and again on the ordinary incompetence of reviewers, the usual complaint of an author, but especially poignant here. He mentions, once in a letter and once in the diary, an imbecile who thought that he was a "social climber "; and he welcomes with joy the first writer who seemed to him to have read the book carefully. But among all these references to his work there is none more illuminating than the last entry he ever made:

"Friends and relatives say I have not drawn my true self. But that's because I have taken my clothes off and they can't recognise me stark! The Book is a self-portrait in the nude."

Thus, with this final self-explanation, he ends his work. The last two words stand alone at the top of a left-hand page, and opposite them in the book lies the blotting paper he used. He had often before said farewell to his Journal. Once it was in a fit of disgust with it and himself, and he took it up again to record the discovery that he was suffering from an incurable disease. Then, owing to the paralysis of his right hand, writing became too painful for him, and he thought this the hardest and shrewdest stroke of fate, to deprive him of his secret consolation. Last, under the date May 25th, 1919, he made an entry of four pages, chiefly supplementing earlier entries, and concluded with the words large and scrawled, but legible: "This is the end. I am not going to keep a diary any more.' But on June 1st, without explanation, he made a long entry, recalling an experience of early life, and on June 3rd the very last, which I have quoted. He desired that at the end should be

1 These entries do not appear in this order in the published book. The Last Diary was written deliberately as a literary composition

written, "The rest is silence," to serve as an inscription on the base of his "self-erected monument. Genuine self-portraits in the nude occur very rarely in the history of literature. This is a picture of a man of genius vividly drawn by himself. It is a remarkable book about a remarkable

man.

Barbellion was born on September 7th, 1889, and was the third son of a reporter on a newspaper in a Devonshire town. He was able to remember the first time a bird's nest was ever shown to him; but a passion for natural history became very early the most important part of his life. He was articled as a boy to his father's unattractive and uncongenial profession. He nevertheless continued to pursue his passion with an extraordinary energy and strength of will, and was determined to secure somehow or other an entrance into the desired career. He was otherwise and exactingly occupied and he was entirely self-taught; and in 1910, just when by great good fortune he had been offered, and had accepted, a post in the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, his father's health broke down altogether, compelling him to renounce this dazzling but ill-paid opportunity. But in the following year he won in open competition an appointment in the Natural History Museum, which justified the abandonment of journalism.

In 1909 there first appears in the diary the definite indication of a theme which was soon to rival natural history in importance and at last most horribly to overwhelm it.

for publication. The manuscript contains directions that certain passages shall be removed from their strictly chronological places and inserted elsewhere.

"Feeling ill-like a sloppy tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan magazines in the Library and occasionally rinkwith palpitation of the heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness, and uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile."

After this he does not often forget the subject of his health for many pages together. The deaths of his father and mother deepened the preoccupation, and Barbellion's symptoms and dreads were almost infinite in their variety. He suffered from intermittent action of the heart, from nervous weakness, and from dyspepsia; he feared now paralysis, now blindness, now consumption. The thought of death was constantly with him, but until the end he could not be sure in what form it would come. Sometimes he demanded that it should finish his sufferings, sometimes he hoped it would delay a little more to allow him to complete the work he had in hand.

Meanwhile, amid the unescapable and agonising reflections which this condition induced, another side of his nature was being developed. In 1910 there is an entry which, again, is like the first tentative introduction of a musical theme in a symphony:

"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."

He was not, of course, by any means so callous and inhuman as this brief note might make him appear;

but he was immensely curious about himself and about other people, and immensely greedy for new sensations. He dabbled a good deal in lovemaking, and his dabbling was prompted as much by curiosity as by the natural pressure of the senses. At last he fell in love, could not make up his mind whether he wanted to marry, made it up and was rejected, felt relieved, then unhappy, renewed his suit and was accepted. In September, 1915, he was married. A few weeks before, during a holiday at Coniston, boisterously prosecuted with his usual reckless disregard of his weak health, he had fallen and jarred his spine, and this had brought on a partial paralysis which filled him with the gloomiest thoughts and seemed to suggest the cancellation of all his plans. But his doctor made light of the matter and the marriage took place.

In the following November, having formally presented himself for recruitment, he was led by curiosity to read the sealed certificate written by his own doctor, not supposing that its being sealed had any particular meaning. Thus he discovered, while sitting in a railway-carriage, that eighteen months before he had shown the first symptoms of a terrible and incurable disease and that this had been concealed from him, though it had been communicated to his relatives. He found later that his wife had learnt of it before their marriage, and also that his fall at Coniston had reawakened activity among the bacteria and hastened the end. 1916 his daughter was born, and in July of the following year his rapidly failing strength compelled him, after ineffectual periods of sick leave, to resign his appointment at the Museum. His health varied; he grew worse and recovered a little,

In

but never recovered what he had lost. He prepared his diary for publication, but the publishers who had first accepted it became afraid of it when it was partly set up in type and asked to be relieved of the undertaking. Another publisher was found. The book appeared, and its reception did something to soften the miseries of his last

months.

How profound and unremitting were these miseries, and how he bore them, is shown in the last section of the diary. His disease was painful and the end certain. He had a wife who was often fatigued and ill, and a child, and he had next to no money. The strain of witnessing his sufferings, as well as the necessity of earning her living, made it imperative that his wife should spend long periods of time away from him. In 1919 there was an idea that a certain prolonged and troublesome treatment might possibly, though only possibly, effect an improvement. But he did not care to be experimented with then. He was already dead, he said, and it was too late, he could not bear the burden of a fresh hope. He continued to be tortured by the long-drawn-out agony of his dissolution, by the defeat of all his ambitions, and by the black prospects of his wife and child. But the success of his book brings a curiously sweeter and gentle note into the diary, a note most poignant to the reader who could understand his refusing to be grateful for anything.

"I am still miserable" (he writes), "especially on E.'s account-that dear, brave woman. But I have suffered a change. My whole soul is sweetened by the love of those near and dear to me, and by the sympathy of those reading my book."