was
perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately
appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd, and the insight but
intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at
times assumed that of cynic disdain - disdain of innocence. To be nothing more
than innocent! Yet in an æsthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous
free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of
it.
    With no power to annul the elemental evil in himself, though he could hide
it readily enough; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; what recourse
is left to a nature like Claggart's, surcharged with energy as such natures
almost invariably are, but to recoil upon itself, and, like the scorpion for
which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end its allotted part.
    Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial
stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars
and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances
that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the
present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun-deck, and one of the external
provocations a man-of-war's man's spilled soup.
    Now when the master-at-arms noticed whence came that greasy fluid streaming
before his feet, he must have taken it - to some extent wilfully perhaps - not
for the mere accident it assuredly was, but for the sly escape of a spontaneous
feeling on Billy's part more or less answering to the antipathy on his own. In
effect a foolish demonstration he must have thought, and very harmless, like the
futile kick of a heifer, which yet were the heifer a shod stallion, would not be
so harmless. Even so was it that into the gall of envy Claggart infused the
vitriol of his contempt. But the incident confirmed to him certain tell-tale
reports purveyed to his ear by Squeak, one of his more cunning corporals, a
grizzled little man, so nicknamed by the sailors on account of his squeaky voice
and sharp visage ferreting about the dark corners of the lower decks after
interlopers, satirically suggesting to them the idea of a rat in a cellar.
    Now his chief's employing him as an implicit tool in laying little traps for
the worriment of the foretopman - for it was from the master-at-arms that the
petty persecutions heretofore adverted to had proceeded - the corporal, having
naturally