The Journal of a Disappointed Man

My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are permanently cold. My right hand is blue – tho' I've shut up the window and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I marvel how God can stick it – lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That is how I live too – but then I am not God.

I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it would take a lot to make me forget myself). So I plunge into these literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know…

It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease would act as a stimulus – I could strike an attitude feverishly and be histrionic. But to be merely "below par" – to feel like a Bunny rabbit perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They suspect him, something fishy.

November 20.

Still at home ill

If anything, R – is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he's in love with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes. Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.

"Why don't you marry her out of hand and be done with all this dalliance? I can tell you what's the matter with you," I growled, "you're a landscape artist… You'll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy, secretive, petty creature, J.W.M. Turner, and allow no human being to interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps – but what a man! You'll finish up with a Mrs. Danby."

"Yes," he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, "and 'lose my salvation for a sketch,' like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not married I should have no wife to desert."

It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art not life. Life interests him – he can't altogether resign himself to the cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking exquisitely, "Ah! there is a very fine sorrow," or, "What an exquisite sensation." The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it with a facetious grin, I said, —

"Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning." The joke pleased him and we roared, bellowed.

"That terrible forefinger of yours," he smiled.

"Like Cardinal Richelieu's eyes – piercing?" I suggested with appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)

"You must regard my passion for painting," he began once more, "as a sort of dipsomania – I really can't help myself."

I jumped on him vehemently, —

"Exactly, my pernickety friend; it's something abnormal and unnatural. When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I know that if he is successful he'll be something as vulgar as a fat woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he'll be just a pathetic mutilation… You are trying to pervert a natural instinct. You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair… Still, now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?" ("Why indeed?") "It's a vice, and I'm very sorry for you, old boy. I'll do all I can – come and have some dinner with me to-night."

"Oh! thank you very much," says my gentleman, "but I'm not at all sorry for myself."

"I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all. We're not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each other from the ropes and shaping for another round."

"Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals," he reflected, "are worthy of a larger audience… To find you of all people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle of every one's vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view. Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same reasons."

"I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair," I began, "I do see every one's point of view. You sit on the other side of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But when you slit up my brother's abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently weak and human to punch you on the nose… You are too cold and Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints."

"It is very beautiful among the snows."

"I suppose so."

(Exit.)

November 23.

Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get out of bed and shoulder the day's burden.

"What's been the matter?" they ask.

"Oh! senile decay – general histolysis of the tissues," I say, fencing.

To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue which means, "Dear, dear," M – tells me these waves of ill-health are quite unaccountable unless I were "leading a dissolute life, which you do not appear to be doing." Damn his eyes.

Reading Nietzsche

Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.

The Test for True Love

The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting your sweetheart's toe-nails – the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night. Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."

Chopin

On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra. It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery. It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the attention and holds it just as a fire does – even a deaf man would be fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with Sir Henry Wood conducting.

Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony…

November 28.

Rodin

More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand – a superb touch! – what a frenzy of remorse!

The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it – down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes – like the hind limbs of some beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen in a photograph.

This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and, for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a soft warm embrace… I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body, purely physical.

November 29.

This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!

December 6.

I know now – I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are returning. Projects in view: —

(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.

(2) To get married.

(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.

(4) To write two essays for Corn hill which shall surely induce the Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and encouraging letters as heretofore.

Wired to A – , "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."

December 7.

Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities – a breakdown in health or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a fool that wants to die.

December 9.

… I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I love you? – Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot tell…" I ought not to love her, I know – every omen is against it… Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his brains and air of distinction…

Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous … I am haunted by the memory of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the cakes – the unravelling of the internal economy of a Helix caused as great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never read nature books – my old favourites – Waterton's Wanderings, Gilbert White, The Zoologist, etc. – have no interest for me – in fact they give me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth – and it's a mouth of iron – wanting a run for all my troubles before Death strikes me down.

All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.

December 12.

Sir Henry Wood conducting

Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes, make a magnificent spectacle.

The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark – the melanic Messiah I call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in stone – Chesterfield's ideal of a man – a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a conflagration, we are all expectant – and even a little fearful, to observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows … I hold my breath… Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit, cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted. His sword zigzags up and down the scale – suddenly the closed fist of his left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith – like the arm of a heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven… But the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated – his body writhes with it – the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders – so you think – he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them all to do their worst – like the picture of Moffat the missionary among the savages of the Dark Continent!

And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows down the orchestra rank by rank… You awake from the nightmare to discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his inimitable bows.

One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention. R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge – sword over head – but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy with its dread fulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting alongside me to-day – knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.

At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.

Tschaikovsky

Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."

In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down – each one seemed the last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call "For God's sake, stop" – to do anything to still this awful lust for annihilation… The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy… And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!

Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!

Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good, ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.

December 14.

My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.

Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are —

Plays of M. Brieux.

Joseph Vance.

The Sequel to Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth, by Willam James.

Beyond Good and Evil.

Dostoievsky's The Possessed.

Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal.

I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only her duplicate.

On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley – the hero of my youth – which old B – has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.

December 15.

Petticoat Lane

This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.

On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called, the first thing I saw was a little girl – a Jewess – being tackled for selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately marched her off to the police station.

In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet – a penny a time. A very fat man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his ticket.

"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.

"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.

Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell – price one shilling. Who?"

I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps, – "any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece – now then!" This show was being run by two men – a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other – a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a "yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."

Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once, —

"There, you look the finest gentleman – oh! ah! a little too large."

At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.

"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid – I washed my hair last – year." (Laughter.)

Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"

The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes – a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"

"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer name?"

"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.

"Hoo – that's not your name in your own bloody country – I expect it's Hullabullinsky."

"Do you know what my name really is?"

"No."

"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)

"I shall call you 'ass' for short."

I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as much, shouted out to me, —

"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"

"Oui, oui," said I.

"Ah! lah, you're one of us – oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic" – a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar – warranted a safe cure for

"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."

Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas. Assenheim."

Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.

But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour an a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells only one kind of article – caps or clocks or songs, braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats, pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares – a perfect pandemonium.

December 31.

A Conversation

"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements, intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well that every Saturday morning will see you with The New Statesman under your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."

"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"

R – replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.

He bought the Pink 'Un and I laughed…

"And so you read Pragmatism," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire stands in the balance."

"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the functions of θ [Greek: Thèta] and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."

This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one another's nerves.

"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You – besides being a bally fool – are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in water-colours."

"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.

His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between ourselves." He labels his paragraphs α, β, γ, instead of a, b, c, and quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter sports, all in the approved manner of dons.