Charm is the ability to elicit the answer yes before the question is asked. So said Jean Cocteau. But it’s an attribute that has connotations that are not always seen as an unalloyed virtue. Evelyn Waugh picked out its flaws. “Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”
But to experience charm is one of life’s greatest pleasures and the company of those who practice it is something you anticipate with joy. They make you feel your best: they bring out your wit and your laughter and you skip home. But it’s the hardest of attributes to bottle as it depends on human chemistry - and that is almost impossible to describe. You know it when you feel it.
Charles James Fox, who dominated, with his opponent, William Pitt the turn of the 18th century British politics was a gambler, politician and roue. Those of the more Roundhead persuasion were appalled that someone as dissolute could be so influential. When one of those asked Pitt, himself no cavalier, how this could be, he replied, ‘Ah, but you have never been in the presence of the master’. Fox had charm and was loved by everyone. But you have to ask whether Waugh’s observation might have a smidgen of truth. Would Fox have been Prime Minister if his charm had been replaced by diligence. Probably - but the world would have been a sadder and greyer place for his contemporaries.
