2 August 1915 – 8 August 1915

House pride in newly-wed folk, for example, H. and D. to-day at Golder's Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor. They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as tho' it were a child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband sotto voce, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manœuvre, wilt away in your chair, the pregnant phrase still-born on your lips. Presently they re-enter the room with the kitten that was heard in the scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the rose tree. She apologises and both settle down again, recompose their countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness, pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it left off with: "Europe? you were saying...." I mobilise my scattered units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips--her heart is far from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to see if the ash will fall on her carpet.

The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that flow thro' the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not re-creation.... To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental kind. A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived. The word "Deceit" comes up against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in these entries behind her back.... Is this journal habit slowly corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously continue to write his journal intime? This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must consider. Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers Werle-like passion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written.... My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul. Provided it is a veritable autochthon--I don't care how much of a tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive--I take him in and--I fear sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your mind. Any eminently "right-minded" Times or Spectator reader will ask: "Who in Faith's name is interested in your introspective muck-rakings--in fact, who the Devil are you?" To myself, a person of vast importance and vast interest, I reply,--as are other men if I could but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr. Times- and Mr. Spectator-reader that actual crimes have many a time been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes be? Nothing much--only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank God; fructify in action--or at all events only the lesser ones. My outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time--or as my sister once called me--a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one. Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to give a poor devil a £5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little phlegm.

Two Adventures On a 'bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large, red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however, continued to cry and the woman said,-- "Come on, there's a good boy--if you don't, I shall give it to the gentleman opposite." Do I look ill-nourished? "'Arma virumque cano,'" a beggar said to me this morning in the High Street, "or as the boy said, 'Arms and the man with a dog,' mistaking the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I feel it's rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is absolutely 'non est' with me," and so on. "My dear sir," I answered expansively, "I am as poor as you are. You at least have seen better days you say--but I never have." He changed in a minute his cringeing manner and rejoined: "No, I shouldn't think you had," eyeing me critically and slinking off. Am I so shabby?

Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects. But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish, living as I do in Armageddon! Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by the negligence of his old wife. About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished. A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS., drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown. Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the French Revolution is known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you have done." There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form. Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) advised writing in copying ink and then pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality. My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know about it think I am mad. I wonder.... But I dare say I am a pathetic fool--an incredible self-deceiver! Anyhow--the "coffin" of raw material I sent down to T---- while I retain the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. E---- took the "coffin" down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton, inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant's coffin carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It's like being tickled in the palm of the hand.... Two volumes of abstracted entries I keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy of these.... Then all in God's good time I intend getting a volume ready for publication.

By Jove! I hope I live! ... Why does an old crock like myself go on living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine.