BARBELLION'S LAST DIARY.*
Tma author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man and Enjoying Life, who chose to call himself "Barbellion," is dead, and his last diary records the final stage of his strange life. The present writer must confess that the two former books left him with an impression of Barbellion's life and character that the new volume has entirely obliterated. To a good many people the harping on sex and on the physical symptoms of ill-health went far to destroy the great pleasure that were given by his quick- ness of mind, his powers of observation and analysis, his subtlety, and his exquisite prose style. The picture was as clever as possible, but did one want to look at it ?
It is difficult for a reviewer in his circumscribed space to find anything to add to the 'straightforward" account by the diarist's brother (Mr. Cummings) which prefaces the present book, and which is at once a clear narrative dissolving all doubts and an admirably fine and delicate appreciation of Barbellion's work, both as a writer and a zoologist. The gist of the facts is as follows. In the first place, there was no mystery to be explained, and those who read luridly between the lines of the diary are as thoroughly mistaken as the worldly wise can be —which is to say a good deal. Barbellion was the youngest of the six children of a locally renowned provincial journalist, a man of great charm and a sympathetic father. As a baby he nearly died of pneu- monia, and Mr. Cummings believes that from that early illness much of his constant ill-health originated. At any rate, he was
a puny, undersized child, nervously shy, with a tiny white face and large brown, melancholy eyes." By the time he was fourteen his taste for natural history was thoroughly developed. Surely, we suggest, if his health had permitted he would have become the English Fabre :—
" I have known him to stay for two or three hours at a stretch in one tense position, silently noting the torpid movements of 'salt a dozen bats withdrawn from some disused mine and kept for experiments in the little drawing-room that was more like a laboratory than a place to eit in. He probably knew more about North Devon and the wild creatures that inhabited its wide spaces than any living person."
And here, we feel assured, is the key of the situation. Suppose an instinctive observer, like Fabre, with the bias towards subjec- tivity which early ill-health always gives; then suppose that ill-health increases in such measure that the romance of free first-hand investigation of bird, beast, or insect becomes impos- sible—upon what can the analytic spirit exercise itself ? There remains the most interesting phenomenon of all to explore, that "bit of specialized protoplasm" which is the man's self.
Perhaps the "plain man's" natural aversion from the intro- spective—it may he a foolish aversion, but it exists—is due to a belief that introspection is a severe symptom of egotism, a first step towards that intolerable concept of the Greek mind, the per- fect but also spherical being whose perfection cannot be marred by the contemplation of the imperfect, and whose thoughts, there- fore, are necessarily concerned exclusively with its own essence. But surely this frightful conclusion need not alarm us here. In reality Barbellion started along a different path. It was of the nature of his art or mystery, of the science he practised, to observe ; and to science nothing is common or unclean—not even the scientist. The fact of a certain act being a man's job makes the difference in our estimate of his actions. The plainest plain man does not consider financial gyrations put to him by his solicitor impertinent, or a doctor's interest in a post- mortem morbid. Mr. Cummings dispels all our further doubts as surely. Hypochondria, Barbellion's fatal disease, his marriage, his relations with his family, with women, with his colleagues—it is all perfectly clear, perfectly simple. The figure of Barbellion is revealed as hardly less amiable than brilliant and tragic. With his super-refined senses he longed for life, and fate accorded him little more than a thirty years' war with death.
And so we need none of us shrink if we see ourselves mirrored in the nude," as Barbellion said of himself in these extraordinary Pages. If Barbellion expresses what each of us feels but conceals —if he is emotionally our brother—it proves to be a relationship of which we have, after all, good reason to be proud.
• A Last Diary. By W. N. P. Bobollion. London Chatto and WIndu.s. las. net.]
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