my dear boy:

as you know, i was your father's closest friend for many years, and i have watched with interest, but i confess not without anxiety, your first attempts in a career of which he was in my young days the most brilliant exemplar.

you will not take it ill in a man of my years and in one as devoted to your family as i am and have proved myself to be, if i tender you a word of advice.

the profession upon which you have engaged is one of the most difficult in the world. it does not offer the great prizes which attend the best forms of cheating, bullying, and blackmail, and at the same time it is highly limited, and offers opportunities to only a handful of the finer souls.

[pg 336]

nevertheless, i am not writing this to dissuade you for one moment from its pursuit. there is something in the fine arts difficult to define, but very deeply felt by every one, which makes them of themselves a sort of compensation for their economic limitations. the artist, the poet, and the actor expect to live, and hope to live well, but each one knows how few are the prizes, and each in his heart expects something more than a mere money compensation. so should it be in that great profession which you have undertaken in the light of your father's example.

in connection with that, i think it my duty to point out to you that even the greatest success in this special calling is only modest compared with successes obtained at the bar, in commerce, or even in politics. you will never become a wealthy man. i do not desire it for you. it should be yours, if you succeed, to enjoy wealth without its responsibility, and to consume the good things our civilisation presents to the wealthy without avarice, without[pg 337] the memory of preceding poverty, and, above all, without the torturing necessity of considering the less fortunate of your kind.

you must not expect, my dear young man, to leave even a modest competence; therefore you must not expect to marry and provide for children. the parasite must be celibate. i have never known the rule to fail, at least in our sex. you will tell me, perhaps, that in the course of your career, continually inhabiting the houses of the rich, studying their manners, and supplying their wants, you cannot fail to meet some heiress; that you do not see why, this being the case, you should not marry her, to your lasting advantage.

let me beg you, with all the earnestness in my power, to put such thoughts from you altogether. they are as fatal to a parasite's success as early commercial bargaining to that of a painter. you must in the first ten years of your exercises devote yourself wholly to your great calling. by the time you have done that you will have unlearned or forgotten all that[pg 338] goes with a wealthy marriage; its heavy responsibilities will be odious to you, its sense of dependence intolerable. moreover (though you may think it a little cynical of me to say so), i must assure you that no one, even a man with your exalted ideal, can make a success of married life unless he enters it with some considerable respect for his partner. now, it is easy for the man who lays himself out for a rich marriage (and that is a business quite different from your own, and one, therefore, on which i will not enter) to respect his wife. such men are commonly possessed, or soon become possessed, of a simple and profound religion, which is the worship of money, and when they have found their inevitable choice, her substance, or that of her father, surrounds her with a halo that does not fade. you could hope for no such illusions. the very first year of your vocation (if you pursue it industriously and honestly) will destroy in you the possibility of any form of worship whatsoever. no, it will be yours to take up with dignity, and i trust in[pg 339] some permanent fashion, that position of parasite which is a proper and necessary adjunct in every wealthy family, and which, when it is once well and industriously occupied, i have never known to fail in promoting the happiness of its incumbent.

let me turn from all this and give you a few rough rules which should guide you in the earlier part of your way. you will not, i am sure, reject them lightly, coming as they do from a friend of my standing and experience. young men commonly regard the advice of their elders as something too crude to be observed. it is a fatal error. what they take for crudity is only the terseness and pressure of accumulated experience.

the first main rule is to take note of that limit of insult and contempt beyond which your master will revolt. note carefully what i say. no one, and least of all the prosperous, especially when their prosperity is combined with culture, will long tolerate flattery. a certain indifference, spiced with occasional contempt[pg 340] and not infrequent insolence, is what those of jaded appetite look for in any permanent companion. without a full knowledge of this great truth, hundreds of your compeers have fallen early upon the field, never to rise again. for if it is true that the wealthy and the refined demand much seasoning in their companionship, it is equally true that there is a fairly sharp boundary beyond which they suddenly revolt. henry bellarmine was thrust out of the congletons' house for no other reason. the same cause led to poor ralph pagberry's imprisonment, and i could quote you hosts of others.

my next rule is that you should never, under any temptation of weather, or ill health, or fatigue, permit yourself really and thoroughly to bore either your patron or any one of his guests, near relatives, or advisers. as it is not easy for a young man to know when he is boring the well-to-do, let me give you a few hints.

when the rich begin to talk one to the other in your presence without noticing you, it is a sign. when they answer what you are saying[pg 341] to them in a manner totally irrelevant, it is another. when they smile very sympathetically, but at something else in the room, not your face, it is a third. and when they give an interested exclamation, such as, "no doubt. no doubt," or, "i can well believe it," such expressions having no relation to what passed immediately before, it is a fourth.

add to these criteria certain plain rules, such as never upon any account to read aloud to the rich unless they constrain you to do so, never to sing, never to be the last to leave the room or to go to bed, and you will not sin upon this score.

let me give you a further rule, which is, to agree with the women. it is very difficult for one of our sex to remember this, because our sex loves argument and is with difficulty persuaded that contradiction and even controversy are intolerable to ladies. mould your conversation with them in such a fashion that they may hear from you either a brilliant account at second hand of themselves or a very odious[pg 342] one of their friends; but do not be so foolish as to touch upon abstract matters, and if these by any chance fall into the conversation, simply discover your companion's real or supposed position, and agree with it.

i have little more to add. be courteous to all chance guests in the house. you will tell me, justly enough, that the great majority of them will be unimportant or poor or both. but the point is that you can never tell when one of them may turn out to be, either then or in the future, important or rich or both. the rule is simple and absolute. cultivate courtesy, avoid affection; use the first upon all occasions, and forget so much as the meaning of the second.

lastly, drink wine, but drink it in moderation. i have known admirably successful parasites who were total abstainers, but only in the houses of fanatics with whom this peculiar habit was a creed. the moment these successful men passed to other employers, i was interested to note that they at once abandoned the foolish[pg 343] trick. but if it is important not to fall into the mohammedan foible of total abstinence from wine, it is, if anything, even more important never upon any occasion whatsoever to exceed in it. excess in wine is dangerous in a degree to the burglar, the thief, the money-lender, the poisoner, and many professions other than your own, but in that which you have chosen it is not dangerous, but fatal. let such excess be apparent once in the career of a young parasite, and that career is as good as done for. i urge this truth upon you most solemnly, my dear lad, by way of ending.

i wish you the best of luck, and i am your poor father's devoted friend and your own.