The two novels, “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915, and “Night and Day,” in 1919, are love stories in which, through the efforts of the lovers to find and express themselves, the author reveals her own ideas of life. Her machinery is largely that of dialogue between the lovers, and her chief actors are normal young men and women, wholesome in their outlook, as well as frank in their expression of their problems, which revolve largely around matrimony. The result is that while the novels are introspective in a way, as well as daring in their analysis of the author's psychology, they are free from the morbidness of many of the introspective books of today. “The Voyage Out” is the expression of healthy, normal youth reverently but straightforwardly seeking in marriage the deeper values that underlie its superficialities and justify the quality of its idealism.

In no more striking and creditable way have the women of Britain demonstrated the legitimacy of “Rights” than by their fiction of the past few years.

CHAPTER VIII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: W. N. P. BARBELLION

“The life of the soul is different. There is nothing more changing, more varied, more restless ... to describe the incidents of one hour would require eternity.” —Journal of Eugénie de Guérin.

Bruce Frederick Cummings, an English entomologist and assistant at the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, developed in early life an infectious disease of the central nervous system called disseminated sclerosis, which riddles the brain and spinal cord with little islets of tissue resembling scars, and died of it October 22, 1919, in the thirtieth year of his age. Six months before his death he published a book entitled “The Journal of a Disappointed Man,” under the pen name of W. N. P. Barbellion. It is not destined to live as long as Pepys' “Diary” or Amiel's “Journal,” but it may outlive “The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff”—the three great diaries of the past century. “The Journal of a Disappointed Man,” in conjunction with another called “A Last Diary,” published after his death, may be looked upon as the revelation of a conscious mind, as complete as the conscious mind can make it. These books afford us opportunity to study the psychology of one variety of self-revelation, just as the books of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson permit study of the subconscious mind, and more specifically undirected or wishful thinking, technically called autistic.

While absolute classification of people is always inaccurate and misleading, still for the convenience of this study, in order to bring into high relief the features which distinguish Barbellion's diaries from the other three great self-revelations of the conscious mind, the authors mentioned may be said to typify four distinct classes of diarists. The immortal Pepys may be dismissed with the words: pedant, philosopher, humourist. Amiel may be considered the mystic poet, with emphasis upon the spiritual side of his nature; Marie Bashkirtseff, the emotional artist whose talent was interpretive rather than creative; and Barbellion, the man of science, direct, forceful, effective on his objective side, but subjectively morbid and egocentric, unable to estimate correctly his own limitations or to direct his emotions into channels which would have made for happy living or sane thinking.

Cummings began to keep a diary when he was thirteen years old, and after seventeen years he had accumulated twenty post-quarto volumes of manuscript. Two years before his death he made an entry “Am busy rewriting, editing and bowdlerising my Journal for publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all flesh. Reading it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written.” In it and in another small volume published posthumously, called “The Joy of Life,” he said,

“You will find much of Bruce Frederick Cummings as he appears to his Maker. It is a study in the nude, with no appeal to pemmicanised intellects, but there is meaty stuff in it, raw, red or underdone.”

The noteworthy features of his life may be stated briefly. He was the youngest child of a journalist known in the little town of Barnstable, in Devon, as a shrewd and facile man, and of a timid, pious mother of the lower middle class. A puny child, backward in development mentally and physically, solitary, sensitive, shy, secretive, and self-conscious, he displayed an uncommon interest in nature, birds, fishes, insects, and all wild creatures. When he was fourteen he determined to become a naturalist, but his father's illness obliged him to contribute to the family maintenance. At sixteen he wrote,

“Signed my death warrant, i.e. my articles apprenticing me to journalism for five years. By Jove, I shall work frantically during these years so as to be ready at the end of them to take up a natural history appointment.”