A Last Diary | Page 9

to him. Foul-mouthed he never was, unless a man is foul-mouthed who calls a thing by its true name and will not cover it with a sham or a substitute. In his talks with me he was as "abandoned" in his frankness as in theJoiwnal; and the longer I knew him the more I admired the boldness of his vision; the unimpeachable honesty and therefore the essential purity of his mind.
His habit of self-introspection and his mordant descriptions of his countless symptoms were not the "inward notes" or the weak outpourings of a hypochondriac. His whole bearing and his attitude to life in general were quite uncharacteristic of the hypochondriac as that type of person is commonly depicted and understood. It should be remembered that his symptoms were real symptoms and as depressing as they were painful, and his disease a terribly real disease which affected from the beginning almost every organ of his body. Though he was rarely miserable he had something to be miserable about, and the accepted definition of a hypochondriac is that of one whose morbid state of mind is produced by a constitutional melancholy for which there is no palpable cause. He scarcely ever spoke of his dyspepsia, his muscular tremors, his palpitations of the heart, and all the other physical disturbances which beset him from day to day, except with a certain wry humour; and while it is true that he would discuss his condition with the air of an enthusiastic anatomist who had just been contemplating some unusually interesting corpus vile, he talked of it only when directly questioned about it, or to explain why a piece of work that he was anxious to finish had been interrupted or delayed. He had a kind of disgust for his own emaciated appearance, arising, not improbably, from his aesthetic admiration for the human form in its highest development. On one occasion, when we were spending a quiet holiday together at a little Breton fishing village, I had some difficulty in persuading him to bathe in the sea on account of his objection to exposing his figure to the view of passers-by. The only thing that might be considered in the least morbid in his point of view with regard to his health was a fixed and absolutely erroneous belief that his weakness was hereditary. His parents were both over sixty when they died from illnesses each of which had a definitely traceable cause. Though the other members of the family enjoyed exceptionally good health, he continued to the last to suspect that we were all physically decadent, and nothing could shake his conviction that my particular complaint was heart disease, regardless of the fact frequently pointed out to him that in the Army I had been passed Al with monotonous regularity.
Mr. Wells has referred to him as "an egotistical young naturalist"; in the same allusion, however, he reiterated the fundamental truth that "we are all egotists within the limits of our power of expression." Barbellion was intensely interested in himself, but he was also intensely interested in other people. He had not that egotistical imagination of the purely selfcentred man which looks inward all the time because nothing outside the province of his own self-consciousness concerns him. He had an objective interest in himself, an outcome of the peculiar faculty which he divulged in the first of the two letters already quoted of looking at human beings, even his own mother, objectively. He described and explained himself so persistently and so thoroughly because he had an obviously better opportunity of studying himself with nice precision and attentive care than he had for the study of other people. He regarded himself quite openly and quite naturally as a human specimen to be examined, classified, and dissected, and he did his work with the detailed skill and the truthful approach of a scientific investigator. The "limits of his power of expression" being far beyond those of the average man, he was able to give a picture of himself that lives on account of its simple and daring candour. He is not afraid to be frank in giving expression to a thought merely because it may be an unpleasant or a selfish thought. If a shadowy doubt assails him, or an outre criticism presents itself about a beloved friend, he sets it down; if he feels a sensuous joy in bathing in the sea and loves to look upon his "pink skin," or derives a catlike satisfaction from rolling a cigarette between his fingers; if he thinks he sees a meanness in his own heart, or catches himself out in some questionable or unworthy piece of conduct, however trivial, the diary receives its faithful record. The dissimilarity between Barbellion and other persons is that, while those of us