LONDON, March 25, O. S. 1751.
MY DEAR FRIEND: What a happy period of your life is this? Pleasure is
now, and ought to be, your business. While you were younger, dry rules,
and unconnected words, were the unpleasant objects of your labors. When
you grow older, the anxiety, the vexations, the disappointments
inseparable from public business, will require the greatest share of your
time and attention; your pleasures may, indeed, conduce to your business,
and your business will quicken your pleasures; but still your time must,
at least, be divided: whereas now it is wholly your own, and cannot be so
well employed as in the pleasures of a gentleman. The world is now the
only book you want, and almost the only one you ought to read: that
necessary book can only be read in company, in public places, at meals,
and in ‘ruelles’. You must be in the pleasures, in order to learn the
manners of good company. In premeditated, or in formal business, people
conceal, or at least endeavor to conceal, their characters: whereas
pleasures discover them, and the heart breaks out through the guard of
the understanding. Those are often propitious moments for skillful
negotiators to improve. In your destination particularly, the able
conduct of pleasures is of infinite use; to keep a good table, and to do
the honors of it gracefully, and ‘sur le ton de la bonne compagnie’, is
absolutely necessary for a foreign minister. There is a certain light
table chit-chat, useful to keep off improper and too serious subjects,
which is only to be learned in the pleasures of good company. In truth it
may be trifling; but, trifling as it is, a man of parts and experience of
the world will give an agreeable turn to it. ‘L’art de badiner
agreablement’ is by no means to be despised.
An engaging address, and turn to gallantry, is often of very great
service to foreign ministers. Women have, directly or indirectly; a good
deal to say in most courts. The late Lord Strafford governed, for a
considerable time, the Court of Berlin and made his own fortune, by being
well with Madame de Wartenberg, the first King of Prussia’s mistress. I
could name many other instances of that kind. That sort of agreeable
‘caquet de femmes’, the necessary fore-runners of closer conferences, is
only to be got by frequenting women of the first fashion, ‘et, qui
donnent le ton’. Let every other book then give way to this great and
necessary book, the world, of which there are so many various readings,
that it requires a great deal of time and attention to under stand it
well: contrary to all other books, you must not stay home, but go abroad
to read it; and when you seek it abroad, you will not find it in
booksellers’ shops and stalls, but in courts, in hotels, at
entertainments, balls, assemblies, spectacles, etc. Put yourself upon the
footing of an easy, domestic, but polite familiarity and intimacy in the
several French houses to which you have been introduced: Cultivate them,
frequent them, and show a desire of becoming ‘enfant de la maison’. Get
acquainted as much as you can with ‘les gens de cour’; and observe,
carefully, how politely they can differ, and how civilly they can hate;
how easy and idle they can seem in the multiplicity of their business;
and how they can lay hold of the proper moments to carry it on, in the
midst of their pleasures. Courts, alone, teach versatility and
politeness; for there is no living there without them. Lord Albermarle
has, I hear, and am very glad of it, put you into the hands of Messieurs
de Bissy. Profit of that, and beg of them to let you attend them in all
the companies of Versailles and Paris. One of them, at least, will
naturally carry you to Madame de la Valiores, unless he is discarded by
this time, and Gelliot--[A famous opera-singer at Paris.]--retaken. Tell
them frankly, ‘que vous cherchez a vous former, que vous etes en mains de
maitres, s’ils veulent bien s’en donner la peine’. Your profession has
this agreeable peculiarity in it, which is, that it is connected with,
and promoted by pleasures; and it is the only one in which a thorough
knowledge of the world, polite manners, and an engaging address, are
absolutely necessary. If a lawyer knows his law, a parson his divinity,
and a financier his calculations, each may make a figure and a fortune in
his profession, without great knowledge of the world, and without the
manners of gentlemen. But your profession throws you into all the
intrigues and cabals, as well as pleasures, of courts: in those windings
and labyrinths, a knowledge of the world, a discernment of characters, a
suppleness and versatility of mind, and an elegance of manners, must be
your clue; you must know how to soothe and lull the monsters that guard,
and how to address and gain the fair that keep, the golden fleece. These
are the arts and the accomplishments absolutely necessary for a foreign
minister; in which it must be owned, to our shame, that most other
nations outdo the English; and, ‘caeteris paribus’, a French minister
will get the better of an English one at any third court in Europe. The
French have something more ‘liant’, more insinuating and engaging in
their manner, than we have. An English minister shall have resided seven
years at a court, without having made any one personal connection there,
or without being intimate and domestic in any one house. He is always the
English minister, and never naturalized. He receives his orders, demands
an audience, writes an account of it to his Court, and his business is
done. A French minister, on the contrary, has not been six weeks at a
court without having, by a thousand little attentions, insinuated himself
into some degree of favor with the Prince, his wife, his mistress, his
favorite, and his minister. He has established himself upon a familiar
and domestic footing in a dozen of the best houses of the place, where he
has accustomed the people to be not only easy, but unguarded, before him;
he makes himself at home there, and they think him so. By these means he
knows the interior of those courts, and can almost write prophecies to
his own, from the knowledge he has of the characters, the humors, the
abilities, or the weaknesses of the actors. The Cardinal d’Ossat was
looked upon at Rome as an Italian, and not as a French cardinal; and
Monsieur d’Avaux, wherever he went, was never considered as a foreign
minister, but as a native, and a personal friend. Mere plain truth,
sense, and knowledge, will by no means do alone in courts; art and
ornaments must come to their assistance. Humors must be flattered; the
‘mollia tempora’ must be studied and known: confidence acquired by
seeming frankness, and profited of by silent skill. And, above all; you
must gain and engage the heart, to betray the understanding to you. ‘Ha
tibi erunt artes’.
The death of the Prince of Wales, who was more beloved for his affability
and good-nature than esteemed for his steadiness and conduct, has given
concern to many, and apprehensions to all. The great difference of the
ages of the King and Prince George presents the prospect of a minority; a
disagreeable prospect for any nation! But it is to be hoped, and is most
probable, that the King, who is now perfectly recovered of his late
indisposition, may live to see his grandson of age. He is, seriously, a
most hopeful boy: gentle and good-natured, with good sound sense. This
event has made all sorts of people here historians, as well as
politicians. Our histories are rummaged for all the particular
circumstances of the six minorities we have had since the Conquest, viz,
those of Henry III., Edward III., Richard II., Henry VI., Edward V., and
Edward VI.; and the reasonings, the speculations, the conjectures, and
the predictions, you will easily imagine, must be innumerable and
endless, in this nation, where every porter is a consummate politician.
Dr. Swift says, very humorously, that “Every man knows that he
understands religion and politics, though he never learned them; but that
many people are conscious that they do not understand many other
sciences, from having never learned them.” Adieu.