“Under the lens of scientific analysis natural beauty disappears. The emotion of beauty and the spirit of analysis and dissection cannot exist contemporaneously. But just as man's scientific analysis destroys beauty, so his synthetic art creates it. And man creates beauty, nature supplying the raw materials. Because there is beauty in man's own heart, he naïvely 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.”
Barbellion's strong sense of moral values was always coloured by his passion—which was almost a mania for receiving appreciation and applause. Although he denied wanting to be liked, respected, and admired, yet he clamoured for it. He displayed pain upon receiving the marks of disapprobation, and reproof he disliked and despised.
He was singularly free from spontaneous disorder of will; that is, of delay, vacillation, and precipitation. The only evidence he gave of vacillation was about his marriage, and that showed his good judgment. He was much more inclined to precipitation than to vacillation, and for a neurotic individual he was strangely without obsession—that is the morbid desire to do some act which the would-be performer discountenances and struggles not to do.
With all his sensitiveness, Barbellion seemed to have been not without an element of cruelty. This was of the refined, indirect sort and was chiefly noticeable in references to his wife. While he was contemplating a proposal of marriage he made an entry in his diary,
“I tried my best, I have sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are lamentable. Poor dear, how I love her! That is why I am so concerned about her thumbs.”
In speaking of his fiancée's letters, he once wrote,
“These letters chilled me. In reply I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless, formal notes, for I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote to me or how she expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my education and mental habits.”
Two years later he added to this entry “What a popinjay!” But then two years later he was a confirmed invalid and she was making great sacrifice to take care of him.
In another place he taunted her, after admitting her letters disappointed him with their coldness, and added, “Write as you would speak. You know I am not one to carp about a spelling mistake”; and at another time he recorded,
“My life here has quite changed its orientation. I am no longer an intellectual snob. If I were E. and I would have parted ere now. I never like to take her to the British Museum because there all the values are intellectual.”