A Last Diary | Page 8

of his life, and the calamity it had brought upon his wife and child, afterwards cried out in protest against my deception based as it was on expert judgment, and inspired solely by an affectionate desire to shield him from acute distress in the remaining period of his life after I had been told that he might live five, ten, fifteen years longer. Yet, reviewing all the circumstances, I realise that I could have come to no other decision even if I might have foreseen all that was to follow. Let it be clearly understood that the devoted woman to whom he became engaged was at once made aware of his actual condition, and after consultation with her family and an interview with the doctor, who left her under no misapprehension as to the facts, she calmly and courageously chose to link her fate with that of Barbellion. How by a curious and dramatic accident Barbellion shortly after his marriage discovered the truth about himself, and kept it for a time from his wife in the belief that she did not know, is related with unconscious pathos in the Journal.
Barbellion was married in September, 1915. In July, 1917, he was compelled to resign his appointment at the South Kensington Museum. His life came to an end on October 22, 1919, in the quaint old country cottage at Gerrard's Cross, Buckinghamshire, where for many months he had lain like a wraith, tenderly ministered to in his utter weakness by those who loved him. His age was thirty-one. He was glad to die. "Life," to use a phrase he was fond of repeating, "pursued him like a fury" to the end; but as he lingered on, weary and helpless, he was increasingly haunted by the fear of becoming a grave burden to his family. The publication of the Journal and the sympathetic reception it met with from the press and public were sources of profound comfort to his restless soul, yearning as he had yearned from childhood to find friendly listeners to the beating of his heart, fiercely panting for a large-hearted response to his self-revealing, half-wistful, half-defiant appeal to the comprehension of all humanity. "The kindness almost everybody has shown the Journal, and the fact that so many have understood its meaning," he said to me shortly before he died, "have entirely changed my outlook. My horizon has cleared, my thoughts are tinged with sweetness, and I am content." Earlier than this he had written: "During the past twelve months I have undergone an upheaval, and the whole bias of my life has gone across from the intellectual to the ethical. I know that Goodness is the chief thing."
He did not accomplish a tithe of what he had planned to do, but in the extent and character of his output he achieved by sheer force of will-power, supported by an invincible ambition and an incessant intellectual industry that laughed his ill-health in the face, more than seemed possible to those of us who knew the nature of the disorder against which he fought with undying courage every day of his life. It is scarcely surprising that there have been diverse estimates of his character and capacities, some wise and penetrating, many imperfect and wide of the mark. It is not for me to try to do more than correct a few crude or glaringly false impressions of the kind of man Barbellion was. Others must judge of the quality of his genius and of his place in life and literature. But I can speak of Barbellion as the man I knew him to be. He was not the egotist, pure and simple, naked and complete, that he sometimes accused himself of being and is supposed by numerous critics and readers of the Journal to have been.
His portrait of himself was neither consummate nor, as Mr. Shanks well says, "immutable." "In the nude," declared Barbellion, more than once, with an air of blunt finality. Yes, but only as he imagined himself to look in the nude.
He was forever peering at himself from changing angles, and he was never quite sure that the point of view of the moment was the true one. Incontinently curious about himself, he was never certain about the real Barbellion. One day he was "so much specialised protoplasm"; another day he was Alexander with the world at his feet; and then he was a lonely boy pining for a few intimate friends. His sensations at once puzzled and fascinated him.
"I am apparently [he said] a triple personality : (1) The respectable youth; (2) the foul-mouthed commentator and critic; (3) the real but unknown I."
Many times he tried thus to docket his manifold personality in distinguishable departments. It was a hopeless task. "Respectability" was the last word to apply