June 30.
My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size of a Gulliver – so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who reports meetings in shorthand.
July 17.
We sang to-night in Church, ‘But when I know Thee as Thou art, I’ll praise Thee as I ought.’ Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of Man will have lived and uttered its protest.
July 22.
Our Simian Ancestry
How I hate the man who talks about the ‘brute creation’, with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?
August 9.
I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out my pipe and say ‘Good-night’, exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.
August 23.
Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary —. Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbour until dark, when I kissed her. ‘Achilles was not the worse warrior for his probation in petticoats.’
September 1.
I hope to goodness she doesn’t think I want to marry her. In the Park in the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new experience.
September 4.
Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to kiss me. My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am constitutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.
September 5.
Read Thomas à Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it out of the window. ‘Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee,’ he says, ‘but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather than elevation to the head.’ Forsooth! Can’t you see me?
September 15.
A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in letting all I saw – the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley and the apple orchards – change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike, immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and I was back where 2 and 2 make 4. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your secrets!
October 4.
Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam. for the vacancy in the B. M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of my nine months’ assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions. In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of N— again under the old régime, reporting platitudes from greasy guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not altogether displeased at some one else’s misfortune.
October 14.
Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the threshold. It was so obviously returning after an unsuccessful flight.
October 22.
Dissected a Squilla for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
October 23.
Ambition
Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of living – something that will enable me to accept disappointment with equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day, and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.
October 24.
In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned into ‘copy’, and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for consolation? That I have done my best? That’s only a mother’s saying to her child.
Perhaps after all it is a narrow life – this diving and delving among charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations – the soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker – so they go on, never living but only working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them … It amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of existence.
To sum up my despondency, what’s the good of such a life? Where does it lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as if we had some purpose or a goal? … Of course to the man who believes in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The Christian is the Egoist par excellence. He does not mind annihilation by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal life … He is reckless of to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.
October 26.
The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his life for a cause. Even secret charities, for they give pleasure to the doer. So your cynic thinks he has thus, with one stroke of his psychological scalpel, laid human nature bare in all its depravities. All he has done really is to reclassify motives – instead of grouping them as selfish and unselfish (which is more convenient) he lumps them together as selfish, a method by which even he is forced to recognise different grades of selfishness. For example, the selfishness of a wife-beater is lower than the selfishness of a man who gives up his life for another.
October 28.
The result arrived. As I thought, I have failed, being fourth with only three vacancies.
November 7.
It is useless to bewail the course of fortune. It cannot be much credit to possess – though we may covet – those precious things, to possess which depends on circumstances outside our control.
November 9.
Dined at the Devonshire Club in St James’s Street, W., with Dr H— and Mr —, the latter showing the grave symptomatic phenomena of a monocle and spats. A dinner of eight courses. Only made one mistake – put my salad on my dish instead of on the side dish. Horribly nervous and reticent. I was apparently expected to give an account of myself and my abilities – and with that end in view, they gave me a few pokes in my cranial ribs. But I am a
peculiar animal, and, before unbosoming myself, I would require a happier mise en scène than a West End Club, and a more tactful method of approach than ogling by two professors, who seemed to think I was a simple penny-in-the-slot machine. I froze from sheer nervousness and nothing resulted.
November 11.
Returned home and found a letter awaiting me from Dr A— offering me £60 a year for a temporary job as assistant at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
Left London horribly depressed. They evidently intend to shuffle me off.
Read Geo. Gissing’s novel, Born in Exile. Godwin Peak, with his intense pride of individuality, self-torturing capacities, and sentimental languishment, reminds me of myself.
November 20.
A purulent cold in the nose. My heart is weak. Palpitation after the least exertion. But I shall soon be swinging my cudgels in the battle of life, so it won’t do to be hypochondriacal … Let all the powers of the world and the Devil attack me, yet I will win in the end – though the conquest may very well be one which no one but myself will view.
Have accepted the Plymouth appointment.
November 30.
Struggling in the depths again within the past few days with heart attacks. Am slowly getting better of them and trying to forget as soon as may be visions of sudden death, coffins, and obituary notices.
December 2.
Death
At first, when we are very young, Death arouses our curiosity, as it did Cain in the beginning.fn4 It is a strange and very rare phenomenon which we cannot comprehend, and every time we hear of some one’s death, we try to recall that person’s appearance in life and are disappointed if we can’t. The endeavour is to discover what it is, this Death, to compare two things, the idea of the person alive and the idea of him dead. At last some one we know well dies – and that is the first shock … I shall never forget when our Matron died at the D— School … As the years roll on, we get used to the man with the scythe and an acquaintance’s death is only a bit of gossip.
Suppose the Hellfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no assurance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible things are true. We do not know that God is not as cruel as a Spanish inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were shovelled into a furnace of fire – we should have to burn. There would be no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any one – even God.
December 9.
Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face – even my own – become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated – a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.
Later: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and immediately whispered without hesitation, –
‘Just had a telephone message to say that your father is at the T— Railway Station, lying senseless. He has evidently had an apoplectic fit.’
(How those brutal words, ‘lying senseless’, banged and bullied and knocked me down. Mother was waiting for me at the door in a dreadful state and expecting the worst.)
Met the train with the Doctor, and took him home in the cab – still alive, thank God, but helpless. He was brave enough to smile and shake me by the hand – with his left, though he was speechless and the right side of his body helpless. A porter discovered him at the railway terminus lying on the floor of a second-class carriage.
December 10.
He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first paralytic stroke.
Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the Plymouth appointment.
December 23.
It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk – the brainless, heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as one of themselves … I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the newspaper world seems very hard, and it is very hard.
December 26.
Windy Ash
With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter’s morning – a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth – a luminant, not a fire – the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps of cloud in the sky like comets’ tails. Everything cold, crystalline.
1911
January 2.
As a young man – a very young man – my purpose was to plough up all obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! ‘My career’ so far has been like the White Knight’s, who fell off behind when the horse started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the monotony.
January 30.
Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying, nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the bliss of sheer living – out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling, soothing activity of the flames.
Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.
February 11.
Walked in the country. Coming home, terrified by a really violent attack of palpitation. Almost every one I met I thought would be the unfortunate person who would have to pick me up. As each one in the street approached me, I weighed him in the balance and considered if he had presence of mind and how he would render first aid. After my friend, P. C. —, had passed, I felt sorry that the tragedy had not already happened, for he knows me and where I live. At length, after sundry leanings over the river wall, arrived at the Library, which I entered, and sat down, when the full force of the palpitation was immediately felt. My face burned with the hot blood, my hand holding the paper shook with the angry pulse, and my heart went bang! bang! bang! and I could feel its beat in the carotids of the neck and up along the Torcular Herophili and big vessels in the occipital region of the head. Drew in each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home (don’t know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very demoralised.
February 13.
Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short – ill.
February 16.
After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me, have come to the conclusion that it’s a long way to go to die. Am coming back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.
March 4.
… The Doctor’s orders ‘Cease Work’ have brought on in an aggravated form my infatuation for zoological research. I lie in bed and manufacture rolling periods in praise of it, I get dithyrambic over the zoologists themselves – Huxley, Wallace, Brooks, Lankester. I chortle to reflect that in zoology there are no stock exchange ambitions, there is no men
tion of slum life, Tariff Reform is not included. In the repose of the spacious laboratory by the seaside or in the halls of some great Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity, scarcely penetrates. Behind those doors, life flows slowly, deeply. I am ascetic and long for the monastic seclusion of a student’s life.
March 5.
From One Maiden Lady to Another. (Authentic)
‘My dear Sister, – You have been expecting to hear from me I know, I have had inflammation to my eyes twice in 3 weeks so I thought I had better let the Doctor see and he says it is catarrh of the eyes and windpipe. I am inhaling and taking lozenges and medicine. You will be sorry to learn Leonora Mims has been taken to a Sanatorium with Diphtheria, we heard yesterday, she is better, poor Mrs Mims herself quite an invalid, she has to walk with a stick, I believe you know she has had to have her breast cut off, they keep a servant as she can’t do anything, old Mrs Point is 87 I think it is so they too have a lot of trouble, Fred Mims has just got married …
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 4
