Letters to His Son, Complete On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman

Produced by David Widger





                           LETTERS TO HIS SON

                               1746-1747

                      By the EARL OF CHESTERFIELD

                     on the Fine Art of becoming a

                            MAN OF THE WORLD

                                 and a

                                GENTLEMAN



PG Editor’s Notes:

O. S. and N. S.: On consultation with several specialists I have learned
that the abbreviations O. S. and N. S. relate to the difference between
the old Julian calender used in England and the Gregorian calender which
was the standard in Europe. In the mid 18th century it is said that this
once amounted to a difference of eleven days. To keep track of the
chronology of letters back and forth from England to France or other
countries in mainland Europe, Chesterfield inserted in dates the
designation O. S. (old style) and N. S. (new style).

Chesterfield demonstrates his classical education by frequent words and
sometimes entire paragraphs in various languages. In the 1901 text these
were in italics; in this etext edition I have substituted single
quotation marks around these, as in ‘bon mot’, and not attempted to
include the various accent marks of all the languages.

Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. The original and
occasionally variable spelling is retained throughout.
D.W.




SPECIAL INTRODUCTION

The proud Lord Chesterfield would have turned in his grave had he known
that he was to go down to posterity as a teacher and preacher of the
gospel of not grace, but--“the graces, the graces, the graces.” Natural
gifts, social status, open opportunities, and his ambition, all conspired
to destine him for high statesmanship. If anything was lacking in his
qualifications, he had the pluck and good sense to work hard and
persistently until the deficiency was made up. Something remained
lacking, and not all his consummate mastery of arts could conceal that
conspicuous want,--the want of heart.

Teacher and preacher he assuredly is, and long will be, yet no thanks are
his due from a posterity of the common people whom he so sublimely
despised. His pious mission was not to raise the level of the multitude,
but to lift a single individual upon a pedestal so high that his lowly
origin should not betray itself. That individual was his, Lord
Chesterfield’s, illegitimate son, whose inferior blood should be given
the true blue hue by concentrating upon him all the externals of
aristocratic education.

Never had pupil so devoted, persistent, lavish, and brilliant a guide,
philosopher, and friend, for the parental relation was shrewdly merged in
these. Never were devotion and uphill struggle against doubts of success
more bitterly repaid. Philip Stanhope was born in 1732, when his father
was thirty-eight. He absorbed readily enough the solids of the ideal
education supplied him, but, by perversity of fate, he cared not a fig
for “the graces, the graces, the graces,” which his father so wisely
deemed by far the superior qualities to be cultivated by the budding
courtier and statesman. A few years of minor services to his country were
rendered, though Chesterfield was breaking his substitute for a heart
because his son could not or would not play the superfine gentleman--on
the paternal model, and then came the news of his death, when only
thirty-six. What was a still greater shock to the lordly father, now
deaf, gouty, fretful, and at outs with the world, his informant reported
that she had been secretly married for several years to Young Hopeful,
and was left penniless with two boys. Lord Chesterfield was above all
things a practical philosopher, as hard and as exquisitely rounded and
polished as a granite column. He accepted the vanishing of his lifelong
dream with the admirable stolidity of a fatalist, and in those last days
of his radically artificial life he disclosed a welcome tenderness, a
touch of the divine, none the less so for being common duty, shown in the
few brief letters to his son’s widow and to “our boys.” This, and his
enviable gift of being able to view the downs as well as the ups of life
in the consoling humorous light, must modify the sterner judgment so
easily passed upon his characteristic inculcation, if not practice, of
heartlessness.

The thirteenth-century mother church in the town from which Lord
Chesterfield’s title came has a peculiar steeple, graceful in its lines,
but it points askew, from whatever quarter it is seen. The writer of
these Letters, which he never dreamed would be published, is the best
self-portrayed Gentleman in literature. In everything he was naturally a
stylist, perfected by assiduous art, yet the graceful steeple is somehow
warped out of the beauty of the perpendicular. His ideal Gentleman is the
frigid product of a rigid mechanical drill, with the mien of a posture
master, the skin-deep graciousness of a French Marechal, the calculating
adventurer who cuts unpretentious worthies to toady to society magnates,
who affects the supercilious air of a shallow dandy and cherishes the
heart of a frog.