The club must hail him master of the joke.
Shall parts so various aim at nothing new?
He’ll shine a Tully and a Wilmot too.’
The world, indeed, are pretty even with these constellations of splendid and superfluous qualities in their fastidious estimate of their own pretensions, for (if possible) they never give any individual credit for more than one leading attainment. If a man is an artist, his being a fine musician adds nothing to his fame. When the public strain a point to own one claim, it is on condition that the fortunate candidate waives every other. The mind is prepared with a plausible antithesis in such cases against the formidable encroachments of vanity: one qualification is regularly made a foil to another. We allow no one to be two things at a time: it quite unsettles our notions of personal identity. If we allow a man wit, it is part of the bargain that he wants judgment: if style he wants matter. Rich, but a fool or miser—a beauty, but vain; so runs the bond. ‘But’ is the favourite monosyllable of envy and self-love. Raphael could draw and Titian could colour—we shall never get beyond this point while the world stands; the human understanding is not cast in a mould to receive double proofs of entire superiority to itself. It is folly to expect it. If a farther claim be set up, we call in question the solidity of the first, incline to retract it, and suspect that the whole is a juggle and a piece of impudence, as we threaten a common beggar with the stocks for following us to ask a second alms. This is, in fact, one source of the prevalence and deep root which envy has in the human mind: we are incredulous as to the truth and justice of the demands which are so often made upon our pity or our admiration; but let the distress or the merit be established beyond all controversy, and we open our hearts and purses on the spot, and sometimes run into the contrary extreme when charity or admiration becomes the fashion. No one envies the Author of Waverley, because all admire him, and are sensible that admire him how they will, they can never admire him enough. We do not envy the sun for shining, when we feel the benefit and see the light. When some persons start an injudicious parallel between him and Shakspeare, we then may grow jealous and uneasy, because this interferes with our older and more firmly rooted conviction of genius, and one which has stood a severer and surer test. Envy has, then, some connexion with a sense of justice—is a defence against imposture and quackery. Though we do not willingly give up the secret and silent consciousness of our own worth to vapouring and false pretences, we do homage to the true candidate for fame when he appears, and even exult and take a pride in our capacity to appreciate the highest desert. This is one reason why we do not envy the dead—less because they are removed out of our way, than because all doubt and diversity of opinion is dismissed from the question of their title to veneration and respect. Our tongue, having a license, grows wanton in their praise. We do not envy or stint our admiration of Rubens, because the mists of uncertainty or prejudice are withdrawn by the hand of time from the splendour of his works. Fame is to genius—
‘Like to a gate of steel fronting the sun,
That renders back its figure and its heat.’
We give full and unbounded scope to our impressions when they are confirmed by successive generations; as we form our opinions coldly and slowly while we are afraid our judgment may be reversed by posterity. We trust the testimony of ages, for it is true; we are no longer in pain lest we should be deceived by varnish and tinsel; and feel assured that the praise and the work are both sterling. In contemporary reputation, the greater and more transcendant the merit, the less is the envy attending it; which shows that this passion is not, after all, a mere barefaced hatred and detraction from acknowledged excellence. Mrs. Siddons was not an object of envy; her unrivalled powers defied competitors or gainsayers. If Kean had a party against him, it was composed of those who could not or would not see his merits through his defects; and in like manner, John Kemble’s elevation to the tragic throne was not carried by loud and tumultuous acclamation, because the stately height which he attained was the gradual result of labour and study, and his style of acting did not flash with the inspiration of the God. We are backward to bestow a heaped measure of praise, whenever there is any inaptitude or incongruity that acts to damp or throw a stumbling-block in the way of our enthusiasm. Hence the jealousy and dislike shown towards upstart wealth, as we cannot in our imaginations reconcile the former poverty of the possessors with their present magnificence—we despise fortune-hunters in ambition as well as in love—and hence, no doubt, one strong ground of hereditary right. We acquiesce more readily in an assumption of superiority that in the first place implies no merit (which is a great relief to the baser sort), and in the second, that baffles opposition by seeming a thing inevitable, taken for granted, and transmitted in the common course of nature. In contested elections, where the precedence is understood to be awarded to rank and title, there is observed to be less acrimony and obstinacy than when it is supposed to depend on individual merit and fitness for the office; no one willingly allows another more ability or honesty than himself, but he cannot deny that another may be better born. Learning again is more freely admitted than genius, because it is of a more positive quality, and is felt to be less essentially a part of a man’s self; and with regard to the grosser and more invidious distinction of wealth, it may be difficult to substitute any finer test of respectability for it, since it is hard to fathom the depth of a man’s understanding, but the length of his purse is soon known; and besides, there is a little collusion in the case:—
‘The learned pate ducks to the golden fool.’
We bow to a patron who gives us a good dinner and his countenance for our pains, and interest bribes and lulls envy asleep. The most painful kind of envy is the envy towards inferiors; for we cannot bear to think that a person (in other respects utterly insignificant) should have or seem to have an advantage over us in any thing we have set our hearts upon, and it strikes at the very root of our self-love to be foiled by those we despise. There is some dignity in a contest with power and acknowledged reputation: but a triumph over the sordid and the mean is itself a mortification, while a defeat is intolerable.