January 1 + 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 2 + 

“This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to anyone who in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss.” + 

Signed: W. N. P. Barbellion. + 

I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and nailed to my “coffin” of Journals. I told the printer first to say “Two Guineas,” but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed but wondered how the devil he knew what the Journals were worth⁠—nobody knows. + 

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

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

January 7 + 

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

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

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

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

Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the French Revolution is known to all, as well as Newton’s “Fido, Fido, you little know what you have done.” + 

There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form. Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) advised writing in copying ink and then pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality. My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know about it think I am mad. I wonder.⁠ ⁠… But I dare say I am a pathetic fool⁠—an incredible self-deceiver! + 

Anyhow⁠—the “coffin” of raw material I sent down to T⁠⸺ while I retain the two current volumes. This is to avoid zeppelins. E⁠⸺ took the “coffin” down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton, inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant’s coffin carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It’s like being tickled in the palm of the hand.⁠ ⁠… Two volumes of abstracted entries I keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy of these.⁠ ⁠… Then all in God’s good time I intend getting a volume ready for publication. + 

January 30 + 

To the Queen’s Hall and heard Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies. + 

Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself, “I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.” I regarded myself with the most ridiculous self-adulation⁠—I smoothed and purred over myself⁠—a great contented Tabby cat⁠—and all because I was so splendidly fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies. + 

It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited for sausage and mashed. + 

How I gloried in the Seventh! I can’t believe there was anyone present who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the “Staircase” introduction), led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of glorious life⁠—a suspicion crossed the mind at one time “Good Heavens, they’re going to knight me.” I cannot say if that were their intentions. But I escaped however.⁠ ⁠… + 

I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra and its various components like a beautiful bird. + 

January 19 + 

After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance⁠ ⁠… at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R⁠⸺. We began by quoting verse at one another in open competition. Of course neither of us listened to the other’s verses. We merely enjoyed the pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore’s “Row gently here, my Gondolier.” R⁠⸺ guessed the author rightly at once and fidgeted until he burst out with, “The Breaths of kissing night and day”⁠—to me an easy one. I gave, “The Moon more indolently sleeps tonight” (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting some of the old French of François Villon which entirely flummoxed me. + 

I don’t believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual sympathy. + 

At the pay desk (Lyons’ is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier⁠—a cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R⁠⸺ (indicating me)⁠— + 

“He’s a funny boy, isn’t he?” + 

“Dangerous,” chirped R⁠⸺, and we laughed. In the street we met an aged, decrepit news vendor⁠—very dirty and ragged⁠—but his voice was unexpectedly fruity. + 

“British Success,” he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice. + 

“I’m not interested,” I said⁠—as an appetiser. + 

“What! Not.⁠ ⁠… Just one sir: I haven’t sold a single copy yet, and I’ve a wife and four children.” + 

“That’s nothing to me⁠—I’ve three wives and forty children,” I remarked. + 

“What!” in affected surprise, turning to R⁠⸺, “he’s Brigham Young from Salt Lake City. Yes I know it⁠—I’ve been there myself and been dry ever since. Give us a drink, sir⁠—just one.” + 

In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on.⁠ ⁠… + 

After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out, farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an appointment with the man to have Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony played to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we can’t recall and it drives us crazy. “What is that one in the second movement which goes like this?” and R⁠⸺ whistled a fragment. “I don’t know,” I said, “but let’s go in here and ask.” In the shop, a youth was kind enough to say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A⁠⸺, the harp player would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony. + 

So this morning, before Madame’s appearance, this kind and obliging youth put a gramophone record of it on, to which we listened like two intelligent parrots with heads sideways. Presently, the fat lady harpist appeared and asked us just what we wanted to find out⁠—a rather awkward question for us, as we did not want to “find out” anything excepting how the tunes went. + 

I therefore explained that as neither of us had sisters or wives, and we both wanted, etc⁠ ⁠… so would she⁠ ⁠… ? In response, she smiled pleasantly and played us the second movement on a shop piano. Meanwhile, Henry the boy, hid himself behind the instruments at the rear of the shop and as we signed to her she would say⁠— + 

“What’s that, Henry?” + 

And Henry would duly answer from his obscurity, “Wood wind,” or “Solo oboe,” or whatever it was, and the lad really spoke with authority. In this way, I began to find out something about the work. Before I left, I presented her with a copy of the score, which she did not possess and because she would not accept any sort of remuneration. + 

“Won’t you put your name on it?” she inquired. + 

I pointed gaily to the words “Ecce homo,” which I had scribbled across Schubert’s name and said, “There you are.” Madame smiled incredulously and we said, “Goodbye.” + 

It was a beautifully clement almost springlike day, and at the street corner, in a burst of joyousness, we each bought a bunch of violets of an old woman, stuck them on the ends of our walking-sticks, and marched off with them in triumphant protest to the B.M. Carried over our shoulders, our flowers amused the police and ⸻, who scarcely realised the significance of the ritual. “This is my protest,” said R⁠⸺, “against the war. It’s like Oscar Wilde’s Sunflower.” + 

On the way, we were both bitterly disappointed at a dramatic meeting between a man and woman of the artisan class which instead of beginning with a stormy, “Robert, where’s the rent, may I ask?” fizzled out into, “Hullo, Charlie, why you are a stranger.” + 

At tea in the A.B.C. shop, we had a violent discussion on Socialism, and on the station platform, going home, I said that before marriage I intended saving up against the possibility of divorce⁠—a domestic divorce fund. + 

“Very dreadful,” said R⁠⸺ with mock gravity, “to hear a recently affianced young man talk like that.” + 

… What should I do then? Marry? I suppose so. Shadows of the prison-house. At first I said I ought not to marry for two years. Then when I am wildly excited with her I say “next week.” We could. There are no arrangements to be made. All her furniture⁠—flat, etc. But I feel we ought to wait until the War is over. + 

At dinnertime tonight I was feverish to do three things at once: write out my day’s Journal, eat my food, and read the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. Did all three⁠—but unfortunately not at once, so that when I was occupied with one I would surreptitiously cast a glance sideways at the other⁠—and repined. + 

After dinner, paid a visit to the ⸻ and found Mrs. ⸻ playing Patience. I told her that 12,000 lives had been lost in the great Italian earthquake. Still going on dealing out the cards, she said in her gentle voice that that was dreadful and still absorbed in her cards inquired if earthquakes had aught to do with the weather. + 

“An earthquake must be a dreadful thing,” she gently piped, as she abstractedly dealt out the cards for a new game in a pretty Morris-papered room in Kensington. + 

January 20 + 

… The timorous man presently took out his cigarette-case and was going to take out a cigarette, when he recollected that he ought first to offer one to the millionaire on his right. Fortunately the cigarette case was silver and the cigarettes appeared⁠—from my side of the dinner-table⁠—to be fat Egyptians. Yet the timorous and unassuming bug-hunter hesitated palpably. Ought he to offer his cigarettes? He thought of his own balance at the bank and then of the millionaire’s and trembled. The case after all was only silver and the cigarettes were not much more than a halfpenny each. Was it not impertinent? He sat a moment studying the open case which he held in both hands like a hymn book, while the millionaire ordered not wines⁠—but a bass! At last courage came, and he inoffensively pushed the cigarettes towards his friend. + 

“No, thanks!” smiled the millionaire, “I don’t smoke.” And so, ’twas a unicorn dilemma after all. + 

February 15 + 

Spent Xmas week at work in her studio, transcribing my Journals while she made drawings. All unbeknown to her I was copying out entries of days gone by⁠—how scandalised she would be if⁠ ⁠… ! + 

February 22 + 

What an amazing Masque is Rotten Row on a Sunday morning! I sat on a seat there this morning and watched awhile. + 

It was most exasperating to be in this kaleidoscope of human life without the slightest idea as to who they all were. One man in particular, I noticed⁠—a first-class “swell”⁠—whom I wanted to touch gently on the arm, slip a half-a-crown into his hand and whisper, “There, tell me all about yourself.” + 

Such “swells” there were that out in the fairway, my little cockleshell boat was well-nigh swamped. To be in the wake of a really magnificent Duchess simply rocks a small boat in an alarming fashion. I leaned over my paddles and gazed up. They steamed past unheeding, but I kept my nerve all right and pulled in and out quizzing and observing. + 

It is nothing less than scandalous that here I am aged twenty-five with no means of acquainting myself with contemporary men and women even of my own rank and station. The worst of it is, too, that I have no time to lose⁠—in my state of health. This accursed ill-health cuts me off from everything. I make pitiful attempts to see the world around me by an occasional visit (wind, weather, and health permitting) to Petticoat Lane, the Docks, Rotten Row, Leicester Square, or the Ethical Church. Tomorrow I purpose going to the Christian Scientists’. Meanwhile, the others participate in Armageddon. + 

February 23 + 

The other day went to the Zoological Gardens, and, by permission of the Secretary, went round with the keepers and searched the animals for ectoparasites. + 

Some time this year I have to make a scientific Report to the Zoological Society upon all the Lice which from time to time have been collected on animals dying in the gardens and sent me for study and determination. + 

We entered the cages, caught and examined several Tinamous, Rhinochetus, Eurypygia, and many more, to the tune of “The Policeman’s Holiday” whistled by a Mynah! It was great fun. + 

Then we went into the Ostrich House and thoroughly searched two Kiwis. These, being nocturnal birds, were roosting underneath a heap of straw. When we had finished investigating their feathers, they ran back to their straw at once, the keeper giving them a friendly tap on the rear to hurry them up a bit. They are just like little old women bundling along. + 

The Penguins, of course, were the most amusing, and, after operating fruitlessly for some time on a troublesome Adèle, I was amused to find, on turning around, all the other Adèles clustered close around my feet in an attitude of mute supplication. + 

The Armadillo required all the strength of two keepers to hold still while I went over his carcass with lens and forceps. I was also allowed to handle and examine the Society’s two specimens of that amazing creature the Echidna. + 

Baloeniceps rex like other royalty had to be approached decorously. He was a big, ill-tempered fellow, and quite unmanageable except by one keeper for whom he showed a preference. While we other conspirators hid ourselves outside, this man entered the house quietly and approached the bird with a gentle cooing sound. Then suddenly he grabbed the bill and held on. We entered at the same moment and secured the wings, and I began the search⁠—without any luck. We must have made an amusing picture⁠—three men holding on for dear life to a tall, grotesque bird with an imperial eye, while a fourth searched the feathers for parasites! + 

February 28 + 

What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells! Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-glass and comb out my tousled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to breakfast ready for the day’s pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place. + 

March 3 + 

I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a glassy, mesmerised face⁠—a fainéant. How different from that extremely busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say⁠—could that lad be I? How many hours do I waste daydreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed and could not stop dreaming⁠—I had not the will to shake myself down to my task.⁠ ⁠… My memories simply trooped the colour. + 

It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves or in the selves that are to be. + 

Then I raced through all sorts of future possibilities⁠—oh! when and how is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man above all should possess the “quiet mind in all changes of fortune” —⁠Sir Henry Wotton’s “How Happy Is He Born and Taught.” + 

The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and⁠—as I might have discovered earlier for myself⁠—success almost out of the question. If only I were purebred science or purebred art! + 

March 4 + 

Life is a dream and we are all somnambules. We know that for a fact at all times when we are most intensely alive⁠—at crises of unprecedented change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought swiftly to a close like a vision! + 

I sit here writing this⁠—a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I? “A soap-bubble hanging from a reed.” + 

Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire⁠—and a taste for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator⁠—critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!⁠—my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole⁠—like old Samuel again⁠—I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways. + 

And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech, etc.? + 

I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul. + 

March 6 + 

Spent a most delightful half-an-hour today reading an account in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (one of my favourite books⁠—it’s so “gey disconnekkit”) the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It’s a delightful bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, “Rejoice with me⁠—see what I have got here.” I fired it off first in detail at ⸻; and H⁠⸺ and D⁠⸺ will probably be my victims tomorrow. After all, it is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope for conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph. + 

March 22 + 

I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me⁠—holds my mind in mortmain. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still and merely breathe⁠—like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass. “The things immediate to be done,” says Thoreau, “I could give them all up to hear this locust sing.” All my energies become immobilised, even my self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how I feel during such moments. + 

March 23 + 

I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging castigation as Hazlitt’s letter to Gifford, or Burke’s letter to a Noble Lord, or Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau’s letter to the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge myself! At this moment I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least! + 

What a raging discontent I have suffered today! What cynicism, what bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance, what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed self-assertiveness! + 

A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had already had much success from collecting in moss. With an icy politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the Hell is Johnson? As a quid pro quo I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the dark as he left me. Our Gods differ, we have a different hierarchy. + 

“Well, how’s your soul?” said R⁠⸺, bursting in with a sardonic smile. + 

I gave him a despairing look and said: + 

“Oh! a pink one with blue spots,” and he left me to my fate. + 

Had tea with the ⸻ and was amazed to find on the music tray in the drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of ⸻’s Memoir on Synapta. Within his hearing, I said, “Did you and Mrs. ⸻ find this exciting reading?” And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. ⸻, of course, was glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable⁠—just how pleased that young man is with himself. + 

After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts paint. I must have glowered at them. I⁠—the energetic, ambitious, pushing youth⁠—of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now? + 

Mrs. ⸻ plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man⁠—to have a wife play you Chopin! + 

March 24 + 

It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about this War. I am not interested in it⁠—this filth and lunacy. I have not yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself⁠—in my moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to stand clear of the data, to marshal and classify the multitude of facts and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to know⁠—if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God’s name am I? A fool, of course, to start with⁠—but the rest of the diagnosis? + 

One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main idea when in a fair state of repair is to seize the passing moment and squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire says, “One must be forever drunken; that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease.” + 

Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My consciousness is a ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent passes of pate, all the “obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet” take my eye for a moment ere I pass on. In Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia, I am interested to find “why Jews do not stink, what is the superstition of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black,” and so forth. There is a poetic appropriateness that in AD 1915 I should be occupied mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it. + 

They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in AD 1915⁠—surely we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with⁠—just as an experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious enough to fight, I should want God first to dictate to me his programme of the future of mankind. + 

March 25 + 

Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a disinterested and usually vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, “Hot stuff, this witch.” Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, “These damned women.” I am apparently a triple personality: + 

The respectable youth. + 

The foul-mouthed commentator and critic. + 

The real but unknown I. + 

Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement! + 

A crowd makes egotists of us all. Most men find it repugnant to them to submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd is potentially full of commotion. Some poor devils suffocating and unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, “Bravo,” or “Hear, hear,” at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly, welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the mass for long on end is what human nature can’t endure in silence and a good deal of self can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into “Alleluia” or “The Lord be praised.” + 

I had to determine the names of some exotic cockroaches today and finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two enthusiasts who know them as “Blattids” by rechristening them with great frivolity, “Fat ’eds.” + 

“These bloody insects,” I said to an Australian entomologist of rare quality. + 

“A good round oath,” he answered quietly. + 

“If it was a square one it wouldn’t roll properly,” I said. It is nice to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy. + 

March 26 + 

The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it is. A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Saturday, and at breakfast as at dinner is to⁠—well, make an ideal husband. + 

… It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an enthusiast⁠—tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless, ironical, and idle. That’s what ill-health can do for a man. To be among enthusiasts⁠—zoologists, geologists, entomologists⁠—as I frequently am, makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now burnt out. + 

I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character. I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom and even spying into private documents. In a railway carriage I will twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the title of the book my neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins. + 

April 10 + 

“Why,” asks Samuel Butler, “should not chicken be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient⁠ ⁠… it is not only not perfect but so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes.⁠ ⁠…” + 

As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe, dress, shave, breakfast once for all, if we could “cut” these monotonous cycles of routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we were immortal!⁠—how much forrarder we should all get⁠—always at the heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of labour in front! + 

The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars. + 

The woman on the bus the other night⁠—pouring out an interminable flow of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man⁠—poor, exhausted devil who kept answering dreamily “Oom” and “Yes” and “Oom”⁠—how I hated her for his sake! + 

April 11 + 

If music moves me, it always generates images⁠—a procession of apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude, terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears and arms bent at the elbows⁠—a staring, bulgy-eyed madwoman such as one sees in Raemakers’ cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the struggle of a man with a steam-hammer⁠—Fate. As though through the walls of a closed room⁠—some mysterious room, a fearful spot⁠—I crouch and listen and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out⁠—there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike blows⁠—melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An epileptic vision or an opium dream⁠—Dostoevsky or De Quincey set to music. + 

In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to “carry on” for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the child; a greyhound’s cold wet nose nuzzling into a listless hand, and outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc. + 

In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums and the sound of horses’ hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great healing wind, then a few ghostlike tappings on the window pane till gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn cortege advancing slowly along. + 

Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc. + 

I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of suicide. + 

April 15 + 

There is an absurd fellow⁠ ⁠… who insists on taking my pirouettes seriously. I say irresponsibly, “All men are liars,” and he replies with jejuneness and exactitude of a pronouncing dictionary, “A liar is one who makes a false statement with intent to deceive.” What can I do with him? “Did I ever meet a lady,” he asked, “who wasn’t afraid of mice?” “I don’t know,” I told him, “I never experiment with ladies in that way.” + 

He hates me. + 

May 11 + 

This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This Titanic war reduces me to the size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist to do? To be a common soldier is to become a pawn in the game between ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all individuality, you become a “bayonet” or a “machine gun,” or “cannon fodder,” or “fighting material.” + 

May 22 + 

Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word), self-advertisement, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out sententious, pompous, and full of self. + 

May 23 + 

The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring: + 

“He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he was proud, overbearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savage amour propre and he took a childish delight in annoying; he cultivated ‘le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.’⁠ ⁠… He could not bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones. Yet he was warmhearted, thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love if he chose.⁠ ⁠… At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet and recoiled upon himself.” + 

This is an accurate description of Me. + 

May 26 + 

The time will come⁠—it’s a great way off⁠—when a joke about sex will be not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of the wonder of creation. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology. The perfectly enfranchised poet⁠—and Walt Whitman in “The Song of Myself” came near being it⁠—should be as ready to sing of the incredible raptures of the sexual act between “twin souls” as of the clouds or sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful things to say but no man dare⁠—for fear of the police, for fear of the coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own high-mindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus been lost to the world! + 

May 27 + 

From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say and to believe that it had no bottom and certainly a very great depth in it could be felt if not accurately gauged as one stood at the water’s edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but today the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with grass and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous rock, rising sheer out of the inky water⁠—a bare sombre surface on which no mosses even⁠—“tender creatures of pity,” Ruskin calls them⁠—have taken compassion by softening the jagged edges of the strata or nestling in the scars. It is an excellent example of “Contortion” as Geologists say, for the beds are bent into a quite regular geometrical pattern⁠—syncline and anticline in waves⁠—by deep-seated plutonic force that makes the mind quake in the effort to imagine it. + 

On the top of this rock and overhanging the water⁠—a gaunt, haggard-looking Fir tree impends, as it seems in a perilous balance, while down below, the pool, sleek and shiny, quietly waits with a catlike patience. + 

In summer time, successive rows of Foxgloves one behind the other in barbaric splendour are ranged around the grassy rubble slopes like spectators in an amphitheatre awaiting the spectacle. Fire-bellied Efts slip here and there lazily through the water. Occasionally a Grass-snake would swim across the pool and once I caught one and on opening his stomach found a large fire-bellied Eft inside. The sun beats fiercely into this deep hollow and makes the water tepid. On the surface grows a glairy Alga, which was once all green but now festers in yellow patches and causes a horrible stench. Everything is absolutely still, air and water are stagnant. A large Dytiscus beetle rises to the surface to breathe and every now and then large bubbles of marsh gas come sailing majestically up from the depth and explode quietly into the fetid air. The horrificness of this place impressed me even when I was intent only on fishing there for bugs and efts. Now, seen in retrospect, it haunts me. + 

May 28 + 

It is only by accident that certain of our bodily functions are distasteful. Many birds eat the faeces of their young. The vomits of some Owls are formed into shapely pellets, often of beautiful appearance, when composed of the glittering multicoloured elytra of Beetles, etc. The common Eland is known to micturate on the tuft of hair on the crown of its head, and it does this habitually, when lying down, by bending its head around and down⁠—apparently because of the aroma, perhaps of sexual importance during mating time, as it is a habit of the male alone. + 

At lunch time, had an unpleasant intermittency period in my heart’s action and this rather eclipsed my anxiety over a probable zeppelin Raid. Went home to my rooms by bus, and before setting off to catch my train for West Wycombe to stay for the weekend at a Farm with E⁠⸺ swallowed two teaspoonfuls of neat brandy, filled my flask, and took a taxi to Paddington. At 3:50 started to walk to C⁠⸺ H⁠⸺ Farm from W. Wycombe Station, where E⁠⸺ has been lodging for some weeks taking a rest cure after a serious nervous breakdown through overwork. As soon as I stepped out of the train, I sniffed the fresh air and soon made off down the road, happy to have left London and the winter and the war far behind. The first man of whom I inquired the way happened to have been working at the Farm only a few weeks ago, so I relied implicitly on his directions, and as it was but a mile and a half decided that my wobbly heart could stand the strain. I set out with a good deal of pleasurable anticipation. I was genuinely looking forward to seeing E⁠⸺, although in the past few weeks our relations had become a little strained, at least on my part, mainly because of her little scrappy notes to me scribbled in pencil, undated, and dull! Yet I could do with a volume of “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” These letters chilled me. In reply, I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless formal notes, for I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote to me or how she expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my education and mental habits. My petty spirit grew disenchanted, out of love. I was false to her in a hundred inconsiderable little ways and even deliberately planned the breaking off of the engagement some months hence when she should be restored to normal health. + 

But once in the country and, as I thought, nearing my love at every step and at every bend in the road, even anticipating her arms around me with real pleasure (for she promised to meet me halfway), I on a sudden grew eager for her again and was assured of a happy weekend with her. Then the road grew puzzling and I became confused, uncertain of the way. I began to murmur she should have given me instructions. Every now and then I had to stop and rest as my heart was beating so furiously. Espying a farm on the left I made sure I had arrived at my destination and walked across a field to it and entered the yard where I heard someone milking a cow in a shed. I shouted over the five-barred gate into empty space, “Is this C⁠⸺ H⁠⸺ Farm?” A labourer came out of the shed and redirected me. It was now ten to five. I was tired and out of sorts, and carried a troublesome little handbag. I swore and cursed and found fault with E⁠⸺ and the Universe. + 

I trudged on, asking people, as I went, the way, finally emerging from the cover of a beautiful wood through a wicket gate almost at the entrance to the Farm I sought. At the front door we embraced affectionately and we entered at once, I putting a quite good face upon my afternoon’s exertions⁠—when I consider my unbridled fury of a short time before. E⁠⸺, as brown as a berry, conducted me to my bedroom and I nearly forgot to take this obvious opportunity of kissing her again. + 

“How are you?” I asked. + 

“All right,” she said, fencing. + 

“But really?” + 

“All right.” + 

(A little nettled): “My dear, that isn’t going to satisfy me. You will have to tell me exactly how you are.” + 

After tea, I recovered myself and we went for a walk together. The beauty of the country warmed me up, and in the wood we kissed⁠—I for my part happy and quite content with the present state of our relations, i.e., affectionate but not perfervid. + 

May 29 + 

Got up early and walked around the Farm before breakfast. Everything promises to be delightful⁠—young calves, broods of ducklings, and turkeys, fowls, cats and dogs. In the yard are two large Cathedral barns, with enormous pent roofs sloping down to within about two feet of the ground and entered by way of great double doors that open with the slowness and solemnity of a Castle’s portal studded with iron knobs. It thrilled me to the marrow on first putting my head outside to be greeted with the grunt of an invisible pig that I found scraping his back on the other side of the garden wall. + 

In the afternoon, E⁠⸺ and I sat together in the Beech Wood: E⁠⸺ on a deck chair and I on a rug on the ground. In spite of our beautiful surroundings we did not progress very well, but I attributed her slight aloofness to the state of her nerves. She is still far from recovered. These wonderful Beech Woods are quite new to me. The forest beech is a very different plant from the solitary tree. In the struggle to reach the light the Forest Beech grows lean and tall and gives an extraordinary suggestion of wiry powerful strength. On the margins of the wood, Bluebells were mobilised in serried ranks. Great Tits whistled⁠—in the language of our allies⁠—“Bijou, Bijou” and I agreed with every one of them. + 

Some folk don’t like to walk over Bluebells or Buttercups or other flowers growing on the ground. But it is foolish to try to pamper Nature as if she were a sickly child. She is strong and can stand it. You can stamp on and crush a thousand flowers⁠—they will all come up again next year. + 

By some labyrinthine way which I cannot now recall, the conversation worked round to a leading question by E.⁠—if in times like these we ought not to cease being in love? She was quite calm and serious. I said “No, of course not, silly.” My immediate apprehension was that she had perceived the coldness in my letters and I was quite satisfied that she was so well able to read the signs in the sky. “But you don’t wish to go on?” she persisted. I persisted that I did, that I had no misgivings, no second thoughts, that I was not merely taking pity on her, etc. The wild temptation to seize this opportunity for a break I smothered in reflecting how ill she was and how necessary to wait first till she was well again. These thoughts passed swiftly, vaguely like wraiths through my mind: I was barely conscious of them. Then I recalled the sonnet about coming in the rearward of a conquered woe and mused thereon. But I took no action. + 

Presently with cunning I said that there was no cloud on my horizon whatever⁠—only her “letters disappointed me a little⁠—they were so cold,” but “as soon as I saw you again, darling, those feelings disappeared.” + 

As soon as they were spoken I knew they were not as they might seem, the words of a liar and hypocrite. They became true. E⁠⸺ looked very sweet and helpless and I loved her again as much as ever. + 

“It’s funny,” she said, “but I thought your letters were cold. Letters are so horrid.” + 

The incident shows how impossible is intellectual honesty between lovers. Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel. + 

“Write as you would speak,” said I. “You know I’m not one to carp about a spelling mistake!” + 

The latter remark astonished me. Was it indeed I who was speaking? All the week I had been fuming over this. Yet I was honest: the Sun and E.’s presence were dispelling my ill-humours and crochets. We sealed our conversation with a kiss and swore never to doubt each other again. E.’s spell was beginning to act. It is always the same. I cannot resist the actual presence of this woman. Out of her sight, I can in cold blood plan a brutal rupture. I can pay her a visit when the first kiss is a duty and the embrace a formality. But after 5 minutes I am as passionate and devoted as before. It is always thus. After leaving her, I am angry to think that once more I have succumbed. + 

In the evening we went out into a field and sat together in the grass. It is beautiful. We lay flat on our backs and gazed up at the sky. + 

S. H. has died of enteric at Malta. In writing to Mrs. H., instead of dwelling on what a splendid fellow he was I belaboured the fact that I still remembered our boyish friendship in every detail and still kept his photo on my mantelpiece and although “in later years” I didn’t suppose we “had a great deal in common I discovered that a friendship even between two small boys cannot wholly disappear into the void.” Discussing myself when I ought to have been praising him! Ugh! She will think what a conceited, puff-breasted Jackanapes. These phrases have rankled in my mind ever since I dropped the letter into the letter-box. “Your Stanley, Mrs. H., was of course a very inferior sort of person and naturally, you could hardly expect me to remain friendly with him but rest assured I hadn’t forgotten him,” etc. + 

Yesterday, I read a paper at the Zoological Society about lice. There was a goodly baldness of sconce and some considerable length of beard present that listened or appeared to listen to my innocent remarks with great solemnity and sapience.⁠ ⁠… I badly wanted to tell them some horrid stories about human lice but I had not the courage. I wanted to jolt these middle-aged gentlemen by performing a few tricks but I am too timid for such adventures. But before going to sleep I imagined a pandemonium in which with a perfectly glacial manner I produced lice alive from my pockets, conjured them down from the roof in a rain, with the skilful sleight of hand drew them out of the chairman’s beard, made the ladies scream as I approached, dared to say they were all lousy and unclean and finished up with an eloquent apostrophe after the manner of Thomas de Quincey (and of Sir Walter Raleigh before him) beginning: + 

“O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet blood drops.⁠ ⁠…” + 

But I hadn’t the courage. Shelley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst out: “O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of Kings, etc.” I’ve always wanted to do something like that and when I have £5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express train⁠—my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson’s courage in tapping the lampposts is really everyone’s envy though we laugh at him for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad. In walking along the pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is working out of truth. I am also rather proud of my courageous self-surrender to the daemon of laughter, especially in those early days when H. and I used to sit opposite one another and howl like hyenas. After the most cacophonous cachinnations as soon as we had recovered ourselves he or I would regularly remark in serious and confidential tones, “I say⁠—we really are going mad.” But what a delightful luxury to be thus mad amid the great, spacious, architectural solemnity with gargoyles and effigies of a scientific meeting! Some people never do more than chuckle or smile⁠—and they are often very humorous happy people, ignorant nevertheless of the joy of riding themselves on the snaffle and losing all control. + 

While boating on ⸻ last summer, we saw two persons, a man and a girl sitting together on the beach reading a book with heads almost touching. + 

“I wonder what they’re reading?” I said, and I was dying to know. We made a few facetious guesses. + 

“Shall I ask?” + 

“Yes, do,” said Mrs. ⸻. + 

The truth is we all wanted to know. We were suddenly mad with curiosity as we watched the happy pair turning over leaf after leaf. + 

While R⁠⸺ leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to shout out a polite enquiry⁠—just to prove that the will is free. But seeing my intention the boatload grew nervous and said seriously, “No,” which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I was a lunatic⁠—we all were. + 

In our postprandial perambulations about S. Kensington G⁠⸺ and I often pass the window of a photographer’s shop containing always a profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses, aristocrats and harlots⁠—some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast. + 

“Why do we suffer this?” I asked G⁠⸺, tapping the window ledge as we stood. + 

“I don’t know,” he answered lamely⁠—morose. (Pause while the two embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women continue to look out.) + 

Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: “If only we had the courage of our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius, we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each photograph with our comments.” + 

Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no coloured glasses⁠—“glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise”⁠—and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot down on the tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street below, shouting down furiously, “The Life Beautiful! The Life Beautiful.” + 

Bergson’s theory is that laughter is a “social gesture” so that when a man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him for his lack “of living pliableness.” At this rate we ought to be profoundly solemn at Baudelaire’s action and moreover a “social gesture” is more likely to be an expression of society’s will to conformity in all its members rather than any dangerous “living pliableness.” Society hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy, conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of Samuel Butler and a hundred others. + 

But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this intoxication of life is usually said to be “temporarily insane.” In those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop⁠—why does he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.⁠ ⁠… But the day never comes and he is nevertheless content. + 

May 30 + 

A brilliantly sunny day. This funny old farmhouse where we are staying quite delights me. It is pleasant, too, to dawdle over dressing, to put away shaving tackle for a day or so, to jump out of bed in the morning and thrust my head out of the window into the fresh and stock-scented air of the garden, listen to the bird chorus or watch a “scrap” in the poultry-run. Then all unashamed, I dress myself before a dear old lady in a flowery print gown concealing 4 thin legs and over the top of the mirror a piece of lace just like a bonnet, caught up in front by a piece of pink ribbon. On the walls Pear’s Soap Annuals, on a side table Swiss Family Robinson and Children of the New Forest. Then there are rats under the floors, two wooden staircases which wind up out of sight, two white dairies, iron hapses on all the doors and a privy at the top of the orchard. (Tell me⁠—how do you explain the psychosis of a being who on a day must have seized hammer and nail and an almanac picture of a woman in the snow with a basket of goodies⁠—“An Errand of Mercy”⁠—carried all three to the top of the orchard and nailed the picture up on the dirty wall in the semidarkness of an earth-closet?) + 

Got up quite early before breakfast and went birds’-nesting.⁠ ⁠… It would take too long and be too sentimental for me to record my feelings on looking into the first nest I found⁠—a Chaffinch’s, the first wild bird’s eggs I have seen for many years. As I stood with an egg between thumb and forefinger, my memories flocked down like white birds and surrounded me. I remained still, fed them with my thoughts and let them perch upon my person⁠—a second St. Francis of Assisi. Then I shoo’ed them all away and prepared for the more palpitating enjoyment of today. + 

After breakfast we sat in the Buttercup field⁠—my love and I⁠—and “plucked up kisses by the roots that grew upon our lips.” The sun was streaming down and the field thickly peopled with Buttercups. From where we sat we could see the whole of the valley below and Farmer Whaley⁠—a speck in the distance⁠—working a machine in a field. We watched him idly. The gamekeeper’s gun went off in one of the covers. It was jolly to put our heads together right down deep in the Buttercups and luxuriously follow the pelting activities of the tiny insects crawling here and there in the forest of grass, clambering over a broken blade athwart another like a wrecked tree or busily enquiring into some low scrub at the roots. A chicken came our way and he seemed an enormous bird from the grass-blade’s point of view. How nice to be a chicken in a field of Buttercups and see them as big as Sunflowers! or to be a Gulliver in the Beech Woods! to be so small as to be able to climb a Buttercup, tumble into the corolla and be dusted yellow or to be so big as to be able to pull up a Beech-tree with finger and thumb! If only a man were a magician, could play fast and loose with rigid Nature? what a multitude of rich experiences he could discover for himself! + 

I looked long and steadily this morning at the magnificent torso of a high forest Beech and tried to project myself into its lithe tiger-like form, to feel its electric sap vitalising all my frame out to the tip of every tingling leaf, to possess its splendid erectness in my own bones. I could have flung my arms around its fascinating body but the austerity of the great creature forbad it. Then a Hawk fired my ambition!⁠—to be a Hawk, or a Falcon, to have a Falcon’s soul, a Falcon’s heart⁠—that splendid muscle in the cage of the thorax⁠—and the Falcon’s pride and sagacious eye! + 

When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells dashed up around the foot of the Oak in front of us.⁠ ⁠… I never knew before, the delight of offering oneself up⁠—an oblation of one’s whole being; I even longed for some self-sacrifice, to have to give up something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another happy.⁠ ⁠… + 

After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun filtered in through the greenery casting a “dim, religious light.” + 

“It’s like a cathedral,” I chattered away, “stained glass windows, pillars, aisles⁠—all complete.” + 

“It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this,” she said. “At C⁠⸺ Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon Beech.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Sir Henry Wood was the organist.” + 

“Yes,” she said, “and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor.” + 

We laughed over our silliness! + 

Shrewmice pattered over the dead leaves and one came boldly into view under a bramble bush⁠—she had never seen one before. Overhead, a ribald fellow of a Blackbird whistled a jaunty tune. E⁠⸺ laughed. “I am sure that Blackbird is laughing at us,” she said. “It makes me feel quite hot.” + 

This evening we sat on the slope of a big field where by lowering our eyes we could see the sun setting behind the grass blades⁠—a very pretty sight which I do not remember ever to have noted before. A large blue Carabus beetle was stumbling about, Culvers cooed in the woods near by. It was delightful to be up 600 feet on a grassy field under the shadow of a large wood at sunset with my darling. + 

May 31 + 

Sitting at tea in the farm house today E⁠⸺ cried suddenly, pointing to a sandy cat in the garden: + 

“There⁠—he’s the father of the little kittens in the barn and I’ll tell you how we know. P⁠⸺ noticed the kittens had big feet and later on saw that old Tom stalking across the garden with big feet of exactly the same kind.” + 

“So you impute the paternity of the kittens to the gentleman under the laurel bushes?” + 

I looked at the kittens tonight and found they had extra toes. “Mr. Sixtoes,” as W⁠⸺ calls him also possesses six toes, so the circumstantial evidence looks black against him. + 

June 1 + 

In the Beech Wood all the morning. Heigh-ho! it’s grand to lie out as straight as a line on your back, gaze upwards into the tree above, and with a caressing eye follow its branches out into their multitudinous ramifications forward and back⁠—luxurious travel for the tired eye.⁠ ⁠… Then I would shut my eyes and try to guess where her next kiss would descend. Then I opened my eyes and watched her face in the most extravagant detail, I counted the little filaments on her precious mole and saw the sun through the golden down of her throat.⁠ ⁠… + 

Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little coups d’oeil, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on the keeper’s gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path, the constant patter of Shrewmice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a Bumblebee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks pours in through the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in by the open lattice. + 

June 2 + 

Each day I drop a specially selected Buttercup in past the little “Peeler,” at the apex of the “V” to lie among the blue ribbons of her camisoles⁠—those dainty white leaves that wrap around her bosom like the petals around the heart of a Rose. Then at night when she undresses, it falls out and she preserves it. + 

In the woods, hearing an extra loud patter on the leaves, we turned our heads and saw a Frog hopping our way. I caught him and gave an elementary lesson in Anatomy. I described to her the brain, the pineal organ in Anguis, Sphenodon’s pineal eye, etc. Then we fell to kissing again.⁠ ⁠… Every now and then she raises her head and listens (like a Thrush on the lawn) thinking she hears someone approach. We neither of us speak much⁠ ⁠… and at the end of the day, the nerve endings on my lips are tingling. + 

Farmer Whaley is a funny old man with a soft pious voice. When he feeds the Fowls, he sucks in a gentle, caressing noise between his lips for all the world as if he fed them because he loved them, and not because he wants to fatten them up for killing. His daughter Lucy, aged 22, loves all the animals of the farm and they all love her; the Cows stand monumentally still while she strokes them down the blaze or affectionately waggles their dewlaps. This morning, she walked up to a little Calf in the farmyard scarce a fortnight old which started to “back” in a funny way, spraddling out its legs and lowering its head. Miss Lucy laughed merrily and cried “Ah! you funny little thing,” and went off on her way to feed the Fowls who all raced to the gate as soon as they heard her footsteps. She brought in two double-yolked Ducks’ eggs for us to see and marvel at. In the breakfast room stands a stuffed Collie dog in a glass case. I’d as soon embalm my grandmother and keep her on the sideboard. + 

I asked young George, the farm-boy, what bird went like this: I whistled it. He looked abashed and said a Chaffinch. I told Miss Lucy who said George was a silly boy, and Miss Lucy told Farmer Whaley who said George ought to know better⁠—it was a Mistle-Thrush. + 

The letters are brought us each morning by a tramp with a game leg who secretes his Majesty’s Mails in a shabby bowler hat, the small packages and parcels going to the roomy tail pocket of a dirty morning coat. A decayed gentleman of much interest to us. + 

June 3 + 

We have made a little nest in the wood and I lead her into it by the hand over the briars and undergrowth as if conducting her to the grand piano on a concert platform. I kissed her.⁠ ⁠… + 

Then in a second we switch back to ordinary conversation. In an ordinary conversational voice I ask the trees, the birds, the sky. + 

“What’s become of all the gold?” + 

“What’s become of Waring?” + 

“What is Love? ’Tis not hereafter.” + 

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” + 

“Who killed Cock Robin?” + 

“Who’s who?” + 

And so on through all the great interrogatives that I could think of till she stopped my mouth with a kiss and we both laughed. + 

“Miss Penderkins,” I say. “Miss Penderlet, Miss Pender-au-lait, Miss Pender-filings.” + 

What do I mean? she cries. “What’s the point of the names? Why take my name in vain? Why? What? How?” + 

She does not know that clever young men sometimes trade on their reputation among simpler folk by pretending that meaningless remarks conceal some subtlety or cynicism, some little Attic snap. + 

I have been teaching her to distinguish the songs of different birds and often we sit a long while in the Cathedral Wood while I say, “What’s that?” and “What’s that?” and she tells me. It is delightful to watch her dear serious face as she listens.⁠ ⁠… This evening I gave a viva voce examination as per below: + 

“What does the Yellow Hammer say?” + 

“What colour are the Hedge Sparrow’s eggs?” + 

“Describe the Nightjar’s voice.” + 

“How many eggs does it lay?” + 

“Oh! you never told me about the Nightjar,” she cried outraged. + 

“No: it’s a difficult question put in for candidates taking honours.” + 

Then we rambled on into Tomfoolery. “Describe the call-note of a motor omnibus.” “Why does the chicken cross the road?” and “What’s that?”⁠—when a railway engine whistled in the distance. + 

Measure by this our happiness! + 

June 4 + 

At a quarter past eight, this morning, the horse and trap were awaiting me outside, and bidding her “Goodbye” I got in and drove off⁠—she riding on the step down so far, as the gate. Then we waved till we were out of sight. Back in London by 10 a.m. She makes slow progress, poor dear⁠—her nerves are still very much of a jangle. But I am better, my heart is less wobbly. + 

June 5 + 

R⁠⸺ cannot make me out. He says one day I complain bitterly at not receiving a Portuguese sonnet once a week, and the next all is well and Love reigneth. “Verily a Sphinx.” + 

June 7 + 

Spent the afternoon at the Royal Army Medical College in consultation with the Professor of Hygiene. Amid all the paraphernalia of research, even when discussing a serious problem with a serious Major, I could not take myself seriously. I am incurably trivial and always feel myself an irresponsible youth, wondering and futile, among owlish grownups. + 

At 4 p.m. departed and went down on Vauxhall Bridge and watched a flour-barge being unloaded before returning to the Museum. I could readily hang on behind a cart, stare at an accident, pull a face at a policeman and then run away. + 

June 20 + 

… It annoys me to find the laissez-faire attitude of our relatives. Not one with a remonstrance for us and yet all the omens are against our marriage. In the state of my nervous system and in the state of hers⁠—we have both had serious nervous breakdowns⁠—how impossible it seems! Yet they say all the old conventional things to us, about our happiness and so on!⁠ ⁠… + 

… Am I a moral monster? Surely a man who can combine such calculating callousness with really generous impulses of the heart is⁠—what? + 

The truth is I think I am in love with her: but I am also mightily in love with myself. One or the other has to give. + 

June 25 + 

If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say I was a ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window then at the mirror⁠—turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or I gaze down into my eyes⁠—my eyes always impress me⁠—and wonder what effect I produce on others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity as curiosity. I know I am not prepossessing in appearance⁠—my nose is crooked and my skin is blotched. Yet my physique⁠—because it is mine⁠—interests me. I like to see myself walking and talking. I should like to hold myself in my hand in front of me like a Punchinello and carefully examine myself at my leisure. + 

June 28 + 

Saw my brother A⁠⸺ off at Waterloo en route for Armageddon. Darling fellow. He shook hands with P⁠⸺ and H⁠⸺, and P⁠⸺ wished him “Goodbye, and good luck.” Then he held my hand a moment, said “Goodbye, old man,” and for a second gave me a queer little nervous look. I could only say “Goodbye,” but we understand each other perfectly.⁠ ⁠… It is horrible. I love him tenderly. + 

June 29 + 

Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state⁠—you get it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always weightily impresses me to see someone asleep⁠—especially someone I love as today, stretched out as still as a log⁠—who perhaps a few minutes ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of recognition in the half-opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in and restore our love to us again. + 

When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me apprehensive⁠—this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else. + 

July 2 + 

I’ve had such a successful evening⁠—you’ve no idea! The pen simply flew along, automatically easy, page after page in perfect sequence. My style trilled and bickered and rolled and ululated in an infinite variety; you will find in it all the subtlest modulations, inflections and suavities. My afflatus came down from Heaven in a bar of light like the Shekinah⁠—straight from God, very God of very God. I worked in a golden halo of light and electric sparks came off my pen nib as I scratched the paper. + 

July 3 + 

Argued with R⁠⸺ this morning. He is a type specimen of the clever young man. We both are. Our flowers of speech are often forced hothouse plants, paradoxes and cynicisms fly as thick as driving rain and Shaw is our great exemplar. I could write out an exhaustive analysis of the clever young man, and being one myself can speak from “inspired sources” as the newspapers say. + 

A common habit is to underline and memorise short, sharp, witty remarks he sees in books and then on future occasions dish them up for his own self-glorification. If the author be famous he begins, “As ⸻ says, etc.” If unknown the quotation is quietly purloined. He is always very self-conscious and at the same time very self-possessed and very conceited. You tell me with tonic candour that I am insufferably conceited. In return, I smile, making a sardonic avowal of my good opinion of myself, my theory being that as conceit is, as a rule, implicit and, as a rule, blushingly denied, you will mistake my impudent confession for bluff and conclude there is really something far more substantial and honest beneath my apparent conceit. If, on the other hand, I am conceited, why I have admitted it⁠—I agree with you⁠—but though there is no virtue in the confession being quite detached and unashamed⁠—still you haven’t caught me by the tail. It is very difficult to circumvent a clever young man. He is as agile as a monkey. + 

His principal concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of antithesis: if you like winkles he proves that cockles are inveterately better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to learn to swim⁠—as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now playing the clever young man by writing out this analysis just as if I were not one myself. + 

You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R⁠⸺’s presence I called ⸻ “the Rev. Fastidious Brisk”⁠—the nickname be it recalled which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of “Rev.”). At the time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite imagined R⁠⸺ was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the life of me I couldn’t muster the honesty to assure him that my feather was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again as “certainly one of my better ones”⁠—but still I remained dumb and the time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty pickle I am in: the name “Brisk” or “F.B.” is in constant use by us for this particular person⁠—he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and wonder how long it will be before R⁠⸺ finds me out. There are all sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for himself, someone might tell him or⁠—worst of all⁠—one day when we are dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe that the person opposite me knows and is about to air his knowledge; then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate and I shall land him with a left and right: “I suppose you’ve read Henley’s verses on Stevenson?” I remark easily and in a moment or so later the conversation has moved on. + 

August 1 + 

Am getting married at ⸻ Register Office on September 15th. It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts, fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. “If you enjoy only twelve months’ happiness,” the Doctor said to me, “it is worth while.” But he makes a recommendation.⁠ ⁠… At his suggestion E⁠⸺ went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the future. To marry an introspective dyspeptic⁠—what a prospect for her!⁠ ⁠… I exercise my microscopic analysis on her now as well as on myself.⁠ ⁠… This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir Michael Foster’s Physiology of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart. + 

August 2 + 

House pride in newlywed folk, for example, H. and D. today at Golder’s Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor. They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as though it were a child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband sotto voce, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manoeuvre, wilt away in your chair, the pregnant phrase stillborn on your lips. Presently they reenter the room with the kitten that was heard in the scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the rose tree. She apologises and both settle down again, recompose their countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness, pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it left off with: “Europe? you were saying.⁠ ⁠…” I mobilise my scattered units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips⁠—her heart is far from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to see if the ash will fall on her carpet. + 

August 6 + 

The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that flow through the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may be, plenty of things escape him and in any event recollection is not recreation.⁠ ⁠… + 

To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental kind. A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived. The word “Deceit” comes up against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in these entries behind her back.⁠ ⁠… Is this journal habit slowly corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously continue to write his journal intime? + 

This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must consider. + 

Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers Werle-like passion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written.⁠ ⁠… + 

My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul. Provided it is a veritable autochthon⁠—I don’t care how much of a tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive⁠—I take him in and⁠—I fear sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other’s eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don’t tell us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your mind. Any eminently “right-minded” Times or Spectator reader will ask: “Who in Faith’s name is interested in your introspective muck-rakings⁠—in fact, who the Devil are you?” To myself, a person of vast importance and vast interest, I reply⁠—as are other men if I could but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr. Times- and Mr. Spectator-reader that actual crimes have many a time been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes be? Nothing much⁠—only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank God! fructify in action⁠—or at all events only the lesser ones. My outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time⁠—or as my sister once called me⁠—a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one. Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to give a poor devil a £5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little phlegm. + 

August 7 + 

On a bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large, red udder, which she swung into the baby’s face. The infant, however, continued to cry and the woman said⁠— + 

“Come on, there’s a good boy⁠—if you don’t, I shall give it to the gentleman opposite.” + 

Do I look ill-nourished? + 

“Arma virumque cano,” a beggar said to me this morning in the High Street, “or as the boy said, ‘Arms and the man with a dog,’ mistaking the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I feel it’s rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is absolutely non est with me,” and so on. + 

“My dear sir,” I answered expansively, “I am as poor as you are. You at least have seen better days you say⁠—but I never have.” + 

He changed in a minute his cringing manner and rejoined: + 

“No, I shouldn’t think you had,” eyeing me critically and slinking off. + 

Am I so shabby? + 

August 8 + 

By Jove! I hope I live!⁠ ⁠… Why does an old crock like myself go on living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine. + 

August 12 + 

Suffering from indigestion. The symptoms include: + 

Excessive pandiculation, + 

Excessive oscitation, + 

Excessive eructation, + 

Dyspnoea, + 

Sphygmic flutters, + 

Abnormal porrigo, + 

A desiccated epidermis. + 

August 16 + 

I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse, the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the best remedies for Pediculosis: I am acquainted with the measures adopted for dealing with the nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical treatises about it, as, for example, the De Phthiriasi of Gilbert de Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease so also did the Dictator Scylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II of Spain, the fugitive Ennius, Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in a leather sack before he could be buried. In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of Montezuma. In the United Service Magazine for 1842 is an account of the wreck of the Wager, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits and Captain Cheap lying on the deck⁠—“like an anthill.” + 

So that as an ancient writer puts it, “you must own that for the quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal man, this most loathsome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty⁠—poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors.” + 

In his well-known Bridgewater Treatise, the Rev. Dr. Kirby, the Father of English Entomology, asked: “Can we believe that man in his pristine state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so loathsome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?” He therefore dated their creation after the Fall. + 

The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with little bits of muslin stretched across the open end through which the Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in Elysium. He is not married. + 

In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even hybridised the two different species! + 

In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice. + 

August 27 + 

Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G⁠⸺ and R⁠⸺.⁠ ⁠… I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston! + 

August 29 + 

Climbed a windy eminence on the other side of the Lake and had a splendid view of Helvellyn⁠—like a great hog’s back. It is fine to walk over the elastic turf with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling all around me in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and resonant as a seashell. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was melted away from me, and Nature received me into her deepest communion⁠—until, until I got on the lee side of a hedge where the calm brought me back my gaol of clay. + 

September 1 + 

Fourteen days hence I shall be a married man. But I feel most dejected about it. When I fell down the other day, I believe I slightly concussed my spinal column, with the result that my 1913 trouble has returned, but this time on the left side! paralysis and horrible vertigo and presentiments of sudden collapse as I walk. + 

September 2 + 

I fear I have been overdoing it in this tempting mountain region. Walking too far, etc. So I am slacking. It was fortunate I did not get concussion of the brain⁠—I came within an inch of it: the hair of my head brushed the ground. + 

I knocked at the door of Sunbeam Cottage the other morning to know if they had a boat for hire. The door was promptly opened by a plump, charming little wench of about 17, and I caught a glimpse of the kitchen with its gunrack holding two fowling pieces, a grandfather clock in one corner and a dresser full of blueish china. + 

“We don’t let our boat out for hire,” she answered with a smile so honest and natural and spontaneous that I was already saying to myself I had never met with anything like it at all when she stretched up her bare, dairymaid arm⁠—strong, creamy and soft, just reached a big key strung to a wooden block and lying on the top shelf of the dresser and at once handed it to me with: + 

“But you are quite welcome to use it and here is the key to the boathouse.” + 

I now felt certain that she was one in a million and thanked her most awfully. I have never met such swiftly-moving generosity. + 

“It’s very nice on the Lake just now,” she said. “I like to lie in the boat with a book and let her drift.” + 

I asked her if she would not come too, but this tight little fairy was too busy in the house. She is Clara Middleton done in earthenware. + 

Subsequently R⁠⸺ and I often visited the cottage and we became great friends, her mother showing us some letters she received as a girl from John Ruskin⁠—a great friend of hers. The gamekeeper himself said that for his part he could never read Ruskin’s books⁠—it was like driving a springless cart over a rocky road. We all laughed and I said he was prejudiced in view of the letters which began: “My darling,” and finished up “Yr loving J. R.” + 

But Mrs. ⸻ said he had never read them, and Madge (ah! that name!) said her father had never shown the least interest in them at which we laughed again, and the gamekeeper laughed too. He is such a jolly man⁠—they all are delightfully simple, charming folk and we talked of Beasts and Birds that live on the mountains. + 

September 4 + 

Bathed in the Lake from the boat. It was brilliantly fine. R⁠⸺ dipped her paddles in occasionally just to keep the boat from grounding. Then I clambered over the bows and stood up to dry myself in the sun like one of Mr. Tuke’s young men. + 

September 7 + 

My 26th birthday. In London again. Went straight to the Doctor and reported myself. I quite expected him to forbid the marriage as I could scarcely hobble to his house. To my amazement, he apparently made light of my paralysis, said it was a common accident to bruise the os coccyx, etc. + 

September 8 + 

Am staying at ⸻ for a few days to rest and try to be better by that fateful 11th, when I am married. + 

Later: My first experience of a zeppelin raid. Bombs dropped only a quarter of a mile away and shrapnel from the guns fell on our roof. We got very panicky and went into a neighbour’s house, where we cowered down in our dressing-gowns in absolute darkness while bombs exploded and the dogs barked. + 

I was scared out of my life and had a fit of uncontrollable trembling. Later we rang up ⸻ and ⸻, and thank Heavens both are safe. A great fire is burning in London, judging by the red glare. At midnight sat and drank sherry and smoked a cigar with Mr. ⸻, my braces depending from my trousers like a tail and showing in spite of dressing-gown. Then went home and had some neat brandy to steady my heart. H⁠⸺ arrived soon after midnight. A motor-omnibus in Whitechapel was blown to bits. Great scenes in the city. + 

September 9 + 

Very nervy today. Hobbled down the road to see the damage done by the bombs. + 

September 10 + 

A swingeing cold in the head through running about on the night of the raid. Too feeble to walk far, so Mrs. ⸻ went into the town for me and purchased my wedding-ring, which cost £2 5s. 0d. + 