When his book was being prepared for publication and while he was still ignorant what reception it would have he remarked without hesitation that he "liked to look at himself posthumously as a writer"; and it appears from the introduction to Enjoying Life that his friends had long before expected him to turn his whole attention to literature. Even here his work is comprised in small space. It consists of three things: the published Journal of a Disappointed Man, containing extracts from his diaries between 1903 and 1917, the posthumous volume, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains, containing, together with a number of essays and articles, long passages omitted for the sake of space from the previous book, and the still unpublished diary from the beginning of 1918 onwards. Even from this certain deductions must be made. The scientific articles in the second volume were only just worth reprinting; and the essays on journal-writers and the two short stories, though they are promising, are yet no more than the experiments of a man who was considering giving himself formally to the profession of literature. But when all these deductions are made there is a residue which is unique in value.
In the introduction to the first volume Mr. Wells very comprehensively lays stress on the circumstances of Barbellion's fate. He represents the diarist as saying, "You shall have at least one specimen carefully displayed and labelled. Here is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square with this." This is, of course, an aspect of the matter which no reader could manage to overlook, even if he desired (as he might conceivably desire) to do so. It would be a pity, however, if we were to consider it to the exclusion of every other aspect. Barbellion was not essentially a specimen who by good luck had the ability to display and label himself. If his circumstances had been quite other than they were, he would still have been a remarkable man and would almost certainly have done remarkable work. His disease and death ought to play the same part in our conception of him that they do in our conception of Keats, with whom, besides, he had certain affinities which he half-consciously recognised. We do not know what part disease played in creating or forcing or conditioning Keats's genius; we only know that it infuses a poignancy and a colour into our picture of his life. He does not appear to us as the diseased poet, but as a poet who, as it happened, was stricken with disease. So with Barbellion: he had a personality and a gift for describing his experiences; and, since it fell out that his experiences were tragic, therefore the story he tells is a tragedy. But the tragedy is not interesting only as such. It is interesting because the principal figure in it is Barbellion.
The comparison with Keats is natural, is suggestive, and can be supported by a number of particulars, both accidental and essential. "Since the fateful November 27th," says Barbellion, "my life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys." Keats writes in his last letter, from Rome, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence." But there is a closer similarity between them than the superficial parallel suggested by their use of the same word. Barbellion himself made the comparison more than once, and once in a very significant context.
You can search all history [he exclaims] for an ambition more powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor Wilhelm II., nor Keats.
And this uncontrollable ambition in both of them was one manifestation of the innermost ruling characteristic which they had in common, the passion for life in all its shapes and forms, for all the sensations life can bring, which inspires Barbellion's Journal as surely as it inspires Keats's poetry and letters.
The title of Barbellion's second book was not, as it might seem, intended in irony. He enjoyed life to a terrifying degree and could abandon himself to the ecstasy which it produced in him.
As you say [he writes in a letter, referring to a review of the Journal] the rest of the notice distinguishing Marie Bashkirtseff from me by her zest for life is an astonishing and ludicrous misreading. Why, even since I became bedridden, as you will see one day, my zest for life took a devil of a lot of killing—like a sectioned worm with all the parts still wriggling....
In the last part of the diary his assertion is amply proved. Here the zest for life, in a man who could no longer indulge it save in memory, is sublimated to a piercing but sweet lyrical cry, which is one of the most moving utterances in literature. Before, when he was in possession of all his faculties, when the shadow of illness could sometimes be forgotten, it is a rapturous and boisterous expression of infinite energy, high spirits and gusto. Almost any paragraph in the essay called Enjoying Life would serve to demonstrate this:
"Dans littérature," said M. Taine, "j'aime tout." I would shake his hand for saying that, and add: "In life, Monsieur, as well." All things attract me equally. I cannot concentrate. I am ready to do anything, go anywhere, think anything, read anything. Wherever I hitch my waggon I am confident of an adventurous ride. Somebody says, "Come and hear some Wagner." I am ready to go. Another, "I say, they are going to ring the bull"—and who wants to complete his masterpiece or count his money when they are going to ring the bull? I will go with you to Norway, Switzerland, Jericho, Timbuctoo. Talk to me about the Rosicrucians or the stomach of a flea and I will listen to you. Tell me that the Chelsea Power Station is as beautiful as the Parthenon at Athens and I'll believe you. Everything is beautiful, even the ugly—why did Whistler paint the squalor of the London streets, or Brangwyn the gloom of a steam-crane? To subscribe to any one particular profession, mode of life, doctrine, philosophy, opinion, or enthusiasm, is to cut oneself off from all the rest—I subscribe to all. With the whole world before you, beware lest the machinery of education seizes hold of the equipotential of your youth and grinds you out the finished product! You were a human being to start with—now, you are only a soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor. Leonardo da Vinci, racked with frustrate passion after the universal, is reported to have declared that only to do one thing and only to know one thing was a disgrace, no less.
Crying for the Moon, the essay which follows, also extracted from the Journal, is the obverse of the same coin: