September 10
My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don’t deserve anybody else’s. In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch gallop: in life I rein in, I am almost another person. Would you believe it, E⸺ says I am full of quick sympathy with others and extraordinarily cheerful, nay gay. Verily I lead a curious double existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable, mealymouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. My life has embittered me au fond, I have the crabbed temper of the disappointed man insufficiently developed yet to be very plainly visible beneath my innate affable, unassuming, humble, diffident, cheerful characteristics. With fools on every hand I am becoming insolent, aggressive, self-declamatory. Last evening came home and got down Robert Buchanan’s sonnet, “When He returns and finds the world so drear,” and felt constrained to read it out to E⸺. I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.
It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.