How to Know a Flatterer from a Friend (6-10)

Well then, let us enquire regularly into this affair. We have already asserted, that friendship generally takes its rise from a conformity of tempers and dispositions, whereby different persons come to have the same taste of the like humors, customs, studies, exercises, and employs, as these following verses import:—;

Old men with old, and boys with boys agree;

And women’s clack with women’s company.

Men that are crazy, full of sores and pain,

Love to diseased persons to complain.

And they who labor under adverse fate,

Tell their sad stories to th’ unfortunate.

The flatterer then, observing how congenial it is to our natures to delight in the conversation of those who are, as

it were, the counterpart of ourselves, makes his first approaches to our affections at this avenue, where he gradually advances (like one making towards a wild beast in a pasture, with a design to tame and bring it to hand) by accommodating himself to the same studies, business, and color of life with the person upon whom he designs, till at last the latter gives him an opportunity to catch him, and becomes tractable by the man who strokes him. All this while the flatterer falls foul upon those courses of life, persons, and things he perceives his cully to disapprove, and again as extravagantly commends those he is pleased to honor with his approbation, still persuading him that his choice and dislike are the results of a solid and discerning judgment and not of passion.

Well, then, by what signs or tokens shall we be able to know this counterfeit copy of ourselves from a true and genuine likeness?

In the first place, we must accurately remark upon the whole tenor of his life and conversation, whether or not the resemblance he pretends to the original be of any continuance, natural and easy, and all of a piece; whether he square his actions according to any one steady and uniform model, as becomes an ingenuous lover of conversation and friendship, which is all of one thread, and still like itself; for this is a true friend indeed. But the flatterer, who has no principles in him, and leads not a life properly his own, but forms and moulds it according to the various humors and caprices of those he designs to bubble, is never one and the same man, but a mere dapple or trimmer, who changes shapes with his company, like water that always turns and winds itself into the figure of the channel through which it flows. Apes, it seems, are usually caught by their antic mimicry of the motions and gesticulations of men; and yet the men themselves are trepanned by the same craft of imitation in a flatterer,

who adapts himself to their several humors, fencing and wrestling with one, singing and dancing with another. If he is in chase of a spark that delights in a pack of dogs, he follows him at the heels, hollowing almost like Phaedra,

O what a pleasure ’tis, ye Gods, to wind

The shrill-mouthed horn and chase the dappled hind;

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and yet the hunter himself is the game he designs for the toils. If he be in pursuit of some bookish young gentleman, then he is always a poring, he nourishes his reverend beard down to his heels, wears a tattered cloak, affects the careless indifference of a philosopher, and can now discourse of nothing under Plato’s triangles and rectangles. If he chance to fall into the acquaintance of a drunken, idle debauchee who has got an estate,

Then sly Ulysses throws away his rags,[*]

puts off his long robe, mows down his fruitless crop of beard, drinks briskly, laughs modishly on the walks, and drolls handsomely upon the philosophical fops of the town. And thus, they say, it happened at Syracuse; for when Plato first arrived there and Dionysius was wonderfully hot upon the study of philosophy, all the areas in the king’s palace were full of nothing but dust and sand, by reason of the great concourse of geometricians who came to draw their figures and demonstrate there. But no sooner was Plato in disgrace at court, and Dionysius finally fallen from philosophy to wine and women, trifles and intemperance, than learning fell into a general disrepute, and the whole body of the people, as if bewitched by some Circe or other, became universally stupid, idle, and infatuated. Besides this. I appeal to the practices of men notorious for flattery and popularity to back my observation. Witness he who topped them all, Alcibiades, who, when he dwelt at Athens, was as arch and witty as any Athenian of them all, kept his stable of horses, played the good fellow, and was universally obliging; and yet the same man at Sparta slaved close to the skin, wore his cloak, and never bathed but in cold water. When he sojourned in Thrace, he drank and fought like a Thracian; and again, in Tissaphernes’s company in Asia, he acted the part of a soft, arrogant, and voluptuous Asiatic. And thus, by an easy compliance with the humors and customs of the people amongst whom he conversed, he made himself master of their affections and interests. So did not the brave Epaminondas nor Agesilaus, who, though they had to do with great variety of men and manners, and cities of vastly different politics, were still the same men, and everywhere, through the whole circle of their conversation, maintained a port and character worthy of themselves. And so was Plato the same man at Syracuse that he was in the Academy, the same in Dionysus’s court that he was in Dixon’s.

Another difference observable betwixt them in the resemblance thy bear to each other is, that a true friend will not rashly commend nor imitate every thing, but only what really deserves it; for, as Sophocles says,

He shares with him his loves, but not his hates,[*]

and will scorn to bear any part with him in any base and dishonorable actions, unless, as people sometimes catch blear eyes, he may chance insensibly to contract some ill habit or other by the very contagion of familiarity and conversation. Thus they say Plato’s acquaintance learned his stoop, Aristotle’s his lisp, and Alexander’s the inclination of his neck and the rapidity of his speech. For some persons, ere they are aware, get a touch of the humors and infirmities of those with whom they converse. But now as a true friend endeavors only to copy the fairest originals, so, on the contrary, the flatterer, like the chameleon, which puts on all colors but the innocent white, being unable to reach those strokes of virtue which are worth his imitation, takes care that no failure or imperfection escape him. As unskilful painters, when they cannot hit the features and air of a face, content themselves with the faint resemblance in a wrinkle, a wart, or a scar, so he takes up with his friend’s intemperance, superstition, cholericness, severity to his servants, distrust of his relations and domestics or the like. For, besides that a natural propensity to evil inclines him always to follow the worst examples, he imagines his assuming other men’s vices will best secure him from the suspicion of being disaffected towards them; for their fidelity is often suspected who seem dissatisfied with faults and wish a reformation. Which very thing lost Dion in the good opinion of Dionysius, Samius in Philip’s, Cleomenes in Ptolemy’s, and at last proved the occasion of their ruin. And therefore the flatterer pretends not only to the good humor of a companion, but to the faithfulness of a friend too, and would be thought to have so great a respect for you that he cannot be disgusted at the very worst of your actions, being indeed of the same make and constitution with yourself. Hence you shall have him pretend a share in the most common casualties that befall another, nay, in complaisance, feign even diseases themselves. In company of those who are thick of hearing, he is presently half deaf, and with the dim-sighted can see no more than they do. So the parasites about Dionysius at an entertainment, to humor his blindness, stumbled one upon another and jostled the dishes off his table.

But there are others who refine upon the former by a pretended fellow-suffering in the more private concernments of life, whereby they wriggle themselves deeper into the affections of those they flatter; as, if they find a man unhappily married, or distrustful of his children or domestics, they spare not their own family, but immediately entertain you with some lamentable story of the hard fortune they have met with in their children, their wife, their servants, or relations. For, by the parallel circumstances they pretend

to, they seem more passionately concerned for the misfortunes of their friends, who, as if they had already received some pawn and assurance of their fidelity, blab forth those secrets which they cannot afterwards handsomely retract, and dare not betray the least distrust of their new confidant for the future. I myself knew a man who turned his wife out of doors because a gentleman of his acquaintance divorced his, though the latter lady smelt the intrigue afterwards by the messages the flatterer sent to his wife after the pretended divorce and the private visits he was observed to make her. So little did he understand the flatterer who took these following verses for the description of a crab rather than his:—;

The shapeless thing’s all over paunch and gut:

Who can the monster’s mighty hunger glut?

It crawls on teeth, and with a watchful eye

Does into every secret corner pry.

For this is the true portraiture of those sharpers, who, as Eupolis speaks, sponge upon their acquaintance for a dinner.