He is like the cabin-boy Ransome in _Kidnapped_, who, being treated
with the grossest brutality by the officers, kept a rope's end of his
own to wallop the little ones with. I do not say that this is a
generous or high-hearted view of life. It would be better if he could
say _Miseris succurrere disco_. What he rather says, to parody the
words of the hermit in _Edwin and Angelina_, is--
"The flocks that range the valley free,
To slaughter I condemn;
Taught by the Power that bullies me,
I learn to bully them."
It is a poor consolation to say that the man who is not loved is
miserable. He is, if he desires to be loved and cannot attain it; if he
says, as Hazlitt said, "I cannot make out why everybody should dislike
me so." But if he does not want love in the least, while he gets what
he does desire--money, a place in the world, influence of a sort--then
he is not miserable at all, and it is idle to pretend that he is.
But if, as I say, one is condemned to the society of a disagreeable
person, it generally happens that on his discovering one to be harmless
and friendly he will furl his spines and become, if not an animal that
one can safely stroke, at least an animal whose proximity it is not
necessary to dread and avoid. One can generally establish a _modus
vivendi_, and unless the man is untrustworthy as well, one may hope to
live peacefully with him.
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