A Last Diary | Page 9

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 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