The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  W. N. P. Barbellion

  * * *

  THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN AND A LAST DIARY

  With an Introduction by

  H. G. Wells

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Journal of a Disappointed Man

  Part One

  Part Two: IN LONDON

  Part Three: MARRIAGE

  A Last Diary

  The Life and Character of Barbellion

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN

  W. N. P. BARBELLION was the pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889–1919), an entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London. He selected W. N. P. as the initials of three of ‘the most wretched figures in history’: Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Nero and Pontius Pilate. Barbellion was the name of his favourite pastry-shop on Gloucester Road.

  Introduction

  by H. G. Wells

  Your egoist, like the solitary beasts, lives only for himself; your altruist declares that he lives only for others; for either there may be success or failure, but for neither can there be tragedy. For even if the altruist meets nothing but ingratitude, what has he to complain of? His premises abolish his grounds of complaint. But both egoist and altruist are philosophical abstractions. The human being by nature and necessity is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of expression, egotists, and our desire is to think and if possible talk and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the world – or as much as we can conveniently assemble – for audience. There is variety in our styles. Some drape the central figure; some let it rather appear than call attention to it; some affect a needless frankness: ‘I am an egotist, mind you, and I pretend nothing else’; some by adopting a pose with accessories do at least develop so great and passionate an interest in the accessories as to generalise and escape more or less completely from self. An egotism like an eggshell is a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape. The fundamental art of life is to recover the sense of that great self-forgetful continuous life from which we have individually budded off. Many people have done this through religion, which begins with a tremendous clamour to some saviour god or other to recognise us and ends in our recognition of him; or through science, when your egotist begins with: ‘Behold me! I, I your humble servant, am a scientific man, devoted to the clear statement of truth’, and ends with so passionate a statement of truth that self is forgotten altogether.

  In this diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically caught by the creeping approach of death, we have one of the most moving records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle. We begin with one of those bright schoolboys that most of us like to fancy we once were, that many of us have come to love as sons or nephews or younger brothers, and this youngster is attracted by natural science, by the employments of the naturalist and by the thought of being himself some day a naturalist. From the very beginning we find in this diary the three qualities, from the narrowest to broadest. ‘Observe me,’ he says to himself, ‘I am observing nature.’ There is the self-conscious, self-centred boy. But he also says ‘I am observing nature!’ And at moments comes the clear light. He forgets himself in the twilight cave with the bats or watching the starlings in the evening sky, he becomes just you and I and the mind of mankind gathering knowledge. And the diary, as the keen edge of untimely fate cuts down into the sensitive tissue shows us presently, after outcries and sorrow and darkness of spirit, the habits of the observer rising to the occasion. Not for him, he realises, are the long life, the honours of science, the Croonian lecture, the listening Royal Society, one’s memory embalmed in specific or generic names, the sure place in the temple of fame, that once filled his boyish dreams. But here is something close at hand to go on observing manfully to the end, in which self may be forgotten, and that is his own tormented self, with desire still great and power and hope receding. ‘I will go on with this diary,’ I read between the lines. ‘You shall have at least one specimen, carefully displayed and labelled. Here is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square with this.’

  Such is what we have here. It will be going beyond the necessities of this preface to expatiate upon a certain thread of unpremeditated and exquisite beauty that runs through the story this diary tells. To all sensitive readers it will be plain enough, and those who cannot see it plain do not deserve to have it underlined for them, that, still unseeing, they may pretend to see. Nor need we dilate upon the development of the quality of this diary from the rather fussy egotism of the earlier half. But it may be well to add a few explanatory facts that the opening chapters rather take for granted. Barbellion began life at a material as well as a physical disadvantage; neither of his parents were sturdy people, his mother died at last of constitutional heart weakness, and his father belonged to that most unfortunate class, the poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances. Barbellion’s father was a newspaper reporter in a west country town, his income rarely exceeded a couple of hundred pounds a year; the educational facilities of the place were poor, and young Barbellion had to get such learning as he could as a day boy at a small private school, his father supplementing this meagre training and presently taking him on as an apprentice reporter. How the passion for natural science arose does not appear in this diary; we already find the naturalist formed in the first schoolboy entries. An uncle, a chemist, seems to have encouraged the tendency, and to have given him textbooks and other help. Somehow at any rate he acquired a considerable amount of knowledge; by the time he was eighteen he was already publishing quite excellent observations of his own in such periodicals as the Zoologist, and by the time he was twenty he could secure an appointment as assistant naturalist to the director of a well-known marine biological station. It was a success, as the reader will learn, gained only to be renounced. His father was ill and he had to stand by his family; our economical country cannot afford to make biologists out of men who can earn a living as hack reporters. Poverty and science are sisters wherever the flag of Britain waves; for how could the rich live if we wasted money on that sort of thing? But the dream was not altogether abandoned, and in 1911 Barbellion got a post, one of the dozen or so of rare and coveted opportunities to toil in a scientific atmosphere that our Empire affords; he secured an assistantship at the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, to which a living wage was attached, a fair equivalent to a reporter’s earnings. The rest of the story needs no helping out. Let me only add that since 1911 Barbellion, in spite of his steadily diminishing strength, has published articles in both British and American periodicals, that entirely justify the statement that in him biological science loses one of the most promising of its recent recruits. His scientific work is not only full and exact but it has those literary qualities, the grace, the power of handling, the breadth of reference, which have always distinguished the best English biological work, and which mark off at once the true scientific man from the mere collector and recorder of items. With this much introduction Barbellion may be left to tell the tragedy of his hopes and of the dark, unforeseen, unforeseeable, and inexplicable fate that has overtaken him.

  Part One

  * * *

  ‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth not his time; as the fis
hes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.’

  Eccles. 9:11

  The Journal begins when its author is a little over 13 years old. (The following are selected entries.)

  1903

  January 3.

  Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing on ‘How Cats Spend their Time’.

  January 17.

  Went with L— out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly – it might not have been one. Had some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away from me. While near a stream, L— spotted what he thought to be some Wild Duck and brought one down, hitting it right in the head. He is a splendid shot. We discovered on examining it that it was not a Wild Duck at all but an ordinary tame Wild Duck – a hen. We ran away, and to-night L— tells me he saw the Farmer enter the poulterer’s shop with the bird in his hand.

  January 19.

  Went to A— Wood with S— and L—. Saw a Barn Owl (Strix flammea) flying in broad daylight. At A— Woods, be it known, there is a steep cliff where we were all out climbing to inspect and find all the likely places for birds to build in, next spring. S— and I got along all right, but L—, being a bit too careless, let go his hold on a tree and fell headlong down. He turned over and over and seemed to us to pitch on the back of his neck. However, he got up as cheerfully as ever, saying, ‘I don’t like that – a bit of a nasty knock.’

  February 8.

  Joe became the mother of one kitten to-day. It was born at 1.20. It is a tiny little thing. One would almost call it deformed. It is grey.

  March 18.

  Our Goldfinch roosts at 5.30. Joe’s kitten is a very small one. ‘Magpie’ is its name.

  March 28.

  Went our usual ramble. But we were unfortunate from the very beginning. First, when we reached the ‘Nightjar Field’, we found there were two men at the bottom of it cutting the hedge, so we decided not to venture on, as Gimbo and Bounce were with us, and it would look like poaching. Later on, we came to a splendid wood, but had to withdraw hastily from it, an old farmer giving us a severe chase. There were innumerable rabbits in the wood, so, of course, the dogs barked hard. I gave them a sound beating when we got back out of danger. The old farmer is known as ‘Bale the Bell-hanger’.

  April 2.

  I was glad yesterday to see the egg season so well in. I shall have to get blow-pipes and egg drills. Spring has really arrived and even the grasshoppers are beginning to stridulate, yet Burke describes these little creatures as being ‘loud and troublesome’ and the chirp unpleasant. Like Samuel Johnson, he must have preferred brick walls to green hedges. Many people go for a walk and yet are unable to admire Nature simply because their power of observation is untrained. Of course some are not suited to the study at all and do not trouble themselves about it. In that case they should not talk of what they do not understand … I might have noticed that I have used the term ‘Study of Nature’. But it cannot be called a study. It is a pastime of sheer delight, with naught but beautiful dreams and lovely thoughts, where we are urged forward by the fact that we are in God’s world which He made for us to be our comfort in time of trouble … Language cannot express the joy and happy forgetfulness during a ramble in the country. I do not mean that all the ins and outs and exact knowledge of a naturalist are necessary to produce such delight, but merely the common objects – Sun, Thrush, Grasshopper, Primrose, and Dew.

  April 21.

  S— and I have made a little hut in the woods out of a large natural hole in the ground by a big tree. We have pulled down branches all around it and stuck in upright sticks as a paling. We are training ivy to grow over the sticks. We smoke ‘Pioneer’ cigarettes here and hide the packets in a hole under the roots of the tree. It’s like a sort of cupboard.

  August 6.

  In the evening, S— and I cycled to S—, and when it was dark we went down on the rocks and lit a fire which crackled and burnt in the dusk of the evening … Intend to do a bit to Beetles these hols. Rev. J. Wood in the B.O.P. has incited me to take them up, and it is really time, for at present I am as ignorant as I can hang together of the Coleoptera.

  December 24.

  Went out with L— to try to see the squirrels again. We could not find one and were just wondering if we should draw blank when L— noticed one clinging to the bark of a tree with a nut in its mouth. We gave it a good chase, but it escaped into the thickest part of the fir tree, still carrying the nut, and we gave up firing at it. Later on, L— got foolishly mischievous – owing, I suppose, to our lack of sport – and unhinged a gate which he carried two yards into a copse, and threw it on the ground. Just then, he saw the Squirrel again and jumped over the hedge into the copse, chasing it from tree to tree with his catty. Having lost it, he climbed a fir tree into a Squirrel’s drey at the top and sat there on the tree top, and I, below, was just going to lift the gate back when I looked up and saw a farmer watching me, menacing and silent. I promptly dropped the gate and fled. L— from his Squirrel’s drey, not knowing what had happened, called out to me about the nest – that there was nothing in it. The man looked up and asked him who he was and who I was. L— would not say and would not come down. The farmer said he would come up. L— answered that if he did he would ‘gob’ [i.e. spit] on him. Eventually L— climbed down and asked the farmer for a glass of cider. The latter gave him his boot and L— ran away.

  1904

  January 23.

  Went to the meet of the Stag hounds. Saw a hind in the stream at L— with not a horse, hound, or man in sight. It looked quite unconcerned and did not seem to have been hunted. I tried to head it, but a confounded sheep-dog got there before me and drove it off in the wrong direction. I was mad, because if I had succeeded in heading it and had there been a kill, I should have got a slot. Got home at 6.30, after running and walking fifteen miles – tired out.

  April 5.

  Just read Stalky & Co. Of Stalky, Beetle, and M’Turk, I like Beetle best.

  April 14.

  Won the School Gymnasium championship (under fifteen).

  August 25.

  Had quite an adventure to-day. D— and I cycled to the Lighthouse at —. On the way, in crossing the sands near the Hospital Ship we espied a lame Curlew which could hardly fly. I gave chase, but it managed to scramble over a gut full of water about two yards wide. D— took off his boots and stockings and carried me over on his back, and we both raced across the sands to where the Curlew lay in an exhausted state. I picked him up and carried him off under my arm, like the boy with the Goose that laid the golden eggs. All the time, the bird screamed loudly, opening its enormously long bill and struggling to escape. Arrived at the gut again, we found that the incoming tide had made the gut wider and deeper so that we were cut off from the mainland, and found it necessary to wade across at once before it got deeper. As I had to carry a pair of field-glasses as well as my boots and stockings, I handed over the struggling bird to D—. While wading across, I suddenly sank to my waist in a sandpit. This frightened me, and I was glad to reach the other side in safety. But on arrival I found D—, but no Curlew. In wading across the current, he grew flurried and let it go. The tide swept it upstream, and the poor bird, I fear, perished by drowning … Knocked up my friend P—, who is skipper of the ship N—, and asked him if he had a fire so that I could dry myself. He replied that they had no fire but that his ‘missus’ would look out a pair of pants for me. Before falling in with this plan unconditionally, I thought it best to inspect the garment. However, it was quite clean – a pair of blue serge seaman’s trousers, very baggy in the seat and far too long. But I turned up the bottoms and hid the baggy part underneath my overcoat. So, I got back home!

  September 8.

  Wet all day. Toothache.

  September 9.

  Toothache.


  September 10.

  Toothache.

  September 11.

  Toothache.

  Xmas Day.

  Mother and Dad wanted to give me one of G. A. Henty’s, but, fearing lest I did not want it, they did not put my name in it, so that if I wished I could change it. Intend doing this. Am reading the Origin of Species. It requires careful study, but I understand it so far and shall go on.

  December 26.

  I have caught nothing in my traps yet. A little while ago I set a springe and two horse-hair nooses in the reed bed for water rails. I have bought a book on practical trapping.

  1905

  January 15.

  I am thinking that on the whole I am a most discontented mortal. I get fits of what I call ‘What’s the good of anything?’ mania. I keep asking myself incessantly till the question wears me out: ‘What’s the good of going into the country naturalising? what’s the good of studying so hard? where is it going to end? will it lead anywhere?’