I am passing through the world swiftly and have only time to live my own life. I am cut off by my own limitations and environment from knowing much or understanding much. I know nothing of literature and the drama; I have but little ear for music. I do not understand art. All these things are closed to me. I am passing swiftly along the course of my life with many others whom I shall never meet. How many dear friends and kindred spirits remain undiscovered among that number? There is no time for anything. Everything and everyone is swept along in the hustling current. Oh! to sun ourselves awhile in the water meadows before dropping over the falls! The real tragedies in this world are not the things which happen to us, but the things which don't happen.
There are critics who would trace the source of such outbursts as these and of the joy in life that constantly appears in Keats to the effects of bacterial disease. We cannot contradict the conclusion, which may have a certain truth. We can only point out that the same cause does not always produce the same effect, and we must therefore deduce a particular genius in those in whom this spirit manifests itself. Barbellion was, from one point of view, a case of pathology, but he was not, any more than was Keats, nothing but that. He had a fine temperament which he expressed very finely.
There is a temptation when one is considering the Journal, to which Barbellion's work must eventually be reduced, to consider it as so much raw material and to speculate how, if he had lived, he would have used the many talents he displays in it. He began it as a record of a naturalist's observations, and it developed only very gradually into a self-portrait and a repository for all his reflections and impressions. He was still, when his last illness overtook him, a professional scientist, scribbling in his diary at night for a hobby. But he was thinking of going over to literature; and one cannot help asking whether, if he had done so, he would not have turned his genius to some more formal and less miscellaneous method of expression. It is easy to discern in him any number of capacities. He might have become a critic—a statement which can be proved by a few examples taken at random:
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.... All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.
It amuses me to discover the evident relish with which the author of The Daffodil Fields emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield's great excitement.... Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable book—a work of genius.
... James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist—one of those books which the mob will take fifty years to discover but once discovered will again neglect.
He might have been a psychological or a satirical novelist, a metaphysician, a casual essayist. He might have been a poet of nature. His diaries are studded with the most exquisite descriptions of landscapes and living things, which grow only more vivid and moving as the end approaches and they become transcripts from memory instead of recent impressions. The last long entry in the Journal is one of them, and it is so good and so characteristic that it insists on being quoted:
Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up!—rock pools, gobies, Blennies, anemones (crassicon, dahlia—oh! I forget). And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the morning when I put some sanded opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the sea, into a glass collecting jar and to my amazement and delight they turned into Ctenophors—alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap-bubble, from its North or to its South Pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat on the water.
But I think that this way of looking on Barbellion's work, excusable as it might be, would nevertheless be mistaken. Every author writes the book that it is given to him to write, and Barbellion's book was the Journal. If, as seems very likely, he had developed altogether into a writer, he might still not have abandoned this form which had become by a gradual process peculiarly his own. Goethe said that all his works were the fragments of a great confession, and this is true, in a greater or lesser degree, of most authors. Barbellion would have differed from the rest only in that his works would have been ostensibly and formally, as well as actually, his confessions.
And this view is supported by the fact that up to the last he was improving the flexible and accommodating method of literary expression which his diary had become. The last eighteen months of it seem to me to show an advance on the third part of the published Journal almost as striking as the advance of that third part on the first. The form fitted very closely to Barbellion's many-sided and individual temperament; and, as time went on and he understood better what he was doing, he made it fit more closely still. It was a frame into which he could put with perfect ease all that his roving perceptions picked up in life: an impression of a landscape or an animal, a conversation overheard in the street, a suddenly flashing truth about himself or some other person, a general reflection upon humanity. As a journal-writer he is not, of course, alone; but, being a strongly-marked personality, he is unique even among journal-writers. His intense interest in his own consciousness does not, as it did with Amiel, blind him to the actual outside world; he has more humour, more gusto in concrete detail than Marie Bashkirtseff, a vein of sheer poetry that we do not find in Pepys. This is not intended to rank him above the writers with whom he loved to compare himself, but rather to emphasise his individuality among them.
We find ourselves at last wondering not how he would have employed the gifts he displays in the Journal, but to what pitch of excellence he might have brought the Journal itself. The last entries are admirably full of matter and admirably worded. The passage I have quoted on the Ctenophors is of almost perfect lyrical beauty—not a random jotting, but an impression seized and made permanent with all the proportion and balance of a sonnet by Hérédia. Over against it there might be quoted passages on the old village nurse who attended him for months, closely and humorously observed and set down without the waste of a syllable. Or there are pages of reflections like this:
The Icons.
Every man has his own icon.
Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably with great respect, by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and subsists. In the self-righteous man's bosom, it is a molten image of a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egotist's, an ideal loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the truth-seeker preserves his image in clay, covered in damp rags—a working hypothesis.
A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered its heart's treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare refer to his own—it is bad form—so that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirls around each one's personality, a man remains sound-tight and insulated.
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person—as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.
Heavens! what a toy shop it will be at the Last Day! When all our little effigies are taken from their cupboards, undraped, and ranged along beside us, nude and shivering. In that Day how few will be able to say that they ever cried
"God be merciful to me a sinner," or "a fool," or "a humbug."
The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man's life is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and the real—the image (or the man's mistaken idea of himself)—like an ignis fatuus leading him through devious paths into the morass of failure, or worse—of sheer, laughing-stock silliness. The moral is:
γνῶθι σεαυτόν {gnôthi seauton}
(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life.)