Of his wife the diaries give a very vague picture. Once he exclaimed, “To think that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my vicious orbit!” but no information is given regarding this past. The idea of marriage was in his thoughts for several years, but his attitude was one of doubt and vacillation. In 1914 he wrote:
“I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself. The title of 'husband' scares me.”
When he finally recorded his marriage as having taken place at the Registry Office he added,
“It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts and fears.”
“The function of the private journal is one of observation, experiment, analysis, contemplation; the function of the essay is to provoke reflection,” wrote Amiel. Barbellion's observation was of himself and of nature; his experiment how to adjust himself to the world; his analysis almost exclusively of his ego; and his contemplation the mystery of life and death. A “sport” in the biological sense, that is, differing markedly from his immediate ancestors, he fell afoul of infection early in life. From the beginning it scarred and debilitated him.
He was an egotist and proud of it. He did not realise that the ego is a wall which limits the view rising higher with every emotional or intellectual growth. There is a certain degree of greatness from which, when a man reaches it, he can always look over the top of the wall of his egotism. Barbellion never reached it. He was a man above the ordinary, capable of originality and of learning from experience, clever at his profession, apt at forming general ideas, sometimes refined and sometimes gross; a solitary, full of contradictions, ironic or ingenuous by fits, tormented by sexual images and sentimental ideas, and possessed by the desire to become famous, but haunted by the fear that he would not live to see his desire accomplished.
He had the misfortune to be without faith or ability to acquire it, but in compensation he was given to an envious degree immunity to fear, and he endured disease and faced death with courage and resignation. If we contrast his thought and conduct with that of another egotist, Robert Louis Stevenson, after he came to know the number of days that remained for him, as thought and conduct are recorded in the “Vailima Letters,” Barbellion suffers from the comparison, for Stevenson was devoid of vanity and selfishness. But the comparison would not be a just one, for euphoria is a feature of the disease with which Stevenson contended, and despair of Barbellion's. Moreover, Stevenson was a Celt and had a sense of humour. Everyone likes to think that his distinguishing characteristic is a sense of humour. Barbellion believed he possessed it tremendously. He may have, but his books do not reveal it.
He forced himself without academic training upon a most conservative institution, a close corporation, archaically conventionalised, and he gave earnest that he could mount the ladder of preferment quickly and gracefully.
He saw himself with the lucidity of genius, but his admirers will not admit that he was the man he said he was. One admirer does.
Would that he had added to his litany: Defenda me, Dios, de me!—The Lord deliver me from myself. Had he done so, he would have accomplished to a greater degree the object of life: to be happy and to make others happy.