ENVY

     Envy will merit as its shade pursue,
     But, like a shadow, proves the substance true.

     Pope.—­Essay on Criticism.

No passion has been more universally recognized than envy as the basest of all the traits that undermine the nobility of man; and yet there is no obnoxious quality so universal in men’s characters.  In the life of the good man it reminds one of the mice, in our houses, which eat their way to our attention and their own destruction; for there are few men who have looked into their own hearts who have not seen the small but odious traces of this gnawing evil.  Again, the mind of the bad man, who has given himself entirely up to envy, is

A WOLF’S DEN—­

a howling pandemonium, where no quarter is given, and where the merits of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast.  The Bible says that envy is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has finally reached the framework of the structure.  Society as now organized is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish.  When, as in AEsop’s fables,

A TAILLESS FOX

is found advocating the disuse of tails, he is at once suspected, and his influence greatly limited.  For the world is waking up to the meanness of envy.  The world, in its better moments, is rising above it.  It is one of our principal duties, on entering the Temple of Life, to search our hearts for the little fox with the sharp tooth.  When we find ourselves about to enter upon a course of action, either momentary or long continuous, which will be adverse to another of our fellow-creatures, let us ask:  “Is there anything of envy in this act?” If there be, let us refrain from acting—­the soul is not yet pure, the body fragrant.

Let us see how ignorant this contemptible quality of envy becomes under the lenses of practical life.  “Base envy withers at another’s joy.”  What has caused it?  In nine cases out of every ten, it is simply the one-sided view of an ignorant mind, which sees only the bare result of unceasing efforts.  Envy sees Fame on the peak.  Envy therefore hates Fame, and declares that there are no crags, or rifts, or snows, or storms on the way up—­that, the path is an easy one, over which all who ever went that way traveled in preference to all other routes!

I lay upon a boarding-house bed day after day, one summer, sick of a fever.  On the one side, a building was going up, and workmen filled the air with mighty din.  On the other side, a young man sang

“DO, HOORAY, ME, FAH, SOLE, LAH, SE, DO!”

I thought:  “The one will be a grand house, and the other will be a great tenor, but oh the way is long.  The feet grow weary!”