Letters, sentences and maxims

by Earl of Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield

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.

V.

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 ought to 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 at Bologna, 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 a bon mot or 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.