“What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull earth, to be no longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the earth creating attractions and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream. To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever hated them—the ignominy of being dead!”
If this latter entry had been written a few years later, one might suspect the influence of Rupert Brooke. As the date stands, one can only infer that Barbellion, in spite of his much vaunted morbidness, possessed a little of the zest of life which so richly flavoured the genius of that young poet.
The entries in the “Journal” after the nature of his disease had been made known to him express a marked difference in his attitude toward death. In 1917 he said,
“I ask myself; what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I hope for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and, above all, for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.”
This, one might almost say, shows Barbellion at his best.
A power of fancy which is displayed in few other connections throughout the book made him say, during the same year,
“What a delightful thing the state of death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past—if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! If the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farmyards in——birdnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over Parker and Haswell and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this; to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times.... My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.”
Nothing in the diaries illustrates more strikingly Barbellion's zest for living than these allusions to death. In the first decade of life, the average person gives no thought as to whether he will live or die; in the second decade he rarely becomes concerned with thoughts of death unless they are forced upon him by painful or persistent illness. In the third decade, when the fear of death is very common, Barbellion knew that he must soon die. This flair for life, which he must have possessed to a marked degree, is evidenced in his love of nature and in his appreciation of beauty and of literature to an immensely greater extent than in contact with his fellows. His pleasure in æsthetics was real and profound, and included an appreciation of sound, colour, and form, both in nature and in art. His capacity for the appreciation of beauty of sound was greater than for the beauty of colour or form. Although apparently he had never studied music, he said of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that it “always worked me up into an ecstasy”; and after listening to music by Tschaikovsky, Debussy, and others that, “I am chock-full of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write.”
Whether or not his suspicion that “my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me only distilled sensuality” was true, the appreciation was unquestionably genuine, as shown by his comment on Rodin's “The Prodigal Son” that it was “Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand—a superb touch—what a frenzy of remorse!,” and on “The Fallen Angel” that “The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it—down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes—like the hind legs of some beautiful dead gazelle.”
Above his appreciation of æsthetic beauty, however, Barbellion realised, theoretically at least, that the topmost levels of pleasure and pain are constituted of qualities dependent upon achievements of the moral order—of duty well done, of happiness conferred, of services rendered, of benefits bestowed; or of the antithesis, of remorse for abstention and neglect of these or for active misdeeds. He says in “The Last Diary,”