July 26, 2025 • 57 mins
Dive into the captivating final journal entries of British naturalist Bruce Frederick Cummings. This poignant narrative stretches from March 1918 to June 1919, a tumultuous period that saw the end of WWI. It’s a book that follows the successful publication of Cummings previous journal, The Journal of a Disappointed Man. In this more concise volume, Cummings offers his contemplative reflections on the end of the war, tinged with the realization that while the world celebrated peace, he was grappling with failing health. His body may have been succumbing to multiple sclerosis, but his emotional and intellectual clarity remained until the end. This journal is not only a vibrant historical document but also a profoundly moving and poetic piece of personal literature. - Summary by Adam Whybray
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Preface to A Last Diary by W. N. P. Barbellian.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot orc preface by Arthur J. Cummings quotation,
(00:33):
we are in the power of no calamity, while death
is in our own religious medici The Life and Character
of Barbellian. The opening entry in A Last Diary was
made on March twenty first, nineteen eighteen. The closing sentence
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was written on June third, nineteen nineteen, in the Journal
of a Disappointed Man. The record ended on October twenty first,
nineteen seventeen, with the one word self discussed. An important
difference between the first diary and that now published lies
in the fact that the first embodies a carefully selected
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series of extracts from twenty post quarto volumes of manuscript
in which Barbelian had recorded his thoughts and his observations
from the age of thirteen, without any clearly defined intention,
except towards the end of his life, of discovering them
to any but one or two of his intimate friends.
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He often hinted to me that some parts of his
diary would make good reading if they could be printed
in essay form. And I think he then had in
mind chiefly those passages which supplied the inspiration of enduring life,
the volume of essays that revealed him more more distinctively
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in the character of a naturalist and a man of letters. Still,
the diary was primarily written for himself. It was his
means of self expression, the secret chamber of his soul,
into which no other person, however deep in his love
and confidence, might penetrate. More than once. I asked him
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to let me look at those parts which he thought
suitable for publication. But surely he turned aside the suggestion
with the remark someday perhaps, but not now. All I
ever saw was a part of the first essay in
Enjoying Life, and an account of his wanderings in a
spirit of burning exaltation over the great stretch of sandy burrows,
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at the estuary of that beautiful Devonshire River, the tour where,
in long days of solitude, he first taught himself, with
the zeal and patience of the born naturalist, the ways
of birds and fish and in sex, and learned to
love the sweet harmony of the sunlight and the flowers,
where too, as a mere boy, he first meditated upon
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the mysteries of life and death. The earlier journal, then,
was generally speaking, spontaneous, not calculated for effect, a part
of himself. He wrote down instinctively and by habit his
inmost thoughts, his lightest impression of the doings of the day,
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a careless jest that amused him, an irritating encounter with
a foolish or a stupid person, something newly seen in
the structure of a bird's wing, a sunset effect. It
was only on rare occasions that he deliberately experimented with
forms of expression. But I cannot help thinking that the
Dari contained in the present volume, though in one sense
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equally a part of himself, has a somewhat different quality.
It appears to bear into kernel evidence of having been
written with an eye to the reader, because of his
settled intention that it should be published in a book.
He has drawn upon the memories of his youth for
many of the most interesting passages. He has smoothed the
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rough edges of his style with the loving care of
an author anticipating criticism and anxious to do his best
would the last Diary will be found less attractive. On
that account is not for me to say the circumstances
in which it was written explained the difference. If, as
I suppose, it is easy to detect in the earlier
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period covered by a Last Diary, the original journal was
actually in the press. In the later period it had
been published and received of general goodwill. Barbellian certainly did
not expect to live to see the Journal in print,
and that is why he inserted at the end in
single false entry. Barbellian died on December thirty one, eineighteen seventeen.
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A few of the later reviewers, whose sense of propriety
was offended by this twisting of the truth for the
sake of an artistic finish, rebuked him for the trick
played upon his readers, but he refused to take the
rebuke seriously. The fact is, he said, with a whimsical smile,
no man dare remain alive after writing such a book.
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A further difference between the present book and its two
predecessors is that both The Journal and Enjoying Life were
prepared by himself for publication, though the latter appeared after
his death. Whereas a last diary was still in manuscript
when he died. He left carefully written instructions as to
the details of publication, and he was extremely anxious that
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there should be no bound. Realizing of any part of
the text, he desired that at the end should be written.
The rest is silence. Nearly the whole of the diary
is in his own handwriting, which in the last entries
became a scarcely legible scrawl. Though in moments of exceptional
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physical weakness he dictated to his wife and sister. Up
to the last, his mind retained its extraordinary strength and vigor.
His eyes never lost their curiously pathetic look of questioning liveness.
In that feeble form, a badly articulated skeleton, he had
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called himself long before. His eyes were indeed the only
feature left by which those who loved him could still
keep recognition of his physical presence. His body was a gaunt,
white framework of skin and bone, enclosing a spirit still
so passionately alive that it threatened to burst asunder the
frail bonds that imprisoned it. I think those who read
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the diary will agree that while it is mellower and
more delicate, in tone. It shows no sign of mental deterioration,
or of any decline in the quality and texture of
his thoughts, certainly no failure in the power of literary expression.
The very last long entry, written the day before he
laid down his pen to write no more, is a
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little masterpiece of joyous description, in which, with the exact
knowledge of the zoologist and the subtle sense of the artist,
he gives reasons why the brightest thing in the world
is a centenophore in a glass jar standing in the sun.
Mister Edward Shanks, in an essay of singular Understanding, has
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quoted this particular entry, a flashing remembrance of earlier days,
as a characteristic example of those exquisite descriptions of landscapes
and living things which grow more vivid and more moving
as the end approaches. The appreciation written by mister Shanks
appeared in March the present year in the London Mercury,
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which also published in successive numbers other extracts from the
diary that is now given in a excit. With the
help of my brother H. R. Cummings, who has been
responsible for most of the work involved in preparing the
manuscript for the press. I have made a few verbal
changes and corrections, and certain passages have been omitted, which,
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now that Barbelian's identity is established, seem to refer too
openly and too intimately to persons still alive. Otherwise, the
entries appear exactly as they were made. In recent months,
I have been asked by various persons, many of whom
I do not know and have never seen, but who
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have been profoundly interested in the personality of Barbelian, to
write a straightforward account of his life. Some of these
correspondents seem to imagine that it holds a strange mystery
not disclosed in the frank story of the journal, while
others suspect that the events of his career as he
recorded them are a judicious blend of truth and fiction.
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I can only say as emphatically as possible that there
is no mystery of any sort, and that the facts
of his life are in close accordance with his own narrative. Obviously,
the disconnected diary form must be incomplete and in some
respects puzzling, and clearly he selected the treatment in a book.
Those entries of fact which were appropriate to the scheme
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of his journal. They were chosen, as I have already indicated,
from a great massive material that accumulated from week to
week over a period of about fifteen years. But they
are neither invented nor deliberately colored to suit his purpose.
When he spoke of himself, he spoke the truth as
far as he knew it. When he spoke of others,
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he spoke the truth as far as he knew it.
When he spoke of actual events, they had happened as
nearly as possible as he related them. The accounts of
his career published at the time of his death last
year were accurate in their general outline. Bruce Frederick Cummings,
Barbellian's real name, was born at the little town of
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Barnstable in North Devon on September seventh, eighteen eighty nine.
He was the youngest of a family of six, three
boys and free girls. His father was a journalist who
had achieved no mean reputation local, though it was, as
a pungent political writer, and had created for himself what
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must have been, even in those days, a peculiar position
for the district representative of a country newspaper. He was
a shrewd but kindly judge of men. He had a
quick wit, a facile pen, and an unusual charm of
manner that made him a popular figure everywhere. In fact,
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in the area covered by his activities. He exercised in
his prime a personal influence unique of its kind, and
such as would be scarcely possible under modern conditions of
newspaper work. Though they had little in common temperamentally, there
always existed a strong tire of affection between my father
and Barbelian, and I believe there is to be found
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amongst the latter's still unexamined literary remains a sympathetic sketch
of the personality of John Cummings. In his infancy, Barbelian
nearly died from attack of pneumonia, and from that early
illness one is inclined to think his subsequent ill health originated.
He was a puny, undersized child, nervously shy, with a
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tiny white face and large, brown, melancholy eyes. He is
so frowl that he was rather unduly coddled, and was
kept at home beyond the age at which the rest
of us had been sent to school. I taught him
in my father's office study to read and write, as
well as the rudiments of English history and English literature,
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and a little Latin up to the age of nine,
when he started to attend a large private school in
the town. He was slow of apprehension, but of an
inquiring mind, and he rarely forgot what he had once learned.
He was nearly twelve years old before his faculties begun
to develop, and they developed rapidly. He revealed an aptitude
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for mathematics and a really surprising gift of composition. Some
of his school essays, both in style and manner, and
in the precocity of their thought, might almost have been
written by a mature man of letters. The head master
of the school, who had been a Summitshire County cricketer,
and whose educational outlook was dominated by a sense of
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the value of sports and games, was a little disconcerted
by this strange, shy boy and his queer and precise
knowledge of out of the way things. But he had
the acumen to recognize his abilities and predict for him
a brilliant future. He read all kinds of books, from
Kingsley to Carlisle with an insatiable appetite. It was about
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this time, too, that he began those long tramps into
the countryside, over the hills to watch the stag hounds meet,
and along the broad river marshes that provided the beginnings
and the foundation of the dry habit which became in
time the very breath of his inner life. He loved
the open air and all that the open air meant.
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After hours of absence, we knew not where he would return,
glowing with happy excitement at some adventure with a friendly fisherman,
or at the identification of a rare bird. Even now,
the wonder of the world was gripping him in its
bewitching spell. In later days he expressed its power over
him in words such as these, with many variations, like
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a beautiful and terrible mistress. The world holds me its
devoted slave. She flouts me, but I love her still.
She is cruel, but still I love her. My love
for her is a guilty love. For the voluptuous curves
of the Devonshire Moors, for the bland benignity of the sun,
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smiling alike on the just and on the unjust, For
the sea which washes in a beautiful shell or a
corpse with the same meditative indifference. In these early years,
I remember the diary took the outward form of an
old exercise book, neatly labeled and numbered, and it reflected
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all his observations on nature. The records, some of which
were reproduced from time to time in the Zoologist, were
valuable not only in their careful exactitude, but for their
breadth of suggestion and that inquiring spirit into the why
of things, which proved him to be no mere classifier
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or reporter. They were the outcome of longer visions of
concentrated watching. I have known him to stay for two
or three hours a to stretch in one tense position,
suddenly noting the torpid movements of half a dozen bats,
withdrawn from some disused mine, and kept for experiments in
the little drawing room that was more like a laboratory
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than a place to sit in. He probably knew more
about North Devon than the wild creatures then inhabited its
wide spaces than any living person. Sometimes he was accompanied
on his journeys, which occupied most of his spare time
and the greater part of the week ends, by two
or three boisterously high spirited acquaintances of his own age, who,
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though leagues, removed from him in character and outlook seemed
to find a mysterious charm in his companionship, and whose
solemn respect for his natural history law he cunningly made
use of by employing them to search for specimens under
his guidance and direction. When he was fourteen years of age.
His fixed determination to become a naturalist by profession was
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accepted by all of us as a settled thing. My father,
whose income was at this time reduced through illness by
about half, generously encouraged him in his ambition by giving
him more pocket money than any of his brothers and
sisters had received in palmere days, in order that he
might add to his rapidly increasing library of costly books
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on zoology and biology, and by allowing him such freedom
of movement as can rarely fall to the lot of
a small boy in an ordinary middle class home. Here
let me say that after the publication of his journal,
Barbellian himself expressed regret at having here and there in
the book unconsciously conveyed the impression that in the home
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of his childhood and youth he received little practical help
and sympathy in the pursuit of his great quest. The
exact contrary was in fact the case, and when, in
nineteen ten, owing to my father's second and this time
complete breakdown, Barbelian had to decline the offer of a
small appointment at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the blow was
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not less bitter to his parents than to himself. And
that time he was the only son at home. He
had been allowed a great amount of leisure for study,
But now, as one of two young reporters of my
father's staff, he was compelled for the time being to
carry a responsibility which he feared and detested. But the
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opportunity for which he had passionately worked and impatiently waited
were not long in coming. In the following year, in
open competition with men from the universities who had been
specially coached for the examination, he won his way by
his own exertions to the staff of the Natural History
Museum at South Kensington. Probably the happiest period of his
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life was that of his late youth. Up to the
time of my father's collapse, he was in somewhat better
health than his childhood. The joy of living intoxicated his being.
He was able to saunter at his own free will
over his beloved hills and downs, he was beginning to
feel his strength and to shape his knowledge, and before
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him stretched a bright vista of vague, alluring, infinite possibilities.
And at this time, apart from the diary, he was
trying his hand at writing, and reveling in that delicious
experience of youth, putting to proof his newly awakened powers.
I have in my possession scores of early letters that
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testify eloquently to his ability to perceive, to think, and
to write. Here is a letter which, at the age
of seventeen he wrote to my brother Harry. It seems
to me remarkable for the vigor and clearness of which
he was able to set down his reflections on a
dark and difficult point of philosophy, and interesting because it
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shows how already his mind was occupied with the mystery
of himself. I am writing, really, he says, to discuss
myself with you. I am particularly interested in it an
article on myself written by Harry, because it differs so
entirely from my own feelings. I am a mendicant friar.
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It is so difficult to see what one really believes
as distinct from what one feels. But for myself I
can see only too distinctly the world without my own
insignificant self after death or before birth. There is one
power which I have to an unusual extent developed, so
I think, and that is the faculty of divesting my
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thoughts of all subjectivity. I can see myself as so
much specialized protoplasm. Sometimes I almost think that in thus
divesting the mind of particulars, I seize the union and
for a short but vivid moment, look through the veil
at the thing itself. I really cannot make myself clear
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without a great deal of care, and I hope you
will not misunderstand me, but to diverge somewhat. It was
only the other day that suddenly, when I was not
expecting it, I saw Mother's face in an objective way.
I saw and looked on it as a stranger who
had never seen her. And mind you, there is a
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good deal of difference between these two points of view.
I never realized until that moment that we look on
those whom we know so well in the light and
shade of the knowledge we have gained Before the natural
conclusion of these observations, I take to be that we
never know how and fropomorphic our views may really be
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somebody else has said this somewhere, but I don't know
who Huxley. I am naturally skeptical of all sciences and
systems of philosophy. Science, of course, deals with the experienced universe,
and cannot possibly ever reach ultimate truth. In philosophy, I
am always haunted by the suspicion that if we only knew,
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we are not anywhere near being able to make even
a rough guess at the truth. Throw a dog a bone.
I'll take it that the dog, if it is an
intelligent one, discusses the bone thoroughly. It discovers the natural
law of the bone, that it satisfies hunger and provides happiness,
and it forms a scientific theory. Intelligent dog mind you
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to explain this inseparable correlative phenomenon, It says, the world
is probably to be considered as an immense mechanism of
separate bone throwing machines worked by an unknown creature. Bone
is necessary to the dog existence, as it is the ineffable,
vital essence of divine love in which we live, move,
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and have our beings. That is so because it has
been proved by experiment that in the absence of bone, throwers.
Dogs have been known to die. Of course, you laugh,
but why not? I cannot help thinking that we may
very well be as much in the dark as the dogs.
Our philosophy may be incorrect in respect of the universe,
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reality and God, as the dog's philosophy is in respect
of the simple process of digestion and the accompanying physiological changes.
If I could drop my anchor behind a rock of certainty,
I should be greatly relieved. But who can convince a
man if he cannot convince himself to sum up? What
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I think is that we I e. Each one of
us separately are exceedingly unimportant wisps, little bits of body,
mind and spirit, but that in the whole, as humanity,
we are a great, immortal organism of real import if
we could see behind the veil. In other words, I
regard individuals as ineffectual units, but the mass as a
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spiritual power. The old philosophical idea that the world was
a big animal had an element of truth in it.
It was only by the skin of his teeth that
Barbellian passed the doctors. After getting through the scientific examination
for the South Kensington Post. He was suffering from chronic dyspepsia.
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He was more than six feet in height and as
thin as a rake, and he looked like a typical consumptive.
The medical gentlemen solemnly shook their heads, but after scrutinizing
him with as much care as if he were one
of his own museum specimens, they could discover no organic defect,
and their inability to classify him, no doubt, save Barbellian
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from what would have been the most dreadful disappointment of
his life. His appearance, notwithstanding his emaciation, was striking. His
great height, causing him to stoop slightly, produced an air
and attitude of studiousness peculiar to himself. A head of
noble proportions was crowned by a thick mass of soft
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brown hair tumbling carelessly about his brow. Deep set, lustrous
eyes wide apart, and a glow with eager life lighted
up a pale, sharply pointed countenance with an indescribable vividness
of expression. His nose, once straight and shapely owing to
an accident, was a regular in its contour, but by
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no means unpleasing in its regularity, for it imparted a
kind of rugged friendliness to the whole face, and he
had a curious habit in moments of animation of visibly
dilating the nostrils, as if unable to contain his excitement.
His mouth was large, firm yet mobile, and his chin
like a rock. He had a musical voice, which are
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used without effort, and when he spoke, especially when he
chose to let himself go on any subject that had
aroused his interest, the energetic play of his features, the
vital intensity which he threw into every expression, had an
irresistible effect of compulsion upon his friends. His hands were
strong and sensitive, with a remarkable fineness of touch, very
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useful to him in the laboratory, and it was always
a pleasure to watch them at work upon a delicate dissection.
His hands and arms were much more active members than
his legs. In conversation, he tried in vain to control
a life long and amusing habit of throwing them out
and beating the air violently to emphasize a point in argument.
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But he moved and walked languidly like a tired man,
as indeed he was. He was continuously unwell, chronically subnormal,
as how he once described his condition to me half playfully.
He had lost forever that sense of a bounding physical
well being which gives zest to living and strength to endure.
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But he has discussed his own symptoms in the journal
with a force and ironic humor that I have not
the capacity or will to imitate. I will say no
more than that. Those who are closest to him remember
with wandering admiration the magnificent struggle which he maintained against
his illness and its effect upon his work. His attacks
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of depression he kept almost invariably to himself in the
presence of others. He was full of high courage, engrossed
in his plans for the future, strong in the determination
not to be mastered by physical weakness. I am not
going to be beaten, he declared, after one very bad bout.
If I develop all the diseases in the doctor's index,
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I mean to do what I have set out to do,
if it has to be done in a bath chair.
His willpower was enormous, unconquos cuble. Again and again he
spurred himself on to work with an appalling expenditure of
nervous energy. When an ordinary man might have flung up
his hands and assigned himself to passive despair. Let me
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quote from one of many letters written to me from
South Kensington, all charged with a strangely arresting amalgam of hope, despair,
defiance in ravingness for imaginative sympathy, lofty ideals, and throbbing
with a prodigious passion of life. Each and everyone was
a challenge and a protest. Surely there never was a
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half dead man more alive. Shortly after war broke out
that he wrote this letter. The reason why the article
The Joy of Life has not been sent you is
because it is not finished. My mood just now is
scarcely fitted for the completion of an essay with such
a title. I like to ask, sullenly, what the devil's
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the good? I have already drawn out of my inside,
big ropey entrails, all hot and steaming. And you say
very nice or effectively expressed. And Austin Harrison says he
is too full up. Damn his eyes, damn everything. Pul
Caine poor Man said once that a most terrible thing
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had happened to him. He sat in a railway carriage
opposite a young woman reading a book written in his
life's blood, and she kept looking up listlessly to see
the names of the stations. The joy of life, my friend,
in the completed state, will make people sit up. Perhaps
so I think as I write it, But perhaps perhaps
perhaps it's been like the birth of a child to me.
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I've been walking about in the family way. The other
essay was a relief to be able to bring forth.
Both are self revelations. My journal is full of them,
and one day, when, as is probable, I have predeceased you,
you will find much of BFC in it, almost as
he appears to his maker. It is a study in
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the nude, with no appeal to the highly pemicanized intellect
of such a being as but there is meaty stuff
in it, raw read or underdone. It is curious to
me how satisfied we all are with wholly inadequate opinions
and ideas as to the character and nature of our friends.
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For example, I have a rough and ready estimate of yourself,
which has casually grown up over a series of years. Well,
I don't really feel very satisfied that I know you,
and most folk wouldn't care if they didn't. They want
neither to understand nor to be understood. They walk about
life as at a mask ball, content to remain unknown
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and unrealized by the consciousness of any single human being.
A man can live with his wife all his days
and never be known to her, particularly if they are
in love. And the extraordinary thing to me is that
they don't wish to understand each other. They accept each
other's current coign without question. That seems to me to
be uncanny to be longing about in the arms of
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someone who is virtually a stranger to you. Not only ourselves,
but everything is bound about with innumerable concentric woms of
impenetrable armor. I long to pull them down, to tear
down all the curtains, screens and dividing partitions, to walk
about with my clothes off, to make a large ventral
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incision and expose my heart. I'm sick of being tied
up in flesh and clothes, hemmed in by wolves, by prosies, deceits.
I want to pull people by the nose and be
brutally candid. I want everyone to know, to be told everything.
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It annoys me to find someone who doesn't realize some
horror actuality like cancer or murder, or who has not
heard of rls or like an infamous man I met
the other day who was not sufficiently alive to know
that it was a Munson, not Scott, as he nonsenately assumed,
who got to the pole first. You ask for my
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dyspepsia in a way which my dear good lad, I
cannot resist. Well, it has been bad, damned bad. There
you are. I have been in hell without the energy
to lift up mine eyes. The first twenty five years
of my life have chased me up and down the keyboard.
I've been to the top and to the bottom, very
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happy and very miserable. But I don't think I am whining.
I prefer a life which is a hunt and adventure
rather than a study in still life. If you suffer,
Bozak said proudly, at least you live. If I were
suddenly assured of wealth and health, long to live, I
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should have to walk about cutting other people's throats so
as to reintroduce the element of excitement. At this present moment,
and feeling so full of JOI de verve that a
summons to depart coming now would exacerbate me into fury.
I should die cursing like an intoxicated trooper. It seems
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unthinkable if life were the sheer wall of a precipice,
I should stick to it by force of attraction. You
shall see in the joy of life how much I
have grown to love it. There is a little beast
which draws its life to start with rather precariously attached
to a crab. But gradually it sends out filaments which
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borrow in and penetrate every fiber of its host, so
that to separate host and parasite means a grievous rupture.
I have become attached in the same way, but not
to a crab life. Life is extraordinarily distracting At times,
zoology melts away from my purview. Gradually, I shouldn't be
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at all surprised if other interests burrow in under my
foundations laid in zoology, and the whole superstructure collapse. If
I go to a sculpture gallery, the continued study of
entomology appears impossible. I will be a sculptor. If I
go to the opera, then I am going to take
up music seriously. Or if I get a new beast,
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an extraordinary new form of bird parasite brought back by
the New Guinea expedition, old sport few Nothing else can
interest me on Earth. I think something does, and with
a wrench, I turn away presently to fresh pastures. Life
is a series of wrenches. I tremble for the fixity
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of my purposes, And as you know so well, I
am an ambitious man, and my purposes are very dear
to me. You see what a trembling, colour changing invertebrate
jellyfish of a brother you have. But you are the
man I look to. Whatever kind of man Barbilian may
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have been, he was certainly not a jellyfish. Any or
all of these sentiments might have come red hot from
his dari, and there are absolutely typical of the delightfully
stimulating and provocative letters which he loved to write, and
could write better than any man I have ever known.
He was as greedy as a shark for life in
(34:33):
the roar, for the whole of life. He longed to
capture and comprehend the entire universe, and would never have
been content with less. I could swallow landscapes, he says,
and swill down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth to
me with hoops of steel. But the world is so impassive,
silent secret. He despised his body because it impeded his
(34:58):
pursuit of the elusive, uncapturable, and while he pursued fate,
fate followed close on his heels. In London, he grew
slowly and steadily worse. Doctors tinkered with him, and he
tinkered himself with their ineffectual nostrums. But at last, after
he had complained one day of partial blindness and of
(35:21):
loss of power in his right arm, I persuaded him,
on the advice of a wisely suspicious young physician, to
see a first class nerve specialist. This man quickly discovered
the secret of his complex and never ending symptoms, without
revealing the truth to Barbelian, he told me that he
was a doomed man in the grip of a horrible
(35:43):
and obscure disease of which I had never heard. Disciminated
sclerosis was the name which the specialist gave to it,
and its effect, produced apparently by a microbe that attacks
certain cells of the spinal cord, is to ji in
the course for a few years, or in some cases
(36:04):
many years, every function of the body, killing its victim
by degrees. In a slow, ruthless process of disintegration. The
specialist was strongly of the opinion that the truth should
not be told my brother. If we do so, he said,
we shall assuredly kick down the hill far more quickly
than he will travel, if we keep him hopeful by
(36:25):
treating the symptoms from time to time as they arise.
Barbelian then was told he was not up to standard,
did it been working too hard, was in need of
a prolonged rest, and could be restored to health only
by means of a long course of careful and regular treatment.
The fact disposes of the criticism of a few unfriendly reviewers, who,
(36:47):
without reading the journal closely enough to disarm their indignation,
accused Barbelian of a selfish and despicable act in getting
married when he knew himself to be dying from an
incurable milady. Whether I was right or wrong in accepting
the medical man's advice, I do not regret the course
I took. Barbelian, in a moment of overwhelming despair the
(37:12):
tragedy of his life and the calamity 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,
(37:32):
fifteen years longer. Yet reviewing all the circumstances, I realized
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
(37:56):
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 Barbellian. How by
a curious and dramatic accident, Barbellian, shortly after his marriage,
discovered the truth about himself and kept it for a
time from his wife in the belief that she did
(38:16):
not know is related with unconscious pathos in the journal.
Barbellian was married in September nineteen fifteen. In July nineteen seventeen,
he was compelled to sign his appointment at the South
Kensington Museum. His life came to an end on October
twenty second, nineteen nineteen, in the quaint old country cottage
(38:39):
at Gerrards 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
(39:01):
to the end. Bert 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
(39:22):
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
(39:43):
me shortly before he died, have entirely changed my outlook.
My horizon is cleared, my thoughts 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 basis of my life has gone across from
the intellectual to the ethical. I know that goodness is
(40:06):
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
(40:27):
the nature of the disorder against which he thought 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
to the mark. It is not for me to try
(40:47):
to do more than correct a few crude or glaringly
false impressions with a kind of man Barbellian was. Others
must judge of the quality of his genius and of
his place in life and literature. But I can speak
of Barbelian as the man I knew him to be.
He was not the eagertist, pure and simple, naked and
(41:08):
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 mister Shankswell says, immutable in the nude, declared Barbelian
more than once, with an air of blunt finality. Yes,
(41:30):
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 Barbelian. One day
(41:51):
he was so much specialized 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. One the respectable youth, two
(42:16):
the foul mouthed commentator and critic. Three the real but unknown.
I many times he tried thus to dock it his
manifold personality indistinguishable departments. It was a hopeless task. Respectability
was the last word to apply to him. Foul Mouthed
(42:38):
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 of me, he was as abandoned in his frankness
as in the journal. 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.
(43:03):
His habit of self introspection and his moderant 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.
(43:23):
It should be remembered that his symptoms were real symptoms,
and as oppressing 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
(43:46):
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 humor. And
(44:06):
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
(44:28):
of disgust for his own emaciated appearance, arising not improbably
from his esthetic admiration for the human form in its
highest development. On one occasion, when we were spending a
quiet holiday together at a little Bourreton fishing village, I
had some difficulty in persuading him to bathe in the
sea on account of his objection to exposing his figure
(44:51):
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 definitively traceable cause. Though the
(45:15):
other members of his 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 a one with monotonous regularity. Mister Wells has
(45:41):
referred to him as an egotistical young naturalist. In the
same illusion, however, he reiterated the fundamental truth that we
are all egotists within the limits of our power of expression.
Barbelian was intensely interested in himself, but he was also
intensely interested in other people. He had not that egotistical
(46:04):
imagination of the purely self centered 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.
(46:28):
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,
(46:48):
classified and dissected, and he did his work with the
detailed skill and the truthful approach of 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 candle. He is not afraid to be frank
(47:12):
in giving expression to a thought, merely because it may
be an unpleasant or a selfish thought. If a shadowy
doubt assells him or an uhtree criticism presents itself about
our 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 cat
(47:34):
like 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 Barbellian and other persons is that all
(47:56):
those of us who have not been blessed or cursed
with the temperament of an ox frequently experienced these queer,
spontaneous promptings about common things and about ourselves and our
fellow creatures that come. We know not how or why.
So far from dragging the half formed thought into the
light of open confession and giving it definite shape, we
(48:18):
avert our gaze as from an evil thing, or turn
to it in secret and stealth. It is scarcely possible
one imagines to read Barbellian honestly without realizing that he
says in plain, forceful language what the rest of us
often think, but have not the nerve to say allowed,
either to others or to ourselves. Resolute courage was the
(48:43):
regnant quality of Barbellian's character. There was no issue he
was afraid to face. The more it frightened him, the
more grimly he held on ineffacible curiosity and the force of
his will will a formidable combination. He saw everything in
focus with clear and steady eye. He penetrated the heart
(49:07):
of a book with unerring instinct, as Bonzac tore out
the secret of a woman's heart. It was hopeless to
attempt to deceive him with a sophistry or a platitude.
His sense of justice was deep and strong, while he
loved disputation for its own sake, no form of mental
recreation making a stronger appeal to his vivid intelligence than
(49:30):
a set battle. In dialectics, he rarely missed the essential argument,
which he commonly handled with solid mastery and generally with
a wealth of convincing illustrations. He was a captivating companion, easy, humorous,
and suggestive in his talk over a wide range of subjects,
and knowing something new or piquant about every bramble bush,
(49:54):
every bird, every beetle that he passed, or that flitted
or crept across his path. Any one less like a
self tormentor a milarde majonnaire a man with a laugh
on the wrong side of his mouth could not be imagined.
It would be using a weak expression to say that
he was cheerful. He was so acutely alive to the
(50:18):
imperious charm of the world in which he lived, that
a fit of depression caused usually by some obstinate symptom
of ill health, which foiled his plans and fretted his temper,
would melt away at a touch. The cry of a peewit,
a gleam of sunshine on the hill, a phrase from
a Beethoven symphony, a line out of Francis Thompson, whose
(50:40):
gorgeous verve inflamed his senses to a white heat of enjoyment,
or a warm note of human sympathy would transform him
at once into another being. He yearned for the fellowship
of sympathy, and rejoiced exceedingly when he seemed to find it.
He had a real capacity for friendship, and his affections,
(51:02):
when once they were engaged, were deep and abiding. But
he could be impitially provoked to an acquaintance, and he
suffered forums without gladness or much self restraint. His judgments
of men and women who he met casually or infrequently
were not to be relied upon. He was as impulsive
as a woman of Barcelona, and the life history of
(51:25):
some harmless creature newly introduced would be created promptly on
such inadequate data as a fortuitous remark, an odd gesture,
or a sweating hand. His nature, I believe, is less
readily to be explained by his so called egotism than
by his super sensitiveness to the world about him and
(51:46):
the beings in it. He bathed in the sea of
life in a perpetual ecstasy, and sometimes it was an
ecstasy of pain that made him call out upon God
and all the gods. And the devil was as well.
One of the truest things I have heard said about
him was said the other day by an accomplished critic
(52:07):
who had never met him, but who had read his
journal with a seeing eye. It seems to me he
remarked that Barbellian was a man with a skin too few,
a wise saying to which Barbellian himself would have been
the first to give his appreciative assent. Nearly every writer
who has tried to form an estimate of my brother's
(52:28):
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 with our interest. I am convinced that he would
not have remained at South Kensington longer than was necessary
(52:51):
to provide him with bread and butter. He was imperatively
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
(53:12):
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 labors and the narrow limitations imposed upon him in
(53:34):
the department of natural history that he cared for. At least,
he was contemplating large literary schemes, some of which he
unfolded to me with an infectious ardor of hope and determination.
He planned in these years a novel that was to
be of immense length, with something of the scope of
(53:54):
the comedy humane, and a series of logically developed tricities
on the lines of his 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.
(54:17):
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
(54:37):
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 to the staff of
the South Kensington Museum, he was weary of his work there,
(55:00):
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
(55:23):
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
(55:47):
self control, in the handling of his theme that his
scientific habit of mind makes possible, and emphasizes. This instinctive
restraint can be discovered again and again in vehement passages
that are at a glance seemed to bear the mark
of reckless extravagance. A Last Diary is the last of
(56:07):
Barbelian 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
(56:30):
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
(56:52):
was forever bounding forward in an untamable effort to grasp
the unknown and unknowable. Fate druck him blow upon blow,
But though his head was often bloody, it remained unbound.
Mister Wells says, the story of his life is a
recorded unhappiness. I prefer to think of it as a
(57:14):
sovereign challenge. A. J. Cummings, nineteen twenty end of preface
to A Last Diary by W. N. P. Barbellion
Preface to A Last Diary by W. N. P. Barbellian.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot orc preface by Arthur J. Cummings quotation,
(00:33):
we are in the power of no calamity, while death
is in our own religious medici The Life and Character
of Barbellian. The opening entry in A Last Diary was
made on March twenty first, nineteen eighteen. The closing sentence
(00:57):
was written on June third, nineteen nineteen, in the Journal
of a Disappointed Man. The record ended on October twenty first,
nineteen seventeen, with the one word self discussed. An important
difference between the first diary and that now published lies
in the fact that the first embodies a carefully selected
(01:20):
series of extracts from twenty post quarto volumes of manuscript
in which Barbelian had recorded his thoughts and his observations
from the age of thirteen, without any clearly defined intention,
except towards the end of his life, of discovering them
to any but one or two of his intimate friends.
(01:41):
He often hinted to me that some parts of his
diary would make good reading if they could be printed
in essay form. And I think he then had in
mind chiefly those passages which supplied the inspiration of enduring life,
the volume of essays that revealed him more more distinctively
(02:01):
in the character of a naturalist and a man of letters. Still,
the diary was primarily written for himself. It was his
means of self expression, the secret chamber of his soul,
into which no other person, however deep in his love
and confidence, might penetrate. More than once. I asked him
(02:23):
to let me look at those parts which he thought
suitable for publication. But surely he turned aside the suggestion
with the remark someday perhaps, but not now. All I
ever saw was a part of the first essay in
Enjoying Life, and an account of his wanderings in a
spirit of burning exaltation over the great stretch of sandy burrows,
(02:47):
at the estuary of that beautiful Devonshire River, the tour where,
in long days of solitude, he first taught himself, with
the zeal and patience of the born naturalist, the ways
of birds and fish and in sex, and learned to
love the sweet harmony of the sunlight and the flowers,
where too, as a mere boy, he first meditated upon
(03:08):
the mysteries of life and death. The earlier journal, then,
was generally speaking, spontaneous, not calculated for effect, a part
of himself. He wrote down instinctively and by habit his
inmost thoughts, his lightest impression of the doings of the day,
(03:29):
a careless jest that amused him, an irritating encounter with
a foolish or a stupid person, something newly seen in
the structure of a bird's wing, a sunset effect. It
was only on rare occasions that he deliberately experimented with
forms of expression. But I cannot help thinking that the
Dari contained in the present volume, though in one sense
(03:53):
equally a part of himself, has a somewhat different quality.
It appears to bear into kernel evidence of having been
written with an eye to the reader, because of his
settled intention that it should be published in a book.
He has drawn upon the memories of his youth for
many of the most interesting passages. He has smoothed the
(04:14):
rough edges of his style with the loving care of
an author anticipating criticism and anxious to do his best
would the last Diary will be found less attractive. On
that account is not for me to say the circumstances
in which it was written explained the difference. If, as
I suppose, it is easy to detect in the earlier
(04:36):
period covered by a Last Diary, the original journal was
actually in the press. In the later period it had
been published and received of general goodwill. Barbellian certainly did
not expect to live to see the Journal in print,
and that is why he inserted at the end in
single false entry. Barbellian died on December thirty one, eineighteen seventeen.
(05:02):
A few of the later reviewers, whose sense of propriety
was offended by this twisting of the truth for the
sake of an artistic finish, rebuked him for the trick
played upon his readers, but he refused to take the
rebuke seriously. The fact is, he said, with a whimsical smile,
no man dare remain alive after writing such a book.
(05:24):
A further difference between the present book and its two
predecessors is that both The Journal and Enjoying Life were
prepared by himself for publication, though the latter appeared after
his death. Whereas a last diary was still in manuscript
when he died. He left carefully written instructions as to
the details of publication, and he was extremely anxious that
(05:47):
there should be no bound. Realizing of any part of
the text, he desired that at the end should be written.
The rest is silence. Nearly the whole of the diary
is in his own handwriting, which in the last entries
became a scarcely legible scrawl. Though in moments of exceptional
(06:07):
physical weakness he dictated to his wife and sister. Up
to the last, his mind retained its extraordinary strength and vigor.
His eyes never lost their curiously pathetic look of questioning liveness.
In that feeble form, a badly articulated skeleton, he had
(06:27):
called himself long before. His eyes were indeed the only
feature left by which those who loved him could still
keep recognition of his physical presence. His body was a gaunt,
white framework of skin and bone, enclosing a spirit still
so passionately alive that it threatened to burst asunder the
frail bonds that imprisoned it. I think those who read
(06:50):
the diary will agree that while it is mellower and
more delicate, in tone. It shows no sign of mental deterioration,
or of any decline in the quality and texture of
his thoughts, certainly no failure in the power of literary expression.
The very last long entry, written the day before he
laid down his pen to write no more, is a
(07:12):
little masterpiece of joyous description, in which, with the exact
knowledge of the zoologist and the subtle sense of the artist,
he gives reasons why the brightest thing in the world
is a centenophore in a glass jar standing in the sun.
Mister Edward Shanks, in an essay of singular Understanding, has
(07:33):
quoted this particular entry, a flashing remembrance of earlier days,
as a characteristic example of those exquisite descriptions of landscapes
and living things which grow more vivid and more moving
as the end approaches. The appreciation written by mister Shanks
appeared in March the present year in the London Mercury,
(07:54):
which also published in successive numbers other extracts from the
diary that is now given in a excit. With the
help of my brother H. R. Cummings, who has been
responsible for most of the work involved in preparing the
manuscript for the press. I have made a few verbal
changes and corrections, and certain passages have been omitted, which,
(08:16):
now that Barbelian's identity is established, seem to refer too
openly and too intimately to persons still alive. Otherwise, the
entries appear exactly as they were made. In recent months,
I have been asked by various persons, many of whom
I do not know and have never seen, but who
(08:36):
have been profoundly interested in the personality of Barbelian, to
write a straightforward account of his life. Some of these
correspondents seem to imagine that it holds a strange mystery
not disclosed in the frank story of the journal, while
others suspect that the events of his career as he
recorded them are a judicious blend of truth and fiction.
(09:01):
I can only say as emphatically as possible that there
is no mystery of any sort, and that the facts
of his life are in close accordance with his own narrative. Obviously,
the disconnected diary form must be incomplete and in some
respects puzzling, and clearly he selected the treatment in a book.
Those entries of fact which were appropriate to the scheme
(09:23):
of his journal. They were chosen, as I have already indicated,
from a great massive material that accumulated from week to
week over a period of about fifteen years. But they
are neither invented nor deliberately colored to suit his purpose.
When he spoke of himself, he spoke the truth as
far as he knew it. When he spoke of others,
(09:45):
he spoke the truth as far as he knew it.
When he spoke of actual events, they had happened as
nearly as possible as he related them. The accounts of
his career published at the time of his death last
year were accurate in their general outline. Bruce Frederick Cummings,
Barbellian's real name, was born at the little town of
(10:06):
Barnstable in North Devon on September seventh, eighteen eighty nine.
He was the youngest of a family of six, three
boys and free girls. His father was a journalist who
had achieved no mean reputation local, though it was, as
a pungent political writer, and had created for himself what
(10:26):
must have been, even in those days, a peculiar position
for the district representative of a country newspaper. He was
a shrewd but kindly judge of men. He had a
quick wit, a facile pen, and an unusual charm of
manner that made him a popular figure everywhere. In fact,
(10:47):
in the area covered by his activities. He exercised in
his prime a personal influence unique of its kind, and
such as would be scarcely possible under modern conditions of
newspaper work. Though they had little in common temperamentally, there
always existed a strong tire of affection between my father
and Barbelian, and I believe there is to be found
(11:08):
amongst the latter's still unexamined literary remains a sympathetic sketch
of the personality of John Cummings. In his infancy, Barbelian
nearly died from attack of pneumonia, and from that early
illness one is inclined to think his subsequent ill health originated.
He was a puny, undersized child, nervously shy, with a
(11:30):
tiny white face and large, brown, melancholy eyes. He is
so frowl that he was rather unduly coddled, and was
kept at home beyond the age at which the rest
of us had been sent to school. I taught him
in my father's office study to read and write, as
well as the rudiments of English history and English literature,
(11:51):
and a little Latin up to the age of nine,
when he started to attend a large private school in
the town. He was slow of apprehension, but of an
inquiring mind, and he rarely forgot what he had once learned.
He was nearly twelve years old before his faculties begun
to develop, and they developed rapidly. He revealed an aptitude
(12:14):
for mathematics and a really surprising gift of composition. Some
of his school essays, both in style and manner, and
in the precocity of their thought, might almost have been
written by a mature man of letters. The head master
of the school, who had been a Summitshire County cricketer,
and whose educational outlook was dominated by a sense of
(12:37):
the value of sports and games, was a little disconcerted
by this strange, shy boy and his queer and precise
knowledge of out of the way things. But he had
the acumen to recognize his abilities and predict for him
a brilliant future. He read all kinds of books, from
Kingsley to Carlisle with an insatiable appetite. It was about
(13:01):
this time, too, that he began those long tramps into
the countryside, over the hills to watch the stag hounds meet,
and along the broad river marshes that provided the beginnings
and the foundation of the dry habit which became in
time the very breath of his inner life. He loved
the open air and all that the open air meant.
(13:22):
After hours of absence, we knew not where he would return,
glowing with happy excitement at some adventure with a friendly fisherman,
or at the identification of a rare bird. Even now,
the wonder of the world was gripping him in its
bewitching spell. In later days he expressed its power over
him in words such as these, with many variations, like
(13:46):
a beautiful and terrible mistress. The world holds me its
devoted slave. She flouts me, but I love her still.
She is cruel, but still I love her. My love
for her is a guilty love. For the voluptuous curves
of the Devonshire Moors, for the bland benignity of the sun,
(14:09):
smiling alike on the just and on the unjust, For
the sea which washes in a beautiful shell or a
corpse with the same meditative indifference. In these early years,
I remember the diary took the outward form of an
old exercise book, neatly labeled and numbered, and it reflected
(14:31):
all his observations on nature. The records, some of which
were reproduced from time to time in the Zoologist, were
valuable not only in their careful exactitude, but for their
breadth of suggestion and that inquiring spirit into the why
of things, which proved him to be no mere classifier
(14:51):
or reporter. They were the outcome of longer visions of
concentrated watching. I have known him to stay for two
or three hours a to stretch in one tense position,
suddenly noting the torpid movements of half a dozen bats,
withdrawn from some disused mine, and kept for experiments in
the little drawing room that was more like a laboratory
(15:13):
than a place to sit in. He probably knew more
about North Devon than the wild creatures then inhabited its
wide spaces than any living person. Sometimes he was accompanied
on his journeys, which occupied most of his spare time
and the greater part of the week ends, by two
or three boisterously high spirited acquaintances of his own age, who,
(15:36):
though leagues, removed from him in character and outlook seemed
to find a mysterious charm in his companionship, and whose
solemn respect for his natural history law he cunningly made
use of by employing them to search for specimens under
his guidance and direction. When he was fourteen years of age.
His fixed determination to become a naturalist by profession was
(15:59):
accepted by all of us as a settled thing. My father,
whose income was at this time reduced through illness by
about half, generously encouraged him in his ambition by giving
him more pocket money than any of his brothers and
sisters had received in palmere days, in order that he
might add to his rapidly increasing library of costly books
(16:21):
on zoology and biology, and by allowing him such freedom
of movement as can rarely fall to the lot of
a small boy in an ordinary middle class home. Here
let me say that after the publication of his journal,
Barbellian himself expressed regret at having here and there in
the book unconsciously conveyed the impression that in the home
(16:43):
of his childhood and youth he received little practical help
and sympathy in the pursuit of his great quest. The
exact contrary was in fact the case, and when, in
nineteen ten, owing to my father's second and this time
complete breakdown, Barbelian had to decline the offer of a
small appointment at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the blow was
(17:06):
not less bitter to his parents than to himself. And
that time he was the only son at home. He
had been allowed a great amount of leisure for study,
But now, as one of two young reporters of my
father's staff, he was compelled for the time being to
carry a responsibility which he feared and detested. But the
(17:29):
opportunity for which he had passionately worked and impatiently waited
were not long in coming. In the following year, in
open competition with men from the universities who had been
specially coached for the examination, he won his way by
his own exertions to the staff of the Natural History
Museum at South Kensington. Probably the happiest period of his
(17:52):
life was that of his late youth. Up to the
time of my father's collapse, he was in somewhat better
health than his childhood. The joy of living intoxicated his being.
He was able to saunter at his own free will
over his beloved hills and downs, he was beginning to
feel his strength and to shape his knowledge, and before
(18:13):
him stretched a bright vista of vague, alluring, infinite possibilities.
And at this time, apart from the diary, he was
trying his hand at writing, and reveling in that delicious
experience of youth, putting to proof his newly awakened powers.
I have in my possession scores of early letters that
(18:36):
testify eloquently to his ability to perceive, to think, and
to write. Here is a letter which, at the age
of seventeen he wrote to my brother Harry. It seems
to me remarkable for the vigor and clearness of which
he was able to set down his reflections on a
dark and difficult point of philosophy, and interesting because it
(18:59):
shows how already his mind was occupied with the mystery
of himself. I am writing, really, he says, to discuss
myself with you. I am particularly interested in it an
article on myself written by Harry, because it differs so
entirely from my own feelings. I am a mendicant friar.
(19:24):
It is so difficult to see what one really believes
as distinct from what one feels. But for myself I
can see only too distinctly the world without my own
insignificant self after death or before birth. There is one
power which I have to an unusual extent developed, so
I think, and that is the faculty of divesting my
(19:47):
thoughts of all subjectivity. I can see myself as so
much specialized protoplasm. Sometimes I almost think that in thus
divesting the mind of particulars, I seize the union and
for a short but vivid moment, look through the veil
at the thing itself. I really cannot make myself clear
(20:09):
without a great deal of care, and I hope you
will not misunderstand me, but to diverge somewhat. It was
only the other day that suddenly, when I was not
expecting it, I saw Mother's face in an objective way.
I saw and looked on it as a stranger who
had never seen her. And mind you, there is a
(20:30):
good deal of difference between these two points of view.
I never realized until that moment that we look on
those whom we know so well in the light and
shade of the knowledge we have gained Before the natural
conclusion of these observations, I take to be that we
never know how and fropomorphic our views may really be
(20:51):
somebody else has said this somewhere, but I don't know
who Huxley. I am naturally skeptical of all sciences and
systems of philosophy. Science, of course, deals with the experienced universe,
and cannot possibly ever reach ultimate truth. In philosophy, I
am always haunted by the suspicion that if we only knew,
(21:12):
we are not anywhere near being able to make even
a rough guess at the truth. Throw a dog a bone.
I'll take it that the dog, if it is an
intelligent one, discusses the bone thoroughly. It discovers the natural
law of the bone, that it satisfies hunger and provides happiness,
and it forms a scientific theory. Intelligent dog mind you
(21:35):
to explain this inseparable correlative phenomenon, It says, the world
is probably to be considered as an immense mechanism of
separate bone throwing machines worked by an unknown creature. Bone
is necessary to the dog existence, as it is the ineffable,
vital essence of divine love in which we live, move,
(21:58):
and have our beings. That is so because it has
been proved by experiment that in the absence of bone, throwers.
Dogs have been known to die. Of course, you laugh,
but why not? I cannot help thinking that we may
very well be as much in the dark as the dogs.
Our philosophy may be incorrect in respect of the universe,
(22:22):
reality and God, as the dog's philosophy is in respect
of the simple process of digestion and the accompanying physiological changes.
If I could drop my anchor behind a rock of certainty,
I should be greatly relieved. But who can convince a
man if he cannot convince himself to sum up? What
(22:43):
I think is that we I e. Each one of
us separately are exceedingly unimportant wisps, little bits of body,
mind and spirit, but that in the whole, as humanity,
we are a great, immortal organism of real import if
we could see behind the veil. In other words, I
regard individuals as ineffectual units, but the mass as a
(23:06):
spiritual power. The old philosophical idea that the world was
a big animal had an element of truth in it.
It was only by the skin of his teeth that
Barbellian passed the doctors. After getting through the scientific examination
for the South Kensington Post. He was suffering from chronic dyspepsia.
(23:28):
He was more than six feet in height and as
thin as a rake, and he looked like a typical consumptive.
The medical gentlemen solemnly shook their heads, but after scrutinizing
him with as much care as if he were one
of his own museum specimens, they could discover no organic defect,
and their inability to classify him, no doubt, save Barbellian
(23:51):
from what would have been the most dreadful disappointment of
his life. His appearance, notwithstanding his emaciation, was striking. His
great height, causing him to stoop slightly, produced an air
and attitude of studiousness peculiar to himself. A head of
noble proportions was crowned by a thick mass of soft
(24:14):
brown hair tumbling carelessly about his brow. Deep set, lustrous
eyes wide apart, and a glow with eager life lighted
up a pale, sharply pointed countenance with an indescribable vividness
of expression. His nose, once straight and shapely owing to
an accident, was a regular in its contour, but by
(24:36):
no means unpleasing in its regularity, for it imparted a
kind of rugged friendliness to the whole face, and he
had a curious habit in moments of animation of visibly
dilating the nostrils, as if unable to contain his excitement.
His mouth was large, firm yet mobile, and his chin
like a rock. He had a musical voice, which are
(24:58):
used without effort, and when he spoke, especially when he
chose to let himself go on any subject that had
aroused his interest, the energetic play of his features, the
vital intensity which he threw into every expression, had an
irresistible effect of compulsion upon his friends. His hands were
strong and sensitive, with a remarkable fineness of touch, very
(25:21):
useful to him in the laboratory, and it was always
a pleasure to watch them at work upon a delicate dissection.
His hands and arms were much more active members than
his legs. In conversation, he tried in vain to control
a life long and amusing habit of throwing them out
and beating the air violently to emphasize a point in argument.
(25:42):
But he moved and walked languidly like a tired man,
as indeed he was. He was continuously unwell, chronically subnormal,
as how he once described his condition to me half playfully.
He had lost forever that sense of a bounding physical
well being which gives zest to living and strength to endure.
(26:06):
But he has discussed his own symptoms in the journal
with a force and ironic humor that I have not
the capacity or will to imitate. I will say no
more than that. Those who are closest to him remember
with wandering admiration the magnificent struggle which he maintained against
his illness and its effect upon his work. His attacks
(26:28):
of depression he kept almost invariably to himself in the
presence of others. He was full of high courage, engrossed
in his plans for the future, strong in the determination
not to be mastered by physical weakness. I am not
going to be beaten, he declared, after one very bad bout.
If I develop all the diseases in the doctor's index,
(26:51):
I mean to do what I have set out to do,
if it has to be done in a bath chair.
His willpower was enormous, unconquos cuble. Again and again he
spurred himself on to work with an appalling expenditure of
nervous energy. When an ordinary man might have flung up
his hands and assigned himself to passive despair. Let me
(27:12):
quote from one of many letters written to me from
South Kensington, all charged with a strangely arresting amalgam of hope, despair,
defiance in ravingness for imaginative sympathy, lofty ideals, and throbbing
with a prodigious passion of life. Each and everyone was
a challenge and a protest. Surely there never was a
(27:36):
half dead man more alive. Shortly after war broke out
that he wrote this letter. The reason why the article
The Joy of Life has not been sent you is
because it is not finished. My mood just now is
scarcely fitted for the completion of an essay with such
a title. I like to ask, sullenly, what the devil's
(28:00):
the good? I have already drawn out of my inside,
big ropey entrails, all hot and steaming. And you say
very nice or effectively expressed. And Austin Harrison says he
is too full up. Damn his eyes, damn everything. Pul
Caine poor Man said once that a most terrible thing
(28:22):
had happened to him. He sat in a railway carriage
opposite a young woman reading a book written in his
life's blood, and she kept looking up listlessly to see
the names of the stations. The joy of life, my friend,
in the completed state, will make people sit up. Perhaps
so I think as I write it, But perhaps perhaps
perhaps it's been like the birth of a child to me.
(28:47):
I've been walking about in the family way. The other
essay was a relief to be able to bring forth.
Both are self revelations. My journal is full of them,
and one day, when, as is probable, I have predeceased you,
you will find much of BFC in it, almost as
he appears to his maker. It is a study in
(29:09):
the nude, with no appeal to the highly pemicanized intellect
of such a being as but there is meaty stuff
in it, raw read or underdone. It is curious to
me how satisfied we all are with wholly inadequate opinions
and ideas as to the character and nature of our friends.
(29:30):
For example, I have a rough and ready estimate of yourself,
which has casually grown up over a series of years. Well,
I don't really feel very satisfied that I know you,
and most folk wouldn't care if they didn't. They want
neither to understand nor to be understood. They walk about
life as at a mask ball, content to remain unknown
(29:52):
and unrealized by the consciousness of any single human being.
A man can live with his wife all his days
and never be known to her, particularly if they are
in love. And the extraordinary thing to me is that
they don't wish to understand each other. They accept each
other's current coign without question. That seems to me to
be uncanny to be longing about in the arms of
(30:15):
someone who is virtually a stranger to you. Not only ourselves,
but everything is bound about with innumerable concentric woms of
impenetrable armor. I long to pull them down, to tear
down all the curtains, screens and dividing partitions, to walk
about with my clothes off, to make a large ventral
(30:36):
incision and expose my heart. I'm sick of being tied
up in flesh and clothes, hemmed in by wolves, by prosies, deceits.
I want to pull people by the nose and be
brutally candid. I want everyone to know, to be told everything.
(30:56):
It annoys me to find someone who doesn't realize some
horror actuality like cancer or murder, or who has not
heard of rls or like an infamous man I met
the other day who was not sufficiently alive to know
that it was a Munson, not Scott, as he nonsenately assumed,
who got to the pole first. You ask for my
(31:21):
dyspepsia in a way which my dear good lad, I
cannot resist. Well, it has been bad, damned bad. There
you are. I have been in hell without the energy
to lift up mine eyes. The first twenty five years
of my life have chased me up and down the keyboard.
I've been to the top and to the bottom, very
(31:41):
happy and very miserable. But I don't think I am whining.
I prefer a life which is a hunt and adventure
rather than a study in still life. If you suffer,
Bozak said proudly, at least you live. If I were
suddenly assured of wealth and health, long to live, I
(32:04):
should have to walk about cutting other people's throats so
as to reintroduce the element of excitement. At this present moment,
and feeling so full of JOI de verve that a
summons to depart coming now would exacerbate me into fury.
I should die cursing like an intoxicated trooper. It seems
(32:24):
unthinkable if life were the sheer wall of a precipice,
I should stick to it by force of attraction. You
shall see in the joy of life how much I
have grown to love it. There is a little beast
which draws its life to start with rather precariously attached
to a crab. But gradually it sends out filaments which
(32:46):
borrow in and penetrate every fiber of its host, so
that to separate host and parasite means a grievous rupture.
I have become attached in the same way, but not
to a crab life. Life is extraordinarily distracting At times,
zoology melts away from my purview. Gradually, I shouldn't be
(33:08):
at all surprised if other interests burrow in under my
foundations laid in zoology, and the whole superstructure collapse. If
I go to a sculpture gallery, the continued study of
entomology appears impossible. I will be a sculptor. If I
go to the opera, then I am going to take
up music seriously. Or if I get a new beast,
(33:30):
an extraordinary new form of bird parasite brought back by
the New Guinea expedition, old sport few Nothing else can
interest me on Earth. I think something does, and with
a wrench, I turn away presently to fresh pastures. Life
is a series of wrenches. I tremble for the fixity
(33:51):
of my purposes, And as you know so well, I
am an ambitious man, and my purposes are very dear
to me. You see what a trembling, colour changing invertebrate
jellyfish of a brother you have. But you are the
man I look to. Whatever kind of man Barbilian may
(34:11):
have been, he was certainly not a jellyfish. Any or
all of these sentiments might have come red hot from
his dari, and there are absolutely typical of the delightfully
stimulating and provocative letters which he loved to write, and
could write better than any man I have ever known.
He was as greedy as a shark for life in
(34:33):
the roar, for the whole of life. He longed to
capture and comprehend the entire universe, and would never have
been content with less. I could swallow landscapes, he says,
and swill down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth to
me with hoops of steel. But the world is so impassive,
silent secret. He despised his body because it impeded his
(34:58):
pursuit of the elusive, uncapturable, and while he pursued fate,
fate followed close on his heels. In London, he grew
slowly and steadily worse. Doctors tinkered with him, and he
tinkered himself with their ineffectual nostrums. But at last, after
he had complained one day of partial blindness and of
(35:21):
loss of power in his right arm, I persuaded him,
on the advice of a wisely suspicious young physician, to
see a first class nerve specialist. This man quickly discovered
the secret of his complex and never ending symptoms, without
revealing the truth to Barbelian, he told me that he
was a doomed man in the grip of a horrible
(35:43):
and obscure disease of which I had never heard. Disciminated
sclerosis was the name which the specialist gave to it,
and its effect, produced apparently by a microbe that attacks
certain cells of the spinal cord, is to ji in
the course for a few years, or in some cases
(36:04):
many years, every function of the body, killing its victim
by degrees. In a slow, ruthless process of disintegration. The
specialist was strongly of the opinion that the truth should
not be told my brother. If we do so, he said,
we shall assuredly kick down the hill far more quickly
than he will travel, if we keep him hopeful by
(36:25):
treating the symptoms from time to time as they arise.
Barbelian then was told he was not up to standard,
did it been working too hard, was in need of
a prolonged rest, and could be restored to health only
by means of a long course of careful and regular treatment.
The fact disposes of the criticism of a few unfriendly reviewers, who,
(36:47):
without reading the journal closely enough to disarm their indignation,
accused Barbelian of a selfish and despicable act in getting
married when he knew himself to be dying from an
incurable milady. Whether I was right or wrong in accepting
the medical man's advice, I do not regret the course
I took. Barbelian, in a moment of overwhelming despair the
(37:12):
tragedy of his life and the calamity 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,
(37:32):
fifteen years longer. Yet reviewing all the circumstances, I realized
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
(37:56):
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 Barbellian. How by
a curious and dramatic accident, Barbellian, shortly after his marriage,
discovered the truth about himself and kept it for a
time from his wife in the belief that she did
(38:16):
not know is related with unconscious pathos in the journal.
Barbellian was married in September nineteen fifteen. In July nineteen seventeen,
he was compelled to sign his appointment at the South
Kensington Museum. His life came to an end on October
twenty second, nineteen nineteen, in the quaint old country cottage
(38:39):
at Gerrards 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
(39:01):
to the end. Bert 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
(39:22):
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
(39:43):
me shortly before he died, have entirely changed my outlook.
My horizon is cleared, my thoughts 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 basis of my life has gone across from
the intellectual to the ethical. I know that goodness is
(40:06):
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
(40:27):
the nature of the disorder against which he thought 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
to the mark. It is not for me to try
(40:47):
to do more than correct a few crude or glaringly
false impressions with a kind of man Barbellian was. Others
must judge of the quality of his genius and of
his place in life and literature. But I can speak
of Barbelian as the man I knew him to be.
He was not the eagertist, pure and simple, naked and
(41:08):
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 mister Shankswell says, immutable in the nude, declared Barbelian
more than once, with an air of blunt finality. Yes,
(41:30):
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 Barbelian. One day
(41:51):
he was so much specialized 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. One the respectable youth, two
(42:16):
the foul mouthed commentator and critic. Three the real but unknown.
I many times he tried thus to dock it his
manifold personality indistinguishable departments. It was a hopeless task. Respectability
was the last word to apply to him. Foul Mouthed
(42:38):
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 of me, he was as abandoned in his frankness
as in the journal. 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.
(43:03):
His habit of self introspection and his moderant 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.
(43:23):
It should be remembered that his symptoms were real symptoms,
and as oppressing 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
(43:46):
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 humor. And
(44:06):
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
(44:28):
of disgust for his own emaciated appearance, arising not improbably
from his esthetic admiration for the human form in its
highest development. On one occasion, when we were spending a
quiet holiday together at a little Bourreton fishing village, I
had some difficulty in persuading him to bathe in the
sea on account of his objection to exposing his figure
(44:51):
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 definitively traceable cause. Though the
(45:15):
other members of his 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 a one with monotonous regularity. Mister Wells has
(45:41):
referred to him as an egotistical young naturalist. In the
same illusion, however, he reiterated the fundamental truth that we
are all egotists within the limits of our power of expression.
Barbelian was intensely interested in himself, but he was also
intensely interested in other people. He had not that egotistical
(46:04):
imagination of the purely self centered 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.
(46:28):
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,
(46:48):
classified and dissected, and he did his work with the
detailed skill and the truthful approach of 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 candle. He is not afraid to be frank
(47:12):
in giving expression to a thought, merely because it may
be an unpleasant or a selfish thought. If a shadowy
doubt assells him or an uhtree criticism presents itself about
our 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 cat
(47:34):
like 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 Barbellian and other persons is that all
(47:56):
those of us who have not been blessed or cursed
with the temperament of an ox frequently experienced these queer,
spontaneous promptings about common things and about ourselves and our
fellow creatures that come. We know not how or why.
So far from dragging the half formed thought into the
light of open confession and giving it definite shape, we
(48:18):
avert our gaze as from an evil thing, or turn
to it in secret and stealth. It is scarcely possible
one imagines to read Barbellian honestly without realizing that he
says in plain, forceful language what the rest of us
often think, but have not the nerve to say allowed,
either to others or to ourselves. Resolute courage was the
(48:43):
regnant quality of Barbellian's character. There was no issue he
was afraid to face. The more it frightened him, the
more grimly he held on ineffacible curiosity and the force of
his will will a formidable combination. He saw everything in
focus with clear and steady eye. He penetrated the heart
(49:07):
of a book with unerring instinct, as Bonzac tore out
the secret of a woman's heart. It was hopeless to
attempt to deceive him with a sophistry or a platitude.
His sense of justice was deep and strong, while he
loved disputation for its own sake, no form of mental
recreation making a stronger appeal to his vivid intelligence than
(49:30):
a set battle. In dialectics, he rarely missed the essential argument,
which he commonly handled with solid mastery and generally with
a wealth of convincing illustrations. He was a captivating companion, easy, humorous,
and suggestive in his talk over a wide range of subjects,
and knowing something new or piquant about every bramble bush,
(49:54):
every bird, every beetle that he passed, or that flitted
or crept across his path. Any one less like a
self tormentor a milarde majonnaire a man with a laugh
on the wrong side of his mouth could not be imagined.
It would be using a weak expression to say that
he was cheerful. He was so acutely alive to the
(50:18):
imperious charm of the world in which he lived, that
a fit of depression caused usually by some obstinate symptom
of ill health, which foiled his plans and fretted his temper,
would melt away at a touch. The cry of a peewit,
a gleam of sunshine on the hill, a phrase from
a Beethoven symphony, a line out of Francis Thompson, whose
(50:40):
gorgeous verve inflamed his senses to a white heat of enjoyment,
or a warm note of human sympathy would transform him
at once into another being. He yearned for the fellowship
of sympathy, and rejoiced exceedingly when he seemed to find it.
He had a real capacity for friendship, and his affections,
(51:02):
when once they were engaged, were deep and abiding. But
he could be impitially provoked to an acquaintance, and he
suffered forums without gladness or much self restraint. His judgments
of men and women who he met casually or infrequently
were not to be relied upon. He was as impulsive
as a woman of Barcelona, and the life history of
(51:25):
some harmless creature newly introduced would be created promptly on
such inadequate data as a fortuitous remark, an odd gesture,
or a sweating hand. His nature, I believe, is less
readily to be explained by his so called egotism than
by his super sensitiveness to the world about him and
(51:46):
the beings in it. He bathed in the sea of
life in a perpetual ecstasy, and sometimes it was an
ecstasy of pain that made him call out upon God
and all the gods. And the devil was as well.
One of the truest things I have heard said about
him was said the other day by an accomplished critic
(52:07):
who had never met him, but who had read his
journal with a seeing eye. It seems to me he
remarked that Barbellian was a man with a skin too few,
a wise saying to which Barbellian himself would have been
the first to give his appreciative assent. Nearly every writer
who has tried to form an estimate of my brother's
(52:28):
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 with our interest. I am convinced that he would
not have remained at South Kensington longer than was necessary
(52:51):
to provide him with bread and butter. He was imperatively
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
(53:12):
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 labors and the narrow limitations imposed upon him in
(53:34):
the department of natural history that he cared for. At least,
he was contemplating large literary schemes, some of which he
unfolded to me with an infectious ardor of hope and determination.
He planned in these years a novel that was to
be of immense length, with something of the scope of
(53:54):
the comedy humane, and a series of logically developed tricities
on the lines of his 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.
(54:17):
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
(54:37):
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 to the staff of
the South Kensington Museum, he was weary of his work there,
(55:00):
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
(55:23):
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
(55:47):
self control, in the handling of his theme that his
scientific habit of mind makes possible, and emphasizes. This instinctive
restraint can be discovered again and again in vehement passages
that are at a glance seemed to bear the mark
of reckless extravagance. A Last Diary is the last of
(56:07):
Barbelian 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
(56:30):
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
(56:52):
was forever bounding forward in an untamable effort to grasp
the unknown and unknowable. Fate druck him blow upon blow,
But though his head was often bloody, it remained unbound.
Mister Wells says, the story of his life is a
recorded unhappiness. I prefer to think of it as a
(57:14):
sovereign challenge. A. J. Cummings, nineteen twenty end of preface
to A Last Diary by W. N. P. Barbellion
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