But you always know how your Samuel looks, and when he wears an unbecoming necktie you grieve and nag and give him no peace. Perhaps it were well, after all, if a bit of soft-soap could be bottled up during courting-time and labelled "To be used after marriage."
When men soft-soap men it is in devious ways. One of the most subtle, if you are a little man and you wish to flatter a great man, is to disagree with him. He is much impressed by your independence, and he is sorry for you too, because you own up to your awful presumption, and by inference you can soft-soap him up and down just as they whitewash a wooden fence. And he says he likes your independence, and he shakes hands with you and knows you the next time you meet, and calls you "My independent young friend," and invites you to luncheon. Now, had you agreed with every word he said you would have been only one of the usual job-lot of admirers, and he wouldn't have remembered you from Adam.
Of course you have to administer disagreement with great caution, because when a man reaches the highest eminence there is nothing that makes him so mad as contradiction. The first sign of real greatness shows itself when you decline to be contradicted. If, as it is stated, Lord Beaconsfield never contradicted his Queen, then did he well deserve her most loyal friendship. The bliss of never being contradicted! for that alone it is worth being a queen; but of course that is essentially a royal prerogative. It is said that there are people who by the exercise of this great negative gift have worked their way up from being quite modest members of society until they are now shining social lights.
Tell a man how great he is and will he come to tea? for there are crowds dying to meet him; why, of course he will come. Who has ever yet met a really celebrated recluse. One has heaps of recluses who professed to like solitude, but only in a crowd, but there was never one, however famous, who chose to exile himself in a desert island without the morning paper.
It is said of a famous poet, whose footsteps were much dogged by the enterprising tourist, that he complained bitterly and wrathfully of his inability to have even his own privacy; but that his bitterness and wrath were as nothing to what he felt when the blameless tripper was discovered to be paying no attention to him whatever. One wonders if this innocent form of soft-soap is out of fashion, or are the poets less great? How many pious pilgrims wandered to the old Colonial house in Cambridge, America, where Longfellow lived, and looked with awe at his front windows. Did not pilgrims by the car-load go to Concord to catch a glimpse of the great Emerson, while they leaned reverently across the philosopher's white picket-fence?