it is generally recognised in this country that an acquaintance more or less familiar with the great, that is, with the very wealthy, and preferably with those who have been wealthy for at least one generation, is the proper entry into any form of public service.
i am in a position to advance for the benefit of younger men of my own social rank, certain views which i think will not be unprofitable to them in this matter.
i will suppose my reader to be still upon the right side of thirty; to be the son of some professional man; to have been kept, at the expense of some anxiety to his parents, for five years or so at a public school, and to have proceeded to the university upon a loan.
with such a start he cannot fail, if he is in[pg 199] any way lively or amiable, to have made the acquaintance by the age of twenty-two of a whole group of men whose fathers may properly be called "the great," and who themselves will inherit a similar distinction, unless they die prematurely of hard living or hereditary disease.
after such a beginning, common to many of my readers, the friendship and patronage of these people would seem to be secure; and yet we know from only too many fatal instances that it is nothing of the kind, and that of twenty young men who have scraped up acquaintance with their betters at winchester or magdalen (to take two names at random) not two are to be found at the age of forty still familiarly entering those london houses, which are rated at over £1000 a year.
the root cause of such failures is obvious enough.
the advantage of acquaintance with wealthy or important people would, so far as general opportunities go, be lost if one did not [pg 200]advertise it; and here comes in a difficulty which has wrecked innumerable lives. for by a pretty paradox with which we are all of us only too well acquainted, the wealthy and important are particularly averse to the recitation of acquaintance with themselves.
formerly—about seventy years ago—your man who would succeed recited upon the slightest grounds, in public and with emphasis, his friendship with the great. it was one of disraeli's methods of advancement. the great discovered the crude method, denounced it, vilified it, and towards the year 1860 it had already become impossible. william tells me he remembers his dear father warning me of this.
those who would advance in the next generation were compelled to abandon methods so simple and to take refuge in allusion. thus a young fellow in the late sixties, the seventies, and the very early eighties was helped in his career by professing a profound dislike for such and such a notability and swearing that he[pg 201] would not meet him. for to profess dislike was to profess familiarity with the world in which that notability moved.
or, again, to analyse rather curiously, and, on the whole, unfavourably, the character of some exceedingly wealthy man, was a method that succeeded well enough in hands of average ability. while a third way was to use christian names, and yet to use them with a tone of indifference, as though they belonged to acquaintances rather than friends.
but the great are ever on the alert, and this habit of allusion was in its turn tracked down by their unfailing noses; so that in our own time it has been necessary to invent another. i do not promise it any long survival, i write only for the moment, and for the fashions of my time, but i think a young man is well advised in this second decade of the twentieth century to assume towards the great an attitude of silent and sometimes weary familiarity, and very often to pretend to know them less well than he does.
[pg 202]
thus three men will be in a smoking room together. the one, let us say, will be the master of the king's billiard room, an aged jew who has lent money to some cabinet minister; the second a local squire, well-to-do and about fifty years of age; the third is my young reader, whose father, let us say, was a successful dentist. the master of the king's billiard room will say that he likes "puffy." the squire will say he doesn't like him much because of such and such a thing; he will ask the young man for his opinion. now, in my opinion, the young man will do well at this juncture to affect ignorance. let him deliberately ask to have it explained to him who puffy is (although the nickname may be familiar to every reader of a newspaper), and on hearing that it is a certain lord patterson he should put on an expression of no interest, and say that he has never met lord patterson.
something of the same effect is produced when a man remains silent during a long conversation about a celebrity, and then towards[pg 203] the end of it says some really true and intimate thing about him, such as, that he rides in long stirrups, or that one cannot bear his double eyelids or that his gout is very amusing.
another very good trick, which still possesses great force, is to repudiate any personal acquaintance with the celebrity in question, and treat him merely as some one whom one has read of in the newspapers; but next, as though following a train of thought, to begin talking of some much less distinguished relative of his with the grossest possible familiarity.
a common and not ineffective way (which i mention to conclude the list) is to pretend that you have only met the great man in the way of business, at large meetings or in public places, where he could not possibly remember you, and to pretend this upon all occasions and very often. but this method is only to be used when, as a matter of fact, you have not met the celebrity at all.
as for letting yourself be caught unawares and showing a real and naïf ignorance of the[pg 204] great, that is not only a fault against which i will not warn you, for i believe you to be incapable of it, but it is also one against which it is of no good to warn any one, for whoever commits it has no chance whatsoever of that advancement which it is the object of these notes to promote.
when you are found walking with the great in the street (a thing which, as a rule, they feel a certain shyness in doing, at least in company with people of your position), it is as well, if your companion meets another of his own order, to stand a little to one side, to profess interest in the objects of a neighbouring shop window, or the pattern of the railings. such at least is the general rule to be laid down for those who have not the quickness or ability to seize at once the better method, which is as follows:
catch if you can the distant approach of the other great before your great has spotted him, then, upon some pretext, preferably accompanied by the pulling out of your watch, depart:[pg 205] for there is nothing that so annoys the great during the conference of any two of them, as the presence of a third party of your station.
since my remarks must be put into a brief compass (though i have much more to say upon this all-important subject) i will conclude with what is perhaps the soundest piece of advice of all.
never under any occasion or temptation, bestow a gift even of the smallest value, upon the great. never let yourself be betrayed into a generous action, nor, if you can possibly prevent it, so much as a generous thought in their regard. they are not grateful. they think it impertinent. and it looks odd. there is a note of equality about such things (and this particularly applies to unbosoming yourself in correspondence) which is very odious and offensive. moreover, as has been proved in the case of countless unhappy lives, when once a man of the middle class falls into the habit of asking the great to meals, of giving them books or pictures or betraying towards them in any[pg 206] fashion a spirit of true companionship, he bursts; and that, as a rule, after a delay quite incredibly short. some men of fair substance have to my knowledge been wholly ruined in this manner within the space of one parliamentary session, a hunting season, or even a single week at cowes, in the isle of wight; from which spot i send these presents, and where, by the way, at the time of writing, the stock of forage in the forecastle is extremely low, with no supplies forthcoming from the mainland.
god bless you!
