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 cringing manner and rejoined:
“No, I shouldn’t think you had,” eyeing me critically and slinking off.
Am I so shabby?
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.
I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse, the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the best remedies for Pediculosis: I am acquainted with the measures adopted for dealing with the nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its brain and stomach and the physiology of
