XIII. THE NEW CHESTERFIELD
LORD CHESTERFIELD detested proverbs. For him they were not so much the wit of one man and the wisdom of many, as the cheap rhetoric of the vulgar, to which no person of condition could possibly condescend. Yet it is his Lordship's misfortune to suggest one of the homeliest. Nothing so well describes the state of his modern reputation as the familiar adage, 'Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.' Dr. Johnson, who had more or less valid reasons for antagonism, characterized the famous letters in one of those vigorous verdicts, the compactness of which has sometimes been allowed to condone injustice. They taught, he declared, 'the morals of a courtesan, 23 and the manners of a dancing-master.'
Cowper followed suit. Addressing the author in the 'Progress of Error' as Petronius, he informed him that the tears of the Muses would 'scald his memory;' and after apostrophizing him as a 'graybeard corrupter of our listening youth,' and a 'polish'd and high-finish'd foe to Truth,' adjured him finally (and rather fatuously) to send from the shades some message of recantation, – in all of which there is more of poetic phraseology than energy of reproach. With the novelists Lord Chesterfield has hardly fared better. Dickens, who drew upon him for Sir John Chester in 'Barnaby Rudge,' makes that personage declare enthusiastically that 'in every page of this enlightened writer, he finds some captivating hypocrisy which had never occurred to him before, or some superlative piece of selfishness to which he was utterly a stranger.' The picture in Thackeray's 'Virginians' is quieter and more lifelike. We are shown Lord Chesterfield at Tunbridge, when Harry Warrington makes his debut there – 'a little beetle-browed, hook-nosed, high-shouldered gentleman,' much like his portrait by Gainsborough, sitting over his wine at the White Horse with M. de Pollnitz, rallying and ironically complimenting that ambiguous adventurer, making magnificent apology to Mr. Warrington when he has unwittingly insulted him, and, at a later period, with his customary composure, losing six hundred pounds to him at cards. As to this last detail there may be doubts. Thackeray probably counted upon human frailty and the inveteracy of an ancient habit, but Lord Carnarvon says that Lord Chesterfield gave up play when he accepted office, and he had been Ambassador at the Hague and Viceroy in Ireland years before he met Colonel Esmond's grandson at M. Barbeau's much-frequented ordinary in the Wells.
Turning to the two quarto volumes which, in March, 1774, were sent forth from Golden Square by that not entirely discreet and certainly rapacious representative, his Lordship's daughter-in-law, one's first impression is that they have been more talked about in the light of Johnson's epigram than read by that of their own merits. No one, of course, would affirm, even allowing for the corrupt state of the society in which they were written, that their moral tone, in one respect especially, is defensible; nor can it be denied, even supposing them to emanate from a friend rather than a parent, that they contain passages which, to our modern taste, are more than unpleasant. But without in the least attempting to extenuate these objectionable features of the correspondence, it is but just to its author to remember that it was never intended either for the public instruction or for the public eye. When Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope trusted the letters would be of use 'to the Youth of these Kingdoms,' she was palpably overlooking this obvious fact. If Lord Chesterfield had published them himself, he would no doubt have considerably edited them; but it is extremely unlikely that he would ever have published them at all. The principles which he desired to instil into Philip Stanhope were the principles of the society in which Philip Stanhope was moving – they were those of his patron, Lord Albemarle, and his preceptress, Lady Hervey. They were intended not for the world at large, but for the narrower world of fashion.
The systematic dissimulation which they appear to inculcate has also been urged against them. But here again it seems to have been forgotten that young Stanhope was intended for a politician and statesman, – that what his father most desired for him was the successes of a court and the rewards of diplomacy. After all, the volto sciolto and pensieri stretti, the 'looks loose' and 'thoughts close,' 24 which he so persistently enjoins, are no more than the unimpeachable Sir Henry Wotton impressed upon the equally unimpeachable John Milton.
Lord Chesterfield puts his points coldly and cynically; but by his excellent sermon on the suaviter in modo and the fortiter in re, he preaches in reality little beyond that necessary conciliation of the feelings of others which is inculcated by almost every manual of ethics. Again, if he harps somewhat wearisomely upon 'les manières, les bienséances, les agrémens, it is precisely because these were the weak points of his pupil, who, master at twenty of Latin, Greek, and political history, speaking readily German, French, and Italian, having a remarkable memory and a laudable curiosity, still retained an awkwardness of address which neither Marcel nor Desnoyers could wholly overcome, 25 and a defective enunciation which would have resisted all the pebbles of Demosthenes.
For the rest, Lord Chesterfield's teaching is, in great measure, unexceptionable. Its worst fault, in addition to those already mentioned, is that it too frequently confuses being with seeming, and the assumption of a virtue with the actual possession of it. But many of its injunctions are most praiseworthy, and even admirable as aphorisms; and those to whom their note of worldly wisdom is distasteful must blame not so much the writer, as Horace and Cicero, Bolingbroke and La Bruyère, De Retz and La Rochefoucault, from whom he had compiled his rules for conduct, and shaped his scheme of life.
When Philip Stanhope died at six-and-thirty, neither 'paitri [sic] de graces' as Lord Chesterfield hoped, nor particularly distinguished in statecraft (he was simply Envoy at Dresden), it was discovered that he had so far adopted the policy of 'pensieri stretti as to have been married privately for some years. Probably the shock of this discovery was softened to his father (who nevertheless behaved liberally to the widow) by the fact that, in the failure of his plans for his son, he had already begun to interest himself in the training of another member of his family, a little boy who was destined to be his successor in the earldom. Seven years before Philip Stanhope's death he had opened a new series of letters with a godchild, also Philip Stanhope, and the son of Mr. Arthur Stanhope, of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire. Beginning when the boy was five and a half, the correspondence was continued for nine years, following him from 'Mr. Robert's boarding School at Marybone by London' to the house in Southampton Row of his tutor, the notorious Dr. Dodd. When the first letter was written, Lord Chesterfield was sixty-seven, and the last was penned only three years before his death. This is the collection which, after being mislaid for a long period, was published in 1889 by the late Lord Carnarvon, to whom it had been presented by his father-in-law, the sixth Earl of Chesterfield. It contributes not a little to the revision of the popular idea formed of the writer, – an idea, it may be added, which, upon re-examination of the earlier correspondence, had already been considerably modified by such critics as Mr. Abraham Hayward and M. Sainte-Beuve. Superficially, the letters resemble their predecessors, and the outline of education is much the same. Little Philip was to be 'perfectly master' of that French which his godfather loved so dearly, and in which he wrote so often and so well; he was to be thoroughly grounded in History, Geography, Dancing, Italian, German; he was to be proficient in Greek and Latin, and he was to complete his studies in the 'well-regulated republic' of Geneva, the salutary austerity of which was then usefully tempered by the presence of Voltaire and the French refugees. Many of the new letters reproduce the old precepts; there are even similarities of thought and phraseology; and though the volto sciolto is not obtruded, the suaviter in modo is still persistently advocated. But age has brought its softening influences – the moral tone is ostensibly higher, and the old worldly savoir-faire has lost much of its ancient cynicism. Some of the axioms which Lord Carnarvon quotes are remarkable for their accent of earnestness; others, as he observes, are 'almost theological' in tone. Saint Augustine, for example, could hardly say more than this: 'Si je pouvois empêcher qu'il n'y eut un seul malheureux sur la Terre, j'y sacrifierois avec plaisir mon bien, mes soins, et même ma santé. C'est le grand devoir de l'homme, surtout de l'homme chrétien.' The next is nearer to the elder manner: 'Ayez une grande Charité pour l'amour de Dieu et une extrême politesse pour l'amour de vous même.' And here is a graver utterance than either: 'God has been so good as to write in all our hearts the duty that He expects from us, which is adoration and thanksgiving and doing all the good we can to our fellow creatures.'
It is extraordingry to note what an infinity of trouble Lord Chesterfield took to arouse and amuse his little pupil. Sometimes the letter is an anecdote, biographical or historical; sometimes a cunningly contrived French vocabulary, one of which, inter alia, comprehensively defines 'Les Graces' as 'Something gracefull, genteel, and engaging in the air and figure.' Others (like the admirable papers in 'The World') denounce the prevailing vice of drunkenness. 'Fuyez le vin, car c'est un poison lent, mais sur.' Occasionally a little diagram aids the exposition, as when a rude circle, with a tiny figure at top, stands for 'le petit Stanhope' and 'ses antipodes;' in other cases, the course of instruction in politeness and public speaking is diversified by definitions of similes and metaphors, epigrams, anagrams, and logogriphes. Finally, there is a complete treatise, in fourteen epistles, on the 'Art of Pleasing,' from which we extract the following on wit and satire:
'When wit exerts itself in satyr it is a most malignant distemper; wit it is true may be shown in satyr, but satyr does not constitute wit, as most fools imagine it does. A man of real wit will find a thousand better occasions of showing it. Abstain therefore most carefully from satyr, which though it fall upon no particular person in company, and momentarily from the malignity of the human heart, pleases all; upon reflexion it frightens all too, they think it may be their turn next, and will hate you for what they find you could say of them more, than be obliged to you for what you do not say. Fear and hatred are next door neighbours. The more wit you have the more good nature and politeness you must show, to induce people to pardon your superiority, for that is no easy matter.'
Alas! and alas! that so much labour and patience should have been lost. For Philip the Second, though he made no secret marriage, was not a much greater success than Philip the First. He turned out a commonplace country gentleman, amiable, methodical, agricultural, but wholly overshadowed and obliterated by the fame of the accomplished statesman and orator who had directed his studies.
'The bows of eloquence are buried with the Archers.' It is impossible, even with the aid of the phonograph, to recapture the magnetic personality, the fervour of gesture that winged the words and carried conviction to the hearer. Equally impossible is it, in this age of egotisms and eccentricities that pass for character, to realize the fascination of those splendid manners for which Lord Chesterfield was celebrated.
The finished elegance, the watchful urbanity, the perfect ease and self-possession, which Fielding commended, and Johnson could not contest, are things too foreign to our restless overconsciousness to be easily intelligible. But we can at least call up – not without compassionate admiration – the pathetic picture of the deaf old gentleman who had been the rival of 'silver-tongued Murray' and the correspondent of Montesquieu, sitting down at seventy in his solitary study at Babiole 26 to write, in that wonderful hand of which Lord Carnarvon gives a facsimile, his periodical letter of advice to a petit bout d'homme at Parson Dodd's in Southampton Row, concerning whose career in life he had formed the fondest – and the vainest – expectations.
XIV. A DAY AT STRAWBERRY HILL
TO the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism it may seem an almost hopeless task to revive the details of a day in a Twickenham Villa when George the Third was King. And yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's letters, of the 'Walpoliana' of Pinkerton, and, above all, of the catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its owner in 1774, there is no insurmountable difficulty in deciding what must probably have been the customary course of events. Nothing is needed at the outset but to assume that you had arrived, late on the previous night, at the embattled Gothic building on the Teddington Road, and that the fatigues of your journey had left you little more than a vague notion of your host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast hour was nine. Then, after carrying with you into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber an indistinct recollection of Richardson's drawings of Pope and his mother, and of Bermingham's 'owl cut in paper,' which you dimly make out with your candle on the walls, you would be waked at eight next morning by Colomb, the Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master as his compatriot Canton in the 'Clandestine Marriage'), and in due time would repair to the blue-papered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, looking pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coasting leisurely round the apartment, you would probably pause before M. de Carmontel's double picture of your host's dead friend, Madame du Deffand, and her relative the Duchesse de Choiseul, or you would peer curiously at the view of Madame de Sevigné's hotel in the 'Rue Coulture St. Catherine.' Presently would come a patter of tiny feet, and a fat, and not very sociable, little dog, which had once belonged to the said Madame du Deffand, would precede its master, whom you would hear walking, with the stiff tread of an infirm person, from his bedroom on the floor above. Shortly afterwards would enter a tall, slim, frail-looking figure in a morning-gown, with a high, pallid forehead, dark brilliant eyes under drooping lids, and a friendly, but forced and rather unprepossessing smile. Tonton (as the little dog was called), after being cajoled into a semblance of cordiality, would be lifted upon a small sofa at his master's side, the teakettle and heater would arrive, and tea would be served in cups of fine old white embossed Japanese china. And then, the customary salutations exchanged and over, would gradually begin, in a slightly affected fashion, to which you speedily grow accustomed, that wonderful flow of talk which (like Praed's Vicar's)
'Slipped from politics to puns,
And passed from Mahomet to Moses,' —
that endless stream of admirably told stories, of recollections graphic and humorous, of sallies and bons mots, of which Horace Walpole's extraordinary correspondence is the cooled expression, but of the vivacity and variety of which, enhanced as they were by the changes in the speaker's voice and look, and emphasized by his semi-French gesticulation, it is impossible to give any adequate idea. A glance across the river would suggest an anecdote of her Grace the Duchess of Queensberry: a falling spoon, a mot by Lady Townshend. Upon yesterday's execution at Tyburn would follow a vivid picture of the deaths of Balmerino and Kilmarnock; or a reference to your ride from London of the night before, would usher in a full and particular account how the voluble and fascinating gentleman before you, with the great chalk stones in his fingers, was once all but shot through the head by the highwayman James Maclean.
Breakfast over, and a liberal bowl of bread-and-milk tossed out of window to the troops of squirrels that come flocking in from the high trees round the lawn, your host would invite you to make the tour of the grounds, adding (if it were May) that his favourite lilacs were well worth the effort. He would astonish you by going out in his slippers and without a hat; and, in reply to your ill-concealed astonishment, would laughingly compare himself to the Indian in the 'Spectator' who said he was 'all face.' Passing by the Abbot's garden, with its bright parterres, he would lead you to the pretty cottage he had built on the site of the old residence of his deceased tenant Richard Francklin, once printer of that scurrilous 'Craftsman' in which Pulteney and Bolingbroke had so persistently assailed his father. In its sunny, print-hung tea-room, with the 'Little Library' at the side, he would show you the picture of his friend Lady Hervey, once the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' of Pulteney and Chesterfield's ballad, and would tell you that the frame was carved by the same Grinling Gibbons to whom we owe the bronze statue of King James the Second in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. Thence you would pass to the chapel in the wood, with its stained-glass pictures of Henry the Third and his Queen from Bexhill Church, and its shrine from Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome; and he would explain that the roof was designed by that unimpeachable authority in Gothic, Mr. Chute of the Vyne, in Hampshire; that George Augustus Selwyn had given him the great earthen pot at the door; and that the carved bench in the ante-chapel had been contrived by no less a person than the son of the famous 'Ricardus Aristarchus,' Master of Trinity, the —
'mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains – '
as he would quote from the 'Dunciad' of the late lamented Mr. Pope. Richard Bentley the younger, he would remind you, had also drawn some excellent illustrations to Gray (the originals of which he will show you later in the library); and meanwhile he invites your attention at the end of the winding walk to another masterpiece from the same ingenious brain – a huge oaken seat shaped like a shell, in which once sat together three of the handsomest women in England – the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Richmond, and the Countess of Ailesbury. If you were still intelligently interested, and your host still unfatigued (for he is capricious and easily tired), you would pass from the garden to the private printing-press, the 'Officina Arbuteana' as he christens it, next the neighbouring farmyard. Here you would be introduced to the superintendent and occasional secretary, Mr. Thomas Kirgate, who, if so minded, would exhibit to you a proof of Miss Hannah More's poem of 'Bishop Bonner's Ghost' (which his patron is kindly setting up for her), or then and there strike you off a piping-hot 'pull' of the latest quatrain to those charming Miss Berrys who are now inhabiting 'Little Strawberry' hard by, once tenanted by red-faced, good-humoured Mrs. Clive. As you return at last to the house, your guide would almost certainly pause in the Little Cloister at the entrance beside the blue and white china tub for goldfish in which was drowned that favourite cat whose fate was immortalized by Gray; and, lifting the label, he would read the poet's words:
''T was on this lofty Vase's side,
Where China's gayest Art has dy'd
The azure Flow'rs, that blow,
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclin'd,
Gaz'd on the Lake below.' 27
Once more under Bentley's japanned tin lantern in the gloomy little hall, your host, pending the scribbling of half-a-dozen pressing letters' to Lady Ossory, Mr. Pinkerton, or one or other of his many correspondents, would beg you to await him in the Picture Gallery. Here, long before you had exhausted your admiration of the Emperor Vespasian in basalt, or the incomparable Greek Eagle from the baths of Caracalla, he would resume his post of cicerone, leading you almost at once to the portraits of his three beautiful nieces, Edward Walpole's daughters, one of whom, painted by Reynolds, had been fortunate enough to marry King George's own brother, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (a fact of which her uncle Horace is ill-disguisedly proud). From the Gallery you would pass to the Round Drawing-Room, whose chief glory was Vasari's 'Bianca Capello;' and thence to the adjoining Tribune, a curious yellow-lit chamber, with semicircular recesses, in which were accumulated most of the choicest treasures of Strawberry, – miniatures by Cooper and the Olivers, enamels by Petitot and Zincke, gems from Italy, bas-reliefs in ivory, coins and seal-rings and reliquaries and filigree work, in the dispersed profusion of which you would afterwards dimly recall such items as a silver bell carved with masks and insects by Benvenuto Cellini, a missal attributed to Raphael, a bronze Caligula with silver eyes, and a white snuff-box with a portrait purporting to be a gift from Madame de Sévigné in the Elysian Fields, but sent in reality by the faithful Madame du Deffand. Each object would bring its train of associations and traditions; and the fading of the 'all-golden afternoon' would find your companion still promising fresh marvels in the yet unexplored rooms beyond, where are the speculum of cannel coal once used by the notorious starmonger, Dr. John Dee; the red hat of his Eminence Cardinal Wolsey; and the very spurs worn by King William the Third, of immortal memory, at the ever-glorious Battle of the Boyne.
With four o'clock would come dinner, eaten probably in the Refectory, a room consecrated chiefly to the family portraits, conspicuous among which, in blue velvet, was your host by Richardson. The repast was 'of Attic taste,' but with very little wine, as Walpole himself drank nothing but iced water, and 'coffee upstairs' was ordered with such promptitude as to afford the visitor but scanty leisure for lingering over the bottle. About five you migrated to the Round Drawing-Room, where your entertainer, after recommending you to replenish your box with Fribourg's snuff from a canister of which the hiding-place was an ancient marble urn in the window-seat, would take up his station on the sofa, and resume his inexhaustible flood of memories and reflections, always bright, often striking, and never wearisome. Once, perhaps, he would rise to exhibit the closet he had built for Lady Di. Beauclerk's seven drawings in soot-water to his own tragedy of the 'Mysterious Mother;' or he would adjourn for an hour to the Library, to turn over his unrivalled collection of Hogarth's prints; or to show you Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Milton,' or the identical 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' from which Pope made his translations, or the long row of books printed at the 'Officina Arbuteana.' But he would gravitate sooner or later to his old vantage-ground on the sofa, whence, unhasting, unresting, he would discourse most excellent anecdote into the small hours, when the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber would again receive his bewitched and bewildered, but still unsatiated, visitor. And so would end your day at Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle of Strawberry Hill.