Letters, Sentences and Maxims

Part 1

(Philip Dormer Stanhope).]

LETTERS, SENTENCES AND MAXIMS

By LORD CHESTERFIELD

WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY CHARLES SAYLE AND A CRITICAL ESSAY BY C. A. SAINTE-BEUVE, DE L’ACADEMIE FRANCAISE

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Castalian spring.”

POPE.

A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

“Viewed as compositions, they appear almost unrivalled for a serious epistolary style; clear, elegant, and terse, never straining at effect, and yet never hurried into carelessness.”--LORD MAHON, 1845.

“In point of style, a finished classical work; they contain instructions for the conduct of life that will never be obsolete. Instinct with the most consummate good sense and knowledge of life and business, and certainly nothing can be more attractive than the style in which they are set before their readers.”--Quarterly Review, vol. lxxvi., 1845.

“Lord Chesterfield’s letters are, I will venture to say, masterpieces of good taste, good writing, and good sense.”--JOHN WILSON CROKER, 1846.

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--a criticism 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.

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 dislike for 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 the corpus sanum as well as the mens 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.”

He only stayed in Cambridge two years, and then travelled abroad to Flanders and Holland. He had just 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 wrote a 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’ time it 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.”

Continue reading Letters, Sentences and Maxims free in the Wunder reader →