Enjoying Life: and Other Literary Remains of W N P Barbellion [B F Cummings

Abstract

THIS book is welcome because it raises a much pleasanter picture of its author than did the rather peevish “Journal” reviewed in these columns in July last. Some of the essays, excluded from the “Journal” for reasons of space, would have illuminated its shadows. One is called “Crying for the Moon,” but Barbellion wanted to swallow the Universe. Even those of us who would be content with the World have to learn that it is too large an oyster. Life is a perpetual renunciation of the unattainable. Barbellion had yet to realise that the half is greater than the whole; his only limitations were those of a sickly body, and so he seemed to scorn those who restrained the appetite of the soul. Hence, in the diarist, an apparent poverty of human kindness. But in his outward relations, as Cummings, the defect is made good or hidden. There is sympathy as well as skill in his sketches of Spallanzani, Montagu, Rousseau, and Goldsmith of the “Animated Nature,” and even for his colleagues, the Scarabees, he has a good word, for he has begun to realise that the driest museum entomologist may have beneath his dusty coat something of a Barbellion.