[From Fraser's Magazine.]
DIPLOMACY—LORD CHESTERFIELD.
The qualifications required for the diplomatic career, we need hardly say, are many and various. To a perfect knowledge of history and the law of nations should be united a knowledge of the privileges and duties of diplomatic agents, an acquaintance with the conduct and management of negotiations, the physical and moral statistics, the political, military, and social history of the powers with which the embasssador's nation comes into most frequent intercommunication. To this varied knowledge, it is needless to state, the negotiator should join moderation, dexterity, temper, and tact. An embassador should be a man of learning and a man of the world; a man of books and a man of men, a man of the drawing-room and a man of the counting-house; a preux chevalieur, and a man of labor and of business. He should possess quick faculties, active powers of observation, and that which military men call the coup d'œil. He should be of urbane, pleasant, and affable manners; of cheerful temper, of good humor, and of good sense. He should know when and where to yield, to retreat, or to advance; when to press his suit strongly, or when merely gently to insinuate it indirectly, and, as it were, by inuendo. He should know how to unbend and how to uphold his dignity, or rather the dignity of his sovereign; for it his business, in whatever quarter of the world he may be placed, to maintain the rights and dignities of his sovereign with vigor and effect. It is the union of these diverse, and yet not repugnant qualities, that gives to an embassador prestige, ascendency, and power over the minds of others, that acquires for him that reputation of wisdom, straightforwardness, and sagacity, which is the rarest and most valuable gift of a statesman. One part of the science of diplomacy may be, by even a dull man, mastered without any wonderful difficulties. It is that positive, fundamental, and juridical portion of the study which may be found in books, in treatises; in the history of treaties and of wars; in treatises on international law; in memoirs, letters, and negotiations of embassadors; in historical and statistical works concerning the states of Europe, the balance of power, and the science of politics generally.
But the abstract, hypothetical, and variable portions of the craft—or, if you will, of the science—depending on ten thousand varying and variable circumstances—depending on persons, passions, fancies, whims; caprices royal, national, parliamentary, and personal, is above theory, and beyond the reach of books; and can only be learned by experience, by practice, and by the most perfect and intuitive tact. The traditional political maxims, the character of the loading sovereigns, statesmen, and public men in any given court, as well as the conduct of negotiations, may be acquired by study, by observation, by a residence as secretary, as attaché; but who, unless a man of real genius for his art—who, unless a man of real ability and talent, shall seize on, fix, and turn to his purpose, the ever-mobile, the ever-varying phases of courts, of camps, of councils, of senators, of parliaments, and of public bodies? No doubt there are certain great cardinal and leading principles with which the mind of every aspirant should be stored. But the mere knowledge of principles, and of the history of the science can never alone make a great embassador, any more than the reading of treatises on the art of war can make a great commander.
An embassador at a first-rate court should, indeed, be the minister of foreign affairs for his country on a small scale; and we know well enough that the duties devolving on a minister for foreign affairs are grave, are delicate, are all important.
The functions appertaining to the ministry for foreign affairs have been in England during the last two years, and certainly also were from 1793 to 1815, the most important and the most difficult connected with the public administration. A man to fill such a post properly, requires not merely elevation and uprightness of character, but experience, tried discretion, the highest capacity, the most extensive and varied knowledge and accomplishments. Yet how few embassadors (we can scarcely name one) have been in our day, or, indeed, for the last century, elevated into Principal Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs! Such promotions in France have been matters of every-day occurrence since and previous to 1792. Dumouriez, Talleyrand, Reinhard, Champagny, Maret, Bignon, Montmorency, Chauteaubriand, Polignac, Sebastiani, De Broglie, Guizot, Soult, had all been embassadors before they were elevated into the higher, the more responsible, and the more onerous office. In England, since the accession of George I., we can scarcely cite, speaking off-hand, above four instances.
In 1716 there was Paul Methuen, who had been embassador to Portugal in the reign of Queen Anne, named Secretary of State, for a short time, in the absence of Earl Stanhope; there was Philip Dormer, earl of Chesterfield, in 1746; there was John, duke of Bedford, who succeeded Lord Chesterfield in 1748, and who had previously been embassador to Paris; and there was Sir Thomas Robinson in 1754, who had been an embassador to Vienna. In our own day there is scarcely an instance. For though George Canning was embassador for a short time to Lisbon, and the Marquis of Wellesley to Spain; though the Duke of Wellington was embassador to Paris, was charged with a special mission to Russia, was plenipotentiary at Verona, yet none of these noblemen and gentlemen ever regularly belonged to the diplomatic corps. The most illustrious and striking instance of an embassador raised into a Secretary of State is the case of Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield The character of no man within a century and a half has been so misrepresented and misunderstood. Lord John Russell, in the Bedford Correspondence, which he edited, charges this nobleman with conducting the French nobility to the guillotine and to emigration. But Lord Chesterfield died on the 24th March, 1773, sixteen years before 1789, and nineteen years before 1792. To any man of reading and research—to any man of a decent acquaintance with literature, it is unnecessary now to vindicate the character of the Earl of Chesterfield. He was unequaled in his time for the solidity and variety of his attainments; for the brilliancy of his wit; for the graces of his conversation, and the polish of his style. His embassy to Holland marks his skill, his dexterity, and his address, as an able negotiator; and his administration of Ireland indicates his integrity, his vigilance, and his sound policy as a statesman and as a politician. He was at once the most accomplished, the most learned, and the most far-seeing of the men of his day; and in our own, these is not one public man to compare with him. He foresaw and foretold, in 1756, that French Revolution whose outbreak he did not live to witness. In 1744 he was admitted into the cabinet, on his own terms, and was soon after intrusted with a second embassy to Holland, in which his skill and dexterity were universally admitted. He was not more remarkable for a quick insight into the temper of others, than for a command of his own. In history, in literature, in foreign languages, he was equally a proficient. With classical literature he had been from his boyhood familiar. He wrote Latin prose with correctness, ease, and purity; and spoke that tongue with a fluency and facility of the rarest among Englishmen, and not very common even among foreigners. In the House of Lords his speeches were more admired and extolled than any others of the day. Horace Walpole had heard his own father, had heard Pitt, had heard Pulteney, had heard Wyndham, had heard Carteret; yet he in 1743 declared, as is recorded by Lord Mahon, that the finest speech he had ever listened to was one from Chesterfield.
For the diplomatic career, Chesterfield prepared himself in a manner not often practiced in his own, and never practiced by Englishmen in our day. Not content, as an undergraduate of Cambridge, with assiduously attending a course of lectures on civil law at Trinity Hall, he applied—as the laws and customs of other countries, and the general law of Europe, were not comprehended in that course—to Vitriarius, a celebrated professor of the University of Leyden and, at the recommendation of the professor, took into his house a gentleman qualified to instruct him. Instead of pirouetting it in the coulisses of the opera, or in the Redouten Saal of Vienna, instead of graduating at the Jardin Mabille, or the Salle Ventadour, instead of breakfasting at the Café Anglais, instead of dining at the Café de Paris, or swallowing his ices, after the Italiens or Académie Royale, at Tortoni's, instead of attending a funcion or bull-fight at Madrid, or spending his mornings and evenings at Jägers's Unter den Linden at Berlin, instead of swallowing Beaune for a bet against Russian Boyars at Petersburgh or Moscow, at Andrieux's French Restaurant, or spending his nights at the San Carlos at Naples, or the Scala at Milan, Chesterfield, eschewing prima donnas, and the delights of French cookery, and the charms of French vaudevilles, set himself down in the town, and in the university in which Joseph Scaliger was a professor, and from whence those famous Elzevir editions of classical works issued, to learn the public law of Europe. These are the arts by which to attain the eminence of a Walsingham and a Burghley, of a D'Ossat and a Jeannin, of a Temple and a De Witt.
Qui cupit optatam cursu contingere metam,
Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit.