Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (100 books to read txt) 📕

a holiday and that he proposed to bring him; Mrs. Aldwinkle replied that she would be delighted to have him. There they were.

Mr. Falx paused for a moment before answering Mr. Cardan’s question. He turned his bright dark eyes round the table, as though collecting everybody’s attention; then spoke in the penetrating musical voice that had stirred so many audiences to enthusiasm. “Twentieth-century rulers,” he said, “respect the educated democracy too much to try to bamboozle it and keep it falsely contented by mere shows. Democracies demand reason.”

“Oh, come,” protested Mr. Cardan. “What about Mr. Bryan’s agitation against Evolution?”

“Moreover,” Mr. Falx went on, ignoring the point, “we in the twentieth century have outgrown that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps we have,” said Mr. Cardan. “Though I can’t imagine how we should have. Opinions change, of course, but the love of a show isn’t an opinion. It’s founded on something deeper, something which has no business to change.” Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It reminds me,” he went on after a little pause, “of another, similarly deep-rooted change that I can never account for: the change in our susceptibility to flattery. It’s impossible to read any ancient moralist without finding copious warnings against flatterers. ‘A flattering mouth worketh ruin’⁠—it’s in the Bible. And the reward of the flatterer is also specified there. ‘He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail’⁠—though one would have thought that the vicariousness of the threatened punishment rendered it a little less formidable. But at any rate, in ancient days the great and the prosperous seem to have been fairly at the mercy of flatterers. And they laid it on so thick, they did their job, from all accounts, so extremely coarsely! Can it be that the educated plutocracy of those days was really taken in by that sort of thing? It wouldn’t be now. The flattery would have to be a great deal more subtle nowadays to produce the same effect. Moreover, I never find in the works of the modern moralists any warnings against flatterers. There’s been some sort of change; though how it has come about, I really don’t quite know.”

“Perhaps there has been a moral progress,” suggested Mr. Falx.

Lord Hovenden turned his eyes from Mr. Falx’s face, on which, while he was speaking, they had been reverently fixed, and smiled at Mr. Cardan with an air of inquiring triumph that seemed to ask whether he had any answer to make to that.

“Perhaps,” repeated Mr. Cardan, rather dubiously.

Calamy suggested another reason. “It’s surely due,” he said, “to the change in the position of the great and the prosperous. In the past they regarded themselves and were regarded by others as being what they were by divine right. Consequently, the grossest flattery seemed to them only their due. But now the right to be a prince or a millionaire seems a little less divine than it did. Flattery which once seemed only an expression of proper respect now sounds excessive; and what in the past was felt to be almost sincere is now regarded as ironical.”

“I think you may be right,” said Mr. Cardan. “One result, at any rate, of this slump in flattery has been a great alteration in the technique of the parasite.”

“Has the technique of the parasite ever altered?” asked Mr. Falx. Lord Hovenden passed on his question to Mr. Cardan in an interrogating smile. “Hasn’t he always been the same⁠—living on the labours of society without contributing to the common stock?”

“We are speaking of different sorts of parasites,” Mr. Cardan explained, twinkling genially at the minor prophet. “Your parasites are the idle rich; mine are the idle poor who live on the idle rich. Big fleas have little fleas; I was referring to the tapeworms of tapeworms. A most interesting class, I assure you; and one that has never really had its due from the natural historians of humanity. True, there’s Lucian’s great work on the art of being a parasite, and a very fine work too; but a little out of date, particularly where flattery is concerned. Better than Lucian is Diderot. But the Neveu de Rameau deals with only a single type of parasite, and that not the most successful or the most worthy of imitation. Mr. Skimpole in Bleak House isn’t bad. But he lacks subtlety; he’s not a perfect model for the budding tapeworm. The fact is that no writer, so far as I’m aware, has really gone into the question of parasites. I feel their remissness,” Mr. Cardan added, twinkling first at Mrs. Aldwinkle, then round the table at her guests, “almost as a personal affront. Professing as I do⁠—or perhaps trying to profess would be a more accurate description⁠—the parasitical mystery, I regard this conspiracy of silence as most insulting.”

“How absurd you are,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. The complacent references to his own moral defects and weaknesses were frequent in Mr. Cardan’s conversation. To disarm criticism by himself forestalling it, to shock and embarrass those susceptible of embarrassment, to air his own freedom from the common prejudices by lightly owning to defects which others would desire to conceal⁠—it was to achieve these ends that Mr. Cardan so cheerfully gave himself away. “Absurd!” Mrs. Aldwinkle repeated.

Mr. Cardan shook his head. “Not at all absurd,” he said. “I’m only telling the truth. For alas, it is true that I’ve never really been a successful parasite. I could have been a pretty effective flatterer; but unfortunately I happen to live in an age when flattery doesn’t work. I might have made a tolerably good buffoon, if I were a little stupider and a little more high-spirited. But even if I could have been a buffoon, I should certainly have thought twice before taking up that branch of parasitism. It’s dangerous being a court fool, it’s most precarious. You may please for a time; but in the end you either bore or offend your patrons. Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau is the greatest literary specimen of the type; you know what a wretched sort of life he led. No, your permanently successful parasite, at any rate in