His view
of himself is, I suppose, of a brilliant and capable man who holds his
own and makes himself felt. The only result on the mind, from
contemplating him, is that one revels in the possibility of
metempsychosis and pictures him as being born again to some dreary and
thankless occupation, a scavenger or a sewer-cleaner, or, better still,
penned in the body of some absurd and inefficient animal, a slug or a
jelly-fish, where he might learn to be passive and contemptible.
Meanwhile it is true, of course, that the most detestable people
generally do improve upon acquaintance. I have seldom spent any length
of time in the enforced society of a disagreeable person without
finding that I liked him better at the end than at the beginning. Very
often one finds that the disagreeable qualities are used as a sort of
defensive panoply, and that they are the result, to a certain extent,
of unhappy experiences. Since I met our friend I have learnt a fact
about him, which makes me view him in a somewhat different light, I
have discovered that he was bullied at school. I am inclined to believe
that his fondness for bullying other people is mainly the result of
this, and that it arises partly from a rooted belief that other people
are malevolent, and that the only method is to exhibit his own spines;
partly also from a perverted sense of justice; on the ground that, as
he had to bear undeserved persecution in the days when he was
defenceless, it is but just that others should bear it in their turn.
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