The Home Journal

Offensive People.

If to be a good man and a successful man is offensive to the world at large, to be praised is exasperating. No greater unkindness can be done to any man than to praise him much. People generally will stand a moderate compliment paid to a neighbor, while they are loath to qualify it, or to admit it as a matter of generosity or courtesy; but praise persisted in will ruin the reputation of anybody. There is nothing more offensive to the average human being than persistent laudation bestowed upon another. To hear a man warmly praised is sufficient usually to make us hate him; and it is only necessary to have the praise repeated often enough to make us desire to shoot him. Praise is one of the articles we would like to have distributed a little—not that we want it, but the object of it is not the best man we know ourselves. Virtue is a good thing, temperance is a good thing, genius is not a bad thing altogether; but no man is to be mentioned so many as ten times as having either of them in possession without making his name a stench and an offense to the nostrils of a sensitive world. The true way of getting along well in the world is not to make one's self offensive to one's friends by excellence of character and habits of life, by success, or by doing anything praiseworthy. Let us strike the average as nearly as possible. Let us be good fellows rather than good men, and choke the first man who dares to ascribe to us a single virtue. Let us keep down and out of sight. All that we do for ourselves, and all that we do for mankind, only feeds hell with slanderers, and so betrays the baseness of human nature that we may well blush to think that we are members of the human race. —Dr. J. G. Holland.