PREFATORY NOTE.

BY CHARLES SAYLE.

It is a singular fate that has overtaken Lord Chesterfield. One of the more important figures in the political world of his time; one of the few Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland whose name was afterward respected and admired; the first man to introduce Voltaire and Montesquieu to England; and the personal acquaintance of men like Addison and Swift, Pope and Bolingbroke; the ally of Pitt and the enemy of three Georges; though he married a king’s daughter and took up the task of the world’s greatest emperor; yet the record of his actions has passed away, and he is remembered now only by an accident.

Lord Chesterfield lives by that which he never intended for publication, while that which he published has already passed from the thoughts of men. It is one more example of the fact that our best work is that which is our heart’s production. We have Lord Chesterfield’s secret, and it bears witness to the strength of that part of him in which an intellectual anatomist has declared him to be deficient—acriticism which is but another proof of that which has been somewhere said of him, that he has had the fate to be generally misunderstood. Yet nothing is more certain than that Lord Chesterfield did not mean to be anything but inscrutable. “Dissimilation is a shield,” he used to say, “as secrecy is armor.” “A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether he really be so or not.” It is still worth while attempting to solve the problem which is offered to us by his inscrutability, not only on its own account, but because Lord Chesterfield is a representative spirit of the eighteenth century.1

Philip Dormer Stanhope did not experience in his youth either of those influences which are so important in the lives of most of us. His mother died before he could know her, and his father was one of those living nonentities whom his biographer sums up in saying that “We know little more of him than that he was an Earl of Chesterfield.” Indeed, what influence there may have been was of a negative kind, for he had, if anything, an avowed dislikefor his son. Naturally under these conditions he had to endure the slings and arrows of fortune alone and uncounselled. One domestic influence was allowed him in the mother of his mother, whose face still looks out at us from the pages of Dr. Maty, engraved by Bartolozzi from the original of Sir Peter Lely—a face sweet, intellectual, open—over the title of Gertrude Savile, Marchioness of Halifax. She it was who undertook, at any rate to some small degree, the rearing of her daughter’s child. Lord Chesterfield is rather a Savile than a Stanhope.

He heard French from a Normandy nurse in his cradle, and he received, when he grew a little older, “such a general idea of the sciences as it is a disgrace to a gentleman not to possess.” But it is not till he gets to Cambridge at the age of eighteen that we hear anything definite. He writes to his tutor of former days, whom he seems to have made a real friend, from Trinity Hall:

“I find the college where I am infinitely the best in the university; for it is the smallest, and filled with lawyers who have lived in the world, and know how to behave. Whatever may be said to the contrary, there is certainly very little debauchery in the university, especially amongst people of fashion, for a man must have the inclinations of a porter to endure it here.”

Thirty-six years later he draws for his son this picture of his college-life:

“As I make no difficulty of confessing my past errors, where I think the confession may be of use to you, I will own that, when I first went to the university, I drank and smoked, notwithstanding the aversion I had to wine and tobacco, only because I thought it genteel, and that it made me look a man.”

This touch of nature it is interesting to find in one who gave so much to the Graces. But to get at what he really did we may take the following:

“It is now, Sir, I have a great deal of business upon my hands; for I spend an hour every day in studying civil law, and as much in philosophy; and next week the blind man [Dr. Sanderson] begins his lectures upon the mathematics; so that I am now fully employed. Would you believe, too, that I read Lucian and Xenophon in Greek, which is made easy to me; for I do not take the pains to learn the grammatical rules; but the gentleman who is with me, and who is a living grammar, teaches me them all as I go along. I reserve time for playing at tennis, for I wish to have thecorpus sanumas well as themens sana: I think the one is not good for much without the other. As for anatomy, I shall not have an opportunity of learning it; for though a poor man has been hanged, the surgeon who used to perform those operations would not this year give any lectures, because, he says, ... the scholars will not come.“Methinks our affairs are in a very bad way, but as I cannot mend them, I meddle very little in politics; only I take a pleasure in going sometimes to the coffee house to see the pitched battles that are fought between the heroes of each party with inconceivable bravery, and are usually terminated by the total defeat of a few tea-cups on both sides.”2

“Methinks our affairs are in a very bad way, but as I cannot mend them, I meddle very little in politics; only I take a pleasure in going sometimes to the coffee house to see the pitched battles that are fought between the heroes of each party with inconceivable bravery, and are usually terminated by the total defeat of a few tea-cups on both sides.”2

He only stayed in Cambridge two years, and then travelled abroad to Flanders and Holland. He hadjust left The Hague when the news reached him across the water which only then was not stale—Queen Anne was dead.

It was the turning point of his career, for his great-uncle, who had influence and position at the court, obtained for him from George I. the post of Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. At the same time he obtained a pocket-borough in Cornwall, and appeared in the House of Commons. He was not yet of age, of which fact a friend in the opposition politely and quietly informed him after he had made his first speech. He was, therefore, not only debarred from voting, but liable to a fine of £500. He made a low bow, left the House, and posted straightway to Paris.

He was not there long. Advancing months soon removed the objection of age, and we find him again frequently in the House. His position on the Schism and Occasional Conformity Bills was one which he himself in after years regretted. He was still, however, swimming with the stream, and the stream led on to fortune. In 1723 he was made Captain of the Yeomen of the Guards, and two years later, when the Order of the Bath was revived, was offered by the King the red ribbon. But this he refused; and not contented with so much discourtesy, objected to others accepting it. He wrotea ballad on Sir William Morgan, who had received the same offer. The ballad came to the ears of the King; and for this, or for other reasons, Stanhope the courtier lost his place.

At this juncture two changes took place, to him of equal importance. George I. died and brought Stanhope’s former master to the throne; and Lord Chesterfield died, leaving his son his title. The latter event raised him to the House of Lords—the Hospital for Incurables, as Lord Chesterfield calls it. The former should have raised him to higher office still; but that policy of scheming for which Lord Chesterfield has become almost as famous as Macchiavelli in this case played him false. Believing that where marriage begins, love, as a necessary consequence, ends, he had paid all his attentions to the new King’s mistress, while he was still Prince of Wales, and none to his queen. And Caroline of Anspach took precaution that when George II. came to the throne the courtier’s negligence should be treated as it deserved. Thus at the age of thirty-three, while still a young man, Chesterfield was cut off from the Court: and he was already in opposition to Walpole. The King as a subterfuge offered him the post of Ambassador to Holland, and the offended courtier was thus removed. But political events were moving rapidly, and in two years’ timeit was rumored that Chesterfield would be reinstated in favor. The King, however, was still obdurate, and instead of Secretary of State he was made High Steward of the Household. Chesterfield remained in Holland, gambling and watching events. “I find treating with two hundred sovereigns of different tempers and professions,” he writes, “is as laborious as treating with one fine woman, who is at least of two hundred minds in one day.”

The game went on for a year more. Then he was by his own wish recalled. On the 2d of May of this same year he was presented with a son by Mme. Du Bouchet. “A beautiful young lady at The Hague,” says one writer, “set her wits against his and suffered the usual penalty; she fell, and this son was the result.” This son was the object of all Lord Chesterfield’s care and affection. It was to him that his now famous letters were written. The father, we find, on his return to England, in the House talking indefatigably as ever. It was the year of Walpole’s Excise Bill which was to have freed the country by changing the system of taxation from direct to indirect methods. It was a good measure and a just one. Every part of Walpole’s scheme has been since carried into effect. But then there was a general cry raised against it. The liberties of the people, it was said, were beingattacked. Chesterfield, with the rest of the Patriots, and with the country behind them, fought hard, and the Bill was dropped (11th April, 1731). Two days afterward, going up the steps of St. James’ Palace, he was stopped by a servant in the livery of the Duke of Grafton, who told him that his master must see him immediately. He drove off at once in the Duke’s carriage, and found that he was to surrender the White Staff. He demanded an audience at Court, obtained it, and was snubbed. Of course he left it immediately.

We could have wished perhaps that Lord Chesterfield’s affection and character had prevented him from falling—especially so soon after the affair at The Hague—into so unpraiseworthy an undertaking as amariage de convenance. Yet whether it was to spite his royal enemy, or because in financial difficulties he remembered the existence of the will of George I.—or even from love; at any rate in the following year he married, in lawful wedlock, Melusina de Schulenberg, whom, though merely the “niece” of the Duchess of Kendale, George the First had thought fit to create Lady Walsingham and the possessor by his will of £20,000. Scandal or truth has been very busy about the relationship of Lady Walsingham and her aunt. Posterity openly declares her to have been the daughter of that ladyby a royal sire. But good Dr. Maty, as though by the quantity of his information, wishing to override its quality, tells us that her father was none other than one “Frederick Achatz de Schulenburg, privy counsellor to the Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburg, Lord of Stehler, Bezendorff, Angern,” etc. But we may well remember Lord Chesterfield’s own words here: “It is a happy phrase that a lady has presented her husband with a son, for this does not admit anything of its parentage.” Anyhow Lord Chesterfield lost the money, for George the Second, on being shown his father’s will by the Archbishop of Canterbury, put it in his pocket and walked hastily out of the room. It never was seen again.

But to have quarrelled with George II. had one recommendation. It made him a friend of the Prince of Wales. No sooner was Lord Chesterfield married than the Prince and Princess sent round their cards, and the rest of their Court, of course, followed them. It seems to have been Lord Chesterfield’s fate to be opposed to the reigning power. His opposition now, however, was quite spontaneous.

We need not follow him through all the political entanglements of the time. Smollet said of him that he was the only man of genius employed under Walpole, and though history has hardly justified such praise, yet it certainly illustrates a truth. Wemay take his speech in 1737 against the Playhouse Bill as a sample of his oratory. I borrow from Lord Mahon:

“[The speech] contains many eloquent predictions, that, should the Bill be enacted, the ruin of liberty and the introduction of despotism would inevitably follow. Yet even Chesterfield owns that ‘he has observed of late a remarkable licentiousness in the stage. In one play very lately acted (Pasquin3) the author thought fit to represent the three great professions, religion, physic, and law as inconsistent with common sense; in another (King Charles the First4), a most tragical story was brought upon the stage—a catastrophe too recent, too melancholy, and of too solemn a nature, to be heard of anywhere but from the pulpit. How these pieces came to pass unpunished, I do not know.... The Bill, my Lords, may seem to be designed only against the stage; but to me it plainly appears to point somewhere else. It is an arrow that does but glance upon the stage: the mortal wound seems designed against the liberty of the press. By this Bill you prevent a play’s being acted, but you do not prevent it being printed. Therefore if alicense should be refused for its being acted, we may depend upon it the play will be printed. It will be printed and published, my Lords, with the refusal, in capital letters, upon the title-page. People are always fond of what is forbidden.Libri prohibitiare, in all countries, diligently and generally sought after. It will be much easier to procure a refusal than it ever was to procure a good house or a good sale; therefore we may expect that plays will be wrote on purpose to have a refusal; this will certainly procure a good house or a good sale. Thus will satires be spread and dispersed through the whole nation; and thus every man in the kingdom may, and probably will, read for sixpence what a few only could have seen acted for half a crown. We shall then be told, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed, which you will not allow to be acted? If we agree to the Bill now before us, we must, perhaps, next session, agree to a Bill for preventing any plays being printed without a license. Then satires will be wrote by way of novels, secret histories, dialogues, or under some such title; and thereupon we shall be told, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed, only because it does not bear the title of a play? Thus, my Lords, from the precedent now before us, we shall be induced, nay,we can find no reason for refusing, to lay the press under a general license, and then we may bid adieu to the liberties of Great Britain.’”5Of course it is impossible from single passages, even perhaps from single speeches, to infer that he was ever a great orator, but Horace Walpole has declared one of his speeches the finest that he had ever listened to, and, as Lord Mahon justly observes, “Horace Walpole had heard his own father; had heard Pitt; had heard Pulteney; had heard Windham; had heard Carteret; yet he declares in 1743 that the finest speech he had ever listened to was one from Lord Chesterfield.”

He was, with the other “Patriots,” in clamoring for war with Spain, pursuing Walpole with an opposition which has been characterized as “more factious and unprincipled than any that had ever disgraced English politics” (Green). In 1739, it will be remembered, Walpole bowed to the storm. The following extract fromAn Ode to a Number of Great Men, published in 1742, will show underneath its virulence who were expected to take the lead:

“But first to C[arteret] fain you’d sing,Indeed he’s nearest to the king,Yet careless how to use him,Give him, I beg, no labor’d lays,He will but promise if you praise,And laugh if you abuse him.“Then (but there’s a vast space betwixt)The new-made E[arl] of B[ath] comes next,Stiff in his popular pride:His step, his gait describe the man,They paint him better than I can,Wabbling from side to side.“Each hour a different face he wears,Now in a fury, now in tears,Now laughing, now in sorrow,Now he’ll command, and now obey,Bellows for liberty to-day,And roars for power to-morrow.“At noon the Tories had him tight,With staunchest Whigs he supped at night,Each party thought to have won him:But he himself did so divide,Shuffled and cut from side to side,That now both parties shun him.“More changes, better times this isleDemands, oh! Chesterfield, Argyll,To bleeding Britain bring ’em;Unite all hearts, appease each storm,’Tis yours such actions to perform,My pride shall be to sing ’em.”

“But first to C[arteret] fain you’d sing,

Indeed he’s nearest to the king,

Yet careless how to use him,

Give him, I beg, no labor’d lays,

He will but promise if you praise,

And laugh if you abuse him.

“Then (but there’s a vast space betwixt)The new-made E[arl] of B[ath] comes next,Stiff in his popular pride:His step, his gait describe the man,They paint him better than I can,Wabbling from side to side.

“Then (but there’s a vast space betwixt)

The new-made E[arl] of B[ath] comes next,

Stiff in his popular pride:

His step, his gait describe the man,

They paint him better than I can,

Wabbling from side to side.

“Each hour a different face he wears,Now in a fury, now in tears,Now laughing, now in sorrow,Now he’ll command, and now obey,Bellows for liberty to-day,And roars for power to-morrow.

“Each hour a different face he wears,

Now in a fury, now in tears,

Now laughing, now in sorrow,

Now he’ll command, and now obey,

Bellows for liberty to-day,

And roars for power to-morrow.

“At noon the Tories had him tight,With staunchest Whigs he supped at night,Each party thought to have won him:But he himself did so divide,Shuffled and cut from side to side,That now both parties shun him.

“At noon the Tories had him tight,

With staunchest Whigs he supped at night,

Each party thought to have won him:

But he himself did so divide,

Shuffled and cut from side to side,

That now both parties shun him.

“More changes, better times this isleDemands, oh! Chesterfield, Argyll,To bleeding Britain bring ’em;Unite all hearts, appease each storm,’Tis yours such actions to perform,My pride shall be to sing ’em.”

“More changes, better times this isle

Demands, oh! Chesterfield, Argyll,

To bleeding Britain bring ’em;

Unite all hearts, appease each storm,

’Tis yours such actions to perform,

My pride shall be to sing ’em.”

Affairs in Holland again compelled him to seek that Court, and it is thence that he was summoned to Ireland in 1744. “Make Chenevix an Irish Bishop,” he had written. “We cannot,” was the reply, “but any other condition.” “Then makeme Lord-Lieutenant,” he wrote back. They took him at his word, and Chenevix soon obtained his place.

Chesterfield had always looked forward to the post with longing. “I would rather be called the Irish Lord-Lieutenant,” he had said, “than go down to Posterity as the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.” It was, as has been truly observed, the most brilliant and useful part of his career. I shall be pardoned for quoting again from Mahon. “It was he who first, since the revolution, had made that office a post of active exertion. Only a few years before the Earl of Shrewsbury had given as a reason for accepting it, that it was a place where a man had business enough to hinder him from falling asleep, and not enough to keep him awake. Chesterfield, on the contrary, left nothing undone nor for others to do.... [He] was the first to introduce in Dublin the principle of impartial justice. It is very easy, as was formerly the case, to choose the great Protestant families as managers; to see only through their eyes, and to hear only through their ears; it is very easy, according to the modern fashion, to become the tool and the champion of Roman Catholic agitators; but to hold the balance even between both; to protect the Establishment, yet never wound religious liberty; to repress the lawlessness, yet notchill the affection of that turbulent but warm-hearted people; to be the arbiter, not the slave of parties; this is the true object worthy that a statesman should strive for, and fit only for the ablest to attain! ‘I came determined,’ writes Chesterfield many years afterward, ‘to proscribe no set of persons whatever; and determined to be governed by none. Had the Papists made any attempt to put themselves above the law, I should have taken good care to have quelled them again. It was said that my lenity to the Papists had wrought no alteration, either in their religion or political sentiments. I did not expect that it would; but surely there was no reason of cruelty toward them.’... So able were the measures of Chesterfield; so clearly did he impress upon the public mind that his moderation was not weakness, nor his clemency cowardice, but that, to quote his own words, ‘his hand should be as heavy as Cromwell’s upon them if they once forced him to raise it.’ So well did he know how to scare the timid, while conciliating the generous, that this alarming period [1745] passed over with a degree of tranquillity such as Ireland has not often displayed even in orderly and settled times. This just and wise—wise because just—administration has not failed to reward him with its meed of fame; his authority has, I find, been appealed to even bythose who, as I conceive, depart most widely from his maxims; and his name, I am assured, lives in the honored remembrance of the Irish people, as perhaps, next to Ormond, the best and worthiest in their long Viceregal line.”

We know that it was a complete success, so far as it went. But he held the post only for four years. He had held the highest offices, he had attained his highest wishes; yet his membership in the Cabinet had been made nominal rather than real, and his power was ever controlled by the hand of the King. Nowhere, in whatever direction he might care to turn his eyes along the political landscape, could he see anything but what was rotten and revolting. In 1748 he retired.

We cannot call his political career an unsuccessful one. It was probably as brilliant as it was possible for a man of his parts to enjoy. He was a good talker and an incomparable ambassador. His action in Holland had permanent influence on the politics of Europe. But indeed, if he had been freed from the opposition of a profligate Court and all that it entailed; if, as has been implied by some, he would have been a greater man had not the death of his father driven him into the House of Lords; if he would then have risen to be anything greater than a second-rate Minister: this we may doubt. Yet weare not entitled to draw an estimate of his character before we have studied its other side.

Chesterfield did not entirely give up attendance or even speaking at the House, but his energies henceforward were devoted to literary rather than political matters. One further act he performed before he left for good; he carried out three years later the reform of the English Calendar, an account of which he gives in one of his letters, and I cannot equal his words.6This was the last important public event in his life. Next year he was attacked with deafness, which incapacitated him of necessity from affairs. It does not seem that he was ever sorry to leave them. Ever and anon the old political fire breaks out, and we find him keeping an observant eye on the course of events. But he was thoroughly despondent of the prestige and ascendancy of England by the time of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. “Nation!” he had cried, “we are no longer a nation.” We find him sympathizing with Wilkes, and to the end on the side of Pitt. But about 1765 his letters begin to bear the mark of decrepitude, and his brains to be unable to cope with the situations that arose.

“I see and hear these storms from shore,suave mari magno, &c.I enjoy my own security and tranquillity, together withbetter health than I have reason to expect at my age and with my constitution: however, I feel a gradual decay, though a gentle one; and I think I shall not tumble, but slide gently to the bottom of the hill of life. When that will be I neither know nor care, for I am very weary.”

And in the following August, anticipating alike the autumn of his life and of the year, he writes:

“I feel this beginning of the autumn, which is already very cold; the leaves are withered, fall apace, and seem to intimate that I must follow them, which I shall do without reluctance, being extremely weary of this silly world.”—(Letter CCCLV.)

Yet even a year later we find him giving dinner parties to the Duke of Brunswick, and wishing that he had both the monarchs of Austria and Prussia, that they should, “together with some of their allies, take Lorraine and Alsace from France.” (Letter CCCLXIV.) For a few more years he lingered on, gardening, reading, and writing, and then in 1773, almost alone, he parted with “this silly world.”

I have omitted from this sketch of Lord Chesterfield’s political life any reference to the literary side of his character. I have, however, spoken of his friendship with Voltaire. Voltaire came to England in the same year that Chesterfield’s father died, to obtain, among other things, a publisher for theHenriade. Chesterfield and Bolingbroke at once took him up and introduced him into high places.7Voltaire never forgot him nor the services which he had rendered; and one of the most charming lights thrown upon the end of Lord Chesterfield’s career is in a letter from the old sage of Ferney to his friend of younger days, now grown old as himself. Chesterfield was always a great admirer of Voltaire’s, though by no means a blind one:

“I strongly doubt,” he writes, “whether it is permissible for a man to write against the worship and belief of his country, even if he be fully persuaded of its error, on account of the terrible trouble and disorder it might cause; but I am sure it is in no wise allowable to attack the foundations of true morality, and to break unnecessary bonds which are already too weak to keep men in the path of duty.”

But differences upon points of morality and religion did not prevent his having an immense regard for Voltaire’s genius.

There is yet the other transaction in which Lord Chesterfield was engaged, and it will probably be as long remembered against him as the letters—his ill-famed treatment of Dr. Johnson. It is too well known how Johnson came to his door, and howChesterfield, who could never be impolite, received the ill-mannered Doctor. But either the Earl objected to having the old man annoying his guests at table, or else he was not sufficiently pressing with his money; anyhow, the Doctor felt repelled, left off calling, and never sought another patron. Years afterward, when he brought out his Dictionary (1755), there was a letter prefixed to the first edition, entitled “The Blast of Doom, proclaiming that patronage shall be no more.” Boswell solicited the Doctor for many years to give him a copy, but he did not do so until 1781, and then gave it from memory:

“... Seven years, my lord, have passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work under difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect; for I never had a patron before....“Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations, where no benefit has been received; or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which providence has enabled me to do for myself.“Having carried on my work thus far, with so little obligationto any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed, though I should conclude it, if possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, my lord, your lordship’s most humble and most obedient servant,“Samuel Johnson.”

“Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations, where no benefit has been received; or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which providence has enabled me to do for myself.

“Having carried on my work thus far, with so little obligationto any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed, though I should conclude it, if possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, my lord, your lordship’s most humble and most obedient servant,

“Samuel Johnson.”

Such a transaction is but little to the praise of Lord Chesterfield, who would have posed as the Mæcenas of the eighteenth century. But there the matter rests. It is another proof of what the Earl was not, but with the slightest bend of his body might have been. He lost the Dedication to one of the greatest achievements of the time.

Let us turn to Lord Chesterfield’s son. Sainte-Beuve says of him—he was “one of those ordinary men of the world of whom it suffices to say there is nothing to be said.” But there is so much melancholy interest attaching to his history that we may well try to discern some of the features of the youth. No portrait of Philip Stanhope, so far as I am aware, has ever been given to the public, though we know from his father’s letters that one, if not more than one, was executed at Venice during his stay there, so that I am unable, as yet, to surmise anything from physical feature of form and angle. We know that his father sent him to WestminsterSchool, and that there he was slovenly and dirty. Of his intellectual qualities we hear nothing. His father’s letter to the boy, then sixteen, is subtle:

“Since you do not care to be an Assessor of the Imperial Chamber, and desire an establishment in England, what do you think of being Greek Professor at one of our Universities? It is a very pretty sinecure, and requires very little knowledge (much less than, I hope, you have already) of that language. If you do not approve of this, I am at a loss to know what else to propose to you.”

The old earl, six months later, added as follows:

“The end I propose by your education, and which (if you please) I shall certainly attain, is, to unite in you all the knowledge of a scholar, with the manners of a courtier, and to join what is seldom joined in any of my countrymen, Books and the World. They are commonly twenty years old before they have spoken to anybody above their schoolmaster, and the Fellows of their College. If they happen to have learning, it is only Greek and Latin; but not one word of Modern History or Modern Languages. Thus prepared, they go abroad, as they call it; but, in truth, they stay at home all that while; for, being very awkward, confoundedly ashamed, and not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company, at least none good, but dine and sup with one another at the tavern. Such example, I am sure you will not imitate, but carefully avoid.”

Young Stanhope went abroad with a tutor, Mr. Harte, to the chief towns, first, of Germany, followed everywhere by letters from his father, though, as his father says in one of them, “God knows whether to any purpose or not.” He never escaped from the paternal care. Wherever you are “I haveArguses with a hundred eyes,” his father told him. The boy was affectionately fond of his father, though he did not inherit his father’s epistolary taste. Yet we find him on corresponding terms with Lady Chesterfield. He was inclined to be stout, a fault which his father tells him to remedy by abstaining from Teutonic beer. He wore long hair. “I by no means agree to your cutting off your hair.” (Stanhope had suggested this as a remedy for headaches.) “Your own hair is at your age such an ornament; and a wig, however well made, such a disguise that I will upon no account whatever have you cut off your hair.” We hear that he was already within two inches of his father’s height. Boswell met him at Dresden, and has left us the following picture of him:—“Mr. Stanhope’s character has been unjustly represented as being diametrically opposed to what Lord Chesterfield wished him to be. He has been called dull, gross, awkward, but I knew him at Dresden when he was envoy to that Court, and though he could not boast of the Graces, he was, in fact, a sensible, civil, well-behaved man.” And what he was as envoy he seems to have been all his life. Lord Chesterfield sent him to Berlin first,8and Turin afterward, as there was to be found the nextfittest training in Europe at that Court. Nothing could exceed his father’s care in warning him against such dangers as usually attend Court life. Against evils of all kind he cautions and guards him. Yet there is this continual insistence on the Graces. “The Graces! The Graces!” he writes, “Remember the Graces! I would have you sacrifice to the Graces.” By no means must a man neglect the Graces if he would pursue his object, the object of getting on.

After all this schooling he went to Paris, and seems to have made a tolerabledébut. There must have been a strange measuring up of qualities when father and son met. At twenty-two Lord Chesterfield obtained for him a seat in the House, but he was never a brilliant speaker. He, like the younger Pitt, was a parliamentary experiment; but it was not given to Stanhope to succeed. In 1757 he goes to Hamburg. Two years later his health broke down, and he came to England. But feeling better again, in 1763 he obtained a post at Ratisbon, whence he was once summoned to vote in the English Parliament. Next year he went to Dresden as envoy, but there his constitution was ruined, and he set off for Berlin, and afterward for France. In the spring of 1767 he returned to Dresden, fancying himself better, but in the following year the old symptomsreturned, and he died on the 17th of October, 1768, near Avignon. It was then only that his father discovered he was the father of two children—by a secret marriage. And these, together with their mother, were thrown upon Lord Chesterfield for support. It is one of the examples of his characteristic traits that he supported and loved all three. There is no more charming pendant to the whole series of letters than a short one of three paragraphs which he wrote to the two children of his illegitimate son only two years before he left them forever.

Here my biographical notice of the three generations ends. But the lives of father and son will ever remain full of interest and suggestion to those who would study human character.

There are several portraits of the Earl of Chesterfield. The most striking, and at the same time probably the most faithful which we have, is that by Bartolozzi in theMaty Memoirs. It is clear, mobile, and benevolent. The features are very large, and the eyes of that cold meditative species which look as though they were the altar stone of that fire of wit and quaint humor which we know he possessed. It is a fine intellectual, if somewhat too receding, forehead, with protruding temples and clear-cut eyebrows; the nose prominent, and the mouth pronounced. There is a great diversity howeverin the portraits, and he seems sometimes to have been unable to hide the traits of sensuality. Yet, on the whole, it is as inscrutable as his own scheming diplomatic soul could ever have wished for its earthly representative in clay.

If we ask ourselves what is the moral of the Letters, and what is their significance, we are met with a varied reply. We have here the outpourings of a man’s soulin penetralibus. As such the book stands for its time unique. Chesterfield, when he wrote these letters, was not actuated by the criticisms of Grub Street, nor indeed any criticisms. He never for a moment dreamt that his letters would be published, and they are therefore bereft of that stifling self-consciousness which is the bane of so many writers. It is this which makes so frequently a man’s letters more living than his published works, at any rate more real. So far, of course, Lord Chesterfield shares this distinction with other writers. But his letters are noteworthy for more than this. They combine with it a complete system of education, a system which was thought out without opposition and expressed without fear. In such a case, of course, we do not look for style; but so perfect and so equal was the man that we are even told thatthese letters are not exceeded in style by anything in the language.9

Manuals, of course, there have been many. In the age gone by there had been Walsingham’s, there had been Burghley’sAdvice, there had been Sir Walter Raleigh’s; but from the time that Cicero wrote hisDe Officiisfor his own child down to these, we come upon but few of this sort. There had been Castiglione’sCortegiano, and in a few years Della Casa’sGalateo; there is Roger Ascham’sScholemaster. Chesterfield had found much to his taste and method in theMoral Reflectionsof La Rochefoucauld and theCharactersof La Bruyère. In England had just appeared Locke’sEssay on Education, and this he sends for his son to read.10In 1759 Lessing and Wieland were writing on the same subject; and in 1762 Rousseau publishedEmile. Everywhere education was, to use a common phrase, in the air. Chesterfield loved his son passionately and unremittingly. He had been much in France, and admired the French nation; and he determined that his son should combine thegood qualities of both nationalities—the ideal statesman and the ideal polished man of society. He did not forget that on Philip Stanhope would ever remain the brand of the bar sinister; but we may well believe that this was only one more daring reason for the experiment which he chose to make. He was playing for high stakes, and he was not careless of the issue. “My only ambition,” he writes in 1754, “remaining is to be the counsellor and minister of your rising ambition. Let me see my own youth revived in you; let me be your mentor, and I promise you, with your parts and knowledge you shall go far.”—(Letter CCLXXIV.)

It is seldom that we have such a continuous series of original letters as these. From the firstbadinageto his son, then five years old, who was then in Holland, in which he explains what a republic is, and how clean is Holland in comparison with London; from the times when he explains how Poetry is made, and who the Muses are, and sends his little son accounts of all the Greek and Roman legends; from the times when he writes, “Let us return to our Geography that we may amuse ourselves with maps;” and in the middle of a letter of affection, having mentioned Cicero, starts off “apropos of him,” and gives his little son his whole history, and that of Demosthenes after him; to the times whenthe boy is able to retort on him for inconsistency in calling Ovidius Ovid, and not calling Tacitus Tacit; through all his explanations of what Irony is and is not; through his pedantic “by the ways;” his definitions (paceProfessor Freeman) of Ancient and Modern History; his sarcasms and his descriptions: down to the time when his advice is about quadrille tables and ministers and kings, the series is absolutely unbroken and of unflagging interest.

They are at the best, as he says himself, “what one man of the world writes to another.” “I am not writing poetry,” he says, “but useful reflections.” “Surely it is of great use to a young man before he starts out for a country full of mazes, windings and turnings, to have at least a good map of it by some experienced traveller.” And so the old man gives us his map of life as he had seen it. It is exactly the same estimate in result as Cicero gave in theDe Oratore: “Men judge most things under the influence of either hate, or love, or desire, or anger, or grief, or joy, or hope, or fear, or error, or some other passion, than by truth, or precepts, or standard of right, or justice, or law.”

“The proper study of mankind is man,”

and if we disapprove of the morality of Cicero and his epoch no less than of Chesterfield’s, we must yetremember that in the one instance, as in the other, their precepts were the purveyors of very soundest advice. His standard is, as has been already pointed out, that of the eighteenth century. “Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.” “It is an active, cheerful, seducing good breeding which must gain you the good-will and first sentiments of the men and affections of the women. You must carefully watch and attend to their passions, their tastes, their little humors and weaknesses, andaller au devant.” “Make love to the most impertinent beauty that you meet with, and be gallant with all the rest.”

It would be a not uninteresting task to see how many of his moral sentiments would stand fire at the present day. We know all the facts of his life, and we have here his opinions on nearly every matter. His opinions are as concise as they are outspoken. “The best of us have had our bad sides, and it is as imprudent as it is ill-bred to exhibit them,”11he says. It is this absence of ceremony which makes him so living and real. Even in Dr. Johnson’s time the merit as well as the demerit of this series of letters had been settled for the standard of that day. “Take out the immorality,” said theworthy Doctor, “and it should be put into the hands of every young gentleman.”

The training to which he subjected his son was in many ways admirable. Rise regularly, however late o’ nights; work all the morning; take exercise in the afternoon; and see good company in the evening. The impressing of this advice upon his son has left us in the possession of one of the most charming examples of Lord Chesterfield’s most playful style.—(Letter CLXI.)

Lord Chesterfield was all for modern to the disadvantage of a classical education. Learn all the modern history and modern languages you can, and if at the same time you can throw in a little Latin and Greek, so much the better for you. Roman history study as much as you will, for of all ancient histories it is the most instructive, and furnishes most examples of virtue, wisdom, and courage. History is to be studied morally, he says, but notonlyso.

When we turn to his judgment of the ancients we are considerably startled. He seems to have preferred Voltaire’sHenriadeto any epic. “Judge whether,” he writes, “I can read all Homer throughtout de suite. I admire his beauties; but, to tell you the truth, when he slumbers I sleep. Virgil, I confess, is all sense, and therefore I like him better thanhis model; but he is often languid, especially in his five or six last books, during which I am obliged to take a good deal of snuff....”

If his views on Milton should be known, he adds, he would be abused by every tasteless pedant and every solid divine in England. His criticism of Dante it will be best for the reader to discover.

The weightier questions and the weightiest he pushed altogether aside. “I don’t speak of religion,” he writes. “I am not in a position to do so—the excellent Mr. Harte will do that.” At any rate, Chesterfield knew his own ground. Incidentally we find his position cropping up. “The reason of every man is, or ought to be, his guide; and I should have as much right to expect every man to be of my height and temperament as to wish that he should reason precisely as I do.” It was the doctrine of the French school that he had adopted, with something of a quietism of his own. “Let them enjoy quietly their errors,” he says somewhere, “both in taste and religion.”12It would be interesting to compare in these matters the relative positions of Chesterfield and Bolingbroke.

Of the movement headed by Wesley, as we have seen earlier in his career, Chesterfield seems to havetaken as little heed as the younger Pliny did of the first holders of Wesley’s faith.

It is a harder and more delicate question which we are met with in discussing Lord Chesterfield’s position with regard to morality. Johnson’s criticism of theLetters, that “they taught the morals of a courtesan and manners of a dancing master,” even though epigrammatic, yet bears within it traces of the sting which the lexicologist felt about the matter of the Dedication. Of the Earl’s opinions we have seen something in former extracts and in his own life. He speaks quite openly—“I wish to speak as one man of pleasure does to another.” “A polite arrangement,” he says elsewhere, “becomes a gallant man.” Anything disgraceful or impolite he will not stand.

Yet as a human Picciola does Lord Chesterfield guard the soul of his son within its prison-house of life. He never speaks, however, to his sonpulpitically. It is ever as a wise counsellor: and his tendency is always the same.

It is suggestive of much to turn aside from thepetitessesof these instructions to the thoughts which were occupying the brain of the author ofEmiliusabout the same time. From very much the same foundations and the same materials how different is the result! In the one we breathe the fresh airof the country, of the rustic home and the carpenter’s shop: in the other we are stifled by the perfumes of the court-room and suffocated by tight lacing. In the one we are never for a moment to wear a mask: in the other we are never for a moment to move without it. Yet, though the one is built up of social theories by an enthusiastic dreamer, and the other is a cold, practical experiment by a man of the world, and “an imperfect man of action, whom politics had made a perfect moralist,” there is the same verdict of failure to be pronounced upon them both. Voltaire said ofEmiliusthat it was a stupid romance, but admitted that it contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. Lord Chesterfield’s was no romance, but its pages deserve perhaps as careful treatment. “It is a rich book,” says Sainte-Beuve; “one cannot read a page without finding some happy observation worthy of being mentioned.” Yet, as a system of education, it is blasted with the foul air of the charnel-house.

If we look at the result we must pronounce his experiment no less a failure. The odds were too heavy in the first instance, and a man of less energy and stability than Lord Chesterfield would not have dared to have played at such high stakes. He oughtto have considered what an infliction he was casting upon his son, and respected the feelings of others rather than his own ambition. He has reaped the harvest which he had sown. When Philip Stanhope tried to obtain an appointment at the embassy in Brussels the Marquis de Botta made so much to do on the ground of his illegitimacy that his claim was disallowed. When there was a chance of his receiving an appointment at Venice, the king objected on the same grounds. Not one word of displeasure is handed down to us in these familiar letters, but we know that both felt it deeply and never forgave. But even Philip Stanhope himself must have disappointed his father. When his widow, with her two children, walked up the hall of Chesterfield House, where the Earl sat alone in solitary childless grandeur, it must have seemed a strange answer to the question which he had asked Time some thirty-eight years before. He may well have grown weary of sitting at the table at which he had staked his all and lost.

Vivacious, sincere, plain, and liberal-minded, his memory may well pass down to posterity as that of a great man with mean aspirations. That ambition was not wanting in his composition is true, and it was this which encompassed his ruin. He reminds us of the melancholy structure of S. Petronio atBologna, begun in emulation of the Florentine Duomo by the Bolognese. One sees the outline of the structure which was to have been raised, but for two centuries it has stood uncompleted, a monument to her greatness and her shame.

Careless of the interests of those around him; careless and callous of what was demanded of man by men; careless of speech so long as he could create abon motor a well-balanced phrase, Lord Chesterfield’s life is characteristic of his time.

Chesterfield, if we may make one more comparison, is like one of those great trees that we see upon the banks of a river, which, while drawing its nurture half from its native soil and the stream by its side, and half from the sky above it, has had that very soil worn away by the current of the stream, so that the tree, by its own natural weight and under the force of adverse winds and circumstance, has bowed itself over toward the waves, losing its natural height and grandeur for ever.

Dead to the higher interests of humanity; dead to the deeper influences which keep us sober and thoughtful and earnest; dead, again, to any ideal save such as might serve his own designs:—such was the man who deemed himself called upon, or fitted, to perform the sacred office of Education to his darling child.

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