Letters to His Son 1746-47 | Page 4

the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

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

Etext 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