THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN BY W.N.P. BARBELLION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 1919 "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. "For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them." INTRODUCTION By H.G. WELLS Your egoist, like the solitary beasts, lives only for himself; your altruist declares that he lives only for others; for either there may be success or failure but for neither can there be tragedy. For even if the altruist meets nothing but ingratitude, what has he to complain of? His premises abolish his grounds of complaint. But both egoist and altruist are philosophical abstractions. The human being by nature and necessity is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of expression, _egotists_, and our desire is to think and if possible talk and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the world--or as much as we can conveniently assemble--for audience. There is variety in our styles. Some drape the central figure; some let it rather appear than call attention to it; some affect a needless frankness: "_I_ am an egotist, mind you, and I pretend nothing else"; some by adopting a pose with accessories do at least develop so great and passionate an interest in the accessories as to generalise and escape more or less completely from self. An egotism like an eggshell is a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape. The fundamental art of life is to recover the sense of that great self-forgetful continuous life from which we have individually budded off. Many people have done this through religion, which begins with a tremendous clamour to some saviour god or other to recognise us and ends in our recognition of him; or through science, when your egotist begins with: "Behold me! I, I your humble servant, am a scientific man, devoted to the clear statement of truth," and ends with so passionate a statement of truth that self is forgotten altogether.