This may seem adorned and artificial, but to me it is the most illuminating entry in the “Journal” and reveals many of his limitations.
At twenty-eight he made the entry,
“The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and ipso facto, an enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man's existence was ever quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew! How scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!”
It would have contributed to his peace of mind had he studied more closely the writings of the immortal physician of Norwich, from whom he believed he had spiritual descent:
“No man can justly censure or condemn another; because indeed no man truly knows another. This I perceive in myself; for I am in the dark to all the world; and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud. Those that know me superficially think less of me than I do of myself; those of my near acquaintance think more; God who truly knows me knows that I am nothing. Further no man can judge another, because no man knows himself; for we censure others but as they disagree from that humour which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us. So that in conclusion, all is but that we all condemn, self-love.”
Self-love, or over-appreciation of self, was Barbellion's most serious stumbling-block. He never got himself in the right perspective with the world, and it is unlikely, even though his brief life had been less tragic, that he would have succeeded in doing so. He was temperamentally unfit.
Barbellion's friends say that he was courteous and soft mannered, but his own estimate of capacity for display of the amenities is so at variance with this that we are forced to believe the manner they saw was veneer.
The following description of Lermontov by Maurice was, he averred, an exact picture of himself:
“He had, except for a few intimate friends, an impossible temperament; he was proud; overbearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savage amour-propre, and he took a childish delight in annoying; he cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique de deplair.'... He could not bear not to make himself felt and if he was unsuccessful in this by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones.”
Two years later he expressed much the same opinion of his social characteristics when he described himself as something between a monkey, a chameleon, and a jellyfish and made himself out an intellectual bully. He was honest enough not to omit an invariable trait of the bully—cowardice. He says,