Eubulides, to be among the laws of Nature that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of great birds is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller. His Boccaccio maintains that seldom are we envied, until we are so prosperous that envy is rather a familiar in our train than an enemy who waylays us. "If we saw nothing of such followers and outriders, we might begin to doubt our station." No crime, it has been said, is so heavily visited as that of being successful: it is the sale of your picture, or the success of your book, that first makes people find out your faults to the full. Little Tidd, of novel note, made it the business of his life to go about maligning every one who was successful, and endeavouring, when he came across them personally, to put them out of conceit by hints and innuendos. Names that lie upon the ground, as Anaxagoras tells Aspasia, are not easily set on fire by Envy, but those quickly catch it which are raised up by fame, or wave to the breeze of prosperity: every one that passes is ready to give them a shake and a rip; for there are few either so busy or so idle as not to lend a hand at undoing. That Sophocles escaped the ordinary persecutions of envy, one of his critics ascribes to that laxity of principle which "made him thought so agreeable a fellow. People lose much of their anger and envy of genius, when it throws them down a bundle or two of human foibles by which they can climb up to its level." Plutarch's Lives iterate the truism that envy delights in the disgrace of great men, and loses a part of her rancour by their fall. He says it of Themistocles; and of Publicola he remarks, "What is the fate of all great men, to be persecuted by envy, was also his ;" while of Plutarch himself biography records that, like other men of renown, he found envy conquered but by death. that death itself invariably conquers that conqueror. To apply Béranger's lines, "Le laurier devient cendre, Cendre qu'au vent l'Envie aime à jeter." Not Vivien tells Merlin, the Fame that follows death is nothing to us: "And what is Fame in life but half-disfame, And counterchanged with darkness? You yourself And since you seem the Master of all Art, They fain would make you Master of all Vice." "So in the light of great The shadow proves the substance. eternity, Life eminent creates the shade of death; The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall." It is old Madame Pernelle's firm creed that "La vertu dans le monde est toujours poursuivie ; Les envieux mourront, mais non jamais l'envie." Non minus periculi ex magnâ famâ, quam ex malâ,—the aphorism is terse as becomes Tacitus. South had the start of Pope in alleging that shadows do not more naturally attend shining bodies, than envy pursues worth and merit, always close at the heels of them, and like a sharp blighting east wind, still blasting and killing the noblest and most promising productions of virtue in their earliest bud, and, "as Jacob did Esau, supplant them in their very birth." Envy is always caused by something either good or great, for "no man is envied for his failures, but his perfections." It is not safe for any man to be "borne upon the wings of fame, and ride in triumph upon the tongues of men; for the tongues of some do but provoke the teeth of more; and men, we know, do much more heartily detract than they use to commend. Milton hails in H. Lawes one greeted "with praise enough for Envy to look wan;" as again George Wither sees true Poesy encompassed with "Mists of envy, fogs of spite, 'Twixt men's judgments and her light." De Quincey speaks of that happy exemption from jealousy which belongs almost inevitably to conscious power in its highest mode; it is where he describes Bentley reposing calmly on his own supremacy, content that pretenders of every size and sort should flutter through their little day. So Boileau declares of “ces basses jalousies, des vulgaires esprits malignes rénésies," that 226 'ENVY DOTH MERIT AS ITS SHADE PURSUE. "Un sublime écrivain n'en peut être infecté ; C'est un vice qui suit la mediocrité." It is in tracking the rise and progress of one whom France at least accounts a great man, altogether one of her greatest, that Mr. Carlyle incidentally remarks: "Numerous enemies arise, as is natural, of an envious venomous description; this is another ever-widening shadow in the sunshine." Du mérite éclatant une sombre rivale,-sombre as becomes ombre. As with Mr. Savage's too versatile hero: "Detraction was of course very busy. Envy began to nibble at his reputation, when it was yet green, by way of earnest of what she would do hereafter, when it should attain its full growth." Ben Jonson's big-voiced burly Roman talks his burliest and biggest when he designates the object of his admiration one for whose virtue "Earth cannot make a shadow great enough, Though envy should come too." Racine is complimented by Boileau on the amount and the degree of envy his genius has stirred into life and strife; the prerogative of genius, this, and to be cancelled only by death, as so many others have said before and since. "Et son trop de lumière, importunant les yeux, De ses propres amis lui fait des envieux. La mort seule, ici-bas, en terminant sa vie, Peut calmer sur son nom l'injustice et l'envie." Handsomely enough the poet contrasts his own comparative freedom from envious attacks with the unlimited liability of Racine: "Moi-même, dont la gloire ici moins répandue Des pales envieux ne blesse point la vue," etc. Persons of eminent virtue, when they are advanced, are less envied, says Bacon, who might have remarked however, as Whately suggests, that in one respect a rise by merit exposes a man to more envy than that by personal favour, through family connection, private friendship, etc., the individual being more envied in the former case, because his advancement is felt as an affront to all who think themselves or their own friends more worthy. In the latter case, the unpromoted are left free to think, “If it had gone by merit, I should have been the man." The annotating archbishop goes on to add, that when any person of really eminent virtue becomes the object of envy, the clamour of abuse by which he is assailed is but the sign and accompaniment of his success in doing service to the public; and that if he is a truly wise man, he will take no more notice of it than the moon does of the howling of the dogs. Her only answer to them is "to shine on." One of a thousand in the rare privilege of immunity from envy, as well as in the gifts and graces that mark him so pre-eminently a man of men, is that Marquis Posa, of whom Schiller makes his sovran admiringly exclaim, "What sort of man is this, Who can deserve so highly, yet awake Who speak his praise? The character he owns A very blank. I'm curious to behold 66 W XXVI. OBVIOUS DUTY DONE WITH MIGHT. ECCLESIASTES ix. 10. HATSOEVER thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." Behold, exclaims another lay Preacher, the day is passing swiftly over, and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. "The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,-it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: 'not of the slightest consequence' whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as * * "The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done."-Carlyle, Past and Present, book iii., ch. iv. musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack * with hard labour and rust. But our work, behold, that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains ;-for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us for evermore. Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how?" At his Church-Porch holy George Herbert meets us with the monition— "When thou dost purpose aught (within thy power), Be sure to do it, though it be but small,"† Act well your part; there all the honour lies. It has been said of St. Paul's injunction to slaves to do service with good will, "as to the Lord, and not unto men," that it shows how entirely he felt the meanest occupation to be sanctified by and * An old story, familiar to all Mr. Carlyle's familiars. ↑ Though it be but small. Contrasting the stage in England (where the actor who represents Laertes or Horatio is considering himself all the while as a degraded man, because he is not the Hamlet of the evening) with that of France, where there is, or was, a race of actors who never aspire to more than secondary parts, or, if they have any hope of so aspiring, endeavour to recommend themselves by the superior manner in which they discharge the subordinate characters meanwhile entrusted to them; the Quarterly Reviewer of the "Life of Kemble " cites the mention by that distinguished actor of his once observing in Paris, while behind the scenes at the Comédie Française along with Talma, one of the company conning his part with great attention, rehearsing it with different tones and gestures, and, in short, so sedulous in his rehearsal, that it seemed he had some most important part to perform. Interested in this actor's assiduity, Kemble asked what weighty character this hard student had to represent. Talma informed him that the man had only five words to say, Madame, the coach is ready;" and that, notwithstanding the brevity and seeming unimportance of his part, whatever it might be, the actor in question uniformly spent much time in studying and adjusting the action, tone, and manner of delivering himself. In short, as Sir Walter Scott says, "the English actor thinks himself positively sunk and injured when obliged to perform a part of little consequence; the Frenchman, with happier vanity, considers that he may exalt any part by his mode of playing it." |