The Letters of Lord Chesterfield, 6 Volumes

The Letters of Lord Chesterfield, 6 volumes.

[King’s Printers’ Edition, Viking Press, $50]

A SINGULAR figure and a solitary the great Lord Chesterfield, a statesman reputable and honest, but hardly of distinction; with flashes of brief success as ambassador to The Hague and as Lord Lieutenant of the Unruly Isle; a reformer of the calendar and a sterling foe to Sir Robert Walpole, his fame grew, not from public service, but from private jest. Awkward and unhandsome by nature, he studied manners until he became their arbiter. His courtly Sovereign styled him the ‘dwarf balloon,’but if apes are in question the compliment should be reversed. To-day the name he bore has passed into the language as the synonym of courtesy and grace, and his undeviating motto, ‘Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re,’has become the accepted creed of worldly advancement.

Two causes conspire to the disapprobation which moralists heap upon Lord Chesterfield — the scaring sarcasm of Dr. Johnson, and the profundity of the cynicism which animates the ‘Letters to His Son.’ But the great Cham, however inspiriting his invective to discouraged learning, was himself hardly an unbiased critic, and as for the infamous recommendation of the elder to the younger Philip inciting him to cultivate grace of manner by taking a lady for his mistress, the reader must admit that the father of an illegitimate son is scarcely in a position to give the usual paternal admonition. In this regard the editor of these glorious volumes, Mr. Dobrée, goes to the ultimate limits of defense by maintaining that, given the circumstances, the advice was ‘of the best.’ But though we appraise it at its odious worst, we must realize that it represented a current mode and that it was intended solely to further what his noble Lordship held to be the most precious thing in life.

To my thinking, the sound claim of Chesterfield to immortality is the example he set to all the schoolmasters on earth. He was the Perfect Pedagogue. Never was teacher so patient, so understanding of his pupil, so impartial in praise and blame, so dextrous in the blending of instruction with admonition. His correspondence with his son from the boy’s fifth year in 1737 to the young man’s death in 1768 is more than a liberal education from kindergarten to graduate school: it is a course in preparation for living the full life such as no other text can offer. The insistence on the necessity of intense concentration in work or play, of persistence, plan, routine, is pressed with such good sense, such grace, liveliness, and vigor, such diversity of attack and defense, as to be the envy of any schoolmaster. While education is still the goal of the race, the ‘Letters to His Son’ will not be displaced.

And of the general letters of his vast correspondence, little of praise can be left unsaid. Most charming of all are his letters to great ladies, for in the gallantry as in the worldly wisdom of the pen Lord Chesterfield has not been surpassed. Writing in English or French with the same facility and wit, he turns his compliments and jests with perfect felicity.

Of the beautiful format, the print, paper, and the grace of this King’s Printers’ edition, the grateful reader can only say that it is the physical expression of every quality in the letters themselves.

ELLERY SEDGWICK.