Part 27

54. One of the greatest difficulties with princes is in the being often obliged, in order to serve them, to give advice, the true reasons of which we dare not mention.

55. The saying things which we foresee will not be pleasing, can only be softened by the greatest appearance of sincerity.

56. We ought never to trifle with favor. If real, we should hastily seize the advantage; if pretended, avoid the allurement.

57. It is very inconsequent to enter into engagements upon suppositions we think impossible, and yet it is very usual.

58. The generality of mankind pay less attention to arguments urged against their opinion, than to such as may engage the disputant to adopt their own.

59. In times of faction and intrigue, whatever appears inert is reckoned mysterious by those who are not accustomed to affairs of moment.

60. It is never allowable in an inferior to equal himself in words to a superior, although he may rival him in actions.

61. Every man whom chance alone has, by some accident, made a public character, hardly ever fails of becoming, in a short time, a ridiculous private one.

62. The greatest imperfection of men is the complacency with which they are willing to think others not free from faults, of which they are themselves conscious.

63. Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with them hereafter.

64. In the management of important business, all turn to raillery must be more carefully avoided than in any other.

65. In momentous transactions, words cannot be sufficiently weighed.

66. The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune.

67. Whoever assembles the multitude will raise commotions.

LORD CHESTERFIELD’S REMARKS UPON THE FOREGOING MAXIMS.

I have taken the trouble of extracting and collecting, for your use, the foregoing Political Maxims of the Cardinal de Retz, in his Memoirs. They are not aphorisms of his invention, but the true and just observations of his own experience, in the course of great business. My own experience attests the truth of them all. Read them over with attention as here above, and then read with the same attention, and tout de suite, the Memoirs, where you will find the facts and characters from whence those observations are drawn, or to which they are applied; and they will reciprocally help to fix each other in your mind. I hardly know any book so necessary for a young man to read and remember. You will there find how great business is really carried on; very differently from what people, who have never been concerned in it, imagine. You will there see what courts and courtiers really are, and observe that they are neither so good as they should be, nor so bad as they are thought by most people. The court poet, and the sullen, cloistered pedant, are equally mistaken in their notions, or at least in the accounts they give us of them. You will observe the coolness in general, the perfidy in some cases, and the truth in a very few, of court friendships. This will teach you the prudence of a general distrust, and the imprudence of making no exception to that rule, upon good and tried grounds. You will see the utility of good breeding toward one’s greatest enemies, and the high imprudence and folly of either insulting or injurious expressions.

FOOTNOTES

The greatest English writer of the present day thus sums up the eighteenth century:--“An age of which Hoadly was the bishop, and Walpole the minister, and Pope the poet, and Chesterfield the wit, and Tillotson the ruling doctor.”--Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, i. 388.

For another, very different, view of the life and studies at Cambridge at the time, see the Life of Ambrose Bonwicke (1694-1714).

Chesterfield says he had been accustomed to read and translate the great masterpieces to improve and form his style. His indebtedness to Milton in his Areopagitica in the above passage is obvious.

See Letter CCXV., also CCXII.

It is just possible, though I have nowhere seen it affirmed, that Voltaire and Chesterfield may have met, still earlier, in Holland. For in 1713 they were both there. Their attainments there were all but parallel, Voltaire succumbing to a fatal passion in 1713, which did not, to our knowledge, overtake Chesterfield till his second visit in 1729.

He must just have escaped traveling from Leipzig to Berlin with Lessing. Both took the journey in February, 1749.

For his fine sense of the quality of words witness: “An unharmonious and rugged period at this time shocks my ears, and I, like all the rest of the world, will willingly exchange and give up some degree of rough sense for a good degree of pleasing sound.”

Characteristically, no mention is made of Shaftesbury nor of Hutcheson.

Cf. Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Every Man’s Folly ought to be his greatest secret.”--(Instructions to his Son.)

“A wise Atheist (if such a thing there is) would, for his own interest and character in the world, pretend to some religion.”--Letter CLXXX.

In this Essay, by the late M. Sainte-Beuve, nothing has been altered, although, in one or two places, even his critical acuteness seems to have missed its point.