Chapter VII: Part II: In London (4)

Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to explore. I could just amble along--a spectator merely--and automatically register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the _Dublin Review_!

What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of studying and tasting life and character in North ----, at Borough Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns--not to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with--Zoology, if you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an indefinite smudge--odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)--all are gone--too remote to bear recital--yet just sufficiently clear to harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth is buried--a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a drowned sailor--disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the coast--with a pitiful myopia--I preferred Wiedersheim's _Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates_. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's _Paleontology_ with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling _Pariasaurus_ and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!

London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?

A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London. Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show. Everywhere always in the street people--millions of them --whom I do not know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as to-day I wake up and race about beside myself--a swollen bag ready to burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.

_Apologia pro vita mea_

How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all time?

Well, here are some precedents:--

Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland agonised at Leipsig.

Hegel wrote the last lines of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ within sound of the guns of Jena.

While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne, ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the song the Sirens sang.

Lacépède composed his _Histoire des Poissons_ during the French Revolution.

Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.

This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats, in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."

_A Woman and a Child_

On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully girlish young creature--a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love, maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.

We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her--she smiled delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty people never touched lips before--I'm certain of it. It was impossible to believe that this virginal creature was a mother--childbirth left no trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence that she was the mother at all.

_The Albert Hall Hag_

While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast thrust itself before me--she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt, cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes, dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat, beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a knot--this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!) stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the strings--they merely held the handle.

A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not 'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt, holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us--one would say she was frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.

After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful task--like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into bed--she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this harrowing incident--for each time she held out the bag, she smiled, which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar prominence and said something--an inarticulate noise in a very high pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R----, "She claims to be a woman." If any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing absently--two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.

As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she thought, "Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man's aid?" The clink of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her terrible grimacing smile.

Why didn't I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if you please.... And she may have been a well-to-do vagrant--well got up for the occasion--a clever simulator?...

_October_ 28.

_Rigor Bordis_

Rigor bordis!--I write like this as if it were a light matter. But to-night I was _in extremis_.... First I read the paper; then I finished the book I was reading--"_Thus Spake Zarathustra_." Not knowing quite what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of coffee. But these manœuvres were only the feeble attempts of a cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:--

How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half before bedtime.

Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work--I don't sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.

Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I sat down and played a game of Patience--no one knows how I loathe playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely, took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass.... I was at bay at last. There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release. I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life. I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn't feel more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before my mind's eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street, with the landlady's dirty daughter below-stairs singing, "Little Grey Home in the West," my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.

This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into merely aesthetic malaise.

_November_ 4.

A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea (like the swine I am). Could I see him?

* * * * *

Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot water--the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)

Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.

Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth reading the _Freethinker_.

_November_ 9.

In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps ... but now....

I don't think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to.... It was just to get it off my mind--a plain statement.... If I don't really and truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to have spoken.

_November_ 10.

Very miserable. Asked R---- three times to come and have dinner with me. Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. _Tu l'as voulu, George Dandin_--that's the rub.

_November_ 11.

She observed me carefully--I'm looking a perfect wreck _--tu l'as voulu, George Dandin_--but it's mainly ill-health and not on her account.

I said,--

"Some things are too funny to laugh at."

"Is that why you are so solemn?"

"No," I answered, "I'm not solemn, I am laughing--some things are too solemn to be serious about."

She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly--an amused faraway smile of feline satisfaction....

_November_ 12.

Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol--a Browning. Or of 10 days' mysterious disappearance, when I will go and live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.

_November_ 13.

Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my Essay was returned by the Editor of ----. One by one I have been divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have been foiled, and now I've nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself as I am at last--and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do but die?

_November_ 14.

Before going over to-night bought _London Opinion_ deliberately in order to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which came off, tho' I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty bearing.

"Don't you ever swear?" I asked. "It's a good thing you know, swearing is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating in his blood."

"Swearing is not the only remedy."

"I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate's sermon: I prefer pimples to pills."

Is it a wonder she does not love me?

* * * * *

I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours--why have I this morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself, and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and disgust.

I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion, only a dragging heavy chain of attraction ... some inflexible law makes me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I cannot look away....

In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love--as one would a bastard child--I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated essence of womanhood that flowed from her....

Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it--it is a scalp.

Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was cruel tho' true.

_November_ 19.

I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of self-commiseration--my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot get warm--try as I will.

My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are permanently cold. My right hand is blue--tho' I've shut up the window and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I marvel how God can stick it--lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That is how I live too--but then I am not God.

I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it would take a lot to make _me_ forget myself). So I plunge into these literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know....

It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease would act as a stimulus--I could strike an attitude feverishly and be histrionic. But to be merely "below par"--to feel like a Bunny rabbit perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They suspect him, something fishy.

_November_ 20.

Still at home ill.

If anything, R---- is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he's in love with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes. Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.

"Why don't you marry her out of hand and be done with all this dalliance? I can tell you what's the matter with you," I growled, "you're a landscape artist.... You'll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy, secretive, petty creature, J.W.M. Turner, and allow no human being to interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps--but what a man! You'll finish up with a Mrs. Danby."

"Yes," he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, "and 'lose my salvation for a sketch,' like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not married I should have no wife to desert."

It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art not life. Life interests him--he can't altogether resign himself to the cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking exquisitely, "Ah! there is a very fine sorrow," or, "What an exquisite sensation." The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it with a facetious grin, I said,--

"Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning." The joke pleased him and we roared, bellowed.

"That terrible forefinger of yours," he smiled.

"Like Cardinal Richelieu's eyes--piercing?" I suggested with appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)

"You must regard my passion for painting," he began once more, "as a sort of dipsomania--I really can't help myself."

I jumped on him vehemently,--

"Exactly, my pernickety friend; it's something abnormal and unnatural. When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I know that if he is successful he'll be something as vulgar as a fat woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he'll be just a pathetic mutilation.... You are trying to pervert a natural instinct. You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair.... Still, now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?" ("Why indeed?") "It's a vice, and I'm very sorry for you, old boy. I'll do all I can--come and have some dinner with me to-night."

"Oh! thank you very much," says my gentleman, "but I'm not at all sorry for myself."

"I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all. We're not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each other from the ropes and shaping for another round."

"Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals," he reflected, "are worthy of a larger audience.... To find _you_ of all people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle of every one's vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view. Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same reasons."

"I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair," I began, "I _do_ see every one's point of view. You sit on the other side of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But when you slit up my brother's abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently weak and human to punch you on the nose.... You are too cold and Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints."

"It is very beautiful among the snows."

"I suppose so."

(Exit.)

_November_ 23.

Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get out of bed and shoulder the day's burden.

"What's been the matter?" they ask.

"Oh! senile decay--general histolysis of the tissues," I say, fencing.

To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue which means, "Dear, dear." M---- tells me these waves of ill-health are quite unaccountable unless I were "leading a dissolute life, which you do not appear to be doing." Damn his eyes.

_Reading Nietzsche_

Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.

_The Test for True Love_

The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting your sweetheart's toe-nails--the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night. Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."

_Chopin_

On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra. It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery. It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the attention and holds it just as a fire does--even a deaf man would be fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with Sir Henry Wood conducting.

Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony....

_November_ 28.

_Rodin_

More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand--a superb touch!--what a frenzy of remorse!

The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it--down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes--like the hind limbs of some beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen in a photograph.

This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and, for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a soft warm embrace.... I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body, purely physical.

_November_ 29.

This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!

* * * * *

_December_ 6.

I know now--I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are returning. Projects in view:--

(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.

(2) To get married.

(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.

(4) To write two essays for _Cornhill_ which shall surely induce the Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and encouraging letters as heretofore.

Wired to A----, "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."

_December_ 7.

Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities--a breakdown in health or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a fool that wants to die.

_December_ 9.

... I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I love you?--Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot tell...." I ought not to love her, I know--every omen is against it.... Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his brains and air of distinction....

Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous ... I am haunted by the memory of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the cakes--the unravelling of the internal economy of a _Helix_ caused as great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never read nature books--my old favourites--Waterton's _Wanderings_, Gilbert White, _The Zoologist_, etc.--have no interest for me--in fact they give me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth--and it's a mouth of iron--wanting a run for all my troubles before Death strikes me down.

All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.

_December_ 12.

_Sir Henry Wood conducting_

Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes, make a magnificent spectacle.

The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark--the melanic Messiah I call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in stone--Chesterfield's ideal of a man--a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a conflagration, we are all expectant--and even a little fearful, to observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows ... I hold my breath.... Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit, cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted. His sword zigzags up and down the scale--suddenly the closed fist of his left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith--like the arm of a heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven.... But the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated--his body writhes with it--the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders --so you think--he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them all to do their worst--like the picture of Moffat the missionary among the savages of the Dark Continent!

And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows down the orchestra rank by rank.... You awake from the nightmare to discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his inimitable bows.

One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention. R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge--sword over head--but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.

_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_

This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy with its dreadfulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting alongside me to-day--knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.

At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.

_Tschaikovsky_

Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."

In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down--each one seemed the last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call "For God's sake, stop"--to do anything to still this awful lust for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!

Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!

Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good, ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.

_December_ 14.

My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.

Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are--

Plays of M. Brieux.

_Joseph Vance._

The Sequel to _Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth_, by Wiliam James.

_Beyond Good and Evil._

Dostoievsky's _The Possessed._

Marie Bashkirtseff's _Journal._

I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only her duplicate.

On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley--the hero of my youth--which old B---- has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.

_December_ 15.

_Petticoat Lane_

This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.

On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called, the first thing I saw was a little girl--a Jewess--being tackled for selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately marched her off to the police station.

In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet--a penny a time. A very fat man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his ticket.

"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.

"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.

Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell--price one shilling. Who?"

I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps,--"any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece--now then!" This show was being run by two men--a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other--a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a "yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."

Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once,--

"There, you look the finest gentleman--oh! ah! a little too large."

At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.

"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid--I washed my hair last--year." (Laughter.)

Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"

The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes--a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"

"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer name?"

"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.

"Hoo--that's not your name in your own bloody country--I expect it's Hullabullinsky."

"Do you know what my name really is?"

"No."

"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)

"I shall call you 'ass' for short."

I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as much, shouted out to me,--

"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"

"Oui, oui," said I.

"Ah! lah, you're one of us--oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic"--a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar--warranted a safe cure for

"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."

Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas. Assenheim."

Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.

But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells only one kind of article--caps or clocks or songs, braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats, pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares--a perfect pandemonium.

_December_ 31.

_A Conversation_

"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements, intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well that every Saturday morning will see you with _The New Statesman_ under your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."

"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"

R---- replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.

He bought the _Pink 'Un_ and I laughed....

"And so you read _Pragmatism_," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire stands in the balance."

"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the functions of _θ_ and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."

This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one another's nerves.

"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You--besides being a bally fool--are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in water-colours."

"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.

His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between ourselves." He labels his paragraphs _α, β, γ_, instead of a, b, c, and quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter sports, all in the approved manner of dons.

Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he is careful to pronounce _eròtic_ to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma," the _Dumà_, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.

"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.

"You ignorant devil," I said, "you don't know what a dominant fifth is!"

We made grimaces at one another.

"Who's the Master of the Mint?" I asked him. "That is an easy one."

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer," was the prompt reply.

"Oh! that's right," I said sarcastic and crestfallen. "Now tell me the shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II."

We laughed. R---- is a very clever man and the most extraordinarily versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is--too many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with some new thing. "For God's sake, do leave it alone--you simply rag your mind to death. Put it out to grass--go thro' an annual season of complete abstinence from knowledge--an intellectual Lent."

No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this--and I do it rather well.

[1] "I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with the Spire of Strassburg Cathedral."

[2] See January 2nd, 1915.

1915

_January_ 1.

I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech. Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoieffsky I gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a _Insus naturæ_ and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual arrogance--excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull myself up--is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail often before stupid but over-bearing persons who consequently never realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere with another's nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to give a Roland for an Oliver--even servants and underlings "tick me off"--to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage _amour propre_ that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore bottled up tight--both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returned. I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), "He's one of my admirers, you know" (sardonically), or, "I simply can't get rid of him."

If however my cork _does_ come out, there is an explosion, and placid people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.

Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my _double-facedness_, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life--to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming--then this Journal would be quite unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain--the pain one might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.

It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice.... It is partly real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant, lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable, why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self upon my flabby amiable half.

On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life--excepting when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney's Ramus girls sends me into a dry tearless anger--for the moment till I turn over the next page.... Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R---- recited, "Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear," and explained how a charming "young person" sang this at breakfast the other morning. It was simply _too_ charming for him to hear.

To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and _I believe_ I mused that E---- was really a lucky girl.... All that is the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent, qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which ....

* * * * *

You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say, amiably disposed towards myself _au fond_, however displeased I may be with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his self-esteem.... A man's loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing imaginable.

_January_ 2.

_The Fire Bogey_

"This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss."

Signed: W.N.P. BARBELLION.

I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and nailed to my "coffin" of Journals. I told the printer first to say _Two Guineas_, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed but wondered how the devil _he_ knew what the Journals were worth--nobody knows.

Next month, I expect I shall have a "hand" painted on the wall and pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.

These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid, anæmic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.

_August_ 7.

Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects. But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish, living as I do in Armageddon!

Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by the negligence of his old wife.

About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.

A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS., drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.

Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the _French Revolution_ is known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you have done."