DEAR BOY: Your distresses in your journey from Heidelberg to
Schaffhausen, your lying upon straw, your black bread, and your broken
‘berline,’ are proper seasonings for the greater fatigues and distresses
which you must expect in the course of your travels; and, if one had a
mind to moralize, one might call them the samples of the accidents, rubs,
and difficulties, which every man meets with in his journey through life.
In this journey, the understanding is the ‘voiture’ that must carry you
through; and in proportion as that is stronger or weaker, more or less in
repair, your journey will be better or worse; though at best you will now
and then find some bad roads, and some bad inns. Take care, therefore, to
keep that necessary ‘voiture’ in perfect good repair; examine, improve,
and strengthen it every day: it is in the power, and ought to be the
care, of every man to do it; he that neglects it, deserves to feel, and
certainly will feel, the fatal effects of that negligence.
‘A propos’ of negligence: I must say something to you upon that subject.
You know I have often told you, that my affection for you was not a weak,
womanish one; and, far from blinding me, it makes me but more
quick-sighted as to your faults; those it is not only my right, but my
duty to tell you of; and it is your duty and your interest to correct
them. In the strict scrutiny which I have made into you, I have (thank
God) hitherto not discovered any vice of the heart, or any peculiar
weakness of the head: but I have discovered laziness, inattention, and
indifference; faults which are only pardonable in old men, who, in the
decline of life, when health and spirits fail, have a kind of claim to
that sort of tranquillity. But a young man should be ambitious to shine,
and excel; alert, active, and indefatigable in the means of doing it;
and, like Caesar, ‘Nil actum reputans, si quid superesset agendum.’ You
seem to want that ‘vivida vis animi,’ which spurs and excites most young
men to please, to shine, to excel. Without the desire and the pains
necessary to be considerable, depend upon it, you never can be so; as,
without the desire and attention necessary to please, you never can
please. ‘Nullum numen abest, si sit prudentia,’ is unquestionably true,
with regard to everything except poetry; and I am very sure that any man
of common understanding may, by proper culture, care, attention, and
labor, make himself whatever he pleases, except a good poet. Your
destination is the great and busy world; your immediate object is the
affairs, the interests, and the history, the constitutions, the customs,
and the manners of the several parts of Europe. In this, any man of
common sense may, by common application, be sure to excel. Ancient and
modern history are, by attention, easily attainable. Geography and
chronology the same, none of them requiring any uncommon share of genius
or invention. Speaking and Writing, clearly, correctly, and with ease and
grace, are certainly to be acquired, by reading the best authors with
care, and by attention to the best living models. These are the
qualifications more particularly necessary for you, in your department,
which you may be possessed of, if you please; and which, I tell you
fairly, I shall be very angry at you, if you are not; because, as you
have the means in your hands, it will be your own fault only.
If care and application are necessary to the acquiring of those
qualifications, without which you can never be considerable, nor make a
figure in the world, they are not less necessary with regard to the
lesser accomplishments, which are requisite to make you agreeable and
pleasing in society. In truth, whatever is worth doing at all, is worth
doing well; and nothing can be done well without attention: I therefore
carry the necessity of attention down to the lowest things, even to
dancing and dress. Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a
young man; therefore mind it while you learn it that you may learn to do
it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act. Dress is of
the same nature; you must dress; therefore attend to it; not in order to
rival or to excel a fop in it, but in order to avoid singularity, and
consequently ridicule. Take great care always to be dressed like the
reasonable people of your own age, in the place where you are; whose
dress is never spoken of one way or another, as either too negligent or
too much studied.
What is commonly called an absent man, is commonly either a very weak, or
a very affected man; but be he which he will, he is, I am sure, a very
disagreeable man in company. He fails in all the common offices of
civility; he seems not to know those people to-day, whom yesterday he
appeared to live in intimacy with. He takes no part in the general
conversation; but, on the contrary, breaks into it from time to time,
with some start of his own, as if he waked from a dream. This (as I said
before) is a sure indication, either of a mind so weak that it is not
able to bear above one object at a time; or so affected, that it would be
supposed to be wholly engrossed by, and directed to, some very great and
important objects. Sir Isaac Newton, Mr. Locke, and (it may be) five or
six more, since the creation of the world, may have had a right to
absence, from that intense thought which the things they were
investigating required. But if a young man, and a man of the world, who
has no such avocations to plead, will claim and exercise that right of
absence in company, his pretended right should, in my mind, be turned
into an involuntary absence, by his perpetual exclusion out of company.
However frivolous a company may be, still, while you are among them, do
not show them, by your inattention, that you think them so; but rather
take their tone, and conform in some degree to their weakness, instead of
manifesting your contempt for them. There is nothing that people bear
more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt; and an injury is much
sooner forgotten than an insult. If, therefore, you would rather please
than offend, rather be well than ill spoken of, rather be loved than
hated; remember to have that constant attention about you which flatters
every man’s little vanity; and the want of which, by mortifying his
pride, never fails to excite his resentment, or at least his ill will.
For instance, most people (I might say all people) have their weaknesses;
they have their aversions and their likings, to such or such things; so
that, if you were to laugh at a man for his aversion to a cat, or cheese
(which are common antipathies), or, by inattention and negligence, to let
them come in his way, where you could prevent it, he would, in the first
case, think himself insulted, and, in the second, slighted, and would
remember both. Whereas your care to procure for him what he likes, and to
remove from him what he hates, shows him that he is at least an object of
your attention; flatters his vanity, and makes him possibly more your
friend, than a more important service would have done. With regard to
women, attentions still below these are necessary, and, by the custom of
the world, in some measure due, according to the laws of good-breeding.
My long and frequent letters, which I send you, in great doubt of their
success, put me in mind of certain papers, which you have very lately,
and I formerly, sent up to kites, along the string, which we called
messengers; some of them the wind used to blow away, others were torn by
the string, and but few of them got up and stuck to the kite. But I will
content myself now, as I did then, if some of my present messengers do
but stick to you. Adieu!