February 4 + 

… Finally and in conclusion I have fallen ill again, have again resumed my periodical visits to the Doctor, and am swallowing his rat-poison in a blind faith as aforetime. In fact, I am in London, leading the same solitary life, seeing no one, talking to no one, and daily struggling with this demon of ill-health. Can no one exorcise him? The sight of both my eyes is affected now. Blindness? + 

B⁠⸺ continues whoring, drinking, sneering. R⁠⸺ as usual, devoid of emotion, cold, passionless, Shavian, and self-absorbed, still titillates his mind with etching, sociology, music, etc., and I have at last ceased to bore him with what he probably calls the febrile utterances of an overwrought mind. + 

Such is my world! Oh! I forgot⁠—on the floor below me is a corpse⁠—that of an old gentleman who passed away suddenly in the night. In the small hours, the landlady went for the Doctor over the way, but he refused to come, saying the old man was too aged. So the poor gentleman died alone⁠—in this rat hole of a place. + 

February 7 + 

Intending to buy my usual 3d. packet of Goldflakes, entered a tobacconist’s in Piccadilly, but once inside surprised to find myself in a classy west-end establishment, which frightened my flabby nature into buying De Reszke’s instead. I hadn’t the courage to face the aristocrat behind the counter with a request for Goldflakes⁠—probably not stocked. What would he think of me? Besides, I shrank from letting him see I was not perfectly well-to-do. + 

February 14 + 

I wonder what this year has in store for me? The first twenty-four years of my life have hunted me up and down the keyboard⁠—I have been right to the top and also to the bottom⁠—very happy and very miserable. Yet I prefer the life that is a hunt and an adventure. I don’t really mind being chased like this. I almost thrive on the excitement. If I knew always where to look with any degree of certainty for my next day’s life I should yawn! “What if today be sweet,” I say, and never look ahead. To me, next week is next century. + 

The danger and uncertainty of my life make me cherish and hug closely to my heart various little projects that otherwise would seem unworthy. I work at them quickly, frantically, sometimes, afraid to whisper to a living soul what expectations I dare to harbour in my heart. What if now the end be near? Not a word! Let me go onward. + 

February 15 + 

Today I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities.⁠ ⁠… + 

This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing cross-examinations⁠—no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I would incessantly ply the questions, “What is the ultimate value of your work, cui bono?” etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of hopelessness and dissatisfaction⁠—haggard with considerations and reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In bed, I tossed from side to side, mentally exhausted with my efforts to obtain some satisfying conclusion⁠—always hopeful, determined to the last to be able to square up my little affairs before going to sleep. But out of this mazy, vertiginous mass of thinking no satisfaction ever came. Now, I thought⁠—or the next moment⁠—or as soon as I review and revise myself in this or in that aspect, I shall be content. And so I went on, tearing down and reforming, revising and reviewing, till finally from sheer exhaustion and very unhappy I fell asleep. + 

Next morning I was all right. + 

February 20 + 

Am feeling very unwell. My ill-health, my isolation, baulked ambitions, and daily breadwinning all conspire to bring me down. The idea of a pistol and the end of it grows on me day by day. + 

February 21 + 

After four days of the most profound depression of spirits, bitterness, self-distrust, despair, I emerged from the cloud today quite suddenly (probably the arsenic and strychnine begins to take effect) and walked up Exhibition Road with the intention of visiting the Science Museum Library so as to refer to Schafer’s Essentials of Histology (I have to watch myself carefully so that I may act at once as soon as the balance of mind is restored). In the lobby was a woman screaming as if in pain, with a passerby at her side saying sternly, “What is the matter with you?” as if she were making herself ridiculous by suffering pain in public. + 

I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest⁠—after all⁠—I should be done out of my Essentials of Histology. Even in the Library I very nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read. + 

March 4 + 

There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes⁠ ⁠… It was really a one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our country’s butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheepdog, he got up and barked, “Mendelian characters,” or “Germ plasm,” what time the obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose, having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any question. So every time the Professor says, “Allelomorph,” or some such phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell it is all about. + 

March 7 + 

Have been feeling very “down” of late, but yesterday I saw a fine Scots Fir by the roadside⁠—tall, erect, as straight as a Parthenon pillar. The sight of it restored my courage. It had a tonic effect. Quite unconsciously I pulled my shoulders back and walked ahead with renewed vows never to flinch again. It is a noble tree. It has strength as a giant, and a giant’s height, and yet kindly withal, the branches drooping down graciously towards you⁠—like a kind giant extending its hands to a child. + 

March 22 + 

Went to bed late last night so I slept on soundly till 9 a.m. Went down to the bathroom, but found the door was shut, so went back to my bedroom again, lay down and dosed a while, thinking of nothing in particular. Went down again⁠—door still locked⁠—swore⁠—returned once more to my room and reclined on the bed, with door open, so that I could hear as soon as the bathroom door opened.⁠ ⁠… Rang the bell, and Miss ⸻ brought up a jug of hot water to shave with, and a tumbler of hot water to drink (for my dyspepsia). She, on being interrogated, said there was someone in the bathroom. I said I wanted a bath too, so as she passed on her way down she shouted, “Hurry up, Mr. Barbellion wants a bath as well.” Her footsteps then died away as she descended lower into the basement, where the family lives, sleeps, and cooks our food. + 

At length, hearing the door open, I ejaculated, “the Lord be praised,” rushed down, entered the bathroom and secured it from further intruders. I observed that Miss ⸻ senior had been bathing her members, and that the bath, though empty, was covered inside with patches of soap⁠—unutterably black! Oh! Miss ⸻! + 

Dressed leisurely and breakfasted. When the table was cleared wrote a portion of my essay on Spallanzani.⁠ ⁠… + 

Then, being giddy and tired, rang for dinner. Miss ⸻ laid the table. She looked very clean. I said, “Good morning,” and she suitably replied, and I went on reading, the Winning Post. Felt too slack to be amiable. Next time she came in, I said as pleasantly as I could, “Is it all ready?” and being informed proceeded to eat forthwith. + 

In the afternoon, took a bus to Richmond. No room outside, so had to go inside⁠—curse⁠—and sit opposite a row⁠—curse again⁠—of fat, ugly, elderly women, all off to visit their married daughters, the usual Sunday jaunt. At Hammersmith got on the outside, and at Turnham Green was caught in a hail storm. Very cold all of a sudden, so got off and took shelter in the doorway of a shop, which was of course closed, the day being Sunday. Rain, wind, and hail continued for some while, as I gazed at the wet, almost empty street, thinking, rethinking and thinking over again the same thought, viz., that the bus ride along this route was exceptionally cheap⁠—probably because of competition with the trams. + 

The next bus took me to Richmond. Two young girls sat in front, and kept looking back to know if I was “game.” I looked through them. Walked in the Park just conscious of the singing of Larks and the chatter of Jays, but harassed mentally by the question, “To whom shall I send my essay, when finished?” To shelter from the rain sat under an oak where four youths joined me and said, “Worse luck,” and “Not half,” and smoked cigarettes. They gossipped and giggled like girls, put their arms around each other’s necks. At the dinner last night, they said, they had Duck and Tomato Soup and Beeswax (“Beesley, you know, the chap that goes about with Smith a lot”) wore a fancy waistcoat with a dinner jacket. When I got up to move on, they became convulsed with laughter. I scowled. + 

Had tea in the Pagoda tearooms, dry toast and brown bread and butter. Two young men opposite me were quietly playing the fool. + 

“Hold my hand,” one said audibly enough for two lovers to hear, comfortably settled up in a corner. Even at a side view I could see them kissing each other in between mouthfuls of bread and butter and jam. + 

On rising to go, one of the two hilarious youths removed my cap and playfully placed it on top of the bowler which his friend was wearing. + 

“My cap, I think,” I said sharply, and the young man apologised with a splutter. I glared like a killjoy of sixty. + 

On the bus, coming home, through streets full of motor traffic and all available space plastered with advertisements that screamed at you, I espied in front three pretty girls, who gave me the “Glad Eye.” One had a deep, musical voice, and kept on using it, one of the others a pretty ankle and kept on showing it. + 

At Kew, two Italians came aboard, one of whom went out of his way to sit among the girls. He sat level with them, and kept turning his head around, giving them a sweeping glance as he did so, to shout remarks in Italian to his friend behind. He thought the girls were prostitutes, I think, and he may have been right. I was on the seat behind this man and for want of anything better to do, studied his face minutely. In short, it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat. I sat behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly. + 

At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at them on the pavement⁠—still interested. I looked down too. They crossed the road in front of us and disappeared. + 

Came home and here I am writing this. This is the content of today’s consciousness. This is about all I have thought, said, or done, or felt. A stagnant day! + 

March 26 + 

Home with a bad influenza cold. In a deplorable condition. The best I could do was to sit by the fire and read newspapers one by one from the first page to the last till the reading became mechanical. I found myself reading an account of the Lincoln Handicap and a column article on Kleptomania, while advertisements of new books were devoured with relish as delicacies. My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court News, Society Gossip⁠—“if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings true”⁠—and advertisements. I went on reading because I was afraid to be alone with myself. + 

B⁠⸺ arrived at tea and after saying he felt very “pin-eyed” swallowed a glass of Bols gin⁠—the Gin of Antony Bols⁠—and recovered sufficiently to inform me delightedly that he had just won £50. He told me all the story; meanwhile, I, tired of wiping and blowing my nose, sat in the dirty armchair hunched up with elbows on knees and let it drip on to the dirty carpet. B⁠⸺, of course, noticed nothing, which was fortunate. + 

Some kinds of damned fool would have been kindly and sympathetic. I must say I like old B⁠⸺. I like him for his simpleness and utter absence of self-consciousness, which make him as charming as a child. Moreover, he often makes me a present of invaluable turf tips. Of course, he is a liar, but his lies are harmless and on his mouth like milk on an infant’s. My own lies are much more dangerous. And when you are ill, to be treated as though you were well is good for hypochondriacs. + 

April 15 + 

H⁠⸺’s wedding. Five minutes before time, I am told I made a dramatic entry into the church clad in an audaciously light pair of Cashmere trousers, lemon-coloured gloves, with top hat and cane. The latter upset the respectability frightfully⁠—it is not comme il faut. + 

April 16 + 

… If I am to admit the facts they are that I eagerly anticipate love, look everywhere for it, long for it, am unhappy without it. She fascinates me⁠—admitted. I could, if I would, surrender myself. Her affection makes me long to do it. I am sick of living by myself. I am frightened of myself. My life is miserable alone, and sometimes desperately miserable when I long for a little sympathy to be close at hand. + 

I have often tried to persuade R⁠⸺ to share a flat with me, because I don’t really wish to marry. I struggle against the idea, I am egotist enough to wish to shirk the responsibilities. + 

But then I am a ridiculously romantic creature with a wonderful ideal of a woman I shall never meet or if I do she won’t want me⁠—“that (wholly) impossible She.” R⁠⸺ in a flat with me would partly solve my difficulties. I don’t love her enough for marriage. Mine must be a grand passion, a bouleversement⁠—for I am capable of it. + 

April 17 + 

The Hon. ⸻, son and heir of Lord ⸻, today invited me to lunch with him in ⸻ Square. He’s a handsome youth of twenty-five, with fair hair and blue eyes⁠ ⁠… and O! such an aristocrat. Good Lord. + 

But to continue: the receipt of so unexpected an invitation from so glorious a young gentleman at first gave me palpitation of the heart. I was so surprised that I scarcely had enough presence of mind to listen to the rest of his remarks and later, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I could recall the place where we arranged to meet. His remarks, too, are not easy to follow, as he talks in a stenographic, Alfred-Jingle-like manner, jerking out disjected members of sentences, and leaving you to make the best of them or else to Hell with you⁠—by the Lord, I speak English, don’t I? If I said, “I beg your pardon,” he jerked again, and left me often equally unenlightened. + 

On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the stairs to the basement: “Elsie, Elsie,” while I gazed with awe at a parcel on the hall table addressed to “Lord ⸻.” Before lunch we sat in his little room and talked about ⸻, but I was still quite unable to regain my self-composure. I couldn’t for the life of me forget that here was I lunching with Lord ⸻’s son, on equal terms, with mutual interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into ⸺⁠shire and I saw Auntie C⁠⸺ serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker’s shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, though I am not at all inclined to be a snob. + 

He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton wool⁠—to absorb the nicotine⁠—a, thing I’ve never seen before. I was so flurried at the time that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told me to throw the cigarette away and have another. + 

By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin, excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, “Why the wrong end? Is there a right and a wrong end?” Lord ⸻’s son and heir pointed out the cotton wool end, now blackened by my match. + 

“That didn’t burn very well, did it?” + 

I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great price, and possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. ⸻ drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me, and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks which I could not catch. + 

I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie, stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton wool plug only suggested to me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end. + 

“Try the other end,” repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed, and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of pipes fitted to carry similar plugs.⁠ ⁠… + 

During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it wasn’t last night’s affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got home late without a latchkey)⁠—it was because he called her “Cook” instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs. A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook’s annoyance. She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and he smiled down on the little weakness de haute en bas. + 

I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after all. He may be a bore⁠—particularly if he sits with his finger tips apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps on relating in extenso how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles. Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the man who has come down in the world⁠—the fool, the drunkard, the embezzler⁠—he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or (better still) a onetime organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It must be very dull to remain stationary⁠—once a peer always a peer. + 

April 20 + 

Miss ⸻ heard me sigh today and asked what it might mean. “Only the sparks flying upward,” I answered lugubriously. + 

A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness. Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly⁠—honest then, perhaps, for the first time in his life. + 

An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennae. + 

Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It’s abominable. Best literature for the latrine: picture puzzles. + 

April 23 + 

With a menacing politeness, B⁠⸺ today inquired of a fat curate who was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a bus⁠— + 

“Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?” + 

The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B⁠⸺, mistaking a bomb for an egg. + 

“I beg your pardon,” replied the fat curate. + 

B⁠⸺ repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch brogue. + 

“I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently.” + 

“I don’t think you will,” said B⁠⸺. + 

“What do you mean?” asked the fat one in falsetto indignation. + 

“This,” B⁠⸺ grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow almost slid on to the floor. + 

A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are “Coppers.” I imagine everyone laughs at them and I have a shrewd suspicion it is one of W. S. Gilbert’s legacies⁠—the Pirates of Penzance having become part of the national Consciousness. + 

R⁠⸺ remarked today that he intended writing a lyric on lighting Chloe’s cigarette. + 

“Ah!” I said at once appreciative, “now tell me, do you balance your hand⁠—by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little finger upon her chin, and” (I was warming up) “do you hold the match vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the light? If you have finesse, you won’t need to be told that the thing is to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to last over a period for as long as possible.” + 

“Chloe,” replied R⁠⸺, “is wearing now a charming blouse with a charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night tentatively, ‘How do you like Chloe’s blouse? Is it too low?’ My Mother scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered doubtfully, ‘No, Maria, I don’t think so.’ ” + 

“How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost. My dear fellow,” I said to R⁠⸺, “I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell them you know.” + 

Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime! + 

May 2 + 

Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that anxiety changes into recklessness⁠—you simply don’t care. The aperients are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere, from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it could stop or go on⁠—I was at last indifferent. In a photographer’s shop was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her. I glowered in through the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing out with that same expression even at the butcher’s boy or the lamplighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment I might have had to quit forever. Such impotence enraged me and I walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, “I shall drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that.” Yet don’t think I was alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical indifference waiting to be struck down. + 

… She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after all. + 

May 3 + 

Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a “dot and carry one,” or say “misses a stitch,” what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your friend’s hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you order another pint of beer. + 

It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven’t much confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable kennel. + 

May 10 + 

In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast capacities for envy⁠—I wish I could fly. + 

May 24 + 

In L⁠⸺ with my brother, A⁠⸺. The great man is in great form and very happy in his love for N⁠⸺. He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than anyone else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine tenderness in my love. + 

We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one another.⁠ ⁠… At these séances we take delight in anaesthetising our hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out⁠—and with malice⁠—weak points in each other’s armour, which previous exchange of confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders⁠—to see the effect. We rig up one another’s cherished ideals like Aunt Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical, contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it’s all smoke. Our love is unassailable⁠—it’s like the law of gravitation, you cannot dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe. + 

N⁠⸺ is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore intervened on his side! + 

May 31 + 

R⁠⸺ outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years and at one time a flask of brandy. + 

June 3 + 

Went to see the Irish Players in The Playboy. Sitting in front of me was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier’s, a sandy, bristly moustache like a housemaid’s broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice that crepitated rather than spoke. + 

She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation⁠—like an enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured entirely. Lucky dog, that clod! + 

After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a physical impossibility for me to check a smile⁠—and oh! Heavens!⁠—she gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked again to see if I was still smiling⁠—I was⁠—and we then smiled broadly and openly on one another⁠—her smile being the timorous ingénue’s not the glad eye of a femme de joie. Later, on the railway platform whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod⁠—ah! dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way off, but she caught me trying to see her through a midnight forest of opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses. + 

Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at them. + 

June 4 + 

Rushed off to tell R⁠⸺ about my little Irish girl. Her face has been “shadowing” me all day. + 

June 6 + 

A violent argument with R⁠⸺ re marriage. He says Love means appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend passion⁠—just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a medieval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny⁠—an old crock as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man⁠—a mummy rather. I told him so amid much laughter. + 

“You’re a reactionary,” says he. + 

“Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?” + 

June 7 + 

My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the one I defended yesterday against R⁠⸺. In fact, I actually subverted to my own pressing requirements some of R⁠⸺’s own arguments! The argument, of course, was with Her. + 

Marriage, I urged, was an economic trap for guileless young men, and for my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss ⸻ said I was a funk⁠—to me who the day before had been hammering into R⁠⸺ my principle of “Plunge and damn the consequences.” I was informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc. + 

“Yes, I am afraid to go out without an umbrella,” I argued formally, “when it’s raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry. As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion, I shan’t be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a misadventure, but I am not going in search of one.” + 

All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part. + 

… The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage.⁠ ⁠… I am such an egotist, I want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal. + 

June 9 + 

Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. Today they return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave trafficker. And by this time, I’m thinking, my little Irish girl can go to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts. + 

June 10 + 

It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an itinerant musician is singing dolefully, “O Rest in the Lord.” In my dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It is all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in through some of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his trousers’ pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to hide the ravages of lupus.⁠ ⁠… He seemed the last man on earth⁠—after everyone else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a train. And this is June! + 

June 15 + 

Spent the day measuring the legs and antennae of lice to two places of decimals! + 

To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner of life suits my incurable frivolousness. + 

I am a Magpie in a Baghdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive, fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: e.g., a book on the quadrature of the circle, the gabbertushed fustilugs passage in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr. Hogsflesh, Tweezer’s Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent, conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning. + 

Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey. + 

June 17 + 

Prof. Geo. Saintsbury’s book on Elizabethan literature amuses me. George, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I bet he don’t eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails⁠—and you should hear him refer to folk who can’t read Homer in the original or who haven’t been to Oxford⁠—to Merton above all. He also says non so che for je ne sais quoi. + 

June 26 + 

… I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.⁠ ⁠… She seemed a little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be very preoccupied⁠—or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it. + 

“I fear I have come at an inconvenient time,” I said, with a sardonic smile and strummed on the piano.⁠ ⁠… “I must really be off. Please read it (which sounded like ‘three times a day after meals’) and tell me how you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don’t give up your present manual for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary.”⁠ ⁠… I rambled on⁠—disposed to be very playful. + 

At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered⁠— + 

“I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I asked you to stop and walk about just as if it were your own home.” + 

I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of tremors. I said after a pause⁠— + 

“Very well, if you think so.⁠ ⁠… Goodbye.” + 

No answer; and I was too proud to apologise. + 

“Goodbye,” I repeated. + 

She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the door⁠—very upset. + 

“Au revoir.” + 

No answer. + 

“Oh,” said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all and I’m not sorry. + 

In the passage met Miss ⸻. “What?” she said, “going already?” + 

“Farewell,” I said sepulchrally. “A very tragic farewell,” which left her wondering. + 

June 29 + 

Went with R⁠⸺ to the Albert Hall to the Empress of Ireland Memorial Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin’s Funeral March, “Trauermarsch” from Götterdammerung, the “Ride of the Valkyries” and a solemn melody from Bach. + 

This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity⁠—a very fine sensation for a London Sparrow.⁠ ⁠… + 

I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health. Surely, even a single exposure to⁠—say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony⁠—must result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed through him. + 

If one could develop a human soul like a negative the effect I should say could be seen.⁠ ⁠… I’ll tell you what I wish they’d do⁠—seriously: divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious self-indulgence and it’s torture to be jammed into a seat where you can’t even tap one foot or wave an arm. + 

The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually condemn. A feeling of immeasurable well being⁠—a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades who together had come through a great experience. For my part I wanted to shake hands all round⁠—happy travellers, now alas! at the journey’s end and never perhaps to meet again⁠—never. + 

R⁠⸺ and I walked up through Kensington Gardens like two young Gods! + 

“I even like that bloody thing,” I said, pointing to the Albert Memorial. + 

We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought of our dismal colleagues⁠ ⁠… though I said (as before!) I loved ’em all⁠—God bless ’em⁠—even old ⸻. R⁠⸺ said it was nothing short of insolence on their part to have neglected the opportunity of coming to the Concert. + 

Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to Rotten Row⁠—I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful place the world is. + 

After separating from R⁠⸺ very reluctantly⁠—it was horrible to be left alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught myself avoiding the shadows of the trees⁠—so as to be every moment out in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale, anaemic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms. + 

At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks of water and in luxuriant wastefulness letting it drool out again from each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid “chops” as with anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again. + 

June 30 + 

There are books which are Dinosaurs⁠—Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There are men who are Dinosaurs⁠—Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon, Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning, Popocatepetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Maenads shout Women’s Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a tame rabbit’s. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I would return to Nature⁠—I could almost return to Chaos. There are times when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could. + 

July 8 + 

The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically⁠—at morning and evening. This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset⁠—however work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine⁠—our natural impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we are too occupied or asleep⁠—but sunrise is the great hour of the departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a mysterious appearance⁠—tonight the tops of the elms seemed supernaturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour of the approach; then slowly the news came through that the sun had arrived for immediate departure. + 

July 14 + 

Have finished my essay. But am written out⁠—obviously. Tonight I struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen. But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand, unable to produce a word. + 

July 19 + 

For a walk with R⁠⸺ in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle’s house at ⸻. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss ⸻, a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping out (as R⁠⸺ said) like two white mice one after the other as she moved across the lawn. + 

Coming home I said to R⁠⸺ histrionically, “Some golden-haired little boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful picture⁠—would that I were the father to make that group a fait accompli.” R⁠⸺, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as “that elegant virgin.” + 

July 25 + 

While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R⁠⸺ heard a whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming “young thing” leaning over the Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven. + 

“Come down,” he cried. + 

She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked with her to the Broadway, saw her into a bus and said “Goodbye,” without so much as an exchange of names. + 

“Even if she were a whore,” I said, “it’s a pity your curiosity was so sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious watercolour painting.” + 

“Perhaps,” replied he enigmatically. + 

“Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again,” I rejoined, “don’t introduce her to that abominable ⸻. He is abominably handsome, and I hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome⁠—parentage, money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman.” + 

R. (reflectively): “Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a passion did not exist.” + 

“Have you none?” + 

“Not much,” he answered, and I believe it. + 

“Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions but I am not a pale watercolour artist.⁠ ⁠… What’s the matter with you,” I foamed, “is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you would exclaim contemplatively, ‘How lovely;’ then putting out one hand to touch her, unsuspectingly, you’d scream aghast, ‘Oh! it’s alive, I hear it ticking.’ ‘Yes, my boy,’ I answer severely with a flourish, ‘That is a woman’s heart.’ ” + 

R⁠⸺ exploded with laughter and then said, “A truce to your desire for more life, for actual men and women.⁠ ⁠… I know this that last night I would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed for a Balaclava Charge.” + 

“A matter of temperament, I suppose,” I reflected, in cold detachment. “You see, I belong to the raw meat school. You prefer life cooked for you in a book. You prefer the confectioner’s shop to cutting down the wheat with your own scythe.” + 

July 26 + 

The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, “Yes.” If you ask for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, “No, but we’ll cut off your nose with a big pair of scissors.” + 

July 27 + 

To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this morning, I exclaimed⁠— + 

“I’d sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Turtle Soup ain’t in it.” + 

She was uninspired, and said, “Oom,” and went on pinning insects. Then more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered⁠— + 

“I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones (Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone.” + 

Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say “Oom.” + 

“Pretty dismal work,” I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie Solar sing, “You made me love you,” and then absentmindedly and in succession inquired⁠— + 

“What’s become of all the gold?” + 

“What’s become of Waring?” + 

“What shall I sing when all is sung?” + 

To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but presently in the usual voice⁠— + 

“I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want it, cannot find it.” + 

“Life is like that,” I said. “I never can find my Agrionines!” + 

August 1 + 

All Europe is mobilising. + 

August 2 + 

Will England join in? + 

August 12 + 

We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The tension makes me feel physically sick. + 

August 21⁠—August 24 + 

In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly came over to see me. + 

September 25 + 

[Living now in rooms alone.] + 

I have⁠—since my return from Cornwall⁠—placed all my journals in a specially made cabinet. R⁠⸺ came to dinner and after a glass or so of Beaune and a cigarette, I open my “coffin” (it is a long box with a brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, “A little of 1912?” as if we were trying wines. R⁠⸺ grins at the little farce and so encourages me. + 

September 26 + 

Doctor’s Consulting Rooms⁠—my life has been spent in them! Medical specialists⁠—Harley Street men⁠—I have seen four and all to no purpose. M⁠⸺ wrote me the other day⁠— + 

“Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find something we can patch.” + 

He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, “Goodbye, old man, and good luck.” More luck than the pharmacopoeia. + 

My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my will in the hope of winning through in the end. Yet at the back of my mind there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last long enough to convince others of what I might have done⁠—had I lived. That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life⁠—nothing more than a shadowy locum tenens, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely to disappear any moment. + 

At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is too late⁠ ⁠… and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living. + 

One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoön with the serpents⁠—the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, “Are you quite sure you are such an important fellow as you imagine?” Or I fret over the condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won’t give in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I write things down so as to look them up in reference books⁠—I am always looking up the things I remember I have forgotten.⁠ ⁠… + 

There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies.⁠ ⁠… It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir Thomas Browne you say, “Every man is his own Atropos.” + 

In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray street, in these drab, dirty rooms⁠—miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two houses in London⁠—the Doctor’s and R⁠⸺’s Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London⁠—millions of them⁠—and then to realise my own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die tomorrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils. I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation. + 

This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy. Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms, with an ugly landlady’s face when⁠ ⁠… I despair of ever finding a woman to love. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not without attractions. “He grows on you,” a girl said of me once. But I am hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.⁠ ⁠… I search daily in the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch. + 

“There’s a beautiful young thing,” R⁠⸺ and I say to one another sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within. + 

I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger⁠—baulked, frustrated as I am at almost every turn of life⁠—in my profession, in my literary efforts, and in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination service in my present state of mind. + 

October 7 + 

To me woman is the wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, “woman.” + 

October 11 + 

Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when Mother died, and the third was today. But I am calm now. Today they were tears of remorse.⁠ ⁠… + 

On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my secrets: for I am determined that some day someone shall know. If God really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.⁠ ⁠… It is not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery. + 

Nietzsche in a newspaper I read today: “For myself I have felt exceptionally blest having Hell’s phantoms inside me to thrust at in the dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys through the bars of my own sickness and weakness⁠—joys with which your notions of happiness, poor sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.” + 

But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a little somehow today. But it’s all in desperation, not in faith. Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the consolation of genius. + 

October 12 + 

Am better today. My better self is convinced that it is silly and small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny⁠—especially at times like these when⁠—God love us all⁠—there is a column of casualties each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am alive and alive now, that I was alive yesterday, and even may be tomorrow. Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I’m a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others in a worse one. I’m going to be brave and fight on the side of Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born! + 

October 13 + 

Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I couldn’t sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking to someone, to be among human beings. + 

Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there, and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on my own initiative. K⁠⸺ has managed to bring about a rapprochement but I go very seldom. Pride again. + 

I wanted to do so tonight. I thought I would just go down the road to look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times tonight I nearly put on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness! Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see her figure constantly before me⁠—gentle, graceful, calm, stretching forth both hands and to me.⁠ ⁠… + 

Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one, I might have known I was in for trouble. + 

October 14 + 

Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of my own. Who are you? I wondered. + 

This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind’s introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be difficult in all the world’s history to discover any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the “very spit of me”! I devoured Mathilde Blind’s pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate⁠—ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heartrending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889. + 

October 15 + 

A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face? He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out of taste to entertain opinions about one’s personal appearance. + 

As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me! I am bound to confess I am biased in favour of the friendly mirror. I am not handsome, but I look interesting⁠—I hope distinguished. My eyes are deep-set⁠ ⁠… but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in the night forces the back door! + 

Today, M⁠⸺ sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R⁠⸺ in my manner of speech and opinions. + 

Now R⁠⸺ has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself⁠—for all the world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me writhe. As we are inseparable friends⁠—everybody assumes that I am his tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose, is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas⁠—Oxford befriending the proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick⁠—that anyone should believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures and manner of voice. + 

“Lost yourself?” inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I came out of R⁠⸺’s room after finding him out. I could have shot him dead!⁠ ⁠… As for ⸻ more than one person thinks that he alone is the brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of thinking it. + 

“It makes me hate you like mad,” I said to him today. “How can I confront these people with the naked truth?” R⁠⸺ chuckled complacently. + 

“If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I’m induced to declare that I loathe you (as I sometimes do)”⁠—(more chuckles) “that your breath stinks, your eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will think I am either jealous or insincere.⁠ ⁠… To be your Echo though!⁠—my God!” I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption. + 

In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me⁠—pale-faced, grief-stricken, demure⁠—a sort of “Thy Will be Done” look. The adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War. Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won’t this demure widow with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits this iniquitous war? + 

October 21 + 

I myself (licking a stamp): “The taste of gum is really very nice.” + 

R.: “I hate it.” + 

I: “My dear fellow” (surprised and entreating), “envelope gum is simply delicious.” + 

R.: “I never lick stamps⁠—it’s dangerous⁠—microbes.” + 

I: “I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with them.” + 

R.: “Yes, you’ll need to.” + 

(Laughter.) + 

Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and Worthington’s, and I rounded it up in a typical cockeyed manner⁠— + 

“Ah! yes, it’s only when the day is over that the day really begins⁠—what?” + 

October 23 + 

I expressed to R⁠⸺ today my admiration for the exploit of the brave and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!) R⁠⸺ was rather cold. “His exploits,” said this bloody fool, “involve loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic.” + 

I cleared my throat and began⁠— + 

“Your precious sociology again⁠—it will be the ruin of your career as an artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.⁠ ⁠… You’ll soon be drawing landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit.” And so on to our own infinite mutual amusement. + 

The English Review returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever find anyone? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end. + 

October 24 + 

Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St. Paul’s, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home. + 

Near Reilly’s Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: “This is easy to draw but hard to earn.” A baby’s funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge among Pink’s jam wagons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea. + 

In the St. Catherine’s Way there is one part like a deep railway cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of warehouses and business establishments⁠—a wonderful sight; and everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge, paused to feed the seagulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel⁠—for market prices⁠—but instead someone had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a cat’s rear and tail with anatomical details. + 

In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular literature⁠—one brochure entitled “Suspended for Life” to indicate the terrible punishment meted out to ⸻, a League footballer. The frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles’ throats! Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, “Anything on this stall lent for 1d.” A news vendor I heard exclaim to a fellow-tradesman in the same line of business⁠— + 

“They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on.” + 

Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch’s The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays was displayed prominently beside a picture of Oscar Wilde. + 

In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for Taverns with “snacks at the bar,” and the chestnut roasters, with their buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling L’Indépendance Belge or pamphlets entitled, “Why We Went to War.” + 

In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and keep their eye in against the time the Germans come. + 

Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ.⁠ ⁠… + 

Returned to the Library and read the Dublin Review (article on Samuel Butler), North American Review (one on Henry James) and dined at seven. After dinner, read: Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster, and the New Statesman. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. Tomorrow Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. + 

October 25 + 

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, firsthand 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 Chekhov 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 today I wake up and race about beside myself⁠—a swollen bag ready to burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation. + 

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 Leipzig. + 

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,” someone said of Keats. “It is just as if a man remarked of Bonaparte,” said Keats, in a pet, “that he’s quite the little general.” + 

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 phoenix 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. + 

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 though 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 someone 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 anyone 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!⁠—I write like this as if it were a light matter. But tonight 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 manoeuvres 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 someone 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 tonight 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 anyone 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 tonight 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, though 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 forever 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 though 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—though 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 tonight.” + 

“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 everyone’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 everyone’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. + 

Tonight, 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. 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 is whether you can endure the thought of cutting your sweetheart’s toenails⁠—the onychectomic test. Or whether you find your Julia’s sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this tonight. Probably she thinks I only “saw it in a book.” + 

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 + 

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 through 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:⁠— + 

To make her happy and myself worthy. + 

To get married. + 

To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal. + 

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 through 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 tonight 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 today 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 + 

Went to the Queen’s Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry’s statuesque figure conducting through 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, though 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 through 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 though 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. + 

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 today⁠—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. + 

Just lately I’ve heard a lot of music including Tchaikovsky’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 Strasbourg Cathedral.” + 

In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tchaikovsky, 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 Tchaikovsky 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 everyone “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 William James. + 

Beyond Good and Evil. + 

Dostoevsky’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 + 

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 buttonhole 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,” someone 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 anyone 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 Français, 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 anyone 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 + 

“There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy,” I said, “by which you forego the dignity of a freewilled 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 watercolours.” + 

“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, though 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, watercolours), music (a charming voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is forever 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 through 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. + 