LONDON, May 27, O. S. 1753.
MY DEAR FRIEND: I have this day been tired, jaded, nay, tormented, by the
company of a most worthy, sensible, and learned man, a near relation of
mine, who dined and passed the evening with me. This seems a paradox, but
is a plain truth; he has no knowledge of the world, no manners, no
address; far from talking without book, as is commonly said of people who
talk sillily, he only talks by book; which in general conversation is ten
times worse. He has formed in his own closet from books, certain systems
of everything, argues tenaciously upon those principles, and is both
surprised and angry at whatever deviates from them. His theories are
good, but, unfortunately, are all impracticable. Why? because he has only
read and not conversed. He is acquainted with books, and an absolute
stranger to men. Laboring with his matter, he is delivered of it with
pangs; he hesitates, stops in his utterance, and always expresses himself
inelegantly. His actions are all ungraceful; so that, with all his merit
and knowledge, I would rather converse six hours with the most frivolous
tittle-tattle woman who knew something of the world, than with him. The
preposterous notions of a systematical man who does not know the world,
tire the patience of a man who does. It would be endless to correct his
mistakes, nor would he take it kindly: for he has considered everything
deliberately, and is very sure that he is in the right. Impropriety is a
characteristic, and a never-failing one, of these people. Regardless,
because ignorant, of customs and manners, they violate them every moment.
They often shock, though they never mean to offend: never attending
either to the general character, or the particular distinguishing
circumstances of the people to whom, or before whom they talk; whereas
the knowledge of the world teaches one, that the very same things which
are exceedingly right and proper in one company, time and place, are
exceedingly absurd in others. In short, a man who has great knowledge,
from experience and observation, of the characters, customs, and manners
of mankind, is a being as different from, and as superior to, a man of
mere book and systematical knowledge, as a well-managed horse is to an
ass. Study, therefore, cultivate, and frequent men and women; not only in
their outward, and consequently, guarded, but in their interior,
domestic, and consequently less disguised, characters and manners. Take
your notions of things, as by observation and experience you find they
really are, and not as you read that they are or should be; for they
never are quite what they should be. For this purpose do not content
yourself with general and common acquaintance; but wherever you can,
establish yourself, with a kind of domestic familiarity, in good houses.
For instance, go again to Orli, for two or three days, and so at two or
three ‘reprises’. Go and stay two or three days at a time at Versailles,
and improve and extend the acquaintance you have there. Be at home at St.
Cloud; and, whenever any private person of fashion invites you to, pass a
few days at his country-house, accept of the invitation. This will
necessarily give you a versatility of mind, and a facility to adopt
various manners and customs; for everybody desires to please those in
whose house they are; and people are only to be pleased in their own way.
Nothing is more engaging than a cheerful and easy conformity to people’s
particular manners, habits, and even weaknesses; nothing (to use a vulgar
expression) should come amiss to a young fellow. He should be, for good
purposes, what Alcibiades was commonly for bad ones, a Proteus, assuming
with ease, and wearing with cheerfulness, any shape. Heat, cold, luxury,
abstinence, gravity, gayety, ceremony, easiness, learning, trifling,
business, and pleasure, are modes which he should be able to take, lay
aside, or change occasionally, with as much ease as he would take or lay
aside his hat. All this is only to be acquired by use and knowledge of
the world, by keeping a great deal of company, analyzing every character,
and insinuating yourself into the familiarity of various acquaintance. A
right, a generous ambition to make a figure in the world, necessarily
gives the desire of pleasing; the desire of pleasing points out, to a
great degree, the means of doing it; and the art of pleasing is, in
truth, the art of rising, of distinguishing one’s self, of making a
figure and a fortune in the world. But without pleasing, without the
graces, as I have told you a thousand times, ‘ogni fatica e vana’. You
are now but nineteen, an age at which most of your countrymen are
illiberally getting drunk in port, at the university. You have greatly
got the start of them in learning; and if you can equally get the start
of them in the knowledge and manners of the world, you may be very sure
of outrunning them in court and parliament, as you set out much earlier
than they. They generally begin but to see the world at one-and-twenty;
you will by that age have seen all Europe. They set out upon their
travels unlicked cubs: and in their travels they only lick one another,
for they seldom go into any other company. They know nothing but the
English world, and the worst part of that too, and generally very little
of any but the English language; and they come home, at three or
four-and-twenty, refined and polished (as is said in one of Congreve’s
plays) like Dutch skippers from a whale-fishing. The care which has been
taken of you, and (to do you justice) the care that you have taken of
yourself, has left you, at the age of nineteen only, nothing to acquire
but the knowledge of the world, manners, address, and those exterior
accomplishments. But they are great and necessary acquisitions, to those
who have sense enough to know their true value; and your getting them
before you are one-and-twenty, and before you enter upon the active and
shining scene of life, will give you such an advantage over all your
contemporaries, that they cannot overtake you: they must be distanced.
You may probably be placed about a young prince, who will probably be a
young king. There all the various arts of pleasing, the engaging address,
the versatility of manners, the brillant, the graces, will outweigh, and
yet outrun all solid knowledge and unpolished merit. Oil yourself,
therefore, and be both supple and shining, for that race, if you would be
first, or early at the goal. Ladies will most probably too have something
to say there; and those who are best with them will probably be best
SOMEWHERE ELSE. Labor this great point, my dear child, indefatigably;
attend to the very smallest parts, the minutest graces, the most trifling
circumstances, that can possibly concur in forming the shining character
of a complete gentleman, ‘un galant homme, un homme de cour’, a man of
business and pleasure; ‘estime des hommes, recherche des femmes, aime de
tout le monde’. In this view, observe the shining part of every man of
fashion, who is liked and esteemed; attend to, and imitate that
particular accomplishment for which you hear him chiefly celebrated and
distinguished: then collect those various parts, and make yourself a
mosiac of the whole. No one body possesses everything, and almost
everybody possesses some one thing worthy of imitation: only choose your
models well; and in order to do so, choose by your ear more than by your
eye. The best model is always that which is most universally allowed to
be the best, though in strictness it may possibly not be so. We must take
most things as they are, we cannot make them what we would, nor often
what they should be; and where moral duties are not concerned, it is more
prudent to follow than to attempt to lead. Adieu.