A Last Diary | Page 8

malady. Whether I was right or wrong in accepting the medical man's
advice, I do not regret the course I took. Barbellion, in a moment of
overwhelming despair at the tragedy 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