Unhappy criminal born, most pitiful dreadful of developed creatures; lonelier and more accursed than banded wolf or solitary tiger: a waif, a spoil, a pariah "born out of his due time":
A scribe's work writ awry and blurred,
Spoiled music, with no perfect word, a wretched, horrible Ishmael with his hand against the hand of every man, and every man's hand implacably against his.
On him, it would appear, has fallen the doom of the prophet, and instead of sweet spices there is rottenness, instead of a girdle a rope: branding instead of beauty.
In the barren garden of his mind no flowers will blow, his trees will bear no fruit All human pleasure is to him a Circe cup; he finds no pathos in the children's laughter, no beauty in the dawn-shine; no glory in the constellations.
What are we to do for this wretched desperate brother who will not love us though we whip him with whips of wire, who will not make friends of us though we spurn and spit upon him; who, though we preach to him, cannot understand; who, though we teach him, cannot learn; who, though we hang him high as, Haman, will "die game," cursing us with his strangled breath, mocking us with his blinded eyes; and in spite of all our intellect and righteousness going back from us unbettered and untamed into the abyss of eternity and the laboratory of evolution, whence he and we were drawn: going back from us a savage still, and in his angry heart and baffled mind holding our half-fledged knowledge and green morality in derision.
Well, he is dead; his stiff neck broken, and his body wrapped in a winding sheet of lime.
And we? We remain the superior persons we are. We are civilised, and holy. We punish weakness with blows, and misfortune with chains. We teach sweet reasonableness with the cat-o'-nine-tails—steeped in brine. We exemplify gentleness and mercy with the gibbet and the axe. We brand the blind, and torture the imbecile, and execrate the miserable, and damn the diseased, and revile the fallen; we set our righteous heel upon the creeping thing, and thank our anomalous and hypothetical God of Love and Justice that we are not as those others—our atavistic brother and his degenerate children.
And our atavistic brother, the criminal born! He does not understand us, he does not admire us, he cannot love us. We fail, in some inexplicable way, to charm the deaf adder, charm we never so wisely.
But some day, perhaps, when the superior person has achieved humility, even the outlawed Bottom Dog may come by some crumbs of sympathy, some drops of the milk of human kindness, and—then?