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 any one 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 'the gentle dews.' 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 any one 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 exigence. 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 any one else—that no one is so clever as Harry, no one 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.