“If only I could rest assured that after I am dead these Journals will be as tenderly cared for—as tenderly as this blessed infant! It would be cruel if even after I have paid the last penalty, my efforts and sufferings should continue to remain unknown or disregarded. What would I give to know the effect I shall produce when published! I am tortured by two doubts—whether these MSS. (the labour and hope of many years) will survive accidental loss and whether they really are of value. I have no faith in either.”
Again he wrote:
“My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul. Provided it is a veritable autochthon—I don't care how much of a taterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive—I take him in and—I fear sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your mind. Any eminently 'right-minded' Times or Spectator reader will ask: 'Who in Faith's name is interested in your retrospective muck-rakings—in fact, who the Devil are you?' To myself, a person of vast importance and vast interest, I reply—as are other men if I could but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr. Times- and Mr. Spectator- reader that actual crimes have many a time been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not....”
It is more than probable that the hope of getting the “Journal” published was suggested by acquaintance with “The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff” when Barbellion was twenty-four years old. On encountering a quotation from her in a book on Strindberg at that time, he noted,
“It would be difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the very spit of me. We are identical. Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff, how we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We are of the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate—ill, so am I. Her Journal is my Journal. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889.”
Barbellion's own estimate of what he calls his ambition is well summed up in the following words:
“My life appears to have been a titanic struggle between consuming ambition and adverse fortune. Behold a penniless youth thirsting for knowledge introduced into the world out of sheer devilment, with a towering ambition, but cursed with ill health and a two-fold nature, pleasure loving as well as labour loving.”
It would be interesting to find out in what way he was pleasure loving. As far as I can see from reading the “Journal,” the only pleasure that he sought was the occasional pleasure of contemplating nature, which was really a part of his work, and from hearing music.
“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.”
In the same way it is difficult to find evidence of this colossal ambition, save his statement of it. In reality he was ambitious for one thing: call it favour, applause, publicity, notoriety, or what not. He wanted to do something in literature which would focus the vision of the world upon him, and to accomplish this he devoted an incredible energy and labour to the production of a diary which was the record of aggressive, directed, logical thinking. He may have had capacity for creative literature, or he may have developed such capacity, but he did not display it. His career can be compared with no other because of the immeasurable handicap of his illness. But if it were not for this illness, it would be interesting to compare him with Huysmans, who, working as a clerk in a Governmental office in Paris, produced a series of books which gave him a commanding and perhaps a permanent place in French literature.