March 11
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I. I snap at any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, “Oh! I expect he read it in a book.”
I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, “Yes … yes … yes,” to nausea, when it ought to be “No … no … no.” I become my own renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character hypnotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.
But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.
For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting, credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can’t believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And strange to say it is the “good” people above all who most bitterly disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he arouses no expectations, and so I get no heartburning. It is the good, the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood’s beliefs. … I am a cynic then, but not a reckless cynic—a careworn unhappy cynic without the cynic’s pride. “It is easy to be cynical,” someone admonished me. “Unfortunately it is,” I said.
We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the Englishman’s reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others. And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting me to the quick. “To the pure all things are pure,” whence I should conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people’s motes.