The Letters of Lord Chesterfield
The Letters of Lord Chesterfield. Edited by Beauty Bohr!, ' (Eyre and Spottiswoode. £12 12s;)
Ix good Victoria's golden days, whosoever ventured to hold a high opinion of the Chesterfield of the Letterx thereby, set himself impiously against the Orthodoxy, thus expressed With his customary vigour by Macaulay : he stands much laser in the CSOMMilln. of posterity than he would have if .done the letters had never been published. Bearing in mind that we arc po4crity, let us consider' this drignia. To begin with, but for the Letters, Chesterfield would stand -generally nowhere ; without them, the -world would have forgotten hint; it was just the Letters that rescued him from oblivion, since his diplomatic and political activities- alone" were not of that conspicuous order that keeps a man's public memory green. The Letters, a literary curiosity, arc like a buoy floating visibly on the waves of time, beneath which lie submerged all things of only teniporary. interest. Anyhow, the Letters were published, and Chesterfield stands. Is it then true, in the next place, that they lower him in our estimation ? Or is it not rather the truth that they do nothing of the kind Look at them: Here you have a man who; having laid it upon I • self to educate his natural son, steadily pursues that object day by day, year after 'year; with 'con- tinuous, unflagging resolution : nothing deters him : the infinite trouble he takes; in great things or small, to be of Use to thiS boy of his is literally phenomenal : it wells up froin an inexhaustible source. Why, you may ransack history and literature in vain to find such another father. Here you have the rarest thing in the world, unalterable unkellish affection ; motherlike, yet masculine; paradoXical. And if the effort ultimately failed, it was Mr fault of the father'S the difficulty lay in the son. The material was refractory, as, according to some philoSophers, the Creator fund when, in Cudworth's quaint phraseology, he went about moliminously " to make a work]. Paul Stanhope did not take the mould ; there were flaws in his clay. That curious and acute literary botanist, Philarete Chasles, caustically observes that the correspondence was a desperate endeavour to transform nature. Chesterfield strove to educe a kind of superlative Marshal Richelieu, as he is depicted in the pre- Revolutionary romances of " Alexander the Great : Paul had ineradicable humbler ambitions. He married a plebe' eryptogamously, and presently died, leaving the paternal artist with all his love's labour lost. It was really tragic, the death of his hopes : as with Sisyphus, the " shameless stone " came tumbling down, crushing him in its fall : Othello's occupation gone ! There is something magnificent, Roman, in the stoical serenity with which the old man met the blow, but he did not long survive it. Does all that lower hint in our estimation ? If so, there is soling! a i aa g wrong with ourselves. There is the record—in the Letters, which are not merely, as those of Sevigne, Mary Montagu, Walpole, du Deffand and others, just letters, but something more : they are a treatise on education, not ideal like Telemachus or. Emile, but an actual experiment in flesh and blood—ceperhaentuor in corpore dilecto—to produce a second self, another more perfect Chesterfield, purged of its errors, a finished man of the world on the old aristocratic model—manners nwkyth man. An ideal alien to our democratic or bourgeois, pro- gressive, we had almost written, Macaulay world. And in the process, what care, what patience, what forethought. what shrewdness, what artistry, what wit ! But the cynical morality ? Well, an attentive reader will discover that the devil is after all, not so black as he is painted. Let us be fair. The thing was of the age, and in this'particular Chester- field was certainly no worse than other people. Many an eighteenth-century father must have said to his son exactly what Chesterfield said to Paul Stanhope : the trouble is that he wrote it all down. But were the Letters intended for publication ? That certainly put him in the limelight, but does it make him worse ? Let us be honest. Our simmers are different, but what about our morals ? A delicate question ; only, as Socrates would say, to be answered by the Deity. This at least we may say, that many of Macaulay's immaculate Whigs would emerge badly from it comparison with Chesterfield; whose lifelong devotion to his son amply redeems hint front his regrettable participation in the universal Crebillonnage of his day.
So far we, in our ignorance. Now at last comes the num who knows, Mr. Bonamy Dobree, with his six noble voluthes, which we hail with the satisfaction of one who suddenly comes upon a nugget long sought for in vain. Mr. Dobree huffs given us a great work; critical; exhaustive, illundnating : nothing could be better than his Introduction. He has slain and buried the old slander, and shown us, in masterly fashion, Chesterfield as he was. tic has produced what our French neighbours would call the edition definitive, worthy to stand on the shelf beside such others as Lord Ernle's EOM. His main object was, as he tells us, to collect, as far as possible, all Lord Chesterfield's letters, and it would Seem that he has left but little for others to glean, so large is the number of letters that he has added to those already knoWn. But for the humbler reader, who does not want to know everything, Sir Charles Strachey's edition of the Letters to the Son will always retain its position, since it is in these that Chesterfield's self-revelation and most interesting literary legacy lies. Their appeal is universal : the others fdrnish a mass or valuable material for the specialist in the diplomacy' and politics of the Hanoverian age.
F. W. B.ox,
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