that was 
 more like a laboratory than a place to sit in. 
 He probably knew more about North Devon 
 and the wild creatures that inhabited its 
 wide spaces than any living person. Some- 
 times he was accompanied on his journeys, 
 which occupied most of his spare time and 
 the greater part of the week-ends, by two or 
 three boisterously high-spirited acquaintances 
 
OF BARBELLION xvii 
 
 of his own age, who, though leagues removed 
 from him in character and outlook, seemed 
 to find a mysterious charm in his companion- 
 ship, and whose solemn respect for his natural 
 history lore he cunningly made use of by 
 employing them to search for specimens 
 under his guidance and direction. 
 
 When he was fourteen years of age his 
 fixed determination to become a naturalist 
 by profession was accepted by all of us as 
 a settled thing. JNIy father, whose income 
 was at this time reduced through illness by 
 about half, generously encouraged him in 
 his ambition by giving him more pocket 
 money than any of his brothers and sisters 
 had received in palmier days, in order that 
 he might add to his rapidly increasing library 
 of costly books on zoology and biology ; and 
 by allowing him such freedom of move- 
 ment as can rarely fall to the lot of a small 
 boy in an ordinary middle-class home. 
 Here let me say that after the publication 
 of his Journal^ Barbellion himself expressed 
 regret at having here and there in the book 
 unconsciously conveyed the impression that 
 
xviii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 in the home of his childhood and youth he 
 received little practical help and sj^npathy 
 in the pursuit of his great quest. The exact 
 contrary was, in fact, the case ; and when 
 in 1910, owing to my father's second, and 
 this time complete, breakdown Barbellion 
 had to decline the offer of a small appoint- 
 ment at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, 
 the blow was not less bitter to his parents 
 than to himself At that time he was the 
 only son at home. He had been allowed 
 a great amount of leisure for study ; but 
 now, as one of two young reporters on my 
 father's staff, he was compelled for the time 
 being to carry a responsibility which he 
 feared and detested. But the opportunity 
 for which he had passionately worked and 
 impatiently waited was not long in coming. 
 In the following year, in open competition 
 with men from the Universities who had been 
 specially coached for the examination, he 
 won his way by his own exertions to the 
 staff of the Natural History Museum at 
 South Kensington. 
 
 Probably the happiest period of his life 
 
OF BARBELLION xix 
 
 'as that of his late youth up to the time of 
 ly father's collapse. He was in somewhat 
 etter health than in his childhood ; the joy 
 uf living intoxicated his being ; he was able 
 to saunter at his own free will over his 
 beloved hills and dales ; he was beginning to 
 feel his strength and to shape his knowledge ; 
 nd before him stretched a bright vista of 
 ague, alluring, infinite possibilities. And at 
 this time, apart from the diary, he was trying 
 Viis hand at writing, and revelling in that 
 delicious experience of youth — putting to 
 •roof his newly awakened powers. I have 
 i a my possession scores of early letters that 
 estify eloquently to his ability to perceive, 
 o think, and to write. Here is a letter which, 
 it the age of seventeen, he wrote to my 
 )rother Harry. It seems to me remarkable 
 :ov the vigour and clearness with which he 
 was able to set down his reflections on a dark 
 and difficult point of philosophy, and interest- 
 ing because it shows how already his mind 
 was occupied with the mystery of himself. 
 
 " I am writing really [he says] to discuss ' Myself ' 
 with you. I am particularly interested in it [an 
 
XX LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 article on "Myself' written by Harry] because it 
 differs so entirely from my own feelings. I am a 
 mendicant friar. It is so difficult to see what one 
 really believes, as distinct from what one feels \ but 
 for myself I can see only too distinctly the world 
 without my own insignificant self, after death or 
 before birth, 
 
 " There is one power which I have to an unusual 
 extent developed, so I think, and that is the faculty 
 of divesting my thoughts of all subjectivity. I can 
 see myself as so much specialised protoplasm. 
 Sometimes I almost think that in thus divesting the 
 mind of particulars I seize the universal and for a 
 short but vivid moment look through the veil at 
 'the thing itself I really cannot make myself 
 clear without a great deal of care, and I hope you 
 will not misunderstand me. 
 
 " But, to diverge somewhat, it was only the other 
 day that suddenly, when I was not expecting it, I 
 saw mother's face in an objective way. I saw and 
 looked on it as a stranger who had never seen her ; 
 and mind you, there is a good deal of difference 
 between these two points of view. I never realised 
 until that moment that we look on those whom we 
 know so well in the light and shade of the know- 
 ledge we have gained before. . . . 
 
 "The natural conclusion of these observations I 
 take to be that we never know how anthropomorphic 
 our views may really be. (Somebody else has said 
 this somewhere, but I don't know who. Huxley ?) I 
 
OF BARBELLION xxi 
 
 am naturally sceptical of all sciences and systems 
 of philosophy. Science, of course, deals with the 
 experienced universe, and cannot possibly ever reach 
 ultimate truth. In philosophy I am always haunted 
 by the suspicion that, if we only knew, we are not 
 anywhere near being able to make even a rough 
 guess at the truth. 
 
 " Throw a dog a bone. Til take it that the dog, 
 if it is an intelligent one, discusses the bone 
 thoroughly. It discovers the natural law of the 
 bone — that it satisfies hunger and provides happiness, 
 and it forms a scientific theory (intelligent dog, 
 mind you) to explain this inseparable correlative 
 phenomenon. It says : ' The world is probably to 
 be considered as an immense mechanism of separate 
 bone-throwing machines, worked by an unknown 
 creature. Bone is necessary to the dog existence as 
 it is the ineffable vital essence of Divine Love in 
 which we live, move, and have our being. This is so, 
 because it has been proved by experiment that in 
 the absence of bone-throwers, dogs have been known 
 to die.' 
 
 " Of course you laugh. But why not .'' I cannot 
 help thinking that we may very well be as much in 
 the dark as the dogs. Our philosophy may be 
 incorrect in respect of the Universe, Reality, and 
 God as the dog's philosophy is in respect of the 
 simple process of digestion and the accompanying 
 physiological changes. 
 
 " If I could drop my anchor behind a rock of 
 
xxii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 certainty I should be greatly relieved, but who can 
 convince a man if he cannot convince himself ? 
 
 " To sum up, what I think is that we — i.e., each 
 one of us separately — are exceedingly unimportant 
 wisps, little bits of body, mind, and spirit, but that 
 in the whole, as humanity, we are a great immortal 
 organism of real import if we could see behind the 
 veil. In other words I regard individuals as in- 
 effectual units, but the mass as a spiritual power. 
 The old philosophical idea that the world was a big 
 animal had an element of truth in it." 
 
 It was only by the skin of his teeth that 
 Barbellion passed the doctors after getting 
 through the scientific examination for the 
 South Kensington post. He was suffering 
 from chronic dyspepsia, he was more than six 
 feet in height, and as thin as a rake, and he 
 looked hke a typical consumptive. The 
 medical gentlemen solemnly shook their 
 heads, but after scrutinising him with as 
 much care as if he were one of his own 
 museum specimens they could discover 
 no organic defect, and their inability to 
 " classify " him no doubt saved Barbellion 
 from what would have been the most dread- 
 ful disappointment of his life. His appear- 
 
OF BARBELLION xxiii 
 
 ance, notwithstanding his emaciation, was 
 striking. His great height, causing him to 
 stoop shghtly, produced an air and attitude 
 of studiousness pecuHar to himself. A head 
 of noble proportions was crowned by a thick 
 mass of soft, brown hair tumbling carelessly 
 about his brow. Deepset, lustrous eyes, wide 
 apart and aglow with eager life, lighted up 
 a pale, sharply pointed countenance with an 
 indescribable vividness of expression. His 
 nose, once straight and shapely, owing to an 
 accident was irregular in its contour, but by 
 no means unpleasing in its irregularity, for 
 it imparted a kind of rugged friendliness to 
 the whole face ; and he had a curious habit 
 in moments of animation of visibly dilating 
 the nostrils, as if unable to contain his 
 excitement. His mouth was large, firm, 
 yet mobile, and his chin like a rock. He 
 had a musical voice, which he used without 
 effort, and when he spoke, especially when 
 he chose to let himself go on any subject 
 that had aroused his interest, the energetic 
 play of his features, the vital intensity which 
 he threw into every expression, had an 
 
xxiv LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 irresistible effect of compulsion upon his 
 friends. His hands were strong and sensi- 
 tive, with a remarkable fineness of touch 
 very useful to him in the laboratory, and it 
 was always a pleasure to watch them at 
 work upon a delicate dissection. His hands 
 and arms were much more active members 
 than his legs. In conversation he tried in 
 vain to control a lifelong and amusing habit 
 of throwing them out and beating the air 
 violently to emphasise a point in argument. 
 But he moved and walked languidly, like a 
 tired man, as indeed he was. He was con- 
 tinuously unwell — "chronically sub-normal" 
 was how he once described his condition to 
 me, half playfully. He had lost forever that 
 sense of abounding physical well-being which 
 gives zest to living and strength to endure. 
 But he has discussed his own symptoms 
 in the Journal with a force and ironic 
 humour that I have not the capacity or the 
 will to imitate. I will say no more than 
 that those who were closest to him re- 
 member with wondering admiration the 
 magnificent struggle which he maintained 
 
m OF BARBELLION xxv 
 
 against his illness and its effect upon his 
 work. His attacks of depression he kept 
 almost invariably to himself. In the presence 
 of others he was full of high courage, en- 
 grossed in his plans for the future, strong 
 in the determination not to be mastered by 
 physical weakness. " I am not going to be 
 beaten " he declared after one very bad bout, 
 " if I develop all the diseases in the doctor's 
 index. I mean to do what 1 have set out 
 to do if it has to be done in a bath-chair." 
 His will-power was enormous, unconquer- 
 able. Again and again he spurred himself 
 on to work with an appalling expenditure of 
 nervous energy, when an ordinary man might 
 have flung up his hands and resigned himself 
 to passive despair. 
 
 Let me quote from one of many letters 
 written to me from South Kensington, all 
 charged with a strangely arresting amalgam 
 of hope, despair, defiance, cravings for 
 imaginative sympathy, lofty ideals, and 
 throbbing with a prodigious passion of life. 
 Each and every one was a challenge and a 
 protest. Surely there never was a half- 
 
xxvi LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 dead man more alive. It was shortly after 
 war broke out that he wrote this letter : j 
 
 " The reason why the article ' The Joy of Life '' 
 has not been sent you is because it is not finished. . . . 
 My mood just now is scarcely fitted for the comple- 
 tion of an essay with such a title. I am like to ask 
 sullenly, " What the deviPs the good .?" I have 
 already drawn out of ray inside big ropy entrails, all 
 hot and steaming, and you say ' Very nice,' or 
 ' effectively expressed,' and Austin Harrison says he 
 is ' too full up.' Damn his eyes ! Damn everything i 
 Hall Caine, poor man, said once that a most terrible 
 thing had happened to him. He sat in a railway 
 carriage opposite a young woman reading a book 
 written ' in his life's blood,' and she kept looking up 
 listlessly to see the names of the stations. ' The Joy 
 of Life/ my friend, in the completed state will make 
 people sit up perhaps. So I think as I write it. 
 But perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. It has been like the 
 birth of a child to me. Fve been walking about ' in 
 the family way.' The other essay was a relief to be 
 able to bring forth. Both are self-revelations. . . . 
 My journal is full of them, and one day when, as is 
 probable, I have predeceased you, you will find much 
 of B. F. C. in it almost as he appears to His Maker, 
 It is a study in the nude, with no appeal to the 
 
 highly pemmicanised intellect of such a being as , 
 
 but there is meaty stuff in it, raw, red, or underdone. 
 
 "It is curious to me how satisfied we all are with 
 wholly inadequate opinions and ideas as to the 
 
OF BARBELLION xxvii 
 
 character and nature of our friends. For example, I 
 have a rough-and-ready estimate of yourself which 
 has casually grown up over a series of years. But I 
 don't really feel very satisfied that I know you, and 
 most folk wouldn't care if they didn't. They want 
 neither to understand nor to be understood. They 
 walk about life as at a mask ball, content to remain 
 unknown and unrealised by the consciousness of any 
 single human being. A man can live with his wife 
 all his days and never be known to her — particularly 
 if they are in love. And the extraordinary thing to 
 me is that they don't wish to understand each other. 
 They accept each other's current coin without 
 question. That seems to me to be uncanny — to be 
 lolling about in the arms of someone who is virtually 
 a stranger to you. 
 
 " Not only ourselves, but everything is bound 
 about with innumerable concentric walls of impene- 
 trable armour. I long to pull them down, to tear 
 down all the curtains, screens, and dividing partitions, 
 to walk about with my clothes off, to make a large 
 ventral incision and expose my heart. I am sick of 
 being tied up in flesh and clothes, hemmed in by 
 walls, by prosies, deceits. I want to pull people by 
 the nose and be brutally candid. I want everyone to 
 know, to be told everything. It annoys me to find 
 someone who doesn't realise some horrible actuality 
 like cancer or murder, or who has not heard of 
 R. L. S., or like an infamous man I met the other 
 day who was not sufficiently alive to know that it 
 
xxviii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 was Amundsen not Scott (as he nonchalantl 
 assumed) who got to the Pole first. . . . 
 
 " You ask for mj dyspepsia in a way which, mj 
 dear, good lad, I cannot resist. Well, it has bee) 
 bad, damned bad. There you are ! I have been ii^ 
 hell without the energy to lift up mine eyes. Thd 
 first twenty-five years of my life have chased me up 
 and down the keyboard. I have been to the top 
 and to the bottom, very happy and very miserable^ 
 But don't think I am whining— I prefer a life whiclj 
 is a hunt, and an adventure rather than a study in 
 still life. If you suffer, Balzac said proudly, at leasti 
 you Hve. If I were suddenly assured of wealth and 
 health, long to live, I should have to walk about 
 cutting other people's throats so as to reintroduce 
 the element of excitement. At this present momenti 
 I am feeling so full of Joie de vivre that a summons!' 
 to depart coming now would exasperate me into fury, j 
 I should die cursing like an intoxicated trooper. Itj 
 seems unthinkable — if life were the sheer wall of a| 
 precipice, I should stick to it by force of attraction ! j 
 
 " You shall see in the ' Joy of Life ' how much 1 1 
 have grown to love it. There is a little beast which ! 
 draws its life to start with rather precariously 
 attached to a crab. But gradually it sends out! 
 filaments which burrow in and penetrate every fibre j 
 of its host so that to separate host and parasite ! 
 means a grievous rupture. I have become attached 
 in the same way, but not to a crab ! 
 
 "Life is extraordinarily distracting. At times I 
 
OF BARBELLION xxix 
 
 'oology melts away from my purview. Gradually, I 
 houldn't be at all surprised if other interests burrow 
 n under my foundations (laid in Zoology) and 
 [he whole superstructure collapse. If I go to a 
 culpture gallery, the continued study of entomology 
 ppears impossible — I will be a sculptor. If I go to 
 he opera, then I am going to take up music seriously. 
 ; )r if I get a new beast (an extraordinary new form 
 if bird parasite brought back by the New Guinea 
 i^xpedition, old sport! phew!) nothing else can 
 nterest me on earth, I think. But something does, 
 ,nd with a wrench I turn away presently to fresh 
 )astures. Life is a series of wrenches, I tremble for 
 he fixity of my purposes ; and as you know so well, 
 '. am an ambitious man, and my purposes are very 
 lear to me. You see what a trembling, colour- 
 ;hanging, invertebrate, jelly-fish of a brother you 
 lave. . . . But you are the man I look to. . . ."" 
 
 Whatever kind of man Barbellion may 
 lave been he certainly was not a jelly-fish. 
 Any or all of these sentiments might have 
 3ome red-hot from his diary, and they are 
 absolutely typical of the delightfully stimu- 
 lating and provocative letters which he loved 
 to write, and could write better than any 
 man I have ever known. He was as greedy 
 as a shark for life in the raw, for the whole 
 Df life. He longed to capture and compre- 
 
XXX LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 hend the entire universe, and would nevd 
 
 i 
 
 have been content with less. " I couli 
 swallow landscapes," he says, " and swil 
 down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth td 
 me with hoops of steel, but the world is sc 
 impassive, silent, secret." He despised hii 
 body because it impeded his pursuit of th^ 
 elusive uncapturable. And while he pursueq 
 Fate, Fate followed close on his heels. Iiij 
 London he grew slowly and steadily worsei 
 Doctors tinkered with him, and he tinkerecl 
 himself with their ineffectual nostrums. Bull 
 at last, after he had complained one day of 
 partial blindness and of loss of power in his! 
 right arm, I persuaded him, on the advicel 
 of a wisely suspicious young physician, to! 
 see a first-class nerve specialist. This man 
 quickly discovered the secret of his complex 
 and never-ending symptoms. Without re- 
 vealing the truth to Barbellion, he told me 
 that he was a doomed man, in the grip of a 
 horrible and obscure disease of which I had 
 never heard. Disseminated sclerosis was 
 the name which the specialist gave to it ; 
 and its effect, produced apparently by a 
 
OF BARBELLION xxxi 
 
 microbe that attacks certain cells of the 
 spinal cord, is to destroy in the course of 
 a few years — or in some cases many years 
 —every function of the body, killing its 
 victim by degrees in a slow, ruthless process 
 of disintegration. 
 
 The specialist was strongly of the opinion 
 that the truth should not be told my brother. 
 " If we do so," he said, " we shall assuredly 
 kick him down the hill far more quickly than 
 he will travel if we keep him hopeful by 
 treating the symptoms from time to time as 
 they arise." Barbellion, then, was told he 
 was not " up to standard," that he had been 
 working too hard, was in need of a prolonged 
 rest, and could be restored to health only 
 iby means of a long course of careful and 
 regular treatment. The fact disposes of the 
 criticism of a few unfriendly reviewers who, 
 without reading the Journal closely enough 
 to disarm their indignation, accused Barbel- 
 lion of a selfish and despicable act in getting 
 married when he knew himself to be dying 
 from an incurable malady. Whether I was 
 right or wrong in accepting the medical man's 
 
xxxii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 advice, I do not regret the course 1 tookjj 
 
 Barbellion, in a moment of overwhelming 
 
 despair at the tragedy of his Hfe, and theji 
 
 calamity it had brought upon his wife anqi 
 
 child, afterwards cried out in protest against; 
 
 my deception — based as it was on experij 
 
 judgment, and inspired solely by an afFectionn 
 
 ate desire to shield him from acute distress 
 
 in the remaining period of his life after Ij 
 
 had been told that he might live five, ten,i 
 
 fifteen years longer. Yet, reviewing all the! 
 
 circumstances, 1 realise that I could havei 
 
 i 
 come to no other decision even if I might j 
 
 have foreseen all that was to follow. Let it be | 
 
 clearly understood that the devoted woman to I 
 
 whom he became engaged was at once madej 
 
 aware of his actual condition, and after con- 1 
 
 sultation with her family and an interview | 
 
 with the doctor, who left her under no mis- 1 
 
 apprehension as to the facts, she calmly and j 
 
 courageously chose to link her fate with that j 
 
 of Barbellion. How by a curious and \ 
 
 dramatic accident Barbellion shortly after his 
 
 marriage discovered the truth about himself, 
 
 and kept it for a time from his wife in the 
 
OF BARBELLION xxxiii 
 
 :)eiief that she did not know, is related with 
 inconscious pathos in the Journal. 
 
 BarbelHon was married in September, 
 
 1915. In July, 1917, he was compelled to 
 
 •esign his appointment at the South Ken- 
 
 ;ington Museum. His life came to an end 
 
 m October 22, 1919, in the quaint old 
 
 country cottage at Gerrard's Cross, Bucking- 
 
 lamshire, where for many months he had 
 
 lain like a wraith, tenderly ministered to 
 
 In his utter weakness by those who loved 
 
 iiim. His age was thirty-one. He was glad 
 
 o die. " Life," to use a phrase he was fond 
 
 )f repeating, "pursued him like a fury" to 
 
 he end ; but as he lingered on, weary and 
 
 lelpless, he was increasingly haunted by the 
 
 jiear of becoming a grave burden to his 
 
 amily. The publication of the Journal and 
 
 he sympathetic reception it met with from 
 
 he press and public were sources of profound 
 
 i omfort to his restless soul, yearning as he 
 
 [lad yearned from childhood to find friendly 
 
 listeners to the beating of his heart, fiercely 
 
 [•anting for a large-hearted response to 
 
 [is self-revealing, half-wistful, half-defiant 
 
xxxiv LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 appeal to the comprehension of all humanityj 
 " The kindness almost everybody has showi 
 the Journal, and the fact that so manj 
 have understood its meaning," he said tij 
 me shortly before he died, " have entirely 
 changed my outlook. My horizon haj 
 cleared, my thoughts are tinged with sweeti 
 ness, and I am content." Earlier than thfl 
 he had written : " During the past twelvd 
 months I have undergone an upheaval, an(i 
 the whole bias of my life has gone acrosji 
 from the intellectual to the ethical. I kno'vii 
 that Goodness is the chief thing." j 
 
 He did not accomplish a tithe of what hd 
 had planned to do, but in the extent anc 
 character of his output he achieved by sheej 
 force of will-power, supported by an inj 
 
 vincible ambition and an incessant Intel 
 
 I 
 
 lectual industry that laughed his ill-healtll 
 in the face, more than seemed possible t(| 
 those of us who knew the nature of th^ 
 disorder against which he fought witl! 
 undying" courage every day of his life; 
 It is scarcely surprising that there have 
 been diverse estimates of his character and 
 
OF BARBELLION xxxv 
 
 capacities, some wise and penetrating, many 
 imperfect and wide of the mark. It is not 
 for me to try to do more than correct a few 
 crude or glaringly false impressions of the 
 kind of man Barbellion was. Others must 
 judge of the quality of his genius and of his 
 place in life and literature. But I can 
 speak of Barbellion as the man I knew him 
 to be. He was not the egotist, pure and 
 simple, naked and complete, that he some- 
 times accused himself of being and is 
 supposed by numerous critics and readers 
 of the Journal to have been. 
 
 His portrait of himself was neither con- 
 summate nor, as Mr. Shanks well says, 
 "immutable." "In the nude," declared 
 Barbellion, more than once, with an air of 
 blunt finality. Yes, but only as he imagined 
 himself to look in the nude. 
 
 He was forever peering at himself from 
 
 changing angles, and he was never quite 
 
 sure that the point of view of the moment 
 
 was the true one. Incontinently curious 
 
 about himself, he was never certain about 
 
 jthe real Barbellion. One day he was " so 
 
xxxvi LIFE AND CHARACTER , 
 
 i 
 
 much specialised protoplasm "; another day 
 he was Alexander with the world at hisi 
 feet ; and then he was a lonely boy pining; 
 for a few intimate friends. His sensations; 
 at once puzzled and fascinated him. 
 
 " I am apparently [he said] a triple personality : 
 (1) The respectable youth ; (2) the foul-mouthed; 
 commentator and critic; (3) the real but un- 
 known I.'" 
 
 Many times he tried thus to docket his 
 manifold personality in distinguishable de- 
 partments. It was a hopeless task. " Re 
 spectabihty " was the last word to apply to 
 him. Foul-mouthed he never was, unless a; 
 man is foul-mouthed who calls a thing by its I 
 true name and will not cover it with a shamj 
 or a substitute. In his talks with me he 
 was as " abandoned " in his frankness as in 
 the Journal ; and the longer I knew him the j 
 more I admired the boldness of his vision : 
 the unimpeachable honesty and therefore 
 the essential purity of his mind. 
 
 His habit of self-introspection and his 
 mordant descriptions of his countless symp- 
 toms were not the "inward notes" or the 
 
I OF BARBELLION xxxvii 
 
 fiveak outpourings of a hypochondriac. His 
 JArhole bearing and his attitude to Hfe in 
 general were quite uncharacteristic of the 
 hypochondriac as that type of person is 
 iommonly depicted and understood. It 
 ;hould be remembered that his symptoms 
 ^ere real symptoms and as depressing as 
 :hey were painful, and his disease a terribly 
 •eal disease which affected from the be- 
 ginning almost every organ of his body, 
 rhough he was rarely miserable he had 
 {omething to be miserable about, and the 
 iccepted definition of a hypochondriac is 
 :hat of one whose morbid state of mind is 
 produced by a constitutional melancholy for 
 A^hich there is no palpable cause. He 
 icarcely ever spoke of his dyspepsia, his 
 nuscular tremors, his palpitations of the 
 iieart, and all the other physical disturbances 
 vhich beset him from day to day, except 
 vith a certain wry humour ; and while it is 
 ;rue that he would discuss his condition 
 vith the air of an enthusiastic anatomist 
 vho had just been contemplating some 
 tinusually interesting corpus vile, he talked 
 
xxxviii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 of it only when directly questioned about it, 
 or to explain why a piece of work that he 
 was anxious to finish had been interrupted 
 or delayed. He had a kind of disgust for 
 his own emaciated appearance, arising, not 
 improbably, from his aesthetic admiration 
 for the human form in its highest develop- 
 ment. On one occasion, when we were 
 spending a quiet holiday together at a little 
 Breton fishing village, I had some difficulty 
 in persuading him to bathe in the sea on 
 account of his objection to exposing his 
 figure to the view of passers-by. The only 
 thing that might be considered in the least 
 morbid in his point of view with regard to 
 his health was a fixed and absolutely 
 erroneous belief that his weakness was 
 hereditary. His parents were both over 
 sixty when they died from illnesses each of 
 which had a definitely traceable cause. 
 Though the other members of the family 
 enjoyed exceptionally good health, he con- 
 tinued to the last to suspect that we were 
 all physically decadent, and nothing could 
 shake his conviction that my particular 
 
OF BARBELLION xxxix 
 
 complaint was heart disease, regardless of 
 the fact frequently pointed out to him 
 that in the Army I had been passed Al 
 with monotonous regularity. 
 
 Mr. Wells has referred to him as "an 
 egotistical young naturalist"; in the same 
 allusion, however, he reiterated the funda- 
 mental truth that " we are all egotists 
 within the limits of our power of expres- 
 sion." Barbellion was intensely interested 
 in himself, but he was also intensely in- 
 terested in other people. He had not that 
 egotistical imagination of the purely self- 
 centred man which looks inward all the 
 time because nothing outside the province 
 of his own self-consciousness concerns him. 
 He had an objective interest in himself, an 
 outcome of the peculiar faculty which he 
 divulged in the first of the two letters 
 already quoted of looking at human beings, 
 even his own mother, objectively. He 
 described and explained himself so persist- 
 ently and so thoroughly because he had an 
 obviously better opportunity of studying 
 himself with nice precision and attentive 
 
xl LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 care than he had for the study of other 
 people. He regarded himself quite openly 
 and quite naturally as a human specimen 
 to be examined, classified, and dissected, 
 and he did his work with the detailed 
 skill and the truthful approach of a 
 scientific investigator. The "limits of his 
 power of expression" being far beyond 
 those of the average man, he was able to 
 give a picture of himself that lives on 
 account of its simple and daring candour. 
 He is not afraid to be frank in giving 
 expression to a thought merely because it 
 may be an unpleasant or a selfish thought. 
 If a shadowy doubt assails him, or an outre 
 criticism presents itself about a beloved 
 friend, he sets it down ; if he feels a sensuous 
 joy in bathing in the sea and loves to look 
 upon his "pink skin," or derives a catlike 
 satisfaction from rolling a cigarette between 
 his fingers ; if he thinks he sees a meanness 
 in his own heart, or catches himself out in 
 some questionable or unworthy piece of 
 conduct, however trivial, the diary receives 
 its faithful record. The dissimilarity between 
 
OF BARBELLION xli 
 
 ^'Barbellion and other persons is that, while 
 those of us who have not been blessed or 
 cursed with the temperament of an ox 
 frequently experience these queer spon- 
 taneous promptings about common things 
 and about ourselves and our fellow-creatures 
 that come we know not how or why, so far 
 from dragging the half-formed thought into 
 
 i the light of open confession and giving it 
 definite shape, we avert our gaze as from 
 
 ||an evil thing, or return to it in secret and 
 
 > stealth. It is scarcely possible, one imagines, 
 to read Barbellion honestly without realis- 
 ing that he says in plain, forceful language 
 what the rest of us often think but have not 
 the nerve to say aloud either to others or to 
 ourselves. 
 
 Resolute courage was the regnant quality 
 of Barbellion's character. There was no 
 issue he was afraid to face. The more it 
 
 ! frightened him the more grimly he held on. 
 
 , Ineffaceable curiosity and the force of his 
 
 I will were a formidable combination. He 
 saw everything in focus, with clear and 
 steady eye. He penetrated the heart of a 
 
xlii LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 book with unerring instinct, as Balzac tore j 
 out the secret of a woman's heart. It was 
 hopeless to attempt to deceive him with a \ 
 sophistry or a platitude. His sense of 
 justice was deep and strong. While he 
 loved disputation for its own sake, no form 
 of mental recreation making a stronger 
 appeal to his vivid intelligence than a set 
 battle in dialectics, he rarely missed the 
 essential argument, which he commonly 
 handled with solid mastery and generally 
 with a wealth of convincing illustrations. 
 He was a captivating companion ; easy, 
 humorous, and suggestive in his talk over a 
 wide range of subjects, and knowing some- 
 thing new or piquant about every bramble 
 bush, every bird, every beetle that he 
 passed or that flitted or crept across his 
 path. Anyone less like a self-tormentor, 
 a malade imaginaire, a man with a laugh 
 on the wrong side of his mouth could not 
 be imagined. It would be using a weak 
 expression to say that he was cheerful. 
 He was so acutely alive to the imperious 
 charm of the world in which he lived that 
 
OF BARBELLION xliii 
 
 a, fit of depression, caused usually by some 
 Dbstinate symptom of ill-health, which 
 foiled his plans and fretted his temper, 
 would melt away at a touch. The cry of a 
 peewit, a gleam of sunshine on the hill, a 
 phrase from a Beethoven Symphony, a line 
 out of Francis Thompson (whose gorgeous 
 verse inflamed his senses to a white heat 
 of enjoyment), or a warm note of human 
 sympathy, would transform him at once into 
 another being. He yearned for the fellow- 
 ship of sympathy, and rejoiced exceedingly 
 when he seemed to find it. He had 
 a real capacity for friendship, and his 
 affections, when once they were engaged, 
 were deep and abiding ; but he could be 
 impishly provoking to an acquaintance, and 
 he suffered fools without gladness or much 
 self-restraint. His judgments of men and 
 women whom he met casually or infrequently 
 were not to be relied upon. He was as 
 impulsive as a woman of Barcelona, and the 
 life-history of some harmless creature newly 
 introduced would be created promptly on 
 such inadequate data as a fortuitous remark, 
 
xliv^ LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 an odd gesture, or a sweating hand. His 
 nature, I believe, is less readily to be 
 explained by his so-called egotism than by 
 his supersensitiveness to the world about him 
 and the beings in it. He bathed in the sea 
 of life in a perpetual ecstasy, and sometimes 
 it was an ecstasy of pain that made him call 
 out upon God and all the gods, and the 
 devils as well. One of the truest things I 
 have heard said about him was said the 
 other day by an accomplished critic who 
 had never met him, but who had read his 
 Journal with a seeing eye. " It seems to 
 me," he remarked, " that Barbellion was a 
 man with a skin too few." A wise saying 
 to which Barbellion himself would have 
 been the first to give his appreciative 
 assent. 
 
 Nearly every writer who has tried to form 
 an estimate of my brother's potentialities 
 has discussed the question whether he would 
 have deserted the science of zoology, his 
 first consuming love, for the broader paths of 
 literature. Now that he is dead it must 
 appear to be a fruitless speculation. But it 
 
OF BARBELLION xlv 
 
 is not perhaps without interest. I am 
 convinced that he would not have remained 
 at South Kensington longer than was 
 necessary to provide him with bread and 
 butter. He was that comparatively rare 
 combination — a man of science, and a man of 
 letters. He was in love with life as soon as 
 he was in love with science, and the life of 
 man inspired his imagination more than the 
 lives of the animals it was his business to 
 know about. His scientific zeal was aroused 
 in " an extraordinary new form of bird , 
 parasite brought back by the New Guinea 
 Expedition," as much because it was a new 
 form of life as because it appealed to 
 the enthusiasm of the trained zoologist. 
 Years before he was filled with sickening 
 disappointment by the drudgery of his 
 labours and the narrow limitations imposed 
 upon him in a department of Natural 
 History that he cared for least, he was con- 
 templating large literary schemes, some of 
 which he unfolded to me with an infectious 
 ardour of hope and determination. He 
 planned in these years a novel that was to be 
 
xlvi LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 of immense length, with something of th( 
 scope of the Comedie Humaine, and a series ; 
 of logically developed treatises on the lines 
 of his essay, " The Passion for Perpetua- 
 tion," which in his own words were to be his 
 magnum opus. His hopes, high and un- 
 quenchable as they always appeared to be, , 
 were cut short by his lingering illness and 
 his early death. There remain only a few 
 documentary fragments that testify to the 
 boldness of his intentions. His one pub- 
 lished attempt at a short story, " How 
 Tom Snored," is in my opinion quite 
 unworthy of his abilities. It is impossible to 
 say in what direction his undoubted literary 
 powers would have found their true outlet. 
 It is certain that if he had lived in the full 
 enjoyment of normal health the Journal in 
 its present outward form or as a narrative of 
 his career and an unreserved record of his 
 personal reflections would never have been 
 published. It is equally certain that months 
 before he resigned his appointment on the 
 staff of the South Kensington Museum he 
 was weary of his work there, and the bias of 
 
OF BARBELLION xlvii 
 
 his mind was turning rapidly from the cause 
 of biological science towards the humanities. 
 His restless spirit demanded a wider range 
 of expression, unhampered by the many 
 exasperating futilities of his professional 
 labours. But his published work is perhaps 
 all the more valuable on account of his 
 exertions in the laboratory, because even 
 when he " meddles " in his fantastic and 
 compelling way " with things that are too 
 high for me, not as a recreation but as a 
 result of intense intellectual discomfort " — 
 even at these moments, when he plunges 
 with impetuous gusto into the infinities of 
 time and space and God, there is a certain 
 sanity of statement, a suggestion of strength 
 in reserve, a studied self-control in the 
 handling of his theme that his scientific 
 habit of mind makes possible and emphasises. 
 This instinctive restraint can be discovered 
 again and again in vehement passages that 
 at a glance seem to bear the mark of reckless 
 extravagance. 
 
 A Last Diary is the last of Barbellion 
 as a writer, For those of us who knew and 
 
xlviii LIFE OF BARBELLION 
 
 loved him as a boy and as a man the 
 memory of his masterful personality — his 
 courage, his wit, his magnetism, his pride 
 of intellect and his modesty withal, his 
 afflictions, his affectionate tenderness — will 
 endure without ceasing. As the most 
 modern of the journal- writers he addresses 
 to the public a dauntless message, the value 
 and significance of which time alone can 
 measure. Like all men of abnormal sensi- 
 bility he suffered deeply ; but if he suffered 
 deeply he enjoyed also his moments of 
 exquisite happiness. He lived fast. He 
 was for ever bounding forward in an un- 
 tameable effort to grasp the unknown and 
 unknowable. Fate struck him blow upon 
 blow, but though his head was often bloody 
 it remained unbowed. Mr. Wells says the 
 story of his life is a "recorded unhappiness " 
 I prefer to think of it as a sovereign 
 challenge. 
 
 A. J. CUMMINGS. 
 
 1920. 
 
1918 
 
A LAST DIARY 
 
 1918 
 
 March 2\st, 1918. — Misery is protean in 
 its shapes, for all are indescribable. I am 
 tongue-tied. Folk come and see me and 
 conclude it's not so bad after all — just as 
 civilians tour the front and suppose they 
 have seen war on account of a soldier with 
 a broken head or an arm in a sling. Others 
 are getting used to me, though I am not 
 getting used to myself. 
 
 Honest British jurymen would say 
 " Temporarily insane " if I had a chance of 
 showing my metal. I wish I could lapse 
 into permanent insanity — 'twould be a 
 relief to let go control and slide away down, 
 down. Which is the farthest star ? I 
 would get away there and start afresh, blot 
 out all memory of this world and its doings. 
 Here, even the birds and flowers seem 
 
 3 
 
4 A LAST DIARY 
 
 soiled. It makes me impatient to see them 
 — they are indifferent, they do not know. 
 Those that do not know are pathetic, and 
 those knowing are miserable. It is ghostly 
 to live in a house with a little child at the 
 best of times — now at the w^orst of times a 
 child's innocence haunts me always. 
 
 March 25th, 1918.— I shall not easily 
 forget yesterday (Sunday). It was just like 
 Mons Sunday. The spring shambles began 
 on Thursday in brilliant summer weather. 
 Yesterday also was fine, the sky cloudless, 
 very warm with scarcely a breeze. They 
 wheeled me into the garden for an hour : 
 primroses, violets, butterflies, bees ; the 
 song of the chaffinches and thrushes — other- 
 wise silence. With the newspaper on my 
 knee, the beauty of the day was oppressive. 
 Its unusualness at this time of year seemed 
 of evil import. Folk shake their heads, and 
 they say in the village there is to be an 
 earthquake on account of the heat. In rural 
 districts simple souls believe it is the end of 
 the world coming upon us. 
 
A LAST DIARY 5 
 
 At such times as these my isolation here 
 is agonising. I write the word, but itself 
 alone conveys little. I spend hours by 
 myself unable to talk or write, but only to 
 think. The war news has barely crossed my 
 lips once, not even to the bedpost — in fact, 
 I have no bedpost. And the cat and 
 canary and baby would not understand. It 
 is hard even to look them in the face 
 without shame. All the while I hear the 
 repeated " kling " in my ears as the wheel 
 of my destiny comes full circle — not once 
 but a hundred superfluous times. When 
 am I going to die ? This is a death in life. 
 
 I intended never to write in this diary 
 again. But the relief it affords could not 
 be refused any longer. I was surprised to 
 find I could scribble at all legibly. Yet it 
 is tiring. 
 
 March '2^tli, 1918. — In reply to a query 
 from me if there were any fresh news in the 
 village this afternoon, my mother-in-law 
 thus (an obiter dictum, while dandling 
 the babe) : " No, not good news anyway. 
 
6 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Still, when there's a thorough assault, we're 
 bound to lose some. . . . Dancy, dancy, 
 poppity pin," etc. 
 
 But we are all moles, in cities as in villages, 
 burrowing blindly into the future. These 
 enormous prospects transcend vision ; we just 
 go on and go on — following instinct, nursing 
 babies, and killing our enemies. How un- 
 speakably sorrowful the whole world is ! 
 Poor men, killing each other. Murder, say, 
 of a rival in love, is comparatively a hallowed 
 thing because of the personal passion. 
 Liberty ? Freedom ? These are things of 
 the spirit. Every man is free if he will. 
 Yet who is going to lend an ear to the words 
 of a claustrated paralytic ? 1 expect I'm 
 wrong, and I am past hammering out what 
 is right. I must anaesthetise thought and 
 accept without comment. My mind is in an 
 agony of muddle, not only about this world 
 but the next. 
 
A LAST DIARY 7 
 
 Publication of the Journal 
 
 31ay 29th, 1918.— This journal in part is 
 being published in September (D.V. ). In 
 the tempest of misery of the past three 
 weeks, this fact at odd intervals has shone 
 out like a bar of stormy white light. By 
 September I anticipate a climax as a set-off 
 to the achievement of my book. Perhaps, 
 like Semele, I shall perish in the lightning I 
 long for ! 
 
 My dear E. has had a nervous breakdown 
 — her despairing words haunt me. Poor, 
 poor dear — I cannot go on. 
 
 Jirne 1st, 1918. — A fever of impatience 
 and anxiety over the book. I am terrified 
 lest it miscarry. I wonder if it is being 
 printed in London ? A bomb on the 
 printing works ? 
 
 When it is out and in my hands I shall 
 believe. I have been out in a beautiful 
 lane where I saw a white horse, led by a 
 village child ; in a field a sunburnt labourer 
 with a black wide-brimmed hat lifted it, 
 
8 A LAST DIARY 
 
 smiling at me. He seemed happy and 1 
 smiled too. 
 
 Am immensely relieved that E. is better. 
 I cannot, ca7inot endure the prospect of 
 breaking her life and health. Dear woman, 
 how 1 love you ! 
 
 Regard these entries as so many weals 
 under the lash. 
 
 June Qrd, 1918. — When it is still scalding, 
 grief cannot be touched. But now after 
 twenty-five days, I look back on those 
 dreadful pictures and crave to tell the story. 
 It would be terrible. ... I scorn such 
 self-indulgence, for the grief was not mine 
 alone, nor chiefly, and I cannot desecrate 
 hers. 
 
 The extraordinary thing is that all this 
 has no effect on me. The heart still goes 
 on beating. I am not shrivelled. 
 
 June 15th, 1918. — I get tired of these 
 inferior people drawn together to look after 
 me and my household. If, as to-day, 1 
 utter a witticism, they hastily slur it over 
 so as to resume the more quickly the flap- 
 
A LAST DIARY 9 
 
 flap monotone of dull gossip. 1 had a 
 suspicion once that my fun was at fault. 1 
 was ill and perhaps had softening of the 
 brain and delusions. So I made an experi- 
 ment : I foisted off as my own some of the 
 acknowledged master - strokes of Samuel 
 Foote and Oscar Wilde, but with the same 
 result. So 1 breathed again. 
 
 However, I except the old village woman 
 come in to nurse me while E. is away. She 
 is a dear, talks little and laughs a lot, is 
 mousy quiet if I wish, has lost a son in the 
 war, has another an elementary- school master 
 who teaches sciences — " a fine scientist." 
 She keeps on feeling my feet and says, 
 " They're lovely warm," or else is horrified 
 because they are cold. Penelope she calls 
 "little miss" (I like this), and attempts 
 to caress her with, " Well, my little pet." 
 But P. is a ruthless imp and screams at 
 her. 
 
 I sat up in my chair to tea yesterday. It 
 was all very quiet, and two mice crept out 
 of their holes and audaciously ate the crumbs 
 
10 A LAST DIARY ' 
 
 that fell from my plate. It is a very old 
 cottage. In the ivy outside a nest of young 
 starlings keep up a clamour. The Doctor 
 has just been (three days since) and says 
 I may live for thirty years. I trust and 
 believe he is a damned liar. 
 
 The prospect of getting the proofs makes 
 me horribly restless. The probability of an 
 air raid depresses me, as I am certain the 
 bombs will rain on the printers. Oh ! do 
 hurry up ! These proofs are getting on my 
 mind. 
 
 Malignant Fate 
 
 June 16th, 1918. — I'm damned; my ma- j 
 lignant fate has not forsaken me ; after the ' 
 agreement on each side has been signed, and 
 the book partly set up in type, the publishers 
 ask to be relieved of their undertaking. 
 The fact is, the reader who accepted the 
 MS. has been combed out, and his work 
 continued by a member of the firm, a godly 
 
A LAST DIARY 11 
 
 f man, afraid of the injury to the firm's reputa- 
 tion as pubHshers of school-books and bibles ! 
 H. G. Wells, who is writing an Introduction, 
 - will be amused I At the best, it means 
 ■ an exasperating delay till another publisher 
 is found. 
 
 June 17th, 1918. — E. comes home on 
 Thursday. 
 
 A robin sits warming her eggs in a mossy 
 hole in the woodshed. A little piece of her 
 russet breast just shows, her bill lies like 
 a little dart over the rim of the nest, and 
 her beady eyes gleam in a fury at the little 
 old nurse in her white bonnet and apron 
 who stands about a yard away, bending 
 down with hands on her knees, looking in 
 and laughing till the tears run down her 
 face : " Poor little body, poor little body — 
 she's got one egg up on her back." They 
 were a pretty duet. She is Flaubert's 
 " Coeur simple." 
 
 July 1st, 1918. — Turning out my desk I 
 found the other day : 
 
12 A LAST DIARY 
 
 " 37, West Frambes Ave., 
 " Columbus, Ohio. 
 
 "September 30th, 1915. 
 
 "Mr. Bruce Cummings, England. 
 
 " Dear Sir, 
 
 " I wonder if you will pardon my 
 impertinence in writing to you. You see I 
 haven't even your address ; I am doing this 
 in a vague way, but I wanted to tell you 
 how much I appreciated your " Crying for 
 the Moon" which I read in the April 
 Forum. You have expressed for me, at 
 least, most completely the insatiable thirst 
 for knowledge. I can't live enough in the 
 short time allotted to me, but I've seldom 
 found anyone so eager, so desirous as you to 
 secure all that this world has to offer in the 
 way of knowledge. JNIy undergraduate 
 work was done at Ohio State University. 
 Then for two years following I was a Fellow 
 in English at the same school, and at 
 present I am here as a laboratory assistant 
 in psychology. Always I am taking as 
 much work as possible to secure as varied 
 
A LAST DIARY 13 
 
 a knowledge as possible. 1 am working 
 now for my doctor's degree ; I have my 
 master's. 
 
 " I have had the idea of trying only so 
 much ; I can't get away from the Greek 
 idea of Nemesis, but your article gave me 
 the suggestion that one should try every- 
 thing ; better to be scorched than not to 
 know anything about everything. And so 
 this year I am trying to lead a fuller life. 
 The article has inspired and helped me 
 to attain a clearer vision of the meaning 
 of Life. As one of your readers, allow me 
 to thank you for the splendid treat you gave 
 us. Pardon please this long message. 
 " Respectfully, 
 *' (Miss) Veiiona Macdollinger." 
 
 On its receipt, I was slightly flattered but 
 chiefly scornful. I know the essay deserved 
 better criticism. But now, I am touched — 
 beggars can't be choosers — and grateful. 
 Dear Miss Verona Macdollinger ! thank you 
 so much for your sympathy, and your truly 
 
14 A LAST DIARY 
 
 wonderful name. Perhaps you are married 
 now and have lost it — perhaps there is a 
 baby Verona. Perhaps ... I don't know, 
 but I am curious about you. 
 
 Four Weeks of Happiness 
 
 August 1th, 1918. — In the cottage alone 
 with E. and nurse. Four weeks of happi- 
 ness — with the obvious reservation. I am 
 in love with my wife ! Oh I dear woman, 
 what agony of mind, and what happiness 
 you give me. To think of you alone 
 struggling against the world, and you are 
 not strong, you want a protector, some- 
 one's strong arm. But we are happy, 
 these few weeks — I record it because it's so 
 strange. I am deeply in love and long to 
 have something so as to sacrifice it all 
 with a passion, with a vehemence of self- 
 abnegation. 
 
 August \5th, 1918. — The Bishops are very 
 preocupied just now in justifying the ways 
 of God to man. I presume it an even 
 harder task to justify the ways of man 
 
A LAST DIARY 15 
 
 'Ito God. Why does not God stop the war? 
 the people are asking — so the Bishops com- 
 plain. But why did man make it ? Man 
 made the war and we know his reasons. 
 God made the world, but He keeps His own 
 counsel. Yet if man, who aspires to good- 
 ness and truth, can sincerely justify the 
 war, I am willing to believe — this is my 
 faith — that God can justify the world, its 
 pain and suffering and death. We made the 
 war and must assume responsibility. 
 
 Yet why is not the world instantaneously 
 
 I redeemed by a few words of reproach coming 
 
 j from a dazzling figure in the Heavens, 
 revealed unmistakably at the same instant 
 to every man, woman, and child in the 
 
 I world ? Why not a sign from Heaven ? 
 Seytemher 1st, 1918. — Eighteen months 
 ago I refused to take any more rat poison, 
 with food so dear, and I refused to have 
 any more truck with doctors. I insist on 
 being left alone, this grotesque disease and 
 I. Meanwhile I must elaborately observe 
 it getting worse by inches. But I scoff at 
 
16 A LAST DIARY 
 
 it. It's so damned ridiculous, and I only 
 give ground obstinately, for I have two 
 supreme objects in life which I have not yet 
 achieved, tho' 1 am near, oh ! so very near 
 the victory. The days creep past shrouded 
 in disappointment ; still I cling to my spar — 
 if not to-day, why then to-morrow, perhaps, 
 and if not to-morrow it won't be so bad — 
 not so very bad because The Times Literary 
 Supplement comes then ; that lasts for two 
 days, and then the Nation. . . . My 
 thoughts move about my languid brain like 
 caterpillars on a ravaged tree. All the 
 while I am getting worse — and they are all so 
 slow : if they don't hurry it will be too late 
 — oh ! make haste. But I must wait, and 
 the caterpillars must crawl. They are 
 *' Looper " caterpillars, I think, which span 
 little spaces. 
 
 A Splendid Dream 
 
 September 2nd, 1918. —It was a brilhantly 
 fine day to-day, with the great avenue of 
 blue sky and sunlight thro' groups of clouds 
 
A LAST DIARY 17 
 
 ranged on each side. I rolled along a very- 
 magnificent way bordered by tall silvered 
 bracken and found two tall hedges. It 
 irked me to remain on the hard road 
 between those two high hedges fending me 
 off from little groups of desirable birch-trees 
 in the woodlands on each side. Suddenly I 
 sprang from my chair, upset it, dumbfounded 
 the nurse, and disappeared thro' the hedge 
 into the woods. I went straight up to the 
 birches and they whispered joyously : " Oh I 
 he's come back to us." I pressed my lips 
 against their smooth, virginal cheeks. I 
 flung myself down on the ground and 
 passionately squeezed the cool soft leaf- 
 mould as a man presses a woman's breasts. 
 I scraped away the surface leaves and, bend- 
 ing down, drew in the intoxicating smell of 
 the earth's naked flesh. ... It was a 
 splendid dream. But I wonder if I could 
 do it if absent-mindedly I forgot myself in 
 an immense desire ! 
 
18 A LAST DIARY 
 
 September 3rd, 1918. — Passed by the 
 birches again to-day. Their leaves rustled 
 as I approached, thrilling me like the 
 liquefaction of Julia's clothes. But I shook 
 my head and went by. Instantly they 
 ceased to flutter, and no doubt turned to 
 address themselves to prettier and more 
 responsive young men who will pass along 
 that road in the years to come. 
 
 September Mh, 1918. — Still no news. I 
 have to reinforce all the strength of my soul 
 to be able to sit and wait day by day, im- 
 potent and idle and alone. . . . 
 
 Goodness the Chief Thing 
 
 September 7th, 1918. — During the past 
 twelve months I have undergone an up- 
 heaval, and the whole bias of my life has gone 
 across from the intellectual to the ethical. 
 1 know that Goodness is the chief thing. 
 
A LAST DIARY 19 
 
 Thatching : A Kodak Film 
 
 September 2Mh, 1918. — Two brown men 
 on a yellow round rick, thatching ; in the 
 background, a row of green elms ; above, 
 a windhover poised in mid-air ; perpendicu- 
 lar silver streaks of rain ; bright sunlight, 
 and a rainbow encircling all. It was as 
 simple as a diagram. One could have cut 
 out the picture with a pair of scissors. I 
 looked with a cold detached eye, for all the 
 world as if the thatchers had no bellies nor 
 immortal souls, as if the trees were timber 
 and not vibrant vegetable life ; I forgot 
 that the motionless windhover contained a 
 wonderful and complex anatomy, rapidly 
 throbbing all the while, and that the sky 
 was only a painted ceiling. 
 
 But this simplification of the universe 
 was such a relief. It was nice for once in a 
 way not to be teased by its beauty or over- 
 stimulated by its wonder. I merely received 
 the picture like a photographic plate. 
 
20 A LAST DIARY 
 
 September 25th, 1918. — Saw a long-tailed 
 tit to-day. Exquisite little bird ! It was 
 three years since I saw one. I should like 
 to show one to Hindenburg, and watch 
 them in juxtaposition. I wonder what 
 would be their mutual effect on each other. 
 I once dissected a " specimen " — God for- 
 give me — but I didn't find out anything. 
 
 Emily Bronte 
 
 Septembei' 26th, 1918. — It was over ten 
 years ago that I read Wuthering Heights. 
 Have just read it again aloud to E., and am 
 delighted and amazed. When I came to 
 the dreadfully moving passages of talk be- 
 tween Cathy and Heathcliff 
 
 " ' Let me alone, let me alone,' sobbed 
 Catherine. ' If I have done wrong, I'm 
 dying for it. It is enough ! You left me 
 too ! But I won't upbraid you for it ! I 
 forgive you I Forgive me !' 
 
 " ' It is hard to forgive, and to look at 
 
A LAST DIARY 21 
 
 those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he 
 answered. ' Kiss me again, and don't let me 
 see your eyes! I forgive you what you 
 have done to me. I love my murderer — 
 but yours ? How can I ?' " 
 
 I had to stop and burst out laughing, or I 
 should have burst into tears. E. came over 
 and we read the rest of the chapter together. 
 
 1 can well understand the remark of 
 Charlotte, a little startled and propitiatory 
 — that having created the book, Emily did 
 not know what she had done. She was the 
 last person to appreciate her own work. 
 
 Emily was fascinated by the heauoo yeux 
 of fierce male cruelty, and she herself once, 
 in a furious rage, blinded her pet bulldog 
 with blows from her clenched fist. Wiither- 
 ing Heights is a story of fiendish cruelty and 
 maniacal love passion. Its preternatural 
 power is the singular result of three factors 
 in rarest combination — rare genius, rare 
 moorland surroundings, and rare character. 
 One might almost write her down as Mrs. 
 Nietzsche — her religious beliefs being a com- 
 
22 A LAST DIARY 
 
 paratively minor divergence. However that 
 may be, the young w^oman who wrote in the 
 poem " A Prisoner " that she didn't care 
 whether she went to Heaven or Hell so long 
 as she was dead, is no fit companion for the 
 young ladies of a seminary. *' No coward 
 soul is mine," she tells us in another poem, 
 with her fist held to our wincing nose. I, 
 for one, believe her. It would be idle to 
 pretend to love Emily Bronte, but I venerate 
 her most deeply. Even at this distance, I 
 feel an immediate awe of her person. For 
 her, nothing held any menace. She was 
 adamant over her ailing flesh, defiant of 
 death and the lightnings of her mortal 
 anguish — and her name was Thunder ! 
 
 Raskolnikoff and Sonia 
 
 October 4<f/i, 1918. — This evening, E. being 
 away in Wales for a few days, sat with 
 Nurse, who with dramatic emphasis and real 
 understanding read to me in the firelight St. 
 Matthew's account of the trial of Jesus. It 
 
A LAST DIARY 23 
 
 reminded me, of course, of Raskolnikoff and 
 Sonia, in Ciime and Punishment, reading the 
 Bible together, though my incident was in a 
 minor key. Nurse told me of the wrangle 
 between Mr. P. and Miss B. over teach- 
 ing the Sunday School children all about 
 hell. 
 
 October 5th, 1918. — Some London neu- 
 rologist has injected a serum into a woman's 
 spine with beneficial results, and as her 
 disease is the same as mine, they wish me to 
 try it too. I may be able to walk again, to 
 write, etc., my life prolonged I 
 
 They little know what they ask of me. 
 Whatever the widow may have expressed, I 
 doubt not Jesus received scant gratitude 
 from the widow's son at Nain for his resur- 
 rection — and I have been dead these eighteen 
 months. Death is sweet. All my past life 
 is ashes, and the prospect of beginning anew 
 leaves me stone cold. They can never 
 understand — I mean my relatives — what a 
 typhoon I have come through, and just as I 
 am crippling into port I have no mind to 
 
24 A LAST DIARY 
 
 put to sea again ! I am too tired now to 
 shoulder the burden of Hope again. This 
 chance, had it been earher, had been welcome, 
 but in this present mood Life seems more of 
 a menace than Death ever did. At the best 
 it would be whinings and pinings and terrible 
 regrets. And how could I endure to be 
 watching her struggles, and, if further mis- 
 fortune came, how could 1 meet her eyes ? 
 
 In short, you see, I funk it, yet I am sure 
 the best thing for her would be to wipe out 
 this past, forget it and start fresh. Memory 
 even of these sad years would lose its outline 
 in course of time. My pity merely enervates ; 
 and sympathy takes on an almost cynical 
 appearance where help is needed. 
 
 November 2nd, 1918. — The war news is 
 fine ! For weeks past I have gained full 
 possession of my soul and lived in dignity 
 and serenity of spirit as never before. It 
 has been a gradual process, but I am 
 changed, a better man, calm, peaceful, 
 and, by Jove! top dog. May God forgive 
 me all my follies. My darling E., I 
 
A LAST DIARY 25 
 
 know, is secretly travelling along the 
 same mournful road as I have travelled 
 these many years, and am now arrived 
 at the end of, and I must lend her all 
 the strength I can. But it is hard to try 
 to undo what I have done to her. Time 
 is our ally, but it moves so slowly. 
 
 November 3rd to November 26th, 1918. — 
 Posterity will know more about these times 
 than we do. Men are now too preoccupied 
 to digest the volume of history in each day's 
 newspaper. 
 
 On the 11th my newspaper never came at 
 all, and I endured purgatory. Heard the 
 guns and bells and felt rather weepy. In 
 the afternoon Nurse wheeled me as far as 
 the French Horn, where I borrowed a paper 
 and sat out in the rain reading it. 
 
 Some speculators have talked wildly about 
 the prospect of modern civilisation, in default 
 of a League of Nations, becoming extinct. 
 Modern civilisation can never be extinguished 
 by anything less than a secular cataclysm or 
 a new Ice Age. You cannot analogise the 
 
26 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Minoan civilisation which has clean vanished. 
 The world now is bigger than Crete, and its 
 history henceforward will be a continuous 
 development without any such lacuna as 
 that between Ancient Greece and our Eliza- 
 bethans. Civilisation in its present form is 
 ours to hold and to keep in perpetuity, for 
 better, for worse. There can be no mon- 
 strous deflection in its evolution at this late 
 period any more than we can hope to culti- 
 vate the pineal eye on top of our heads — 
 useful as it would be in these days of 
 aeroplanes. But the chance is gone — evolu- 
 tion has swept past. Perhaps on some other 
 planet mortality may have had more luck. 
 There are, peradventure, happy creatures 
 somewhere in this great universe who 
 generate their own light like glow-worms, 
 or can see in the dark like owls, or who 
 have wings like birds. Or there may be no 
 mortality, only immortality, no stomachs, 
 no 'flu, no pills — and no kisses, which would 
 be a pity ! But it's no good we earth- 
 dwellers repining now. It is too late. Such 
 
A LAST DIARY 27 
 
 things can never be— not in our time, any- 
 how ! So far as I personally am concerned, 
 I am just now very glad man is only bipedal. 
 To be a centipede and have to he in bed 
 would be more than even I could bear. 
 
 If the civilisations of Ancient Greece or 
 Ancient Rome had permeated the whole 
 world they would never have become ex- 
 tinct. 
 
 We are now entered on the kingless 
 republican era. The next struggle, in some 
 ways more bitter and more protracted than 
 this, will be between capital and labour. 
 After that, the millennium of Mr. Wells 
 and the Spiritistic age. After the aeroplane, 
 the soul. Few yet realise what a trans- 
 formation awaits the patient investigations 
 of the psychical researchers. We know next 
 to nothing about the mind force and spirit 
 workings of man. But there wdll be a tussle 
 with hoary old materialists like Edward 
 Clodd. 
 
28 A LAST DIARY 
 
 The Old Lady Shoavs her Coins 
 
 Noveviher 26th, 1918. — My old nurse 
 lapses into bizarre malapropisms. She is 
 afraid the Society for the Propagation of 
 Cruelty to Animals will find fault with the 
 way we house our hens ; for boiling potatoes 
 she prefers to use the camisole (casserole) ! 
 She says Mr. Bolflour, arminstance, von 
 Tjipazz, and so on. Yesterday, in the long 
 serenity of a dark winter's night, with a view 
 to arouse my interest in life, she went and 
 brought some heirloom treasures from the 
 bottom of her massive trunk — some coins of 
 George I. " Of course, they're all obsolute 
 now," she said. " What! absolutely obso- 
 lute?" I enquired in surprise. The answer 
 was in the informative. 
 
 In spite of physical difficulties surround- 
 ing me in a mesh- work, I have now unaided 
 corrected my proofs in joyful triumph — an 
 ecstatic conqueror up to the very end. I 
 
A LAST DIARY 29 
 
 take my life in homoeopathic doses now. I 
 am tethered by but a single slender thread 
 — curiosity to know what Mr. Wells says in 
 the Preface — a little piece of vanity that 
 deserves to be flouted. 
 
 Novernber 29t/i, 1918. — O all ye people I 
 the crowning irony of my life — where is the 
 sacred oil? — is my now cast-iron religious 
 convictions shortly summarised as Love 
 and Unselfishness. These, my moral code, 
 have captured the approval, not only of my 
 ethical but my intellectual side as well. 
 Undoubtedly, and dogmatically if you like, 
 a man should be unselfish for the good of 
 the soul and also to the credit of his 
 intellect. To be selfish is to imprison in a 
 tiny cage the glorious ego capable of pene- 
 trating to the farthest confines of the uni- 
 verse. As for love, it is an instinct and the 
 earnest, like all beauty, physical as well as 
 moral, of our future union into One. " One 
 loving heart sets another on fire." — St. 
 Augustine {Co7ifessions). 
 
30 A LAST DIARY 
 
 December Isf, 1918. — What I have always 
 feared is coming to pass — love for my little 
 daughter. Only another communication 
 string with life to be cut. I want to hear 
 " the tune of little feet along the floor." I 
 am filled with intolerable sadness at the 
 thought of her. Oh ! forgive me, forgive me I 
 
 The " PuGGiLisT " 
 
 December 3rd, 1918. — "My word ! you do 
 look a figure !" the old nurse exclaimed to 
 me to-day in the course of one of the 
 periodical tetanuses of all my muscles, when 
 the whole body is contorted into a rigid 
 tangle. " I shall never make a puggilist " 
 (the word is her own), I said. 
 
 I was rather impressed, though, for she is 
 one of those who, like Mr. Saddletree, I 
 believe, in The Heart of Midlot/iiafi, never 
 notice anything. She would not notice if 
 she came into my room, and I was standing 
 on my head as stiff as a ferule. " You may 
 observe," I should say, "I am standmg 
 
A LAST DIARY 31 
 
 upside down — would you turn me round ?" 
 " With pleasure," is her invariable reply to 
 every request I proffer. 
 
 Victory at Christmas 
 
 December 23rd, 1918. — It is strange to 
 hear all this thunderous tread of victory, 
 peace, and Christmas rejoicings above 
 ground, all muffled by the earth, yet quite 
 audible. They have not buried me deep 
 enough. Here in this vault all is un- 
 changed. It is bad for me, for, as to-day, a 
 faint tremor passes along my palsied limbs 
 — a tremor of lust — lust of life, a desire to 
 be up and mingling in the crowd, to be 
 soaked up by it, to feel a sense of all man- 
 kind flooding the heart, and strong mascu- 
 line youth pulsing at the wrists. I can 
 think of nothing more ennobling than the 
 sense of power, unity, and manhood that 
 comes to one in a sea of humanity, all 
 animated by the same motive — to be sweep- 
 
32 A LAST DIARY 
 
 ing folk off their feet and to be swept off 
 oneself; that is to be man, not merely Mr. 
 Brown. 
 
 Death 
 
 Christmas Day, 1918. — Surely, I muse, a 
 man cannot be accounted a failure who 
 succeeds at last in calling in all his idle 
 desires and wandering motives, and with 
 utter restfulness concentrating his life on 
 the benison of Death. I am happy to think 
 that, like a pilot hard aport, Death is ready 
 at a signal to conduct me over this moaning 
 bar to still deep w^aters. After four years of 
 war, life has grown cheap and ugly, and 
 Death — how desirable and sweet ! Youth 
 now is in love with Death, and many are 
 heavy-hearted because Death flouts their 
 affection — the maimed, halt, and blind. 
 How terrible if Life had no end ! 
 
 With how splendid a zest the young 
 men flung themselves on Death — like 
 
A LAST DIARY 38 
 
 passionate lovers ! A magnificent slaughter 
 — for indifference to Life is the noblest form 
 of unselfishness, and unselfishness is the 
 highest virtue. 
 
 Victurosque Dei celant ut vivere durent^ 
 Felix esse mori. Lucan, with Sir Thomas 
 Browne's rendering : 
 
 We're all deluded, vainly searching ways 
 To make us happy by the length of days ; 
 For cunningly, to make 's protract this breath. 
 The gods conceal the happiness of death. 
 
 This mood, not permanent, but recurring 
 constantly, equals the happiness and comfort 
 of the drowning man when he sinks for the 
 third time. A profound compassion for my 
 dear ones and friends, and all humanity left 
 on the shore of this world struggling, fills 
 my heart. I want to say genially and per- 
 suasively to them as my last testament : 
 Why not die ? What loneliness under the 
 stars I It is only bland, unreflecting eupepsia 
 that leads poets to dithyrambs about the 
 heavenly bodies, and to call them all by 
 beautiful names. Diana ! Yet the moon 
 
84 A LAST DIARY 
 
 is a menace and a terrible object-lesson. 
 Despite Blanco White, it were well if the 
 night had never revealed the stars to us. 
 Suppose a man with the swiftness of light 
 touring through the darkness and cold of 
 this great universe. He would pass through 
 innumerable solar systems and discover 
 plenty of pellets (like this earth, each 
 surging with waves of struggling life, like 
 worms in carrion). And he would tour 
 onwards like this for ever and ever. There 
 would be no end to it, and always he would 
 be discovering more hot suns, more cold and 
 blasted moons, and more pellets, and each 
 pellet would be in an internal fatuous dance 
 of revolutions, the life on it blind and 
 ignorant of all other life outside its own 
 atmosphere. 
 
 But out of this cul-de-sac there is one 
 glorious escape — Death, a way out of Time 
 and space. As long as we go on living, we 
 are as stupid and as caged as these dancing 
 rats with diseased semicircular canals that 
 incessantly run round and round in circles. 
 
A LAST DIARY 35 
 
 But if we be induced to remain in this cul- 
 de-sac, there is always an alleviative in 
 communication and communion with our 
 fellows. Men need each other badly in this 
 world. The stars are crushing, but mankind 
 in the mass is even above the stars — how far 
 above, Death may show, perhaps to our 
 surprise. 
 
 But if I go on, I shall come round to the 
 conviction that life is beer and skittles. 
 Cheerio ! . . . This is not written in despair 
 — " despair is a weakening of faith, hope in 
 God." But I am tired and in need of relief. 
 Death tantalises iny curiosity, and some- 
 times I feel I could kill myself just to satisfy 
 it. But I agree that Death, save as the only 
 solution, is merely a funk-hole. 
 
 Boxing Day, 1918. — James Joyce is my 
 man (in the Forti^ait of the Artist as a Young 
 Man). Here is a writer who tells the truth 
 about himself It is almost impossible to 
 tell the truth. In this journal I have tried, 
 but I have not succeeded. I have set down 
 a good deal, but I cannot tell it. Truth of 
 
36 A LAST DIARY 
 
 self has to be left by the psychology-miner 
 at the bottom of his boring. Perhaps 
 fifty or a hundred years hence Posterity 
 may be told, but Contemporary will never 
 know. See how soldiers deliberately, from 
 a mistaken sense of charity or decency, 
 conceal the horrors of this war. Publishers 
 and Government aid and abet them. Yet a 
 good cinema film of all the worst and most 
 filthy and disgusting side of the war — every- 
 one squeamish and dainty-minded to attend 
 under State compulsion to have their necks 
 scrofFed, their sensitive nose-tips pitched into 
 it, and their rest on lawny couches disturbed 
 for a month after — would do as much to 
 prevent future wars as any League of 
 Nations. 
 
 It is easy to reconcile oneself to man's 
 sorrows by shutting the eyes to them. But 
 there is no satisfaction in so easy a victory. 
 How many people have been jerry-building 
 their faith and creed all their lives by this 
 method 1 One breath of truth and honest 
 self-dealing would blow the structure down 
 
A LAST DIARY 37 
 
 like a house of cards. The opthnist and 
 believer must bear in mind such things as 
 the CCS. described by M. Duhamel, 
 or this from M. Latzko's Men in 
 Battle : 
 
 " The captain raised himself a little, and 
 saw the ground and a broad dark shadow 
 that Weixler cast. Blood ? He was 
 bleeding ? Or what ? Surely that was 
 blood. It couldn't be anything but blood. 
 And yet it stretched out so peculiarly, and 
 drew itself up like a thin thread to Weixler, 
 up to where his hand pressed his body as 
 though he wanted to pull up the roots that 
 bound him to the earth. 
 
 " The captain had to see. He pulled his 
 head farther out from under the mound — 
 and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite 
 horror. The wretched man was dragging 
 his entrails behind him." 
 
 The reviewer suggests that the book should 
 be read by school-children in every school in 
 the world ! I should like to take it (and I 
 hope it is large and heavy) and bring it down 
 
38 A LAST DIARY 
 
 on the heads of the heartless, unimaginative 
 mob, who would then have to look at it, if 
 only to see what it was that cracked down 
 on their skulls so heavily. 
 
 Certainly Joyce has chosen the easier 
 method of transferring his truth of self to a 
 fictional character, thus avoiding recognition. 
 I have failed in the method urged by 
 Tolstoi in the diary of his youth : " Would 
 it not be better to say " (he asks), " * This is 
 the kind of man I am ; if you do not like 
 me, I am sorry, but God made me so ' ? . . . 
 Let every man show just what he is, and 
 then what has been weak and laughable in 
 him will become so no longer." Tolstoi 
 himself did not live up to this. He con- 
 fessed to his diary, but he kept his diary to 
 himself. Some of my weaknesses I publish, 
 and no doubt you say at once " self- 
 advertisement." I agree more or less, but 
 believe egotisvi is a diagnosis nearer the 
 mark. I do not aspire to Tolstoi's ethical 
 motives. Mine are intellectual. I am the 
 scientific investigator of myself, and if the 
 
A LAST DIARY 39 
 
 published researches bring me into notice, I 
 am not averse from it, though interest in my 
 work comes first. 
 
 Did not Sir Thomas Browne say ever so 
 long ago : " We carry within us the wonders 
 we seek without us ; there is all Africa and 
 her prodigies in us . . . "? 
 
1919 
 
I 
 
 1919 
 
 January 1st, 1919. — My dear Arthur ! — if 
 it's a boy, call him Andrew Chatto Windus. 
 Then perhaps the firm will give him a 
 royalty when he is published at the font. 
 
 My life here has quite changed its orienta- 
 tion. I am no longer an intellectual snob. 
 If I were, E. and I would have parted ere 
 now. I never liked to take her to the B.M. 
 (in my petty way) because there all the values 
 are intellectual. 
 
 1 write this by candlelight in bed. In 
 the room above E. is in bed with 'flu. We 
 have had days of cold rain, and just now it 
 drips drearily off the roof, and the wind 
 blows drearily in gusts round the cottage as 
 if tired of blowing, and as if blowing 
 prospects were nothing to be roaring 
 about. 
 
 43 
 
44 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Wilson 
 
 President Wilson is my hero. I worship 
 him. I could ask him to stamp across my 
 prostrate body to save getting his feet wet 
 in a puddle. But 1 know nothing about him 
 save what I read in the Nation, and I don't 
 want to. Supposing I discovered traits . . . ? 
 I have had enough of disenchantment to last 
 me a lifetime. If he is not the greatest 
 figure in modern history, then there's no 
 money in Wall Street. 
 
 January ^rd, 1919. — She taxes me with 
 indifference, says my sympathy is cold. By 
 God 1 this is hard to bear. But she is so 
 desperate, she is lunging out right and 
 left at all. I fear for her mental balance. 
 What's going to happen to us ? Why does 
 everyone seem to have forsaken us ? Ah ! it 
 is almost too hard for me to bear. And I 
 can't break down. I am like ice. I can't 
 melt. I had a presentiment of evil awaiting 
 us about now. I don't know why, unless 
 
A LAST DIARY 45 
 
 long experience of it produces a nose for it, 
 so that I can smell it in advance. 
 
 January Mh, 1919, — I have talked of 
 being in love with ones own ruin, Bashkirt- 
 sefF of liking to suffer, to be in despair. 
 Light, frivolous talk. At the most, such 
 moods are only short lulls between the 
 spasms of agony of suffering ; one longs to 
 be free of them as of acute physical pain, to 
 be unconscious. I look forward to night, 
 to darkness, rest, and sleep. I sleep well 
 between twelve and six and then watch the 
 dawn, from black (and the owl's hoot) to 
 grey (and the barncock's crow) to white (and 
 the blackbirds' whistle). The oak beam on 
 my ceiling, the Japanese print on the wall 
 come slowly into view, and I dread them. 
 T dread the day with my whole soul. Each 
 dawn is hopeless. Yes, it is true, they have 
 not buried me deep enough. I don't think I 
 am buried at all. They have not even taken 
 me down from the tree. And my wife they 
 are just nailing up. I can never forget, 
 wherever I may be, in Heaven or Hell, her 
 
46 A LAST DIARY 
 
 figure in dressing-gown and shawl drawn up 
 erect — but swaying because she is so weak — 
 before me at the fireside (she had just been 
 bending over me and kissing me, hot cheeks 
 and hot tears that mingled and bound us 
 together to that moment for ever), her head 
 tilted towards the ceiling, and her poor face 
 looking so ill and screwed up as she half- 
 whispered : " Oh, God ! it's so hopeless." 
 I think that picture is impressed even on the 
 four walls of the room, its memory is 
 photographed on the air to haunt those who 
 may live here in the time to come. I said : 
 "Fight it out, dear. Don't give in. I 
 believe in a personal devil. The human 
 spirit is unconquerable. You'll come 
 through if you fight." It was but a few 
 weeks ago that she came home one evening, 
 dug out from a drawer her beautiful dance 
 dress, got into it, and did a pas seul for my 
 pleasure round the little cottage room. 
 That ogre Fate was drawing out her golden 
 wing and mocking her loss of liberty. Ah ! 
 the times we intended to have together ! 
 
A LAST DIARY 47 
 
 January Stk, 1919. — I lie stiff and con- 
 torted till Nurse arrives at nine-thirty. She 
 straightens me out and bolsters me up. 
 Breakfast at nine. Cigarettes while I listen 
 with ravenous ears for the postman. No 
 letter for me, then plop right down into the 
 depth among the weeds and goblins of the 
 deep sea for an hour. There usually is no 
 letter for me. 
 
 My chief discovery in sickness and mis- 
 fortune is the callousness of people to our 
 case — not from hard-heartedness (everyone 
 is kind), but from absence of sympathetic 
 imagination. People don't know the horrors 
 and they can't imagine them — perhaps they 
 are unimaginable. You will notice how 
 suicides time and again in farewell notes to 
 their closest and dearest have the same 
 refrain, " I don't believe even you can realise 
 all I suffer." Poor devil ! of course not. 
 Beyond a certain point, suffering must be 
 borne alone, and so must extreme joy. Ah ! 
 we are lonely barks. 
 
 Januai^y 13th, 1919. — All the postman 
 
48 A LAST DIARY 
 
 brought me to-day was an income-tax 
 form ! 
 
 Last night — Nurse (having put me back 
 to bed). — Shall I shut up your legs ? 
 
 B. — No, thank you. They've been bent 
 up all the evening, and it's a relief to have 
 them out straight. 
 
 Later — B. — Before you go you might 
 uncross my legs. 
 
 (She pulls bed-clothes back, seizes my 
 feet, one in each hand, and forces them 
 apart, chanting humorously : "Any scissors 
 to grind ?" As I have pointed out to her, 
 the sartorius muscle, being on the inside of 
 the thigh and stronger than the others, has 
 the effect of crossing my legs when a tetanic 
 spasm occurs.) 
 
 N. — There, good-night. 
 
 B. — And a good-night to you. 
 
 N. — I'll come in first thing in the morning. 
 
 \_Exit. 
 
 I lie on my back and rest awhile. Then 
 I force myself on to the left side by putting 
 my right arm over the left side of the bed 
 
A LAST DIARY 49 
 
 beneath the wood-work and pulling (my 
 right arm is stronger than any of the other 
 limbs). To-night, Nurse had not placed me 
 in the middle of the bed (I was too much 
 over on the right side), so even my long arm 
 could not reach down beneath the wood- 
 work on the left. I cursed Nanny for a 
 scabby old bean, struggled, and at last got 
 over on my left side. The next thing was 
 to get my legs bent up — now out as stiff 
 and straight as ferrules. When lying on the 
 left side I long ago found out that it is 
 useless to get my right leg up first, as it only 
 shoots out again when I come to grapple 
 with the left. So I put my right arm down, 
 seized the left leg just above the knee and 
 pulled ! The first result is always a violent 
 spasm in the legs and back. But I hang on 
 and presently it dies away, and the leg 
 begins to move upward a little. Last night 
 Nanny uncrossed my legs, but was not 
 careful to separate them. Consequently, 
 knee stuck side by side to knee, and foot to 
 foot, as if glued, and I found, in pulling at my 
 
 4 
 
50 A LAST DIARY 
 
 left, I had the stubborn live weight of both 
 to lift up. I would get them part way, then 
 by a careless movement of the hand on a 
 ticklish spot both would shoot out again. 
 So on for an hour — my only relief to curse 
 Nanny. 
 
 And thus, any time, any week, these 
 last eighteen months. But I have faith 
 and hope and love in spite of all. I forgive 
 even Nanny ! 
 
 January 19th, 1919. — The situation is 
 eased. E. is at Brighton for a change, and 
 has P. with her (she came up from Wales 
 with the nurse after seven months' visit). 
 But I am heartsore and unhappy. 
 
 January 20t/i, 1919. — If I were to sum 
 up my life in one word I should say 
 suffocation. R. has been my one blow- 
 hole. Now I look forward to a little 
 oxygen when my Journal is published ! I 
 am delighted and horrified at the same 
 time. What will my relatives say ? 'Twill 
 be the surprise of their lives. I regard it as 
 a revanche. The world has always gagged 
 
A LAST DIARY 51 
 
 and suppressed me — now I turn and hit it 
 in the belly. 
 
 Januarij 22nd, 1919. — Am now lodging 
 alone under one roof with Nanny 1 Makes 
 me think of some of Sterne's adventures in 
 the Sentimental Journey, only I must shut 
 my eyes very tight to see the likeness and 
 imagine very hard. This is a selection from 
 last night's conversation (remember she is 
 deaf, old, and obstinate ; she hates to 
 be instructed or corrected ; hence her 
 ignorance and general incapacity) : 
 
 Ornithology 
 
 N. — I think a sparrow out at the back has 
 young birds, by the way she carries off the 
 food. 
 
 B. — It's too early for young sparrows. 
 A sparrow is too worldly wise to encumber 
 himself with a young family in January, or 
 in February or March for that matter. 
 
 N. — I've seen young sparrows in March. 
 
 B. — Why didn't you write to the papers 
 about it ? 
 
52 A LAST DIARY 
 
 N. —There wasn't so much writing to the 
 papers in my days. But there were things 
 I could have written about. Young 
 plovers, for example, I used to catch and 
 hold in my lap. You know the plover? 
 It's called the lapwing sometimes ; only a 
 few young at a time 
 
 B.— Four. 
 
 N. — Yes. Now Charlie used to show me 
 partridges' nests with as many as twenty- 
 four. 
 
 B. — Yes, but laid probably by more than 
 one hen. 
 
 N. — Charlie said it was all one bird. The 
 prettiest nest he ever showed me was a 
 greenfinch's. 
 
 B. — What was that like ? 
 
 N. — It was swung underneath the bough 
 of a fir-tree right at the end. 
 
 B. — That was not a greenfinch's. 
 
 N. — Well, Charlie said it was, and he 
 showed it to all of us ; we all saw it, 
 
 B. — It was the nest of a goldcrest. 
 
 N. — Yes ? Charlie had a wonderful col- 
 
A LAST DIARY 53 
 
 lection of eggs. He could name them all, 
 and labelled the names on them. They 
 would cover the table when all set out. 
 
 B.— Yes ? 
 
 N. — Oh, I forgot, another nest he showed 
 me — a kingfisher's. 
 
 B.— What was that like ? 
 
 N. — It was right down among some reeds 
 of a stream. 
 
 B. — What were the eggs like ? 
 
 N. — There were no eggs in it when I saw 
 it. Another pretty 
 
 B. — That was not a kingfisher's nest. A 
 kingfisher nests at the end of a hole in the 
 bank of the stream. 
 
 N. — Charlie said it was. Another pretty 
 nest was the robin's. 
 
 B. — The prettiest nest of all, I think, is 
 the long-tailed tit's. 
 
 N. — Oh, yes, I know that. 
 
 B.— What's it like ? 
 
 N. — I can't recollect. 
 
 B. — All arched over with sticks and lined 
 with green leaves ? 
 
54 A LAST DIARY 
 
 N, — Oh, yes. 
 
 I suspect " Charlie " (whoever he was) 
 could not tell a hawk from a handsaw, even 
 when the wind was southerly. Now what a 
 stupid old woman not to make better use 
 of me ! 
 
 January 237'd, 1919. — Have been sustain- 
 ing a hell of tedium by reading a sloppy 
 novel — sentimental mucilage — called Con- 
 7'ad in Quest of His Youth, which sent me 
 in quest of mine. I see now that my youth 
 was over before I came to London. For 
 never after did I experience such electric 
 
 tremors of joy and fear as, e.g., over . 
 
 As a small boy I knew her, and always 
 lifted my hat. But one day at the age of 
 sixteen, with a heart like nascent oxygen 
 (though I did not know it), I lifted my hat 
 and, in response to her smile, fell violently 
 in love. During country rambles I liked to 
 pause and carve her initials on the bark of a 
 tree. It pleased me to confide my burning 
 secret to the birds and wild things. I knew 
 it was safe in their keeping. And I always 
 
A LAST DIARY 55 
 
 hoped she might come along one day and 
 see the letters there, and feel curiosity, yet 
 she couldn't find out. ... I daresay they 
 are still legible in places, some of them of 
 exquisite rural beauty ; though the letters 
 themselves probably now look obscured and 
 distorted by the evergrowing bark, the trees 
 and locality doubtless are still as beautiful : 
 
 " Upon a poet's page I wrote 
 Of old two letters of her name ; 
 Part seemed she of the effulgent thought 
 Whence that high singer's rapture came. 
 When now I turn the leaf the same 
 Immortal light illumes the lay, 
 But from the letters of her name 
 The radiance has waned away." 
 
 For a whole year I was in agony, meeting 
 her constantly in the town, but never daring 
 to stop and speak. I used to return home 
 after a short cap-lifting encounter with an 
 intolerable ache that I did not understand. 
 Even in subsequent miseries I do not 
 believe I suffered mental pain equal to this 
 in acuteness. I used to lift my cap to her 
 in the High Street, then dart down a side- 
 
56 A LAST DIARY 
 
 street and around, so as to meet her again, 
 and every time I met her came a raging 
 stormy conflict between fear and desire. I 
 wanted to stop — my heart always failed me. 
 How I cursed myself for a poltroon the 
 very next moment I 
 
 I always haunted all the localities — park, 
 concerts, skating-rink — where I thought to 
 see her. In church on Sundays I became 
 electrified if she was there. One afternoon 
 at a concert in company with my sister, I 
 determined on a bold measure : I left before 
 it was over — saw my sister home, and at 
 once darted back to the hall and met my 
 paragon coming out. She was with her 
 friend (how I hated her !) and her friend's 
 mother (how I feared her I) I was seven- 
 teen, she was seventeen, and of ravishing, 
 virginal beauty. I spoke. I said (obviously) : 
 " How did you enjoy the concert ?" 
 
 While the other two walked on, she 
 replied " Very much." That was all. I 
 could think of nothing more, so I left her, 
 and she rejoined her friends. It had been a 
 
A LAST DIARY 57 
 
 terrible nervous strain to me. At the crucial 
 second my nose twitched and I felt my face 
 contorted. But I walked home on air and 
 my soul sang like a bird. It was the beau- 
 tiful rhapsody of a boy. There was nothing 
 carnal in it. Indeed, the poor girl was 
 idealised aloft into something scarcely 
 human. But that at the moment of speak- 
 ing to her I was in the power of an unpre- 
 cedented emotion is obvious if I write that 
 neither before nor after has anything ever 
 caused facial twitching. It is evidence of 
 my ardour and youth. 
 
 Our acquaintance remained tenuous for 
 long. I was shy and inexperienced. I was 
 too shy to write. I heard rumours that she 
 was staying by the sea, so I went down and 
 wandered about to try to see her. In vain. 
 I went down another day, and it began to 
 pour with rain. So I spent all my time 
 sheltering under doorways and shop awn- 
 ings, cursing my luck, and groaning at the 
 waste of my precious time. " There was a 
 large halil)ut on a fishmonger's stall," I 
 
58 A LAST DIARY 
 
 posted in my diary, "but not caught, I 
 think, off this coast." Then follows ab- 
 ruptly : 
 
 " A daughter of the gods she walked, 
 Divinely tall, and most divinely fair." 
 
 I bought a local paper in the High Street, 
 and, examining the " Visitors' List," I went 
 through hundreds of names, and at the end 
 saw " The most recent arrivals will be found 
 on page 5." 1 turned to page 5 and found 
 nothing there. I complained to the 
 manager. " Ah, yes, I know, an unfor- 
 tunate oversight, sir. If you will leave 
 your name and address, I will see it appears 
 in next week's issue." I felt silly, and 
 slunk off, saying : " Oh, never mind. I 
 don't care much about it." 
 
 "It is the more worrying to me because 
 I know — 
 
 (1) It is wasting good time. 
 
 (2) A common occurrence to others, and 
 they all get over it. 
 
 (3) There is no comfort in study or 
 reading. Knowledge is dull and dry. 
 
A LAST DIARY 59 
 
 Poetry seems to me to be more attrac- 
 tive." 
 
 Then immediately follows a description 
 of a ring snake with notes on its anatomy. 
 Then a few days later : " Have not seen my 
 beloved all the week. Where on earth has 
 she been hiding herself?" And again: "I 
 cannot hope ever to see more wonderful 
 eyes — of the richest, sweetest brown-amber, 
 soft, yet bright." At length we became 
 friends, wrote letters to one another (her 
 first one was an event), and went for walks. 
 
 Of course, the next stage was kissing her. 
 It took me over another twelve months to 
 kiss her. I must have been close on nine- 
 teen. We had been walking in the woods 
 all the afternoon, then had tea in the garden 
 tea-rooms. We sat in the green arbour till 
 after dark. I was in a terrible state. Rest- 
 lessness and fever were exhausting me. 
 Desire struggled with pride. What if she 
 smacked my face? Then I lit a cigarette 
 for her (I used to buy her httle heUotrope 
 boxes of cigarettes labelled in gold " My 
 
60 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Darling"). Greatly daring, I put my left 
 arm round her neck, and holding the match- 
 box, struck a light and kissed her at the 
 same moment. She said, " 1 ought not to 
 let you really," quite calm. I was in too 
 much of a turmoil to answer, but kissed her 
 again. 
 
 I kissed her many times after that. One 
 wet afternoon we had spent kissing in a 
 linhay by a country lane. Coming home, 
 we met her sister's baby, and she stopped to 
 lean over the pram, and crow. This irritated 
 me, and I strolled on. " Do you like 
 babies ?" I asked when she came up. " Yes," 
 she answered, " do you ?" " Not much," 
 said I with dryness, and changed what I felt 
 to be almost an indelicate subject. After 
 all, a baby is only a kiss carried to a rational 
 conclusion, in natural sequence, sometimes 
 arithmetical, sometimes geometrical. It de- 
 pends on the length of the engagement. 
 
 But it was curious how this kissing 
 destroyed my ideal. I soon knew I was 
 not in love. With callous self-possession I 
 
A LAST DIARY 61 
 
 was investigating a new sensation, and found 
 it very enjoyable. " 1 kiss you" I said to 
 her one night in the park, "but you never 
 kiss me." She at once gave me a passionate 
 token on my Ups, and having exacted thus 
 much tribute, I sank into complacency, self- 
 adulation, and, ultimately, indifference. I 
 had been swxhai'ged. The relief was too 
 complete. After exchanging impassioned 
 verses (oh, such tosh !), each other's photo- 
 graphs, and plenty of letters, my romance 
 died a natural death. My agony and sweat 
 became a trifle, and one I wished to blot 
 from my memory out of boyish sense of 
 shame. 
 
 Doubtless I broke her heart. She had 
 left the town, when one morning I received 
 a last pathetic appeal. I remember now 
 the nausea that love-letter caused me. 1 
 put it on the fire, and thought, " Heavens 
 what a fool the girl is !" In 1913 I met her 
 igain, and had the effrontery to go to her 
 lome and have dinner with her people. 
 ;See May 31st and June 3rd, 1913.) 
 
62 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Now, in my old age, I like to gaze back 
 on this flashing gem of youth. It still 
 reflects the light, and she is a princess 
 again. " Love in the Valley " becomes a 
 personal memory instead of someone else's 
 poem. 
 
 Ah I what a heart I had in those days ! 
 a nascent oxygen with an affinity for every 
 pretty girl who smiled at me. I fell in 
 love with a post-office girl, a silversmith's 
 daughter, a grocer's daughter, the daughter 
 
 of a judge. For months I worshipped , 
 
 and bought every kind of photograph of 
 her. But I've never seen her in my life, 
 and now she's Dead Sea fruit. I had never 
 set eyes on any beautiful women until 1 
 came to London. Then I was dazzled by 
 them all — in every rank or station, in the 
 street or on the street, in the Cafe de 
 I'Europe or the Cafe Royal — pretty, laugh- 
 ing girls, handsome women, or beautiful 
 pieces of mere flesh only. ... I was 
 doomed to destruction from the first. If 
 I had not developed disease, if I had 
 
A LAST DIARY 63 
 
 come up from the country a healthy, lusty 
 youth, I must soon have got on the rocks. 
 Now that the blood is slow, it is difficult to 
 recall the anguish. That I only succumbed 
 twice is a marvel to me and a joy. My 
 situation at one time was fraught with dire 
 possibilities. My secret life was a tumult. 
 I never went skylarking with jaunty pals in 
 the West End. I crept along the streets 
 alone ... all this time I was alone, in 
 dirty diggings, by myself. I am consumed 
 with self-pity at the thought. 
 
 I cannot understand how saints like 
 Augustine and Tolstoi confess how they 
 went with women in their youth, but recall 
 no sense of nausea. They just deplore their 
 moral lapse. When St. Augustine's mother 
 enjoined him never to lie with his neighbour's 
 wife, he laughed at the advice as womanish ! 
 
 For myself, I never received any parental 
 instruction. I first learned of the wonder 
 of generation through the dirty filter of a 
 barmaid's nasty mind. 
 
 I remember — — telling me in sardonic 
 
64 A LAST DIARY 
 
 vein that the only advice his father ever 
 gave him on leaving home was to keep his 
 bowels open. The present generation has 
 altered all that. 
 
 Birds' eggs were another electrifying 
 factor in my youth. I can remember 
 tramping to and fro all one warm June 
 afternoon over a bracken- covered sandy 
 waste, searching for a nightjar's eggs. H. 
 and I quartered out the ground systematic- 
 ally, till presently, after two hours' search, 
 the hen goat-sucker flipped up at my feet 
 and fluttered away like a big moth across 
 the silvery bracken out of sight. Lying 
 before me on the ground were two long, 
 grey eggs, marbled like pebbles. I turned 
 away from this intoxicating vision, flicking 
 my fingers as if I had been bitten. Then I 
 turned, approached slowly, and gloated. 
 
 It was just such an effect on me as a 
 girl's beautiful face used to make — equally 
 tantalising and out of reach. I stared, 
 fingered them, put one to my lips. Then 
 it was over. I had to leave them, and an 
 
A LAST DIAKY 65 
 
 equal thrill at goat-suckers' eggs could 
 never return again. 
 
 The Cottage on the Shore 
 
 January 24M, 1919. — It was as mysterious 
 as Stevenson's Pavilion on the Links. For a 
 long time T never noticed any indication of 
 its being inhabited, save a few chickens at 
 the back which no one seemed to feed. I 
 could see it from miles around, as it was situ- 
 ated in a desolate, treeless waste, thousands 
 of acres of marshes and duckponds (known 
 as the Mires) on the one side, and on the 
 other a wilderness of sandy links and sand- 
 hills swarming with rabbits (known as the 
 Burrows). Immediately in front, the 
 waters of a broad tidal estuary came up 
 almost to the door during spring tides. 
 The nearest human habitation was the 
 lighthouse, a mile away round the corner 
 on the sands near the harbour bar. In my 
 rambles in search of bird or beast, I used 
 occasionally, while eating sandwiches at 
 
 5 
 
66 A LAST DIARY 
 
 midday on a sandhill top, to turn my field- 
 glasses on the cottage idly. For long I 
 saw no one. Then one spring, while 
 thousands of lapwings circled above my 
 head, calling indignantly at me " Little 
 boo-oy," and larks dotted the blue sky 
 everywhere in little white-hot needle-points 
 of song, I saw a tiny man — a manikin — 
 come out of this tiny cottage — a doll's 
 house — and throw some corn to the chickens. 
 He was three miles away, and by the time 
 that I arrived at the cottage, the little man 
 had disappeared. It was a little four-roomed 
 cottage, with no path leading up to it, no 
 garden, no enclosure, only a few hardy 
 shrubs to keep the sandy soil from drifting. 
 For a long time I never saw him again, and 
 began to think he had been an hallucination. 
 But the desolate cottage was still there and 
 the chickens were still alive, so they must 
 have been fed. Then one day I ran up 
 against him on the Mires, and we exchanged 
 greetings. He was a round, tubby, shorty 
 man with a stubble of beard. Devon folk l 
 
A LAST DIARY 67 
 
 would have called him bungy, stuggy. His 
 face bore a ludicrous resemblance to the 
 monkey in the " Monkey Brand "' advertise- 
 ment, only fatter and rounder. We dis- 
 cussed birds (he was the gamekeeper) and 
 became fast friends. He would take me 
 the round of his duckponds, and sometimes 
 he sent me a postcard when there were 
 wild swans or geese " in over," or when he 
 had discovered a "stranger" on his water. 
 
 But this did not dispel the mystery of 
 the cottage. For he had a woman inside 
 whose presence was never suspected until I 
 had occasion to knock at the door. There 
 was no answer and no sound. All the 
 windows were shut. I knocked again, and 
 heard a distant noise. Then there were 
 long, preparatory noises, as if someone were 
 climbing up from an underground cellar or 
 cave, or wandering down a long, dark 
 1 passage. Bolts were drawn (and powerful 
 I enough they sounded to make fast a port- 
 cullis), and I watched the door opening 
 f with curiosity ; a tall, fat, middle - aged 
 
68 A LAST DIARY 
 
 woman stood there blinking at me like an 
 owl unaccustomed to daylight. Her eyes 
 were weak blue, and her face puffy and red. 
 
 " Oh ! is Fedder about ?" I enquired. 
 
 Without changing a muscle of her face, 
 she replied mechanically : 
 
 " No, but Fedder said if the young 
 gentleman called, I was to say that the 
 shovellers brought off their brood all right." 
 
 I thanked her and departed, as she was 
 obviously embarrassed. In her moping 
 countenance I detected a startled look — 
 Robinson Crusoe, as it were, discovering 
 Friday all at once without any advertising 
 Friday. I heard her bolting the door again, 
 as I strolled off down by the waterside to 
 examine the tide-wrack. It was almost 
 eerie to hear the cackle of herring gulls 
 overhead. They seemed to be laughing at 
 the stupidity of human nature. 
 
 There are some things the imagination 
 boggles at. For example, what did that 
 woman in that desolate cottage do ? What 
 did she think about ? What were her 
 
A LAST DIARY 69 
 
 wants, her grievances ? Where were her 
 relatives ? Did she ever love, or want little 
 babies ? Did murder stories interest her at 
 all ? Drugs ? That is an easy explanation 
 — to jump at some horrible vice. Theatrical. 
 In reality I should have found, I expect, the 
 answer would be just nothing at all. She 
 did nothing, thought nothing, perhaps only 
 feared a little, so she always bolted the door 
 and hid herself away. I suppose if one saw 
 nothing bigger than a kingplover or a seagull 
 during the twelve months, and heard no 
 noises other than the trumpet of wild 
 swans and the cries of Fedder's wild fowl, a 
 tall man six feet high, with a voice like a 
 human being's, must seem a little dis- 
 concerting. 
 
 January 2M, 1919. — Here is some 
 arithmetic which ought to please me. But 
 it doesn't. 1 wrote : 
 
 12 papers in the Zoologist in the years 
 1905-1910; 6 in the P.Z.S. (1912- 
 1916) ; 7 in the Annals and Magazine 
 
70 A LAST DIARY 
 
 of Natural History (1912-1916) ; 3 
 in Bulletin of Eiitomological Reseaj'ch; 
 2 B.M. pamphlets, in addition to 18 
 literary efforts (some in newspapers 
 and some not published), and other 
 old scientific papers in different 
 periodicals such as British Birds, the 
 Journal of Animal Behaviour, etc. 
 In all Q5 publications. 
 
 Further, in my locker lie : 
 
 6 unpublished literary MSS. 
 
 17 volumes of Journal post quarto, pre- 
 war Is. thickness. 
 
 12 smaller volumes written in boyhood. 
 
 6 volumes (post quarto Is.) of abstracted 
 entries from the Journal. 
 
 2j post quarto volumes of abstract, 
 abstracted from the volumes of 
 abstract for publication purposes. 
 
 In vulgar parlance, cacoethes scribendi. 
 January 27th, 1919. — Have you ever 
 considered what a fever of anticipation 
 
A LAST DIARY 71 
 
 must be raging in me as I sit by the fire, 
 day after day, awaiting the constantly 
 delayed publication of this my Journal ; how 
 I strain to hold it, to smell the fresh ink, to 
 hear the binding crackle as I open it out, 
 and above all to read what one of the fore- 
 most literary men thinks about me and my 
 book. 
 
 I wait with head on the block for my 
 child to be brought to receive my farewell 
 blessings. 
 
 Will it come in time ? 1 nearly died last 
 month of 'flu, and get worse almost daily. I 
 am running a neck-and-neck race up the 
 straight with my evil genius on the black 
 horse. It is touch and go who wins ; and if 
 I do, I expect some horrible forfeit will be 
 exacted of me, a penalty will have to be 
 paid — Use - majeste — for my audacity in 
 challenging the stars in their courses and 
 defeating them. 
 
 My life has certainly been an astonishing 
 episode in human story. To me, it appears 
 as a titanic struggle between consuming 
 
72 A LAST DIARY 
 
 ambition and adverse fortune. Behold a 
 penniless youth thirsting for knowledge intro- 
 duced into the world out of sheer devilment, 
 hundreds of miles from a university, with a 
 towering ambition, but cursed with ill-health 
 and a twofold nature — pleasure-loving as 
 well as labour- loving. The continuous, 
 almost cunning frustration of my endeavours 
 long ago gave me a sense of struggle with 
 some evil genius. Think of the elaborate 
 precautions I took of my MSS. during the 
 air-raids ! I saw each bomb labelled 
 " Barbellion's contemptible ambition." 
 Consider the duplication of abstracts — 1 
 saw an army of housemaids prowling round 
 to throw them on the fire after Carlyle's 
 French devolution. 1 have been consciously 
 contesting with an incendiary, a bomber 
 from Hunland, a wicked housemaid, a whole 
 world of wicked folk, in league with a 
 hostile spirit decided on killing and obliter- 
 ating me and my ambition — a grotesque 
 couple, a monkey astride a IiippogrifF, 
 an ass with a Jabberwock! True, he has 
 
A LAST DIARY 73 
 
 ruined me ; yet the struggle is not over. 
 With demoniac determination, I am 
 getting on still, crawling on all fours, with 
 the dagger between my teeth. I am 
 mauled, battered, scorched, but not slain. 
 The dagger I hope to see published 
 by Messrs. Chatto and Windus next 
 month. 
 
 You can search all history and fiction 
 for an ambition more powerful than mine 
 and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor 
 Wilhelm II, nor Keats. No, I am not proud 
 of it, not at all. The wonder is that I 
 remain sane, the possessed of such a demon. 
 I am sane or I could not make fun of it as 
 I do. Ah ! my God ! it is a ridiculous 
 weakness, but the leopard cannot change 
 his spots, and I feel just as hopelessly 
 spotty as a leopard, 
 
 January 28th, 1919.— "The rest is 
 silence" — I should like this inscribed at 
 the end of this garrulous Journal, an in- 
 scription for the base of my self-erected 
 monument. 
 
74 A LAST DIARY 
 
 ROWBOTHAM, THE MoDERN HOMER 
 
 January 30tk, 1919. — The Human Epic ; 
 The Twelfth Epic Poem, of the World; The 
 Story of the Universe and Prehistoric Man; 
 The Vanished Continent in the Atlantic; 
 The Ice Age ; The Anemones, Corals, and 
 Population of the Primeval Ocean (" These 
 latter cantos have been made the subject of 
 interesting lectures" — The Bard); Other 
 Epics by liozvbotham, the Modern Homer ; 
 God and the Devil; The Swiss Lake 
 Dwellers ; The Epic of the Empire ; 
 London; Charlemagne. Each Epic 2s. 6d. 
 Foyle, 121, Charing Cross Road. 
 
 Who is "The Bard"? What a safe 
 remark to make about the anemones and 
 corals ! Who is Rowbotham ? I wish 
 someone would lecture to me on him. 
 What are the " other epics of the world "? 
 The twelfth has the suggestion of quack 
 verse sold as a green liquid from a four- 
 wheeled vehicle at a country fair. But I 
 can't run to 2s. 6d., though I ache to read 
 and know you, O Rowbotham ! Rowbotham, 
 
A LAST DIARY 75 
 
 the late 3f?\ Homer, I suppose. Say, though, 
 who is this Rowbotham ? 
 
 Snow hes on the ground outside. All the 
 morning it was too dark in my vault to read. 
 Even had it been light, my eyesight had 
 become temporarily too deranged for me to 
 see the print. Had my eyes been all right, 
 it was so cold that I had to keep my hands 
 under the bedclothes. 
 
 All the afternoon I dozed. In the even- 
 ing I sat by the fire and read Uim-burial. 
 During the day, at long intervals, Nanny 
 comes in, and I shout out fatuities — e.g., 
 " Still snowing," or " Colder than ever." 
 
 There are some days when I give up, 
 surrender voluntarily every earthly desire, 
 when every thread binding me to life is cut. 
 I long to be free, and hack and cut in a 
 frenzy — frenzies in which I curse and swear 
 out loud to myself, alternating with fits 
 of terrible apathy, when I am indifferent to 
 everything and everybody, when the petty 
 routine of my existence, washing, eating, 
 and sitting out, goes on and carries me along 
 
76 A LAST DIARY 
 
 with it mechanically. And I wonder all 
 the time why on earth 1 trouble about it. 
 I look at human life and human affairs with 
 inhuman detachment, yet not from the side 
 of the angels. I am neither one thing nor 
 the other, neither dead nor alive, a nonde- 
 script creature in a No-Man's Land, and, 
 like all who keep a middle course, not 
 claimed with any enthusiasm by either side. 
 The living must be tired of me, and the 
 dead don't seem eager for my reception. 
 Yet I must go somewhere, and by heavens 1 
 I will not choose willingly, God knows, 
 the bare heath of this world. The bare 
 bodkin is an alluring symbol to lonely 
 paralytics, meaning liberty, fraternity, peace. 
 Ever since 1 came into it, I have felt an 
 alien in this life — a refugee by reason of 
 some pre-natal extradiction. I always felt 
 alien to my father and mother. I was 
 different from them. I knew and was 
 conscious of the detachment. They seemed 
 the children and I was a very old man. 
 My father's youth, which continued to 
 
A LAST DIARY 77 
 
 flower past middle-age and in the midst 
 of adversity and terrible affliction, and his 
 courage and happiness of soul I admired 
 greatly. But we were very far from one 
 another. I was proud and irritable. My 
 mother I loved, and she loved us all with an 
 instant love and tenderness such as I have 
 never seen in any mother since. I did not 
 realise this at the time, alas ! Her love 
 helped to wear her out. She never parted 
 from me for however short a period with- 
 out tears — tears certainly of weakness — 
 especially later, of sheer inability to stand 
 steady any longer against the bufFetings of a 
 hard lot. But we had little in common. I 
 was a queer duckling, self-willed and de- 
 termined at the water's edge, heedless of her 
 frantic " clucks." Dear soul I " If you be- 
 have so," she would warn me sorrowfully, 
 " no one, you know, will like you when you 
 go out into the world." *' I don't care," I 
 would answer. " I don't want them to like 
 me. I shan't like them. Theirs would be 
 the greater loss." Ours was a family — not 
 
78 A LAST DIARY 
 
 uncommon I imagine, at any time — in 
 which the parents were under the tolerant 
 surveillance and patronage of the children. 
 
 1 was a little alien among my school- 
 fellows. I knew I was different, and accepted 
 my ostracism as a quite natural consequence. 
 I never played games with them, but after 
 afternoon school hurried home, gobbled 
 down an early tea (prepared for me in the 
 kitchen by Martha), and went off on a long 
 solitary ramble till nightfall (and later 
 sometimes), through orchards of very old 
 crooked trees ; the air reeking of garlic or 
 humming with the scoldings of tits whose 
 nests I was after in the holes in trees ; 
 through gorse-covered thickets, over streams, 
 in woods, disturbing the game — I went 
 across country, avoiding lanes, roads, and 
 footpaths as if they were God-forsaken. 
 
 I never entered into any intimacy with 
 my masters. They and the boys regarded 
 me quizzically with a menacing " Now then, 
 Barbellion, where are you sloping off to ?" 
 I would flush, and parry with them with 
 
A LAST DIARY 79 
 
 " I've got to be home early to-night." It 
 was a He. I knew it was a lie. They knew 
 it was a lie. But I presented such an 
 invertebrate, sloppy, characterless exterior, 
 that no one felt curious enough to probe 
 further into my way of life. And I was 
 content to leave it at that. 
 
 It was the same in London. I was alien 
 to my colleagues and led a private life, 
 totally outside their imaginings. Among 
 them only R., dear fellow, has ventured to 
 approach my life, and seek a communion 
 with me. And I can't believe he has 
 suffered any hurt. I am not a live wire. 
 Now at all events my power station is dis- 
 mantled, my career a cinder-path. I wish 
 1 could think that others who have come 
 near me are similarly immune. My wife 
 and child seem at a remote distance from 
 me. Strange to say, 1 am calmer in mind 
 when they are away, as now. Would that 
 they could go on with their lives as if I had 
 never been. E. is a dear woman. I love 
 : her, and she, I hope, loves me a little. She 
 
80 A LAST DIARY 
 
 is my wife, and it is my child, and my 
 dreamy ineffectual existence, poised between 
 earth and heaven, cannot annul the physical 
 contact. They may be dream figures, but 
 1 created them, and am responsible. For- 
 give me, forgive me, and try to think well of 
 me. I am weak, and this great universe is a 
 bully. This disease has weakened the fibre 
 of my life. Existence blows me about any- 
 where. I am possessed by any idle devil 
 who cares to take me, give me a shake, and 
 pass on : forebodings and evil visions, 
 imaginary pictures of horrible accidents, 
 cataclysms, fears — fears that the earth may 
 drop into the sun. 
 
 February 3rd, 1919. — Suffering does not 
 only insulate. It drops its victim on an 
 island in an ocean desert where he sees men 
 as distant ships passing. I not only feel 
 alone, but very far away from you all. But 
 what is my suffering ? Not physical pain. 
 I have none. Pain brings clusters of one's 
 fellows — a toothache is intelligible. But 
 when I say I am grown tired of myself, 
 
A LAST DIARY 81 
 
 have outlived myself, am unseasonable 
 and " mopy " like a doomed swallow in 
 November, it is something that requires a 
 John Galsworthy to understand. The world 
 to me is but a dream or mock show ; and we 
 all therein but Pantalones and Anticks to 
 my severe contemplations. This used to be 
 a transitory impression that amused my 
 curiosity. But it hurts and bewilders now 
 that it has become the permanent com- 
 plexion on my daily existence, when I long 
 for real persons and real things. Tinsel and 
 pictures are melancholy substitutes to any- 
 one heart-hungry for the touch of real hands, 
 and the sound of real voices. Acute mental 
 pain at intervals seizes me with pincers and 
 casts me helpless into the whirlpool — it may 
 be E.'s despair, or the failure to find a home 
 for me to go to. But these are spasms of 
 reality, the momentary opening and closing 
 pf a shutter on Life. As soon as they are 
 I )ver, I at once relapse into the dull monotone 
 I )f misery and picture-show. 
 
 I have not left my room since Novem- 
 
82 A LAST DIAKY 
 
 ber 11th. I eat well, sleep well, am in 
 possession of all my higher faculties — those 
 for feeling and thinking. But I can't get out. 
 
 I think sometimes folk do not come to 
 see me because I am such a gruesome object. 
 It is not pleasant to feel you are gruesome. 
 I have outstayed my welcome. I know 
 everyone will be relieved to hear of my death 
 — no doubt for my sake, as they will eagerly 
 point out, but also for their own sake, as I 
 believe. Yet now and then in selfish and 
 ignoble moods, I, being an egotist, fancy I 
 would like some loving hands to clutch at 
 me, in a blind, ineffectual effort to save me in 
 any condition, if only alive. 
 
 February Mh, 1919. — The last part of 
 yesterday's entry was maudlin tosh — entirely 
 foreign to my nature. I hereby cancel it. 
 
 The Day's Life 
 
 I woke at seven, when my desk, the 
 Japanese print on the wall, the wooden 
 chair with my basin on it, the chest ofj 
 
A LAST DIARY 83 
 
 drawers were emerging out of a grey ob- 
 scurity. I had tetanuses of my legs (which 
 alternately shot out straight and contracted 
 up to my chin) till eight- thirty, when Nanny 
 came in and drew the blinds, letting in a 
 foggy light. It is bitterly cold. I hear 
 noises in the kitchen — a dull mewing sound 
 (this is the tap being turned on), then a 
 scrape, scrape (she is buttering my toast). 
 
 Then breakfast arrives (two pieces of toast 
 and two cups of tea), for which I am set up 
 in bed with pillows. Through the window 
 on my left I can see the branch of a walnut- 
 tree and beyond, a laurel. The little squares 
 of ancient glass are so loosely fixed in the 
 leads (one is broken and covered over with 
 a piece of cardboard) that the draught pours 
 through and sometimes makes wind enough 
 to blow out my match for a cigarette. As 
 I eat comes a heavy scrunch, scrunch, right 
 up the front door, which is only a few feet 
 away from me, concealed behind a curtain. 
 It is the postman, who puts the letters in the 
 porch, gives a resounding knock, and goes 
 
84 A LAST DIARY 
 
 away again. As I smoke my cigarette 
 there is another scrunch, scrunch, but this 
 one goes round tot he back door. Ihere 
 is a hammering on the door (they all know 
 Nanny is deaf) and I hear a rough, throaty 
 voice, saying, " Nearly copped him that 
 time," and Nanny replying, " Yes, 'tis cold 
 this morning." It is the newspaper man, 
 who always shies half a brick at a rat that 
 haunts our garden. 
 
 While reading the Daily News I hear 
 every now and then a distant rattle, which 
 comes nearer, increases to a roar and passes 
 off again in a furious rattle of sound — it is a 
 motor-car along the Oxford Koad. Then 
 I hear the clock at the Manor strike twelve, 
 sparrows chattering, or a scolding tit in the 
 garden. 
 
 Presently a smell of dinner comes through 
 from the kitchen, and while it cooks, N. 
 comes in with the hot water and helps me 
 to wash. All the afternoon I sleep or doze. 
 At four-thirty I get up, by a little careful 
 arrangement get into my wheeled chair, and 
 
A LAST DIARY 85 
 
 am taken to the fireside. My legs having 
 shot out in a tetanus meanwhile, they have 
 to be bent up before I can climb into my 
 armchair. As soon as I have tricked 
 myself into the chair they shoot out again, 
 and have to be bent up, and feet placed on 
 the hot bottle. 
 
 Then tea ! N. sits opposite — a short, fat 
 little woman, who always on all occasions 
 wears large black boots, which she says are 
 necessary on account of her varicose veins. 
 Her white apron above the waist is decorated 
 with an embroidered design — a large red " O " 
 with green leaves around it. She always 
 eats with her mouth open, otherwise, I 
 suspect, she has discovered the noise of her 
 mastication drowns every other sound. 
 
 After tea I read Gogol. After supper, 
 Gogol. Then, my eyes aching, I stop and 
 gaze into the fire. Nanny reads me a lot of 
 funny stories out of Answers. I listen with 
 a set smile, still gazing into the fire. I do 
 not mind in the least, for to me it is all a 
 mock show. Then came a biographical 
 
86 A LAST DIARY 
 
 study of Charlie Chaplin — his early struggles, 
 his present tastes and habits, what his 
 Japanese chauffeur said of him (in the pidgin 
 English of a Chinaman), his favourite holiday 
 retreat, how he reads voraciously and always 
 carries with him when he travels a trunk full 
 of books (ah ! my God, it did not give their 
 titles !), etc. There was a ridiculous likeness 
 in all this to a " critique " of, say, George 
 Moore in the Bookman. It aroused my 
 slumbering brain. It interested me. (N. was 
 absorbed.) This flashlight into a strange 
 new world where the life, thoughts, habits 
 of Mr. Chaplin were of transcendent interest 
 recalled me to reality. I had been floating 
 in a luxury of dream. Now I flouted Circe, 
 and struggled back into full possession of 
 my personality. I was tickled, amused, 
 amazed. 
 
 Then N. read me a series of informative 
 snippets : how to make your lamp burn 
 brighter (by putting a spoonful of sugar 
 in the oil-well) ; how black beetles were not 
 really beetles at all ; how Alfred Noyes was 
 
A LAST DIARY 87 
 
 a great poet ; what a red bargee meant ; 
 what a Blue Peter signified. 
 
 At this my gorge rose at last. In the 
 tones of a pufF-breasted pedagogue addressing 
 a small boy, I said : " Oh, don't you know 
 the famous line of R. L. S. about climbing 
 into a sea-going ship when the Blue Peter 
 is floating aloft ?" 
 
 Now this was a contemptible piece of 
 pride, for I only wanted to demonstrate to 
 this scabby old bean that I knew all about 
 a Blue Peter, and it was like her cheek to 
 suppose I didn't. I experience the same 
 irritation when she explains to me how to 
 go from Paddington to Victoria, or where 
 the British Museum is. Of a truth I 
 am no dream figure then. The veritable 
 W. N. P. B. shows his bristling pelage from 
 every opening in the wires of the cage. 
 
 How petty ! Intellectual pride has been 
 the bane of my life. Yet I must be fair to 
 myself. Who, 1 should like to know, has 
 received greater incentive to this vice ? Have 
 not inferior types all my life choked me, 
 
88 A LAST DIARY 
 
 bound me, romped over me ? But what a 
 beautifully geometrical Nemesis it all is 1 
 Here I am in the last scene of the last act, 
 the ruthless, arrogant intellectual, spending 
 the last days of his ruined life alone, in the 
 close companionship of an uneducated village 
 woman who reads Answers. 
 
 February Hth, 1919.-100,000 copies of 
 Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal were sold in 
 America alone. If 100,000 copies of my 
 book are sold, that will mean £5,000 for E. 
 Then I have a second volume for posthu- 
 mous publication, the remainder of my diary 
 from March, 1918, to the end, under the 
 sensational and catchpenny title of The 
 Diary of a Dying Man, beginning with Sir 
 Thomas Browne's " We are in the power of 
 no calamity while Death is in our own," and 
 finishing up with Hamlet's last worst words : 
 " The rest is silence." Another £5, 000, eh ? 
 and E. a rich woman ? Time will show. 
 
A LAST DIARY 89 
 
 The Icons 
 
 Every man has his own icon. Secreted 
 in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, 
 the image of himself, concealed from view 
 with elaborate care, treated invariably with 
 great respect by means of which the Ego, 
 being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to 
 the rest of mankind, measures itself there- 
 with, and in accordance with which it acts 
 and moves and subsists. In the self- 
 righteous man's bosom, it is a molten 
 image of a little potentate who can do no 
 wrong. In the egoist's, an idol loved and 
 worshipped by almost all men, addressed 
 with solemnity and reverence, and cast in 
 an immutable brazen form. Only the truth - 
 seeker preserves his image in clay-covered, 
 damp rags — a working hypothesis. 
 
 A man towards his icon is like the tender- 
 ness and secretiveness of a little bird towards 
 its nest, which does not know you have 
 discovered its heart's treasure. For every- 
 one knows the lineaments of your image 
 
90 A LAST DIARY 
 
 and talks about them to everyone else save 
 you, and no one dare refer to his own — it is 
 bad form — so that in spite of the gossip and 
 criticism that swirl around each one's per- 
 sonality, a man remains sound-tight and 
 insulated. 
 
 The human comedy begins at the thought 
 of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, 
 of the treasured image to the real person — 
 as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about 
 a bust by Gaudier- Brzeska. 
 
 Heavens ! what a toy-shop it will be at 
 the Last Day, when all our little effigies 
 are taken from their cupboards, unwrapped 
 and ranged along beside us, shivering and 
 nude. In that day how few will be able 
 to say that they ever cried " God be 
 merciful to me, a sinner," or " a fool," or 
 " a humbug." 
 
 The human tragedy begins as soon as one 
 feels how often a man's life is ruined by 
 simple reason of this disparity between the 
 image and the real — the image (or the 
 man's mistaken idea of himself) like an 
 
A LAST DIARY 91 
 
 ignis fatuus leading him through devious 
 paths into the morass of failure, or worse, of 
 sheer laughiag-stock silliness. The moral 
 is yvoiOi creavTov. 
 
 (My dear chap, quoting Greek at your 
 time of life 1) 
 
 February lUh, 1919. — At 9 a.m. I heard 
 the garden gate being forced open (it was 
 frozen to the post) and the postman's 
 welcome footsteps up the path. He dropped 
 a parcel on the porch seat, knocked and 
 went away again. I could not get at my 
 parcel, though I was only a few feet away 
 from it. So I lay and reflected what it 
 might be. Surely not the book ordered at 
 Bumpus's ? Too soon. H.'s promised 
 cigarettes ? It sounded too heavy. My own 
 book ? An early advance copy ? Perhaps. 
 
 Nanny came in and settled it. It was 
 the book from B.'s. I was so interested I 
 let her go away without cutting the string. 
 I struggled, but could not tear off the cover, 
 and had to sit with the book on my lap, 
 wondering. She came in to light the fire, 
 
92 A LAST DIARY 
 
 and I asked for a knife. She picked the 
 parcel up, took it to the kitchen, and brought 
 the book back opened. I did not Hke this. 
 I like opening my own parcels. 
 
 It was James Joyce's Portrait of the 
 Artist — a book which the mob will take 
 fifty years to discover, but having once 
 discovered it will again neglect. 
 
 It was cold enough to freeze a brass 
 monkey. I had had some diary to post up. 
 The diary seemed to lose all interest and 
 attraction. It was a sore temptation, but I 
 decided to be a Stoic, and wrote till eleven- 
 thirty, though my hands were blue and my 
 nose ran. 
 
 Then I read Joyce. An amazing book. 
 Just the book I intended to write — had 
 started it, in fact, when the crash came. 
 He gives the flow of the boy's consciousness 
 — rather the trickle of one thing after 
 another — almost as well as Bashkirtseff. I 
 have never read anything so extraordinary 
 as the latter's pages wherein she plumbs to 
 the bottom and the dregs of current con- 
 
A LAST DIARY 93 
 
 sciousness. Her brain runs synchronously 
 with her pen. She eviscerates her current 
 thoughts and records them exactly with a 
 current pen. 
 
 It is difficult to do. I've tried it in this 
 Journal and failed. I am trying it now, but 
 it's not coming very easily. What I like is 
 Joyce's candour and verisimilitude. I have 
 tried that, but it's no good. The publishers 
 rejected two splendid entries about prosti- 
 tutes and other stuff. That is why I think, in 
 truth, 100,000 copies will not be sold. My 
 diary is too unpleasant for popularity. It is 
 my passion for taking folk by the nose and 
 giving them a wigging, my fierce contempt 
 for every kind of complacency, Stephen 
 Daedalus. Butler started the fashion with 
 Edward Pontifex. Then there is Wells' 
 George Ponder evo. Pontifex is a good name. 
 
 On the wall in front of me is a pattern 
 of ivy-leaves. In odd moments of list- 
 lessness I am always counting them : 
 there are 30 perpendicular rows with 47 
 leaves in each row — that's 1,410 leaves in 
 
94 A LAST DIARY 
 
 all. You'd never think there were so many, 
 to look at the wall. I know to nausea that 
 there are 40 little panes of glass in the 
 window on my left — really only 39, as one 
 is broken and stopped with cardboard. 
 There are 7 bars (5 thin and 2 thick) in the 
 back of the wooden chair. There were 
 17 degrees of frost this morning, and I have 
 to stop constantly to wipe my nose and 
 warm my hands on a water-bottle. There 
 is also a water-bottle at my feet. Klim — 
 that is MILK backwards — printed on a wooden 
 box I use as a book-rest and now lying 
 upside down. Yliad Swen — this is the 
 Daily News backwards. I am for ever 
 w% reading it backwards as it 
 
 lies about on my bed upside 
 down. Then there are faces 
 on the morris-patterned cur- 
 tain and in the fire. 1 saw 
 
 / \ ^ ^^^^ -^^^^ ^^i^ 1^^^ night. It 
 
 ^^ was like me, but with a big 
 
 hole excavated in the top of the skull, 
 
 carrying red-hot coals and giving off a 
 
A LAST DIARY 95 
 
 black smoke. The face was coal-black, too. 
 I might have been some evil genie stoking 
 the fires of hell. 
 
 Heavens ! I wish I could discuss James 
 Joyce with someone. I must write to R. 
 
 "Dear old Lad, 
 
 " Have you ever read James Joyce ? 
 Literatui'e, my boy ; the most vivid book, 
 living, obviously autobiographical, candid, 
 such realism, beauty of style. Am so pleased 
 I have found him out ! 1 am quite exultant. 
 He is one of us !" 
 
 Our sukie is an old copper one, and sings 
 sometimes in splendid imitation of an 
 orchestra tuning up. I can hear very 
 clearly the oboes and violins. It makes me 
 thirsty. 
 
 JNIy hand has gone too cold and stiff to 
 write more. 
 
96 A LAST DIARY 
 
 My Canary 
 
 The jacket is put over his cage at night- 
 fall, and all night he roosts on a table close 
 to my bed. When I wake in the silence of 
 the night, it is difficult to believe that close 
 to me there is a little heart incessantly 
 pumping hot red blood. I have a sense of 
 companionship at the thought. For I, too, 
 silent, concealed in my bed, possess a heart 
 pumping incessantly, though not so fast. 
 I, too, am an animal, little bird, and we 
 must both die. 
 
 A Gasconade 
 
 I owe neither a knee nor a bare gramercy 
 to any man. All that I did, I did by my 
 own initiative. To this sweeping assertion 
 I make one exception — R., if for no other 
 reason than that he taught me to love 
 music. 
 
 February ISth, 1919. — I had a letter 
 from H. G. Wells this morning. He says : 
 
A LAST DIARY 97 
 
 " You will have seen my Preface by this 
 time." (I haven't.) " Prefaces always devas- 
 tate relationships. But I hope you didn't 
 think it too horrible. I had to play up to 
 your standard of frankness." I knew he 
 would be rude. But I'm afire to see what 
 he says. 
 
 I am going to be quite fond of this old 
 Nanny. She is always cheerful and ready 
 to do any mortal thing for me. Across the 
 frightful abyss that separates our two several 
 existences I throw this thin line of attach- 
 ment and appreciation. 
 
 The difference between a highly de- 
 veloped human — say, like Meredith — and his 
 housemaid is greater than the difference 
 between the highest ape and the house- 
 maid. 
 
 February 16tk, 1919. — The publishers this 
 morning sent me a proof of Mr. Wells' 
 Introduction. It is excellent, and not rude 
 at all. I devoured it with avidity — can't 
 you see me ? The book won't be ready till 
 about the end of March. 
 
98 A LAST DIARY 
 
 The Bankruptcy of Imagination 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George, at the Peace Confer- 
 ence, said that he was persuaded to the 
 League of Nations idea when recently he 
 saw in France the innumerable graves of 
 the fallen covering acres. 
 
 Perpend. The statement is worth con- 
 sidering. Note that it is at the end of the 
 war he is speaking, that it is the number of 
 graves he is moved by, and that what moves 
 him to realise the horrors of war is the 
 graves of dead men. What was Mr. Lloyd 
 George's imagination doing before he went 
 to France and saw the graves ? Would it 
 help on the League, think you, if someone 
 took his child by the hand and showed him 
 all the acres of all the graves in Europe ; or 
 all the mutilated in the hospitals when their 
 wounds are being dressed ; or all the asylums 
 when the madmen are having their morning 
 rave ; or all the St. Dunstan's in the world ; 
 or all the dying and dead babies ? 
 
 The war has beggared the imagination. 
 
A LAST DIARY 99 
 
 If a woman loses five sons, she is not smitten 
 five times as much as if she lost only one. 
 All suffering has limits beyond which the 
 heart is insensible. We are no more appalled 
 at the death of ten million men than at that 
 of ten thousand, or, indeed, if it be under 
 our eyes, ten or one. It is a fact that we 
 are forgetting the war already — those who 
 weren't in it. Skating, dancing, political 
 squabbles are all the go — pigs over their 
 pannage. If a woman has lost a son, com- 
 pensations are manifold — e.g., some gewgaw 
 from the King's hands at Buckingham Palace. 
 What the son thought or suffered no one 
 knows, because he's dead. If he survives 
 he wants to remain dumb, or lacks capacity 
 to express his thought about the hell and 
 damnation of war. If he had such a capacity, 
 lis hearers would lack the imaginative sym- 
 pathy to be scalded by his boiling ink. 
 
 In this week's Times Literary Supplement 
 
 s a cringing review of a rotten book. 
 
 Notebooks of a Spinster Lady — obviously 
 
 1 1 nob — say, an earl's daughter. True, the 
 
100 A LAST DIARY 
 
 reviewer deferentially refers to some of the 
 stories as o/of, but hastens to explain that all 
 he means is 0/6? to him. In the same issue 
 is another snobbish review on the life of 
 Meredith, excellent according to other 
 reviewers. It is headed " Small Talk about 
 George Meredith " — from which one knows 
 what to expect. The reviewer knew Mere- 
 dith personally, and explains with delightful 
 naivete that the reason why Meredith 
 would not go to see his first wife on her 
 death-bed, though she asked him to come, 
 was his sensitive horror of death-bed scenes. 
 As for Meredith being ashamed of being a 
 tailor's son, the idea is scouted. Yet, he 
 was, and I hate him for it. 
 
 February 17th, 1919.— Reading the Intro- 
 duction was like reading my own 
 obituary notice. It rather moved me. 
 All day yesterday I buzzed over it 
 like a famished bee. Streaks of it at 
 intervals would shoot through my mind. 
 I weighed sentences, measured them, tested 
 them. I was curious over " a certain 
 
A LAST DIARY 101 
 
 thread of unpremeditated and exquisite 
 beauty that runs through the story this 
 diary tells." Lord in heaven, what is it ? 
 
 Mr. Wells is sympathetic and almost too 
 generous. Characteristically he concentrates 
 on me as a biologist, whereas I like to look 
 at myself posthumously as a writer. 
 
 He is a good fellow, and I am most 
 grateful and most pleased. 
 
 It's milder to-day, and the chaffinches are 
 sweetly singing outside my window. 
 
 Nurse said to me after breakfast : 
 
 *' Well, what are you going to do ?" 
 
 I replied apologetically : 
 
 " Oh, writing, I suppose." 
 
 *' This everlasting writing." She shrugged 
 her shoulders, and I felt it was most un- 
 sociable in me not to satisfy her curiosity. 
 
 Legs 
 
 February \5th, 1919.— B.— (to Nurse 
 stepping on his toes) — Seemingly either 
 my feet or yours are very large. 
 
 N. — Oh, but you see it's my legs are so 
 
102 A LAST DIARY 
 
 short. 1 can't step across easily. It will 
 be all right if you go to Eastbourne. 
 Nurse has long legs. 
 
 B. — But what's the use of her long legs if 
 she can't get a house ? 
 
 N. — Aunt Hobart's legs were so bent up 
 that though she was six feet long, her coffin 
 was only four feet. 
 
 B. — Why were Aunt Hobart's legs bent 
 up? 
 
 N. — Rheumatism. She was buried at the 
 same time as her grand-daughter. 
 
 B. — But her legs were not bent up ? 
 
 N. — Oh, no. Bessie was only sixteen, and 
 died of scarlet fever. 
 
 The Water Ousel's Song 
 A Memory. 
 I leaned over the parapet of an old stone 
 bridge covered with great, old, branching, 
 woody tangles of ivy, and leading from an 
 oak wood across a stream into a meadow. 
 I leaned over the parapet, and gazed long at 
 the rushing water below. " I will look," 
 
A LAST DIARY 103 
 
 I said, " as if I am never going to see this 
 picture again." And so I looked, and now I 
 am glad I looked like that, for the memory 
 of the picture in every detail comes back, and 
 indeed has never left me. 
 
 Along each bank margin grew a row of 
 alders, and in the bed of the river were 
 scattered great slabs of rock jutting out of 
 the water, and spotted white with the 
 droppings of water ousels and kingfishers 
 that loved to pause on them. A great 
 body of swift, strong and silent water came 
 sweeping down to the falls, then dropping 
 over in a solid green bar into a cauldron of 
 roaring, hissing liquid below, churning the 
 surface waters into soapy foam of purest 
 white — the white of the summer cloud and 
 the water ousel's breast. Outside the 
 foam- belt the water of this salmon pool 
 ripples away gently in oily eddies and circles. 
 After the rough passage over the falls, 
 some of the water rests awhile in little 
 recesses on the periphery of the pool. But 
 gradually it works round into the current 
 
104 A LAST DIARY 
 
 which, like the wake of a steamer, cuts 
 diametrically across the pool, and swishes 
 everything — leaves, twigs, dead insects — on 
 to the hurtling shallows. " Watch how the 
 vault of water first bends unbroken in pure 
 polished velocity over the arching rocks at 
 the brow of the cataract covering them with 
 a dome of crystal, twenty feet thick, so 
 swift that its motion is unseen, except when 
 a foam globe from above darts over it like a 
 fallen star." 
 
 This is from Ruskin's description of the 
 Falls of SchaiFhausen. But note that it is 
 equally applicable to my little falls — if we 
 banish the phantom Size. 
 
 It may be only sour grapes for my part, 
 but— 
 
 " Why go gallivanting 
 With the nations round ? 
 Leave to Robert Browning 
 Beggars, fleas, and vines — 
 Leave to mournful Ruskin 
 Popish Apennines. 
 Where's the mighty credit 
 In admiring Alps ? 
 Any goose sees glory 
 In their snowy scalps." 
 
A LAST DIARY 105 
 
 A water ousel alighted on a boulder and 
 bowed to me. He and his little white shirt- 
 front, continually bobbing, were like a con- 
 cert-room artist acknowledging the plaudits 
 of an enthusiastic audience. 1 was pleased 
 with him, but his excess of ecstasy at sight 
 of me made my own pleasure seem dull and 
 lethargic. 
 
 Then he hopped a little higher on to the 
 stump of an alder, and being twilight now, 
 and the day's food hunt over, he poured 
 out his quivering soul in an ecstasy of song. 
 Like a solo violin with orchestra accompani- 
 ment, it blended in harmony with the 
 voluminous sound of the water, now rising 
 above it, now overwhelmed by it. Then, as 
 if suddenly shy and nervous of his self- 
 revelation, the little bird gave one or two 
 short bobs, and flew swiftly away upstream. 
 Such spiritual ecstasy made me feel very 
 poor indeed in soul, and I went home with 
 a sense of humiliation. 
 
 February 20th, 1919. — My beloved wife 
 spent the night here, then returned to 
 
106 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Brighton. " Do you feel my heart on my 
 lips?" "Dear, I love you," and her tears 
 trickled on to my beard. 
 
 Two poor grief-stricken things. She 
 shook with the anguish of the moment, 
 withdrew, and again flung herself on my 
 breast. I sat motionless in my chair. Ah 1 
 my God ! how I longed to be able to stand 
 and pick up, press to me, and hide away in 
 the shelter of strong arms that sweet, dear, 
 fluttering spirit. It is cruel — cruel to her 
 and cruel to me. I thought my heart must 
 break. There comes a time when evil cir- 
 cumstances squeeze you out of this world. 
 There is no longer any room. Oh I Why 
 did she marry me ? They ought not to 
 have let her do it. 
 
 February ^Ast, 1919. — I sometimes fancy 
 I am not weaned from life even now. Pic- 
 tures in the paper make me agonise. Oh> 
 for a little happiness for her and me together, 
 jurt a short respite. What agony it is to 
 have a darling woman fling herself into your 
 arms, press you to her dear bosom and ask 
 
A LAST DIARY 107 
 
 you desperately to try to get well, when you 
 know it is hopeless. She knows it is hopeless, 
 yet every now and then. . . . She pictures me 
 in a study in her flat (all her own), walking 
 on two sticks. And already the tendons of 
 my right leg are drawing in permanently. 
 
 I am not weaned because my curiosity is 
 not dead. When I think of dying, I am 
 tantalised to know all that will happen after. 
 I want to be at my funeral, and see who's 
 there and if they are very sorry, who sheds a 
 friendly tear, what sort of service, etc. Oh 1 
 I wish I were dead and forgotten. 
 
 February 2'2nd, 1919.— Mr. Wells, in his 
 Preface, refers to my watching bats in a 
 cave (they were deserted manganese mine 
 borings) and the evening flights of starlings, 
 which were described in separate articles I 
 sent him. Herewith is my adventure among 
 the bats. A first-class field naturalist who 
 has made some remarkable studies in the 
 habits of that elusive and little known 
 animal the mole, said to me at the conclusion 
 of his investigations : " Yes, I have lived two 
 
108 A LAST DIARY 
 
 years with the mole, and have arrived only 
 on the fringe of the subject." He was a 
 melancholy fellow and too absorbed in his 
 studies even to shave his face of a morning. 
 I arrived only on the outside of the fringe 
 in my study of the habits of the Greater 
 Horseshoe Bat, but I got a lot of enjoyment 
 out of the risky adventure of exploring the 
 disused mines. The wooden struts were 
 rotten, and the walls and roofs of the galleries 
 had fallen in here and there. So we had 
 sometimes to crawl on hands and knees to 
 get past. All the borings were covered with 
 a red slime, so we wore engineers' overalls, 
 which by the time we had finished changed 
 from blue to red, speckled with grease drop- 
 ping from our candles. Occasionally, in 
 turning a corner, a sudden draught would 
 blow the candles out, and in one rather lofty 
 boring we were stopped by deep water, and, 
 boy-like, meditated the necessity of removing 
 clothes and swimming on with candles 
 fastened on our foreheads. One boring 
 opened into the side of a hill by a small, 
 
A LAST DIARY 109 
 
 insignificant, and almost invisible hole at the 
 bottom of a steep slide. We slid down with 
 a rope, and once inside the little hole at the 
 bottom, found a big passage with a narrow- 
 gauge line and abandoned truck — great 
 excitement ! Another entrance to the mines 
 was by way of a shaft no bigger than an 
 ordinary man-hole in a drain pipe, its mouth 
 being overgrown with brambles. We fixed 
 a rope round the trunk of a tree, and went 
 down, hand over hand. We crawled along 
 a narrow passage — three of us, leaving no 
 one at the top to guard the rope — and at 
 intervals espied our game, hanging to the 
 roof by the hind legs. We boxed three 
 altogether, gently unfixing the hind legs, 
 and laying the little creatures in a tin care- 
 fully lined with wool. The Horseshoe Bat is 
 the strangest sight in the world to come 
 upon in a dark cave hanging upside down 
 from the roof like an enormous chrysalis in 
 shape. For when roosting, this bat puts its 
 two thin hind legs and feet very close to- 
 gether, making a single delicate pedicle, and 
 
no A LAST DIARY 
 
 wraps its body entirely in its wings, head 
 and ears included. When disturbed, it 
 gently draws itself up a little by bending its 
 legs. When thoroughly awakened, it un- 
 folds its wings and becomes a picture of 
 trembling animation : the head is raised, and 
 it looks at you nervously with its little beady 
 dark, glittering eyes, the large ears all the 
 while vibrating as swiftly as a tuning-fork. 
 These with the grotesque and mysterious 
 leaf-like growth around its nose — not to 
 mention the centrepiece that stands out 
 like a door-knocker — make a remarkable 
 vision by candle-light in a dark cave. 
 
 February 237'd, 1919. — Despite the un- 
 fathomable ennui and creeping slowness 
 of the hours in the living through of each 
 day, the days of the past month or two, by 
 reason of their dull sameness, seem, when 
 viewed in retrospect, like the telegraph poles 
 on a railway journey. And always rolling 
 through my head is the accompaniment 
 of some tune — Shepherd Fennel's Dance, 
 Funeral Marches. 
 
A LAST DIARY 111 
 
 I want to hear Berlioz's Requiem. Poor 
 Berlioz ! How I sympathise with you. 
 
 February 25th, 1919. — Am feeling rather 
 queer these last few days, and am full of 
 forebodings. Dear E.'s struggles harrow 
 me, and worst of all, I anticipated this as 
 from December, 1915. When I showed 
 my terrible gloom then, one person laughed 
 gaily. Too much imagination — the ability 
 to foresee in detail and preconstruct — is a 
 curse. For I have lived through all this 
 time before ; yet the actual loses none of its 
 poignancy. 
 
 February 26th, 1919. — The doctor came 
 to-day and recommended petroleum. All 
 right. He is a decent sort and knows his 
 business. Am feeling muzzy. Moras non 
 numero nisi serenas. This should make us 
 nineteen-nineteeners smile ! 
 
 February 27th, 1919. — A little easier in 
 
 mind. Posted proofs of my Journal to R. 
 
 Am much perturbed. Will he shrink from 
 
 me, or merely tolerate me as a poor wretched 
 
 I manikin? I fear it will not bring me 
 
112 A LAST DIARY 
 
 any increase of affection from anyone, and 
 
 some 
 
 A load of sadness settled on me this after- 
 noon. As I lay resting down in bed, for no 
 reason I can discover, the memory of the 
 evening prayers my mother taught me 
 flashed over my mind, and because steeped 
 in memory seemed very beautiful. Here 
 they are : 
 
 " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, 
 Look upon a little child, 
 Pity my simplicity. 
 Suffer me to come to Thee." 
 
 Then the Lord's Prayer. Then : 
 
 " Keep us faithful, keep us pure, 
 Keep us ever more Thine own. 
 Help, O help us to endure. 
 Fit us for the promised ci'own." 
 
 Then I hopped into bed and was asleep 
 in a moment. 
 
 I went on mechanically saying these 
 prayers when I was grown to a big boy, 
 and subconsciously felt that the first verses 
 were quite unsuitable. But I never had, 
 like some, an instinct for prayer. I don't 
 
A LAST DIARY 113 
 
 suppose I ever prayed, only raced through 
 some rhymed requests learnt by rote ! 
 
 I can remember very clearly the topog- 
 raphy these addresses to the Almighty 
 assumed in my brain. Thus : 
 
 ^ W ni c 
 
 A. I began here in a horizontal direction 
 with " Gentle Jesus," the successive verses 
 being so many hurdles to leap over. Then 
 I turned abruptly to the left and ran 
 up a tall, narrow, squiggly piece like a 
 pagoda — the Paternoster (B) finishing off 
 with the tail-piece (C), the single verse of 
 4 lines. 
 
 I never had till recently any religious 
 sense at all. I was a little sceptic before I 
 inew it. With no one to direct me, I had 
 I nose for agnostic literature, and when I 
 bund Haeckel and Hume I whooped with 
 
114 A LAST DIARY 
 
 satisfaction. " I thought so/' I said to my- 
 self. 
 
 "Beautiful," did I say? Why, no. 
 Sottish doggerel. The pathos of an inno- 
 cent child repeating it ! 
 
 February 2Uh, 1919.— I thirst, I thirst 
 for a little music — to replenish my jaded 
 spirit. It is difficult to keep one's soul alive 
 in such an atmosphere. 
 
 Analysis of the "Journal of a 
 
 Disappointed Man " 
 March lOtk, 1919. 
 
 1. Ambition. 
 
 2. Reflections on Death. 
 
 3. Intellectual Curiosity. j 
 
 4. Self Consciousness. 1 
 
 5. Self Introspection. ! 
 
 6. Zest of Living. 
 
 I wonder if any reviewer will bring out I 
 these points : ' 
 
 7. Humour. 
 
 8. Shamelessness. 
 
 My confessions are shameless. I confess, 
 but do not repent. The fact is, my con-! 
 
A LAST DIARY 115 
 
 fessions are prompted, not by ethical 
 motives, but intellectual. The confessions 
 are to me the interesting records of a self- 
 investigator. 
 
 If I live to read the review notices, I 
 shall probably criticise them. I shall be 
 criticising the criticisms of my life, putting 
 the reviewers right, a long lean hand 
 stretching out at them from the tomb. I 
 shall play the part of boomerang, and " cop " 
 them one unexpectedly. There will be a 
 newspaper discussion : Is Barbellion dead ? 
 And I shall answer by a letter to the 
 Editor : 
 
 " Dear Sir, 
 
 " Yes, 1 am dead. I killed myself 
 off at the end of my book, because it was 
 high time. Your reviewer is incorrect in 
 saying I died of creeping paralysis. It 
 was of another kindred but different 
 disease. 
 
 "P.S. — It may interest your readers to 
 know that I am not yet buried." 
 
116 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Or, 
 
 " Dear Sir, 
 
 " There is an inaccuracy in your 
 reviewer's statement. I was not in the 
 Secret Service. It should have been the 
 Civil Service, of which I was a member up 
 to within eighteen months of my decease." 
 
 Or, 
 
 '* Dear Sir, 
 
 " I should be glad if you would 
 correct the impression generated by one of 
 your correspondents that Bai^bellioJi is the 
 name of an evil spirit appearing on Wal- 
 purgis night. As a matter of fact, my 
 forbears were simple folk — tallow chandlers 
 in B " 
 
 March 12th, 1919. 
 
 " Out of the day and night 
 A joy has taken flight. 
 Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar 
 Fill my faint heart with grief, but with delight 
 No more, O nevermore." 
 
A LAST DIARY 117 
 
 These sobbing words bring a catch in my 
 breath and tears to my eyes. Dear Shelley, 
 I, too, have suffered. 
 
 " No more, O nevermore ! 
 No more, O nevermore !" 
 
 March 15th, 1919.— The first peep of the 
 chick : among the pubhshers' announcements 
 in The Times: " The Journal of a Dis- 
 appointed 3Ian, a genuine confession of 
 thwarted ambition and disillusionment." 
 
 Am reading another of James Joyce's — 
 
 Ulysses — running serially in that exotic 
 
 periodical. The Little Review, which 
 
 announces on its cover that it makes " no 
 
 compromise with the public taste." Ulysses 
 
 is an interesting development. Damn ! it's 
 
 all my idea, the technique I projected. 
 
 I According to the reviews, Dorothy Richard- 
 
 jon's Tunnel is a novel in the same manner 
 
 —intensive, netting in words the continuous 
 
 low of consciousness and semi-consciousness. 
 
 3f course the novelists are behind the 
 
 laturalists in the recording of minutiae : 
 
118 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Edmund Selous and Julian Huxley and 
 others have set down the life of some species 
 of bird in exhaustive detail — every flip of 
 the tail, every peck preceding the grand 
 drama of courtship and mating. But this 
 queer comparison lies between these natu- 
 ralists and novelists like William de Morgan 
 rather than Joyce. 
 
 March 16th, 1919. — I am getting rapidly 
 worse. One misery adds itself to another 
 as I explore the course of this hideous 
 disease. 
 
 March 17th, 1919.— Here is Hector 
 Berlioz in his amazing Memoirs writing to 
 a friend for forgiveness for causing him 
 anxiety : " But you know how my life fluc- 
 tuates. One day, calm, dreary, rhythmical ; 
 the next, bored, nerve-torn, snappy and 
 surly as a mangy dog ; vicious as a 
 thousand devils, sick of life and ready to end| 
 it, were it not for the frenzied happiness thatj 
 draws ever nearer, for the odd destiny that II 
 feel is mine ; for my staunch friends ; for! 
 music, and lastly for curiosity. My life is 
 
A LAST DIARY 119 
 
 a story that interests me greatly." This 
 verftuchte curiosity ! I could botanise over 
 my own grave, attentively examine the 
 maggots out of my own brain. 
 
 March 18th, 1919.— Mother (she liked me 
 to call her Moth. Hubbard, Lepidopterous 
 Hubbard, and she used to sign her letters 
 Hubbard) had a pretty custom, which she 
 hated anyone to detect, of putting every 
 letter she wrote to us when stamped, 
 directed and sealed, into her Bible for a 
 minute or two, ostensibly to sanctify the 
 sealing up. 
 
 Memories like these lurk in corners of my 
 dismantled brain like cobwebs. I fetch 
 them down with a pen for a mop. 
 
 I've had such a dear and beautiful letter 
 from H. this morning. 
 
 March 19th, 1919. 
 
 " While all alone 
 Watching the loophole's spark 
 Lie I, with life all dark^ 
 Feet tethered, hands fettered 
 Fast to the stone. 
 The grim walls, square lettered 
 
120 A LAST DIARY 
 
 With prisoned men's groan, 
 Still strain the banner poles, 
 Through the wind's song ; 
 Westward the banner rolls 
 Over my wrong." 
 
 For all C.O.'s and paralytics (selected 
 by E.). 
 
 March 20fh, 1919.— A letter from H. G. 
 Wells. My book, he says, interested him 
 personally as he once " tried hard " to get 
 into the B.M. (in Flower's time), but failed. 
 " I don't think I should have found it very 
 suitable." No I He would have promptly 
 finished on the gallows for murdering the 
 keeper. 
 
 March 21st, 1919. — Another cobweb : an 
 illustrated book of miscellanies called The 
 Woidd of Wonders in our ancient bookcase 
 at home alongside Eliza Cook's poems, 
 Howutt's Visits to Remarkable Places, an im- 
 mense green volume of Hogarth's drawings, 
 a Dictionary of Dates, Roget's Thesaurus, 
 etc. I remember distinctly the pictures of 
 the Man in the Iron Mask, freak tubers, and 
 
A LAST DIARY 121 
 
 carrots like human heads in a row across a 
 page, snow crystals, Indian jugglers, two 
 Amazons of heroic girth carrying swords, 
 striding along sands ; the swords were 
 curved, and one lady was much stouter than 
 the other. I used to stare at these pictures 
 before I could read, and invented my own 
 legends. I always thought the potatoes 
 and carrots were a species of savage, and 
 many pictures I can recall, but do not know 
 what they represent even now. 
 
 March ^Qth, 1919. — Time lures me for- 
 ward. But I've dug my heels in awaiting 
 those two old tortoises, Chatto and Windus. 
 
 March 27th, 1919.— I've won! This 
 morning at 9 a.m. the book arrived. 
 C. and W. thoughtfully left the pages to 
 be cut, so I've been enjoying the exquisite 
 pleasure of cutting the pages of my own 
 book. And nothing's happened. No earth- 
 quake, no thunder and hghtning, no omen 
 in a black sky. In fact, the sun is shining. 
 Publication next week. 
 
 March 2Hth, 1919. — Having stabbed my 
 
122 A LAST DIARY 
 
 arm and signed the contract, now when the 
 clock strikes, I'd Hke to stay : 
 
 '^O lente, lente, currite noctis equi ! 
 The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, 
 The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned." 
 
 But I asked for it, have got it — and to the 
 full — and must fulfil my undertaking. My 
 feelings see-saw. To-day I want to live in 
 Hell's despite. The day before yesterday I 
 had my back to the wall in a feat of sheer 
 endurance. 
 
 Maixh 30th, 1919. — Now that I have 
 spurred my hippogrifF to the journey's end, 
 now that I have wreaked my will on that 
 very obtuse gentleman, my Lord Destiny, 
 who failed to take due measure of his man, 
 now as soon as I have freed myself from the 
 hard cocoon of my environment, and can 
 sweeten and soothe my warped frame with 
 a little of the delicious honey of kindly 
 recognition, I can rest in the sun a while, 
 soak up the warmth and sweetness into this 
 tortured spirit and crave everyone's pardon 
 before the end comes. For I know that the 
 
A LAST DIARY 123 
 
 Journal will mean horror to some. I realise 
 that a strong-minded man would by instinct 
 keep his sufferings to himself — the English- 
 man above all — (but I doubt if I am an 
 Englishman really. My true home I guess 
 is further east). I have been recklessly 
 self-willed and inconsiderate, and I have no 
 sort of excuse except the most unprecedented 
 provocation. 1 have been in the grip of 
 more than one strong passion, and my moral 
 strength has been insufficient to struggle 
 with them and throw them off. I have 
 been overcome, and the publication of 
 my Journal is really the signal of my 
 defeat. 
 
 Ah, but it takes a terrific lot of energy 
 to set about putting one's moral house in 
 order ! It is too late, and I am too weakened. 
 You must take me as I am and remember 
 that with a longer life, just as I might have 
 done better things intellectually, so also 
 morally. Give me your love if you can. I 
 love you all, and because I love you comfort 
 my self-despondency with the thought that 
 
124 A LAST DIARY 
 
 there must be some grain of goodness in me 
 overlaid. 
 
 jipriL 1st, 1919. — I love my hair to be 
 combed — it makes one realise what an 
 avenue for self-expression was closed when 
 man lost his tail. I bitterly regret the loss 
 of my tail ; 1 love the benison of hot water 
 for my urticating hands ; the tick-tack of 
 our cottage clock ; a cigarette — many cigar- 
 ettes ; letters — these are all my pleasures ; 
 pills, the air-cushion, hot bottle, a cramped 
 leg straightened — these are my reliefs ; sleep 
 — this my refuge. 
 
 R. AND I AT THE B.M. 
 
 Ap?il 5t/i. 1919. — What friends we 
 were ! The mutual sympathy between 
 us was complete, so that our intercom- 
 munication was telegraphic in its brevity, 
 frequently telepathic and wordless, yet all- 
 sufficing. He had an extraordinary faculty 
 for apt quotations : he loved Admiral 
 Buzza, Mr. Middleton, and similar cronies. 
 
A LAST DIARY 125 
 
 Shakespeare was a never- failing reservoir. 
 Together we passed along the street to our 
 rendezvous, coats flapping, hands waving, 
 tongues wagging, two slim youths, bespec- 
 tacled, shoulders bent, bright- eyed. 
 
 We used to lunch at Gloucester Road, 
 sometimes in Soho, and in the summer in 
 Kensington Gardens. Our luncheon talks 
 were wild and flippant. It was in the even- 
 ings after dinner at his rooms or at mine 
 that we conversed seriously far into the 
 stilly night, serious and earnest as only 
 youth can be. During the course of a year 
 our discussions must have several times 
 passed in stellar transit through the whole 
 zodiac of intellectual, moral, and social arcs, 
 God! how we talked! I took charge of 
 metaphysics and literature ; R. of art and 
 sociology. 
 
 His room and mine at the British Museum 
 were near one another on opposite sides of 
 the same corridor, and one of my vivid 
 memories of those days is R. coming in the 
 course of the morning, gently opening my 
 
126 A LAST DIARY 
 
 door, stealing in and advancing slowly up 
 towards my table on tip-toe, eyebrows raised 
 as far as he could possibly get them right up 
 under his scalp, arms down straight at the 
 sides, hands raised at the wrists and perform- 
 ing continuous circular movements outwards 
 while he softly whistled some beautiful 
 melody we'd heard the night before. I 
 would drop my dissections, turn and ask 
 
 " How does that piece go that starts ?" 
 
 (T whistled a fragment.) 
 
 At lunch-time, whoever was first ready 
 would visit the other's room, and should the 
 occupant's head be still bent over his work, 
 the same kind of remark was regularly made : 
 " Come, come ! I don't like to see this 
 absorption in the trivial round. Remember 
 the man with the muckrake. The sun 
 shines : be heliotropic. Let gallows gape 
 for dog, let man go free." 
 
 Our intimacy nettled some of our col- 
 leagues. " What are you two conspirators 
 up to?" (R. in a black billycock, and I in a 
 brown one, were tete-a-tete in the corridor.) 
 
A LAST DIARY 127 
 
 "Discussing the modern drama" (said to 
 annoy, of course). 
 
 " Damon and Pythias," sneered one, and 
 we laughed aloud. 
 
 We carried our youth like a flag through 
 those dusty galleries, and our warm friend- 
 ship was a ringing challenge to all those 
 frosty pows. 
 
 April 8tk, 1919. — Went out yesterday for 
 the first time for nearly five months. A 
 beautiful April day, warm, a full bird chorus, 
 the smell of violets, of wood- smoke — and the 
 war was over. I felt I could as an honour- 
 able human being look a Long-tailed Tit in 
 the feathers now and not blench. The sky 
 was above me — scores of white eyots floating 
 in the sea of blue — and my heart fluttered a 
 little, and for a moment my blood ran wine, 
 until the inevitable reflection settled like a 
 blight. I should have preferred not to be 
 reminded, but the realisation how beautiful 
 the world is swept over me all unready in a 
 mighty flood. " Women are pretty things 
 really," said E. as she looked at photos in a 
 
 I 
 
128 A LAST DIARY 
 
 picture paper : it was reborn in her mind in 
 a flash of dehght. 
 
 April 10th, 1919. — A quiet day with my 
 heartf nil of loving-kindness for all. Given 
 time, I could change myself into something 
 better. You may not believe it, but even in 
 my worst days 1 once had a big desire for 
 self-sacrifice. I was thrilled to find that I 
 was making someone happy by my love and 
 deeply longed to surrender all for love. 
 
 An Enigma 
 
 April 11th, 1919. — In 1915 I received a 
 p.c. which has puzzled me ever since. It is 
 an enigma to me as baffling as a piece of 
 Coptic text. It was in an uneducated hand 
 asking for a museum pamphlet I had written 
 on the louse, signed " T. Wood {Boggeria 
 princeps)." Any suggestions ? 
 
 Nurse and I have lived here alone for over 
 a month, and she is kindness itself, cheerful, 
 willing to fetch and bring, never impatient 
 with me or irritable — a good soul. 
 
A LAST DIARY 129 
 
 The Rabbits' Golgotha 
 
 April lUh, 1919. — Those sand dunes 1 
 Their characteristic feature was rabbits' 
 skulls, rabbits' scapulae, ribs, pelvises, legs, 
 bleached, white and dry ; rotting rabbits 
 being mined and gradually buried by gaudy 
 red-marked carrion beetles ; pieces of rabbits' 
 fluff and fur ; rabbits' screams in the teeth of 
 a stoat (a common sound) ; and the little 
 round dry pellets of rabbits, more number- 
 less than the snail shells. And lastly, rabbits 
 — rabbits hopping, racing, slinking, dis- 
 appearing down holes, always and every- 
 where showing the intruder fleeting glimpses 
 of the little white patches on the underside 
 of the stumpy tail, the signal to disperse or 
 dive into the sand. 
 
 The dunes are always associated in my 
 mind with burning hot, cloudless, summer 
 lays, during the whole long course of which 
 Arithout ceasing Lapwings flopped around my 
 lead, uttering their crazy wails, circuses of 
 
 9 
 
180 A LAST DIARY 
 
 scimitar-winged Swifts swished by and 
 screamed hysterically, the face of the blue 
 sky was dotted at regular intervals with 
 singing Larks, singing all day long without 
 intermittence, poised menacingly overhead, 
 so that the white-hot needle points of their 
 song seemed likely at any moment to 
 descend perpendicularly and penetrate the 
 skull. Occasionally, a dazzlingly white 
 Herring Gull would sail slowly, majestically 
 in from the cliffs, and from a much greater 
 height than all the rest of us, cry in a deep 
 voice " ha-ha-ha," like some supreme being 
 in sardonic amusement at the vulgar whirli- 
 gig of life below him. I 
 A still summer day, say you ? The air 
 was charged with sound, had you the ears I 
 to hear. It is not merely the birds' cries, it 
 is their dangerous living, feverish and intense, 
 that contributes to this uproar of life. The 
 heart-muscles and wing-muscles give out a 
 note as they contract (this is a physiological, 
 fact). The interior of, say, a Falcon's body 
 is a scene of dark -sounding romance andj 
 
A LAST DIARY 131 
 
 incessant activity, with the blood racing 
 through the vessels, and the glands secreting, 
 and the muscles contracting. Just here at 
 my feet is an avalanche, jagged boulders of 
 silica are descending and spreading out in a 
 fan-shaped talus — only sand grains, so I 
 cannot hear the crash of the boulders, but 
 matter — atomic solar systems — colossal ! 
 
 And behind all, behind every sight and 
 every other sound, is the sound of the great 
 sea, the all-powerful creator of the dunes, 
 who in a single evening (for a thousand ages 
 are but an evening in his calculations) could 
 sweep them away or sweep up another area 
 of sand and marram grass as big. One 
 church is already obliterated. That was 
 yesterday. To-morrow, maybe, the village 
 further inland will have vanished too. 
 
 That is the secret of the fascination of the 
 dunes. Superficially, all seems dead and 
 dull. Reflection brings the deeper under- 
 standing of myriad forms of life, creeping, 
 running, springing, burrowing — of noisy, 
 screaming, struggling life, dominated by 
 
 ii 
 
132 A LAST DIARY 
 
 the august, secular movements of the great 
 sea. 
 
 Sometimes, towards the end of the after- 
 noon, I would grow tired, the brilliance 
 would become garish. Then, leaving the 
 thyme, the eyebright, the wild pansies, the 
 viper's bugloss (in clusters), an occasional 
 teazle, after boxing every sort of insect and 
 every sort of plant that I had not collected 
 before (the birds' eggs I had long ago swept 
 into my cabinet), J would hurry out to the 
 shore, take off my clothes, and be rebaptised 
 in the sea. A hundred yards' run up the 
 cool sands and back, and I was dry, and 
 dallied awhile in the sand-hills before putting 
 on my shirt that smelled of stale sweat. 
 
 It was so good to divest myself of particu- 
 larities that clung like the burrs on my 
 stockings, and plunge into the universality 
 of the sea I Subconsciously that was my 
 motive and the cause of my delight. 
 
 April IQth, 1919. — I am still miserable, 
 especially on E.'s account, that dear brave 
 woman. But I have undergone a change. 
 
A LAST DIARY 133 
 
 My whole soul is sweetened by the love 
 of those near and dear to me, and by the 
 sympathy of those reading my book, 
 
 Apiil 2\st, 1919. — Nurse was cutting my 
 beard, and handed me the mirror to report 
 progress. " The right moustache," I said 
 critically, "seems to droop down a lot." 
 She twisted up the left between finger and 
 thumb, and then in a flash, before I had time 
 to scream, damped her finger with her 
 tongue, and gave a powerful screw to the 
 right 1 
 
 Beauty 
 
 April 2'lnd, 1919.— Under the lens of 
 scientific analysis, natural beauty disappears. 
 The emotion of beauty and the spirit of 
 
 I analysis and dissection cannot exist con- 
 temporaneously. The sunset becomes waves 
 of light impinging on atmospheric dust ; 
 the most beautiful pearl, the encysted itch 
 of a mollusc. 
 
 And not natural beauty alone, but all 
 
 I, beauty — all the furniture of earth, and all 
 
134 A LAST DIARY 
 
 the choir of heaven at the intellect's beck 
 must shed their beautiful vestments, although 
 their aureoles in the interim shall remain 
 safe in the keeping of man's soul. For just 
 as man's scientific analysis destroys beauty, 
 so his synthetic art creates it, and man 
 creates beauty, Nature supplying the raw 
 materials. 
 
 Nature is the clay, man the potter. Every- 
 one feeling the emotion of beauty becomes 
 a creative artist. If the world were as ugly 
 as sin, the artist would recreate it beautiful 
 in the image of his own beautiful spirit, just 
 as Frank Brangwyn and Joseph Pennell are 
 actually now doing with those industrial 
 hideousnesses. But man's generous nature, 
 because there is beauty in his own heart, 
 naively assumes its possession by others, and 
 so projects it into Nature. But he sees in 
 her only the truth and goodness that are in 
 himself. Natural beauty is everyone's 
 mirror. 
 
 Similarly, as I believe, man creates the 
 world itself after his own mind. Consult 
 
A LAST DIARY 135 
 
 the humanists, in whose system of philosophy 
 I have a profound intuitive belief. 
 
 Certainly there are many times when 
 Nature, by pure accident, having other aims 
 than our delight, produces the finished 
 article. Helen of Troy, I suppose, required 
 no emendation from the artist's hand. Nor 
 does the Watersmeet, Lynton. Occasionally 
 a human drama completes itself perfectly in 
 five acts, observing all the unities. 
 
 It may be claimed by the moralists that 
 there must be some very definite inherent 
 direction in Nature's processes towards the 
 light of beauty, if in the ordinary course of 
 producing, say, a blue flower to attract 
 insects, a thing of rare beauty at the same 
 time emerges therefrom. But this is putting 
 the cart before the horse. For man's own 
 ideas of beauty are necessarily based on the 
 forms and colour he finds in Nature, the 
 only world he knows. So that we may say 
 roughly that for our purposes we love blue 
 flowers, for instance, because bees first loved 
 them 1 The bees were the original artists 
 
186 A LAST DIARY 
 
 who created and educated our taste — they 
 and the blue sky above us, that is. As a 
 fact it is impossible to imagine the physical 
 world " as ugly as sin " — unless at the same 
 time you imagine man's soul as being 
 " as ugly as sin." You can imagine the world 
 different — e.g., with fewer forms and colours, 
 say uniformly flat and brown, a desert. 
 But that would mean that, not only art 
 would be poorer, but man himself as such 
 would cease to exist. Instead we should 
 have evolved as glorified sand. 
 
 Art has to take its cue from Nature, 
 though Nature, whatever its chance form in 
 any sort of planet, would always be emended 
 by Art provided man were the same, because 
 Mind is above Matter, Art above Nature. 
 
 Ap?il25th, 1919.— My beloved's birthday. 
 
 April 26th, 1919. — Here is the nucleus of 
 a sordid newspaper tragedy. I sleep on the 
 ground floor in the front. Nurse sleeps at 
 the back, upstairs She is very deaf and I 
 am helpless. Her father and mother both 
 died of heart failure. One sister has heart 
 
A LAST DIARY 137 
 
 disease and another heart weakness. Her 
 heart too is weak, and my electric bell won't 
 ring. If it did, she can only hear it when 
 awake. We live alone, and each morning 
 1 endure suspense till I hear her coming 
 down the stairs. 
 
 Overheard in the World Outside 
 
 In the road, e?i passant. 
 
 A Patrician's Voice : I was staying at 
 Lord Burnham's place over the week-end. 
 Very jolly. 
 
 Second Voice : I can never understand 
 why he . . . (They passed.) 
 
 Two countrymen meeting in the road. I 
 cannot see them, but quite well know how 
 they have drawn up like railway engines 
 standing on their metals, one on the right 
 side and the other on the left of the road, 
 converse a moment across the intervening 
 middle space : 
 
 " How is it then ?" 
 
 " Oh, pretty middling." 
 
138 A LAST DIARY 
 
 " They aven't shot your dog yet then, I 
 see " (rabies reported in the district). 
 
 "I'll watch it." 
 
 And they steam slowly onwards. 
 
 April 28th, 1919. — Yes, there are com- 
 pensations. Few can appreciate a sunny 
 morning and a blackbird's contralto from 
 the walnut-tree. 
 
 The " happy and comfortable " like to 
 hear about the compensations. They always 
 thought things were never so bad as they 
 seem. " You must pull your socks up 
 and make the best of things." But you 
 shouldn't have the impudence to tell him so. 
 
 Last night, a blizzard, a gale ! 
 
 Ap?il 29th, 1919. — Having cast my bread 
 upon the waters, it amuses me to find it 
 returning with the calculable exactitude of 
 a tidal movement — e.g., in my Journal I 
 stroked Public Opinion and it now purrs to 
 the tune of two and half pages of review : 
 the Saturday Review I cursed with bell, 
 book, and candle and — voila ! they mangle 
 me in their turn. 
 
A LAST DIARY 139 
 
 For the most part the reviewers say what 
 I have told them to say in the book. One 
 writes that it is a remarkable book. I told 
 him it was. Another says I am a conceited 
 prig. I have said as much more than once. 
 A third hints at the writer's inherent mad- 
 ness. I queried the same possibility. It is 
 amusing to see the flat contradictions. 
 There is no sort of unanimity of opinion 
 about any part of my complex character. 
 One says a genius, another not a genius ; 
 witty — dull; vivacious — dismal; intoler- 
 ably sad —happy ; lewd — finicky ; " quiet 
 humour " — " wild and vivacious wit.' As a 
 whole, I am surprised and delighted with 
 the extraordinary kindness and sympathy 
 meted out to it, more than I deserve or it 
 deserves, while one or two critics, with power 
 that amazes, penetrate to the wretched Bar- 
 bellion's core. To Mr. Massingham I feel 
 I can only murmur, " Too kind, too kind," 
 like the aged Florence Nightingale when they 
 came to present her with the O.M. But 
 what sympathetic understanding ! Compare 
 
 
140 A LAST DIARY 
 
 one man who said I was a social climber ; 
 another that I was " finicky " on sexual 
 matters ( Ha ! ha ! ha ! pardon my homeric 
 laughter); another — or was it the same? — 
 that I shrank from life — yes, shrank ! Give 
 me more life, to parody Goethe : I have 
 shouted thus for years. Poor old reviewers I 
 Friends and relatives say I have not drawn 
 my real self But that's because I've taken 
 my clothes off and they can't recognise 
 me stark 1 The book is a self-portrait in 
 the nude. 
 
 May 1st, 1919. — What a sad, intractable 
 world ! Will human love and goodness ever 
 overcome it ? 
 
 May 2nd, 1919. — I long to see my httle 
 daughter again. Yet I fear it horribly, I am 
 ashamed to meet her gaze. She will be 
 frightened at me. Better she should have 
 no memory of me at all to take through life. 
 
 May 16th, 1919.— On the 14th at 2 p.m. 
 a well-appointed ambulance took me to a 
 nursing home at Eastbourne, where I arrived 
 at 7 p.m., exhausted but cheerful. It was 
 
A LAST DIARY 141 
 
 like being raised from the dead. We 
 travelled via Acton and Ealing and Shep- 
 herd's Bush, where we turned down H. road 
 past my old rooms, across Kensington Road, 
 and down Warwick Gardens, where one 
 dark November night E. and I plighted our 
 troth beneath a lamp-post. We passed the 
 lamp-post ! Then to West Cromwell Road, 
 to Fulham, Wandsworth, Tooting, to 
 Tunbridge Wells, where at four-thirty we 
 drew up at an inn and a servant-maid put a 
 tray of tea and cakes on the bench beside 
 me, and I ate and smoked while the driver 
 in the road compared notes with the landlord 
 on war adventures. 
 
 " Where were you then ?" 
 
 " Messines." 
 
 " Ah ! I didn't go so far north as that." 
 
 It was so hot, I lay on my couch with my 
 rugs, etc., off. But the street boys were so 
 curious over my pyjama suit, I pulled the 
 blinds. Then they moved round and looked 
 in through the door. Nurse closed it. 
 They moved round to the other side, so 
 
142 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Nurse drew those blinds too. Then they 
 capered off. 
 
 After that across Crowborough Forest, 
 the car running at an even pace uphill and 
 down. I lay happy and triumphant, and 
 watched the country speeding by. We 
 passed picnic parties someone should have 
 given them a warning and an exhortation ; 
 a dreadful thing for them, thought I, if they 
 are not aware fully of their magnificent good 
 fortune. The sky was cloudless. It was an 
 amusing thing to me to feel so happy. Then 
 1 became displeased at my mood, on E.'s 
 account, as I recollected the picture of her 
 and baby in the road waving me good- 
 bye. 
 
 3Iay 17th, 1919. — This egotism business: 
 the Journal is more egoism than egotism, 
 especially the latter part. And ought 
 not Meredith to have called it " The 
 Egotist " ? 
 
 Maij 18th, 1919. — In the Journal I can 
 see now that I made myself out worse than 
 1 am, or was. I even took a morbid 
 
A LAST DIARY 143 
 
 pleasure in intimating my depravity — self- 
 mortification. If I had spoken out more 
 plainly I should have escaped all this censure 
 The reviewers are only too ready to take me 
 at my word, which is but natural. I don't 
 think on the whole my portrait of myself 
 does myself justice. 
 
 A beautiful morning. At the bottom of 
 my bed two French windows open out on to 
 the garden, where a blackbird is singing me 
 something more than well. It is a magnifi- 
 cent flute obligato to the tune in my heart 
 going " thub-dup " " thub-dup " wildly as if 
 I were a youth again in first love. He 
 shouted out his song in the evening, the very 
 moment I arrived here. What fine spirits 
 these blackbirds are ! I listen to him and 
 my withered carcase soaks up his song 
 with a sighing sound, like a dry sponge 
 taking up water. 
 
144 A LAST DIARY 
 
 PoMPA Mortis 
 
 May 20th, 1919. —If I could please myself, 
 I should have my coffin made and kept 
 under my bed. Then if I should die they 
 could just pull the old box out and put me 
 in it. It is the orthodox pompa mortis that 
 makes death so ugly and terrible. I like the 
 idea of William Morris, who was taken to 
 the cemetery in an old farm- cart. 
 
 Ludicrous Impotence 
 
 I often laugh loud at the struggles of 
 Nurse with my perfectly ludicrous, impotent 
 body. If you saw us, you would certainly 
 believe in a personal devil ; but when you 
 saw what a devil he is, you would also see in 
 him a most fantastic clown. JNIy right leg 
 is almost completely aneesthetised — curious 
 experience this. You could poke the fire 
 with it, and I shouldn't feel anything out of 
 the way. I could easily emulate Cranmer's 
 
A LAST DIARY 145 
 
 stoical behaviour. It is so dead that if 
 you put my body out in the sun, the flies in 
 error would come and lay their eggs on me. 
 Yes, Satan was the first and chiefest of Pan- 
 taloons. Everyone who desires to possess 
 a complete knowledge of the world should 
 read Duhamel, Latzko, Barbusse, and con- 
 sult the illustrations in a textbook of 
 tropical medicine. 
 
 The Idealist 
 
 The ultimate detection of a few bad faults 
 in a good man most unfairly discounts his 
 goodness in the idealist's judgment. For 
 the idealist can be a stern, implacable task- 
 master. So a few good points unexpectedly 
 coming to light in a bad man are enough to 
 make the ever sanguine idealists forget the 
 fellow's general badness. For the man of 
 ideals must snatch at a straw. This is not 
 justice, but it's human nature. 
 
146 A LAST DIARY 
 
 Those Nurses Again 
 
 Nurse No. 1 (helping her colleague to 
 put away her books, examining a lapful). — 
 Ah, French novels ! Tum-ti-tum-tum ! 
 
 Nurse No. 2 (scandaUsed). — French 
 classics I 
 
 Nurse No. 1. — Oh, I beg your pardon — I 
 thought they were French novels. 
 
 May 22nd, 1919. — The reviewers say I 
 am introspective — they mean self- intro- 
 spective. I am really both. 
 
 May 24/A, 1919.— My legs have to be 
 tied down to the bed with a rope. A little 
 girl staying here lends me her skipping rope. 
 
 The Peace Treaty 
 
 After those bright hopes of last autumn 
 Justice will be done only when all power is 
 vested in the people. Every liberal-minded 
 man must feel the shame of it. 
 
A LAST DIARY 147 
 
 This is the end. I am not going to keep 
 a diary any more. 
 
 The Brightest Thing in the World 
 
 June 1st, 1919. — Rupert Brooke said the 
 brightest thing in the world was a leaf with 
 the sun shining on it. God pity his ignor- 
 ance ! The brightest thing in the world is a 
 Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. 
 This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows 
 about it save only the naturalist. I had a 
 new sponge the other day and it smelt of 
 the sea till I had soaked it. But what a 
 vista that smell opened up ! — rock pools, 
 gobies, blennies, anemones (crassicorn, dahlia 
 — oh ! I forget). And at the end of my 
 little excursion into memory I came upon 
 the morning when I put some sanded, 
 opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the 
 sea into a glass collecting jar, and to my 
 amazement and delight they turned into 
 Ctenophors — alive, swimming, and irides- 
 cent ! You must imagine a tiny soap 
 
148 A LAST DIARY 
 
 bubble about the size of a filbert with four 
 series of plates or combs* arranged regularly 
 on the soap bubble from its north to its 
 south pole, and flashing spasmodically in 
 unison as they beat the water. 
 
 June 3rd, 1919. — To-morrow I go to 
 another nursing home. 
 
 The rest is silence. 
 
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