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Some critics find in the diary of Barbellion's last days evidence that he remembered he was writing for an audience. It may be there, but it is not plain to me. It is likely that if we were writing a paragraph while doubtful whether the hair which held the sword over us would last till we had finished, we might find we were not so joyously abandoned to pure art as we used to be.
But it is clear that though secluded from the turmoil in a country cottage, paralyzed, and his trunk already dead, Barbellion's sensitive mind and imaginative sympathy knew more of what was happening to his fellows in France, and what it meant for us all, than the combined Cabinet in Downing Street.
It was just such minds as Barbellion's, not uncommon in the youth of our war time though in his case the unusual intuitions and adventurous aspirations were defined by genius it was such minds that the war-mongers condemned and destroyed. Those men were selected for sacrifice because they had the very qualities which, when lost to the community, then it dies in its soul.
Yet there has been a book of confessions published recently which may be read as literature when the important gossip with the vast sales is merely curious evidence for historians equipped for psychological analysis. I mean Barbellion's Journal of a Disappointed Man.
A dull man might make a dull thing of his autobiography even if he had lived through the French Revolution; whereas a country curate might thrill the world with his story, provided that his mind were cast in the right mould and that he found a quickening interest in its delineation. Barbellion's Diary provides the proof. The interest of that supremely interesting book lies in the way of telling.
All is shown in these two books in an exceptional degree, and, in Barbellion's diary, is expressed with a remarkable wit and acuteness, and not seldom, as in the description of a quarry, of a Beethoven Symphony, of a rock-pool of the Devon coast, with a beauty that is startling. Keeling was killed in the War.
Beyond those cheerful dinner-tables, and in that outer darkness of which the best people knew nothing except that it was possible to rake it fruitfully with a comb, there was a host of young men from which could be manifested the courageous intellectual curiosity, the ardour for truth, the gusto for life, and the love of earth, which we see in Keeling's letters and Barbellion's diary.
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