What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion.
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