a one never contradicts you, but gains upon you, not by a fulsome way of commending you in broad terms, but liking whatever you propose or utter; at the same time is ready to beg your pardon, and gainsay you, if you chance to speak ill of yourself. An old lady is very seldom without such a companion as this, who can recite the names of all her lovers, and the matches refused by her in the days when she minded such vanities (as she is pleased to call them, though she so much approves the mention of them). It is to be noted, that a woman's flatterer is generally older than herself, her years serving at once to recommend her patroness's age, and to add weight to her complaisance in all other particulars.
We gentlemen of small fortunes are extremely necessitous in this particular. I have indeed one who smokes with me often; but his parts are so low, that all the incense he does me is to fill his pipe with me, and to be out at just as many whiffs as I take. This is all the praise or assent that he is capable of, yet there are more hours when I would rather be in his company than that of the brightest man I know. It would be a hard matter to give an account of this inclination to be flattered; but if we go to the bottom of it, we shall find that the pleasure in it is something like that of receiving money which lay out. Every man thinks he has an estate of reputation, and is glad to see one that will bring any of it home to him: it is no matter how dirty a bag it is conveyed to him in, or by how clownish a messenger, so the money is good. All that we want to be pleased with flattery, is to believe that the man is sincere who gives it us. It is by this one accident that absurd creatures often outrun the more skilful in this art. Their want of ability is here an advantage, and their bluntness, as it is the seeming effect of sincerity, is the best cover to artifice.
Terence introduces a flatterer talking to a coxcomb whom he cheats out of a livelihood, and a third person on the stage makes on him this pleasant remark, "This fellow has an art of making fools madmen."36 The love of flattery is indeed sometimes the weakness of a great mind; but you see it also in persons who otherwise discover no manner of relish of anything above mere sensuality. These latter it sometimes improves, but always debases the former. A fool is in himself the object of pity till he is flattered. By the force of that his stupidity is raised into affectation, and he becomes of dignity enough to be ridiculous. I remember a droll, that upon one's saying, "The times are so ticklish that there must great care be taken what one says in conversation," answered with an air of surliness and honesty, "If people will be free, let them be so in the manner that I am, who never abuse a man but to his face." He had no reputation for saying dangerous truths; therefore when it was repeated, "You abuse a man but to his face?" "Yes," says he, "I flatter him."
It is indeed the greatest of injuries to flatter any but the unhappy, or such as are displeased with themselves for some infirmity. In this latter case we have a member of our club, that when Sir Jeffery falls asleep, wakens him with snoring. This makes Sir Jeffery hold up for some moments the longer, to see there are men younger than himself among us who are more lethargic than he is.
When flattery is practised upon any other consideration, it is the most abject thing in nature; nay, I cannot think of any character below the flatterer, except he that envies him. You meet with fellows prepared to be as mean as possible in their condescensions and expressions; but they want persons and talents to rise up to such a baseness. As a coxcomb is a fool of parts, so is a flatterer a knave of parts.
The best of this order that I know, is one who disguises it under a spirit of contradiction or reproof. He told an errant driveller the other day, that he did not care for being in company with him, because he heard he turned his absent friends into ridicule. And upon Lady Autumn's37 disputing with him about something that happened at the Revolution, he replied with a very angry tone, "Pray, madam, give me leave to know more of a thing in which I was actually concerned, than you, who were then in your nurse's arms."
No. 209. [Steele.
From Tuesday, Aug. 8, to Thursday, Aug. 10, 1710
A noble painter, who has an ambition to draw a history-piece, has desired of me to give him a subject on which he may show the utmost force of his art and genius. For this purpose I have pitched upon that remarkable incident between Alexander the Great and his physician. This Prince, in the midst of his conquests in Persia, was seized by a violent fever; and according to the account we have of his vast mind, his thoughts were more employed about his recovery as it regarded the war, than as it concerned his own life. He professed, a slow method was worse than death to him, because it was what he more dreaded, an interruption of his glory. He desired a dangerous, so it might be a speedy remedy. During this impatience of the King, it is well known that Darius had offered an immense sum to any who should take away his life. But Philippus, the most esteemed and most knowing of his physicians, promised, that within three days' time he would prepare a medicine for him which should restore him more expeditiously than could be imagined. Immediately after this engagement, Alexander receives a letter from the most considerable of his captains, with intelligence, that Darius had bribed Philippus to poison him. Every circumstance imaginable favoured this suspicion; but this monarch, who did nothing but in an extraordinary manner, concealed the letter; and while the medicine was preparing, spent all his thoughts upon his behaviour in this important incident. From his long soliloquy he came to this resolution: "Alexander must not lie here alive to be oppressed by his enemy. I will not believe my physician guilty; or, I will perish rather by his guilt than my own diffidence."
At the appointed hour, Philippus enters with the potion. One cannot but form to one's self on occasion the encounter of their eyes, the resolution in those of the patient, and the benevolence in the countenance of the physician. The hero raised himself in his bed, and holding the letter in one hand, and the potion in the other, drank the medicine. It will exercise my friend's pencil and brain to place this action in its proper beauty. A prince observing the features of a suspected traitor after having drank the poison he offered him, is a circumstance so full of passion, that it will require the highest strength of his imagination to conceive it, much more to express it. But as painting is eloquence and poetry in mechanism, I shall raise his ideas, by reading with him the finest draughts of the passions concerned in this circumstance from the most excellent poets and orators. The confidence which Alexander assumes from the air of Philippus's face as he is reading his accusation, and the generous disdain which is to rise in the features of a falsely accused man, are principally to be regarded. In this particular he must heighten his thoughts, by reflecting, that he is not drawing only an innocent man traduced, but a man zealously affected to his person and safety, full of resentment for being thought false. How shall we contrive to express the highest admiration mingled with disdain? How shall we in strokes of a pencil say what Philippus did to his Prince on this occasion? "Sir, my life never depended on yours more than it does now. Without knowing this secret, I prepared the potion, which you have taken as what concerned Philippus no less than Alexander; and there is nothing new in this adventure, but that it makes me still more admire the generosity and confidence of my master." Alexander took him by the hand, and said, "Philippus, I am confident you had rather I had any other way to have manifested the faith I have in you, than a case which so nearly concerns me: and in gratitude I now assure you, I am anxious for the effect of your medicine, more for your sake than my own."38
My painter is employed by a man of sense and wealth to furnish him a gallery, and I shall join with my friend in the designing part. It is the great use of pictures to raise in our minds either agreeable ideas of our absent friends, or high images of eminent personages. But the latter design is, methinks, carried on in a very improper way; for to fill a room full of battle-pieces, pompous histories of sieges, and a tall hero alone in a crowd of insignificant figures about him, is of no consequence to private men. But to place before our eyes great and illustrious men in those parts and circumstances of life wherein their behaviour may have an effect upon our minds, as being such as we partake with them merely as they were men: such as these, I say, may be just and useful ornaments of an elegant apartment. In this collection therefore that we are making, we will not have the battles,
"Eunuchus," act ii. sc. 2, l. 23.
See Nos. 36 and 140.
Q. Curtius, "Hist.," iii. 6, &c.
