His family feeling seems to have been concentrated largely on his brother, A. J., who prefixed a brief account of his life and character to “The Last Diary.”
Of him Barbellion said,
“He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than anyone else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine tenderness in my love.”
There were times when, despite his habitual self-appreciation, Barbellion sold his stock fairly low, and especially after he had been in London for two or three years and realised what little progress he was making in the world and how small the orbit of his activity remained.
“I have more than a suspicion that I am one of those who grow sometimes out of a brilliant boy into a very commonplace man.”
In speaking of his personal appearance he said, “I am not handsome, but I look interesting, I hope distinguished”; and at another time,
“If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say that I was a ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window, then at the mirror—turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or I gaze down into my eyes—my eyes always impress me—and wonder what effect I produce upon others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity as curiosity.”
Naturally Barbellion's estimate of himself and of his potentialities varied from time to time, but he never rated his abilities lower than the sum total of his accomplishments would seem to justify, save in hours of extreme depression and discouragement. When twenty-one years of age he wrote,
“Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face—even my own—becomes ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated—a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.”
A more hopeful note, and one that is of interest in that it foreshadows the plan of publication of the diary, is sounded after he had been working in the museum for less than a year.