The Journal of a Disappointed Man

December 15. "To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice and protracts our sufferings." W.S. Landor. December 19. The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an agnostic. "There are several interesting lines of thought down here," he said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over Jesus Christ. December 20. The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax. We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when, in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote: "Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene." Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own end from a passage in Julian and Maddalo, "... if you can't swim, Beware of Providence." "Did no earthly dixisti," Thompson asks, "sound in his ears as he wrote it?"