Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Mean isn’t just an insult here; it’s a diagnosis. Le Gallienne, a fin-de-siecle poet with a moralist’s eye, sketches a grim little engine inside the social imagination: we don’t merely notice scandal, we prefer it. The sentence moves like gossip itself, piling clause on clause - “willing ear,” “ready welcome” - until you can feel the speed and ease with which suspicion travels. Calumny doesn’t need proof; it needs an audience hungry for the small thrill of believing the worst.

The subtext is less about individual villainy than about a communal reflex. “Jealousy of goodness and greatness” is a sharp inversion: virtue isn’t rewarded with admiration so much as punished for making everyone else feel comparatively smaller. Malice becomes a leveling mechanism. If someone’s reputation is “of good report,” it threatens the group’s private ledger of resentments; tearing it down restores a sense of fairness, the ugly kind where no one gets to stand too tall.

Context matters. Writing in an era obsessed with respectability and ruin - when a whispered allegation could crater a career, and mass newspapers were industrializing outrage - Le Gallienne reads the room and refuses the comforting story that cruelty is rare. His intent isn’t to wallow; it’s to warn. A culture that treats goodness as a provocation will always find reasons to disbelieve it, and it will call that skepticism “realism.”