Here are three types that can be traced back to antiquity, and are familiar in early modern historical and literary writing, but disappear around 1900: the flatterer, the inheritance-chaser, and the miser.
The top flatterer is a creature of the royal court, but anyone with some modicum of power or wealth can attract flatterers. They are, to use the term of the great court memorialist Saint-Simon, who despised them, although he too sometimes played their game, rampant, “crawling”. They abase themselves without limits to magnify their patrons. They are definitionally cynical, both because they live by hypocrisy—one is not a flatterer if one believes the object of one’s effusions deserves them—and because they view their targets as vain and foolish enough not to find out that hypocrisy.
The flatterer, the inheritance-chaser, and the miser disappear around 1900.
The inheritance-chaser is a sub-species of the flatterer, in that he too throws himself into gaining the good graces of his prey. But he has the added grisly characteristic of counting not on the munificence of a living benefactor, but on that benefactor’s death. His relationship with the testator amounts to wanting the old man dead as soon as possible after he has extracted by hook or by crook that crucial line naming him in the will.
The miser is a sort of counterweight to the flatterer and inheritance-chaser, in that he has acquired the wealth they covet, and has committed himself body and soul to devoting none of that wealth to the munificence that would enrich parasites, or indeed anyone else. The miser’s refusal to spend or give extends notoriously to his family and to his own self: he and his family dress in rags and feed off stale bread.
These three types are morally repulsive figures, but they are also pathetic. They are utterly disenfranchised: the flatterer and inheritance-chaser are the slaves of their targeted benefactors, while the miser is the slave of the treasure he has amassed. All three are men so intent on winning against the hard odds of life, that they have lost the dignity and freedom that makes life worth living.
The three types are morally repulsive figures, but they are also pathetic.
These three deformed figures have disappeared in the industrial age. This is due firstly to the vast prosperity that industry has spread through every rank of society, secondly to the almost total disappearance of a “gentlemanly” class that aspired to live without working, and lastly to the replacement of interpersonal with institutional hierarchies of power. As the fear of haunting poverty disappeared, the temptations that turned men into misers lost much of their force. So too did the urgency of finding a benefactor, living or dead. At the same time, living off a patron became too shameful to contemplate as “get a job” turned into the ordinary exhortation for anyone who could not live off their own means. Accordingly the rich no longer saw it as their role to be the personal patrons of a herd of hangers-on. The task of supporting those who couldn’t or wouldn’t work was taken on by the welfare state, which was designed to be a faceless, procedure-governed bureaucracy, immune to flattery.
It is hard to regret the disappearance of the flatterer, the inheritance-chaser and the miser. When we bemoan the coldness of the industrial age, we would do well to recall how a warmer climate also fed these unwholesome fungi. But we would also do well to remember that our new models of power and wealth are always partly mythical. To an extent, we no longer have these old types, not because they are truly gone without trace, but because we no longer believe in them. Surely we have not truly eliminated all that once sustained them. Personal relations have not been, and could never be, entirely replaced by procedural ones, and wealth and power have not lost all of their sheen. Crawling flattery can still get a man a long way in the world, and the love of money can still eat away at his soul. Vanity and greed will hardly be slain by a belief that they have been channelled into beneficent engines of prosperity.
