IV.
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 soul in 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 that these 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’s Advice, there had been Sir Walter Raleigh’s; but from the time that Cicero wrote his De Officiis for his own child down to these, we come upon but few of this sort. There had been Castiglione’s Cortegiano, and in a few years Della Casa’s Galateo; there is Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster. Chesterfield had found much to his taste and method in the Moral Reflections of La Rochefoucauld and the Characters of La Bruyère. In England had just appeared Locke’s Essay on Education, and this he sends for his son to read.[10] In 1759 Lessing and Wieland were writing on the same subject; and in 1762 Rousseau published Emile. 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 the good 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 first badinage to 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 when the 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 (pace Professor 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 the De 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 yet remember 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, and aller 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,”[11] he 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 the worthy 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 not only so.
When we turn to his judgment of the ancients we are considerably startled. He seems to have preferred Voltaire’s Henriade to any epic. “Judge whether,” he writes, “I can read all Homer through tout 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 than his 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.”[12] It 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 have taken 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 the Letters, 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 son pulpitically. It is ever as a wise counsellor: and his tendency is always the same.
It is suggestive of much to turn aside from the petitesses of these instructions to the thoughts which were occupying the brain of the author of Emilius about 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 air of 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 of Emilius that 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.