_November_ 12.
Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol--a Browning. Or of 10 days" mysterious disappearance, when I will go and live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.
_November_ 13.
Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my Essay was returned by the Editor of ----. One by one I have been divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have been foiled, and now I"ve nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself as I am at last--and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do but die?
_November_ 14.
Before going over to-night bought _London Opinion_ deliberately in order to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at her. Rehea.r.s.ed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which came off, tho" I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty bearing.
"Don"t you ever swear?" I asked. "It"s a good thing you know, swearing is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating in his blood."
"Swearing is not the only remedy."
"I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate"s sermon: I prefer pimples to pills."
Is it a wonder she does not love me?
I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours--why have I this morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself, and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and disgust.
I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a pa.s.sion, only a dragging heavy chain of attraction ... some inflexible law makes me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I cannot look away....
In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love--as one wou"d a b.a.s.t.a.r.d child--I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated essence of womanhood that flowed from her....
Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it--it is a scalp.
Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was cruel tho" true.
_November_ 19.
I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of self-commiseration--my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot get warm--try as I will.
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 G.o.d can stick it--lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That is how I live too--but then I am not G.o.d.
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 att.i.tude 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 precieux 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 s.p.a.ce between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)
"You must regard my pa.s.sion 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 p.u.b.erty 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 gla.s.s 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." d.a.m.n 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.