| <Saturday Review, 24 July 1869, 112-3>
| <FLATTERY.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| Nothing is so delightful as flattery. To hear and believe pleasant
| fictions about oneself is a temptation too seductive for weak mortals
| to resist, as the typical legends of all mythologies and the private
| histories of most individuals show; in consequence of which, home
| truths, to one used to ideal portraiture, come like draughts of
| <p> 'bitter cup' </p> to the dram-drinker. 
| And flattery is dram-drinking; and
| yet not quite without good uses to balance its undeniable evil, if it
| be only exaggeration and not wholly falsehood; that is, if it assumes
| as a matter of course the presence of virtues potential to your
| character but not always active, and praises you for what you might be
| if you chose to live up to your best. Many a weak brother and weaker
| sister, and all children, can be heartened into goodness by a little
| dash of judicious praise or flattery where ponderous exhortation and
| grave reproof would fail; just as a heavily-laden horse can be coaxed
| up-hill when the whip and spur would lead to untimely jibbing. If, on
| the contrary, the flattery is of a kind that makes you believe
| yourself an exceptionally fine fellow when you are only <p> 'mean
| trash' </p> ~~ a king of men when you are 
| nothing better nor nobler than a
| moral nigger ~~ making you satisfied with yourself when at your
| worst ~~ then it is an unmitigated evil; for it then becomes
| dram-drinking of a very poisonous kind, which sooner or later does for
| your soul what unlimited blue ruin does for your body. But this is
| what we generally mean when we speak of flattery; and this is the kind
| which has such a deservedly bad name from moralists of all ages.
| The flatteries of men to women, and those of women to men, are very
| different in kind and direction. Men flatter women for what they
| are ~~ for their beauty, their grace, their sweetness, their
| charmingness in general; while a woman will flatter a man for what he
| does ~~ for his speech in the House last night, 
| of which she understands
| little; for his book, of which she understands less; or for his
| pleading, of which she understands nothing at all. Not that this
| signifies much on either side. The most unintellectual little woman in
| the world has brains enough to look up in your face sweetly, and
| breathe out something that sounds like <p> 'beautiful ~~ charming ~~ so
| clever,' </p> vaguely sketching the outline 
| of a hymn of praise to which
| your own vanity supplies the versicles. For you must have an
| exceptionally strong head if you can rate the sketch at its real value
| and see for yourself how utterly meaningless it is.
| You may be the most mystical poet of the day, suggesting to your
| acutest readers grave doubts as to your own power of comprehending
| yourself; or you may be the most subtle metaphysician, to follow
| whom in your labyrinth of reasoning requires perhaps the rarest
| order of brains to be met with; but you will nevertheless believe
| any narrow-browed, small-headed woman who tells you in a low sweet
| voice, with a gentle uplifting of her eyes and a suggestive curve
| of her lip, that she has found you both intelligible and charming,
| and that she quite agrees with you and shares your every sentiment.
| If she further tells you that all her life long she has thought in
| exactly the same way but was wholly unable to express herself, and
| that you have now supplied her want and translated into words her
| vague ideas, and if she says this with a reverential kind of
| effusiveness, you are done for, so far as your critical power goes;
| and should some candid friend, whom she has not flattered, tell you
| with brutal frankness that your bewitching little flatterer has
| neither the brains nor the education to understand you, you will set
| him down as a slanderer, spiteful and malignant, and call his candour
| envy because he has not been so lucky as yourself.
| The most subtle form of flattery is that which asks your advice with
| the pretence of needing it ~~ your advice, particularly ~~ yours above
| that of all other persons, as the wisest, best, most useful to be
| obtained. This too is a form that belongs rather to women in their
| relations with men than the converse; though sometimes men will
| pretend to want a woman's advice about their love affairs, and
| will perhaps make-believe to be guided by it. Not unfrequently,
| however, asking one woman's opinion and advice about another is a
| masked manner of love-making on its own account; though sometimes it
| may be done for flattery only, when there are reasons. Of course not
| all advice-asking is flattery; but when intended only to please and
| not meant to be genuine, it is perhaps one of the most potent
| instruments of the art to be met with.
| But if seeking advice be the most subtle form of flattery, the most
| intoxicating is that which pretends to moral elevation or reform by
| your influence. The reformation of a rake is a work which no woman
| alive could be found to resist if the rake offered it to her as his
| last chance of salvation; and to lead a pretty sinner back to the ways
| of picturesque virtue by his own influence only is a temptation to
| self-reliance which no man could refuse ~~ 
| a flattery which not Diogenes
| nor Zeno himself could see through. The pretensions of 
| <reg orig=”any one”> anyone </reg> else
| would be laughed at cruelly enough; but this is one of the things
| where personal experience and critical judgment never go in harness
| together ~~ one of the manifestations of flattery which would overcome
| the calmest and bewilder the wisest.
| Priests of all denominations are especially open to this kind of
| flattery; not only from pretty sinners who have gone openly out of the
| right line, but from quite comely and respectable maids and matrons
| who have lived blamelessly so far as the broad moral distinctions
| go, yet who have not lived the Awakened Life until roused thereunto by
| this peculiarly favoured minister. It is a tremendous trial of a man's
| discernment when such flattery is offered to him. How much of this
| pretended awakening is real? How much of this sudden spiritual insight
| is true, and not a mere phrasing, artfully adopted for pleasantness
| only? These are the cases where we most want that famous spear of
| Ithuriel to help us to a right estimate, for they are beyond the power
| of any ordinary man to determine.
| But if priests are subject to these delusions of flattery on the one
| hand, they know how to practise them on the other. Take away the
| flattery which, mingled with occasional rebuke, forms the great
| ministerial spur, and both Revivalism and Ritualism would flag like
| flowers without <p> 'the gentle dews.' </p> 
| Scolded for their faults in dress,
| for their vanity, extravagance and other feminine vices, are not women
| also flattered as the favourites of heaven and of the Church? Are they
| not told that they are the lilies of the ecclesiastical garden? the
| divinely appointed missionaries for the preservation of virtue and
| godly truth in the world? without whom the coarser race of men would
| be given over to inconceivable spiritual evil, to infidelity and all
| immorality. We may be very sure of this, that if humanity, and
| especially feminine humanity, were not flattered as well as chastened,
| clerical influence would not last for a day.
| There is one kind of flattery which is common to both men and women,
| and that is the expressed preference of sex. Thus, when men want to
| flatter women, they say how infinitely they prefer their society to
| that of their own sex; and women will say the same to men. Or, if they
| do not say it, they will act it. See a set of women congregated
| together without the light of a manly countenance among them. They may
| talk to each other certainly; and one or two will sit away together
| and discuss their private affairs with animation; but the great mass
| of them are only half vitalized while waiting the advent of the men to
| rouse them into life and the desire to please. No man who goes up
| first from the dinner-table, and earlier than he was expected, can
| fail to see the change which comes over those wearied, limp,
| indifferent-looking faces and figures so soon as he enters the room.
| He is like the prince whose kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty and all
| her court; and can <reg orig=”any one”> anyone </reg> 
| say that this is not flattery of the most
| delightful kind? To be the Pygmalion even for a moment, and for the
| weakest order of soul-giving, is about the greatest pleasure that a
| man can know, if he be susceptible to the finer kinds of flattery.
| Some women indeed, not only show their preference for men, but openly
| confess it, and confess at the same time to a lofty contempt or
| abhorrence for the society of women. These are generally women who
| are, or have been, beauties; or who have literary and intellectual
| pretensions; or who despise babies and contemn housekeeping, and
| profess themselves unable to talk to other women because of their
| narrowness and stupidity. But for the most part they are women who, by
| their beauty or their position, have been used to receive extra
| attention from men; and thus their preference is not flattery so much
| as <hi> exigence </hi>. Women who have been in India, 
| or wherever else they are
| in the minority in society, are of this kind; and nothing is more
| amazing to them when they first come home than the attentions which a
| certain style of Englishwoman pays to men, instead of demanding and
| receiving attentions from them.
| There are also those sweet, humble, caressing women who flatter you
| with every word and look, but whose flattery is nothing but a pretty
| dress put on for show and taken off when the show is done with.
| Anything serves for an occasion with these people. Why, the way in
| which certain unmarried women will caress a child before you is an
| implied flattery; and they know it. If only they would be careful to
| carry these pretty ante-nuptial ways into the home where nothing is to
| be gained by them but a humdrum husband's happiness! But too often the
| woman whose whole attitude was one of flattering devotion before her
| end was gained, gives up every shred of that which she had in such
| profusion, when she has attained her object, and lets the home go bare
| of that which was so beautiful and seductive in the ball-room and the
| flirting corner.
| Some men however, want more home flattery to keep them tolerably happy
| and up to the mark than any woman with a soul to be saved by truth can
| give. Poets and artists are of this kind ~~ men who literally live on
| praise, without which they droop and can do nothing. With them it is
| absolutely necessary that the people with whom they are associated
| should be of appreciative and sympathetic natures; but the burden
| comes heavy when they want, as they generally do, so much more than
| this. For, in truth, they want flattery in excess of sympathy; and if
| they do not get it they hold themselves as the victims of an unkind
| fate, and fill the world with the echo of their woes. This is
| nine-tenths of the cause why great geniuses are so often unhappy in
| married life. They demand more incessant flattery than can be kept up
| by one woman, unless she has not only an exceptional power of love but
| also an exceptional power of self-suppression. They think that by
| virtue of their genius they are entitled to a Benjamin's mess of
| devotion double that given to other men; and when they get only
| Judah's share, they cry out that they are ill-used, and make the world
| think them ill-used as well.
| But though a little home flattery helps the home life immeasurably,
| and greases the creaking domestic wheels more than anything else can,
| a great deal is just the most pernicious thing that can be offered.
| The belief prevalent in some families that all the very small and
| commonplace members thereof are the world's wonders and greater
| than <reg orig=”any one”> anyone </reg> else ~~ that 
| <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg> is so clever as Harry, 
| <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg> so pretty
| as Julia, that Amy's red hair is of a more brilliant gold than can be
| found elsewhere, and Edward's mathematical abilities about equal to
| Newton's ~~ this belief, nourished and acted on, is sure to turn out an
| insufferable collection of prigs and self-conceited damsels who have
| to be brought down innumerable pegs before they find their own level.
| But we often see this; especially in country places where there is not
| much society to give a standard for comparative measurement; and we
| know that those fond parents and doting relations are blindly and
| diligently sowing seeds of bitterness for a future harvest of sorrow
| for their darlings. These young people must be made to suffer if they
| are to be of any good whatever in the world; and finding their level,
| after the exalted position which they have been supposed to fill so
| long, and being pelted with the unsavoury missiles of truth in
| exchange for all the incense of flattery to which they have been used,
| will be suffering enough. But it has to be gone through; this being
| one of the penalties to which the unwisdom of love so often subjects
| its objects.
| The flattery met with in society is not often very harmful save to
| coarse or specially simple natures. You must be either one or the
| other to be able to believe it. Lady Morgan was perhaps the most
| unblushing and excessive of the tribe of social flatterers; but that
| was her engine, the ladder by which she did a good part of her
| climbing. We must not confound with this kind of flattery the
| impulsive expression of praise or love which certain outspoken people
| indulge in to the last. You may as well try to dam up Niagara as to
| make some folks reticent of their thoughts and feelings. And when one
| of this kind sees anything that he or she likes, the praise has to
| come out, with superlatives if the creature be prone to exaggeration.
| But this is not flattery; it is merely a certain childlike
| expansiveness which lasts with some into quite old age. Unfortunately,
| very few understand this childlike expansiveness when they see it.
| Hence it subjects its possessor to misrepresentation and unfriendly
| jibes, so soon as his or her back is turned, and the explosion of
| exaggerated but perfectly sincere praise is discussed critically by
| the uninterested part of the audience.