from him. Accordingly he hides his feelings as carefully as if they
were secret sins, and so becomes an inexhaustible inventor of tricks
and artifices and devices for concealing and masking his procedure,
in order that, unperceived, he may wound the object of his envy. For
instance, with an air of the utmost unconcern he will ignore the
advantages which are eating his heart out; he will neither see them,
nor know them, nor have observed or even heard of them, and thus make
himself a master in the art of dissimulation. With great cunning he
will completely overlook the man whose brilliant qualities are gnawing
at his heart, and act as though he were quite an unimportant person;
he will take no notice of him, and, on occasion, will have even quite
forgotten his existence. But at the same time he will before all
things endeavour by secret machination carefully to deprive those
advantages of any opportunity of showing themselves and becoming
known. Then out of his dark corner he will attack these qualities with
censure, mockery, ridicule and calumny, like the toad which spurts
its poison from a hole. No less will he enthusiastically praise
unimportant people, or even indifferent or bad performances in the
same sphere. In short, he will becomes a Proteas in stratagem, in
order to wound others without showing himself. But what is the use
of it? The trained eye recognises him in spite of it all. He betrays
himself, if by nothing else, by the way in which he timidly avoids
and flies from the object of his envy, who stands the more completely
alone, the more brilliant he is; and this is the reason why pretty
girls have no friends of their own sex. He betrays himself, too, by
the causeless hatred which he shows--a hatred which finds vent in a
violent explosion at any circumstance however trivial, though it is
often only the product of his imagination. How many such men there are
in the world may be recognised by the universal praise of modesty,
that is, of a virtue invented on behalf of dull and commonplace