How rare, how sweet they fall, these honeyed words, these golden bells that stroke the listening air! O Flattery, thou coaxing, heav’nly maid, thou com’st too seldom to seduce and soothe. How amiable are thy feet as thou drawest nigh, how bright and insincere thy smile!
Sometimes the post brings thee. Perhaps an American professor has written me a kind word; he is learned as well as good-natured; he seems to know what is good in literature. Perhaps it is, instead, a kindly unknown, living in the English provinces. What a clever, well-educated man! What a sympathetic, intelligent woman! How different from some others! Here is someone who admires my poetry; another who thinks my essays well expressed; even my novels well conceived, with passable plots. Their words are sweet as honey in the mouth. An author there are few to praise should save and keep these copious and elegant celebrations of her merit: keep them, and show them one day to those contemners, those heapers of gratuitous obloquy, who write tasteless and tactless books pointing out how deficient in literary merit and personal worth practically all authors are. Here, Mr. Blank (I shall say), is the real truth about me, which you, who have apparently omitted to read the majority of my works before pronouncing on them and on me, have so blindly overlooked. What about this, pray, I shall boast to the reviewers of my next book, when they find it insubstantial and facetious, or pedantic and dull, or sadly trivial and unconvincing. I would like you to know (I shall say) what this learned professor thinks of me, and this excellent gentleman from (or perhaps still in) Yorkshire, and all these ardent young students who desire to write a thesis on me in German, Italian, French and Scandinavian universities. (This is not a form of flattery that pleases me, as these young innocents all request lengthy and informing answers, and, though from me they receive no answer, they remain, on account of their projected theses and their tender years, a little on my conscience. It is obvious that they write to all authors. Has any so far answered them, poor nit-wits?)
Flattery. That great call, to which every sentient being down the ages has responded. Gods, men, women, children, beasts and birds; how readily these have fallen into the snares spread for their feet, the while they spruce themselves and smirk and smug, tripping it along life’s highway, toes barely touching the earth, as if they were indeed puffed up with these agreeable gases until they have acquired the levity of balloons. For a very little, they would leave the earth, and soar away into the skyey sphere, still smiling and smirking like cherubs among the buxom clouds. “Vix humum tetigit pede,” wrote Milton of his proud and dreaming youth; scarcely did he touch the earth with his feet; and so these happy ones who live with flattery. The sweet inebriant only comes my way on occasion, and stays not long enough to obliviate that negligence which is man’s normal earthly portion. I would that it were otherwise. I would wish to go companioned and beleaguered by flatterers telling their sugared lies, like those Italian gentlemen whom one meets in trains. “Come è bellina, simpatica, graziosa!” Charming voices murmur in one’s memory, like honeybees among clover. How comely and how elegant you appear, how fitly garbed, how altogether worthy of esteem. Nor man nor woman did I ever see, at all parts equal to the parts in thee.…
“Think’st thou,” asked Silvia disagreeably of Protheus trying to please her, “think’st thou I am so shallow, so conceitless, to be seduced by thy flattery?” “Nay, Sir,” says Dr. Johnson, “flattery pleases very generally. In the first place, the flatterer may think what he says to be true: but in the second place, whether he thinks so or not, he certainly thinks those whom he flatters of consequence enough to be flattered.” In the third place, he has a kindly desire to please them, and they are churlish indeed if they be not pleased by his amiable intentions, his delightful cozenage. Look on the pleasant fellow’s picture, sketched three centuries since by the observant but hard-to-please Dr. John Earle.
“He will commend to you first what he knows you like, and has always some absurd story or other of your enemy.… He will ask your counsel sometimes as a man of deep judgment … and whatsoever you say, is persuaded.… A piece of wit bursts him with an overflowing laughter, and he remembers it for you to all companies, and laughs again in the telling. He is one never chides you but for your virtues, as, you are too good, too honest, too religious.… It is a happiness not to discover him, for as long as you are happy, you shall not.”
Certainly I shall not. By all means flatter me; be kind and courteous; hop in my walks and gambol in my eyes; feed me with apricocks and dewberries; nod to me and do me courtesies, fool me to the top of my bent, for I enjoy it.
Though, alas, it makes the unflattering world at large seem more hard, chilly and malicious than ever.