Nearly every writer who has tried to form an estimate of my brother’s potentialities has discussed the question whether he would have deserted the science of zoology, his first consuming love, for the broader paths of literature. Now that he is dead it must appear to be a fruitless speculation. But it is not perhaps without interest. I am convinced that he would not have remained at South Kensington longer than was necessary to provide him with bread and butter. He was that comparatively rare combination — a man of science, and a man of letters. He was in love with life as soon as he was in love with science, and the life of man inspired his imagination more than the lives of the animals it was his business to know about. His scientific zeal was aroused in ‘an extraordinary new form of bird parasite brought back by the New Guinea Expedition’, as much because it was a new form of life as because it appealed to the enthusiasm of the trained zoologist. Years before he was filled with sickening disappointment by the drudgery of his labours and the narrow limitations imposed upon him in a department of Natural History that he cared for least, he was contemplating large literary schemes, some of which he unfolded to me with an infectious ardour of hope and determination. He planned in these years a novel that was to be of immense length, with something of the scope of the Comédie Humaine, and a series of logically developed treatises on the lines of his essay, ‘The Passion for Perpetuation’, which in his own words were to be his magnum opus. His hopes, high and unquenchable as they always appeared to be, were cut short by his lingering illness and his early death. There remain only a few documentary fragments that testify to the boldness of his intentions. His one published attempt at a short story, ‘How Tom Snored’, is in my opinion quite unworthy of his abilities. It is impossible to say in what direction his undoubted literary powers would have found their true outlet. It is certain that if he had lived in the full enjoyment of normal health the Journal in its present outward form or as a narrative of his career and an unreserved record of his personal reflections would never have been published. It is equally certain that months before he resigned his appointment on the staff of the South Kensington Museum he was weary of his work there, and the bias of his mind was turning rapidly from the cause of biological science towards the humanities. His restless spirit demanded a wider range of expression, unhampered by the many exasperating futilities of his professional labours. But his published work is perhaps all the more valuable on account of his exertions in the laboratory, because even when he ‘meddles’ in his fantastic and compelling way ‘with things that are too high for me, not as a recreation but as a result of intense intellectual discomfort’ — even at these moments, when he plunges with impetuous gusto into the infinities of time and space and God, there is a certain sanity of statement, a suggestion of strength in reserve, a studied self-control in the handling of his theme that his scientific habit of mind makes possible and emphasises. This instinctive restraint can be discovered again and again in vehement passages that at a glance seem to bear the mark of reckless extravagance.
A Last Diary is the last of Barbellion, as a writer. For those of us who knew and loved him as a boy and as a man the memory of his masterful personality — his courage, his wit, his magnetism, his pride of intellect and his modesty withal, his afflictions, his affectionate tenderness — will endure without ceasing. As the most modern of the journal-writers he addresses to the public a dauntless message, the value and significance of which time alone can measure. Like all men of abnormal sensibility he suffered deeply; but if he suffered deeply he enjoyed also his moments of exquisite happiness. He lived fast. He was for ever bounding forward in an untameable effort to grasp the unknown and unknowable. Fate struck him blow upon blow, but though his head was often bloody it remained unbowed. Mr Wells says the story of his life is a ‘recorded unhappiness’. I prefer to think of it as a sovereign challenge.
1920
THE BEGINNING
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The Journal of a Disappointed Man first published in 1919
A Last Diary first published in 1920
Published in Penguin Classics 2017
Cover artwork © The John Nash Estate/Bridgeman Images
ISBN: 978-0-241-29770-4
PART ONE
fn1 Up to 1911, the Journal is mainly devoted to records of observations in general Natural History and latterly in Zoology alone.
fn2 There are numerous drawings of dissections scattered through the Journal about this period.
fn3 He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.
fn4 In Byron’s poem.
fn5 See entry for October 8, 1913.
fn6 Italics added 1917.
fn7 The paper was ‘Distant Orientation in Batrachia’ – detailing experiments on the homing faculty in newts.
PART TWO: IN LONDON
fn1 ‘The life of the Soul is different; there is nothing more changing, more varied, more restless … to describe the incidents of one hour would require an eternity.’ – Journal of Eugénie de Guérin.
fn2 See entry for November 27, 1915.
fn3 ‘I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with the Spire of Strassburg Cathedral.’
fn4 See January 2nd, 1915.
fn5 1917. I am now editing my own Journal – bowdlerising my own book!
fn6 A method of collecting insects in winter by shaking moss over white paper.
fn7 1917. Cf. Sainte-Beuve’s Essay on Maurice de Guérin: ‘Il aimait à se répandre et presque à se ramifier dans la Nature. Il a exprimé en mainte occasion cette sensation diffuse, errante; il y avait des jours ou, dans son amour ou calme, il enviait la vie forte et muette qui règne sous l’écorce des chênes; il rêvait à je ne sais quelle métamorphose en arbre …’
fn8 Cf. 1916, November 6.
fn9 Cf. Burns’s poem ‘On a Louse’.
PART THREE: MARRIAGE
fn1 The English Dialect Dictionary derives the word from Old French chiboule, and gives a reference to Piers Plowman. Why hasn’t such an old and useful word become a part of the English language like others also brought over at the time of the Norman Conquest?
fn2 So it proved. See September 26 et seq.
fn3 In ‘La Récherche de l’Absolu’ (Balzac).
fn4 See September 3 (next entry), ‘A Jolt’, and September 24 (infra).
fn5 The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.
fn6 This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his friend Brown.
fn7 I had destroyed the first certificate (see here), but it was necessary to obtain another when conscription came in.
fn8 Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at Putney.
Napoleon regretted that he had not died at Borodino. At St Helena he is reported to have said: ‘To die at Borodino would have been to have died like Alexander: to be killed at Waterloo would have been a good death: perhaps Dresden would have been better: but no, better at Waterloo.’
fn9 John Wesley rewrote his journals from entries in rough draft.
fn10 I once received from an editor a very encouraging letter which gave me a great deal of pleasure and made me hope he
was going to open the pages of his magazine to me. But three weeks after he committed suicide by jumping out of his bedroom window.
fn11 The Egoist explains himself again.
fn12 Writing difficult to decipher.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 41