Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/45

 Envy As a Philosophy

But under this pretension to superiority, of course, there lies an uncomfortable realization of actual inferiority. The peasant hates; ergo, he envies—and "l’envie," as Heine said to Philarète Chasles, "est une infériorité qui s'avoue." The disdain that goes with genuine superiority is something quite different; there is no sign of it in him. He is so far from it, indeed, that he can imagine no higher delights than such as proceed from acts which, when performed by the hated city man, he denounces as crimes, and tries to put down by law. It is the cabaret that makes a Prohibitionist of him, not the drunkard in the gutter. Doomed himself to drink only crude and unpalatable stimulants, incompetently made and productive of depressing malaises, and forced to get them down in solitary swinishness behind the door, he naturally longs for the varieties that have a more delicate and romantic smack, and are ingested in gay society and to the music of harps and sackbuts. That longing is vain. There are no