“by Nature sent
To lead the guilty—guilt’s worst instrument.”
He had been betrayed by misplaced confidence.
“Doom’d by his very virtues for a dupe,
He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill,
And not the traitors who betray’d him still;
Nor deem’d that gifts bestow’d on better men
Had left him joy, and means to give again,
Fear’d—shunn’d—belied—ere youth had lost her force,
He hated man too much to feel remorse,
And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call,
To pay the injuries of some on all.”
Conrad was not, and could not be, mean and selfish. A selfish Conrad
would be an absurdity. His motives are not gross—
“he shuns the grosser joys of sense,
His mind seems nourished by that abstinence.”