“Il n’est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie.”
It is at these sentences more especially that the modesty of the grave Johnson is put to the blush; ours is content to smile at them.
The serious and the frivolous are perpetually mingling in these letters. Marcel, the dancing master, is very often recommended, Montesquieu no less. The Abbé de Guasco, a sort of toady to Montesquieu, is a useful personage for introductions. “Between you and me,” writes Chesterfield, “he has more knowledge than genius; but a clever man knows how to make use of everything, and every man is good for something. As to the Président of Montesquieu, he is in all respects a precious acquaintance: He has genius, with the most extensive reading in the world. Drink of his fountain as much as possible.”
Of authors, those whom Chesterfield particularly recommends at this time, and those whose names occur most frequently in his counsels, are La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. “If you read some of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims in the morning, consider them, examine them well, and compare them with the originals you meet in the evening. Read La Bruyère in the morning, and see in the evening if his portraits are correct.” But these guides, excellent as they are, have no other use by themselves than that of a map. Without personal observation and experience, they would be useless, and would even be conducive to error, as a map might be if one thought to get from it a complete knowledge of towns and provinces. Better read one man than ten books. “The world is a country that no one has ever known by means of descriptions; each of us must traverse it in person to be thoroughly initiated into its ways.”
Here are some precepts or remarks which are worthy of those masters of human morality:
“The most essential of all knowledge, I mean the knowledge of the world, is never acquired without great attention, and I know a great many aged persons who, after having had an extensive acquaintance, are still mere children in the knowledge of the world.”
“Human nature is the same all over the world; but its operations are so varied by education and custom that we ought to see it in all its aspects to get an intimate knowledge of it.”
“Almost all men are born with every passion to some extent, but there is hardly a man who has not a dominant passion to which the others are subordinate. Discover this governing passion in every individual; search into the recesses of his heart, and observe the different effects of the same passion in different people. And when you have found the master passion of a man, remember never to trust to him where that passion is concerned.”
“If you wish particularly to gain the good graces and affection of certain people, men or women, try to discover their most striking merit, if they have one, and their dominant weakness, for every one has his own, then do justice to the one, and a little more than justice to the other.”
“Women, in general, have only one object, which is their beauty, upon which subject hardly any flattery can be too gross to please them.”