Letters to His Son

A capable statesman, an accomplished diplomatist, and the courtliest and best-bred man of his century, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, born on September 22, 1694, and dead March 24, 1773, would have been almost forgotten at the present day but for the preservation of his letters to his natural son, Philip Stanhope. It was the ambition of Lord Chesterfield’s life that this young man should be a paragon of learning and manners. In a voluminous series of letters, more than 400 of which are preserved, his father minutely directed his classical and political studies, and, above all, instructed him with endless insistence as to his bearing in society, impressed upon him the importance of good breeding, the “graces,” and the general deportment required of a person of quality. The letters are a classic of courtliness and worldly wisdom. They were prepared for the press by Philip Stanhope’s widow, and were published in 1774, under the title of “Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield, together with Several other Pieces on Various Subjects.” Since then many editions have appeared, bearing such titles as “The Fine Gentleman,” “The Elements of Polite Education,” etc.

I.-On Manners and Address

London, December 29, 1747. I have received two letters from you of the 17th and 22nd, by the last of which I find that some of mine to you must have miscarried; for I have never been above two posts without writing to you or to Mr. Harte, and even very long letters. I have also received a letter from Mr. Harte, which gives me great satisfaction; it is full of your praises.

Your German will go on, of course; and I take it for granted that your stay at Leipsig will make you a perfect master of that language, both as to speaking and writing; for remember, that knowing any language imperfectly is very little better than not knowing it at all, people being as unwilling to speak in a language which they do not possess thoroughly as others are to hear them.

Go to the Duchess of Courland’s as often as she and your leisure will permit. The company of women of fashion will improve your manners, though not your understanding; and that complaisance and politeness, which are so useful in men’s company, can only be acquired in women’s.

Remember always what I have told you a thousand times, that all the talents in the world will want all their lustre, and some part of their use, too, if they are not advanced with that easy good-breeding, that engaging manner, and those graces, which seduce and prepossess people in your favour at first sight. A proper care of your person is by no means to be neglected; always extremely clean; upon proper occasions, fine. Your carriage genteel, and your motions graceful. Take particular care of your manners and address when you present yourself in company. Let them be respectful without meanness, easy without too much familiarity, genteel without affectation, and insinuating without any seeming art or design.... Adieu!

II.-On the Art of Pleasing

Bath, March 9, 1748. I must from time to time remind you of what I have often recommended to you, and of what you cannot attend to too much: sacrifice to the graces. Intrinsic merit alone will not do; it will gain you the general esteem of all, but not the particular affection, that is the heart, of any. To engage the affections of any particular person you must, over and above your general merit, have some particular merit to that person; by services done, or offered; by expressions of regard and esteem; by complaisance, attentions, etc., for him; and the graceful manner of doing all these things opens the way to the heart, and facilitates, or rather, insures, their effects.

A thousand little things, not separately to be described, conspire to form these graces, this je ne scais quoi, that always pleases. A pretty person, a proper degree of dress, an harmonious voice, something open and cheerful in the countenance, but without laughing; a distinct and properly varied manner of speaking; all these things and many others are necessary ingredients in the composition of the pleasing je ne scais quoi, which everybody feels, though nobody can describe. Observe carefully, then, what displeases or pleases you in others, and be persuaded that, in general, the same things will please or displease them in you.

Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it; and I would heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh. Many people, at first, from awkwardness and mauvaise honte, have got a very disagreeable and silly trick of laughing whenever they speak.

This, and many other very disagreeable habits, are owing to mauvaise honte at their first setting out in the world. They are ashamed in company, and so disconcerted that they do not know what they do, and try a thousand tricks to keep themselves in countenance; which tricks afterwards grow habitual to them. Some put their fingers in their nose, others scratch their heads, others twirl their hats; in short, every awkward, ill-bred body has its tricks. But the frequency does not justify the thing, and all these vulgar habits and awkwardness are most carefully to be guarded against, as they are great bars in the way of the art of pleasing.

London, September 5, 1748. I have received yours, with the enclosed German letter to Mr. Grevenkop, which he assures me is extremely well written, considering the little time that you have applied yourself to that language.

St. Thomas’s Day now draws near, when you are to leave Saxony and go to Berlin. Berlin will be entirely a new scene to you, and I look upon it, in a manner, as your first step into the great world; take care that step be not a false one, and that you do not stumble at the threshold. You will there be in more company than you have yet been; manners and attentions will, therefore, be more necessary.

You will best acquire these by frequenting the companies of people of fashion; but then you must resolve to acquire them, in those companies, by proper care and observation. When you go into good company-by good company is meant the people of the first fashion of the place-observe carefully their turn, their manners, their address; and conform your own to them. But this is not all either; go deeper still; observe their characters, and pry into both their hearts and their heads. Seek for their particular merit, their predominant passion, or their prevailing weakness; and you will then know what to bait your hook with to catch them.

As women are a considerable, or, at least, a pretty numerous part of company; and as their suffrages go a great way towards establishing a man’s character in the fashionable part of the world, which is of great importance to the fortune and figure he proposes to make in it, it is necessary to please them. I will, therefore, upon this subject, let you into certain arcana that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal and never seem to know.

Women, then, are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid reasoning, good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together. Some little passion or humour always breaks in upon their best resolutions. Their beauty neglected or controverted, their age increased or their supposed understandings depreciated, instantly kindles their little passions, and overturns any system of consequential conduct that in their most reasonable moments they have been capable of forming. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about nor trusts them with, serious matters; though he often makes them believe that he does both, which is the thing in the world that they are proud of.

But these are secrets, which you must keep inviolably, if you would not, like Orpheus, be torn to pieces by the whole sex. On the contrary, a man who thinks of living in the great world must be gallant, polite, and attentive to please the women. They have, from the weakness of men, more or less influence in all courts; they absolutely stamp every man’s character in the beau monde, and make it either current, or cry it down, and stop it in payment.

It is, therefore, absolutely necessary to manage, please, and flatter them; and never to discover the least mark of contempt, which is what they never forgive; but in this they are not singular, for it is the same with men, who will much sooner forgive an injustice than an insult.

These are some of the hints which my long experience in the great world enables me to give you, and which, if you attend to them, may prove useful to you in your journey through it. I wish it may be a prosperous one; at least, I am sure that it must be your own fault if it is not.

III.-The Secret of Good Breeding

London, November 3, 1749. From the time that you have had life, it has been the principal and favourite object of mine to make you as perfect as the imperfections of human nature will allow. In this view, I have grudged no pains nor expense in your education, convinced that education, more than nature, is the cause of that great difference which you see in the characters of men. While you were a child I endeavoured to form your heart habitually to virtue and honour, before your understanding was capable of showing you their beauty and utility. Those principles, which you then got, like your grammar rules, only by rote, are now, I am persuaded, fixed and confirmed by reason.

My next object was sound and useful learning. All that remains for me then to wish, to recommend, to inculcate, to order, and to insist upon, is good breeding, without which all your other qualifications will be lame, unadorned, and to a certain degree unavailing. And here I fear, and have too much reason to believe, that you are greatly deficient. The remainder of this letter, therefore, shall be-and it will not be the last by a great many-upon the subject of good breeding.

A friend of yours and mine has very justly defined good breeding to be the result of much good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence from them. Taking this for granted, as I think it cannot be disputed, it is astonishing to me that anybody who has good sense and good nature, and I believe you have both, can essentially fail in good breeding. As to the modes of it, indeed, they vary according to persons and places and circumstances, and are only to be acquired by observation and experience; but the substance of it is everywhere and eternally the same. Good manners are, to particular societies, what good morals are to society in general; their cement and their security. And as laws are enacted to enforce good morals, or, at least, to prevent the ill-effects of bad ones, so there are certain rules of civility, universally implied and received, to enforce good manners, and punish bad ones.

Mutual complaisances, attentions, and sacrifices of little conveniences, are as natural an implied compact between civilised people as protection and obedience are between kings and subjects; whoever, in either case, violates that compact justly forfeits all advantages arising from it. For my own part, I really think that, next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing; and the epithet which I should covet the most, next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred.

I will conclude with these axioms:

That the deepest learning, without good breeding, is unwelcome and tiresome pedantry, and of use nowhere but in a man’s own closet; and, consequently, of little or no use at all.

That a man who is not perfectly well-bred, is unfit for good company, and therefore unwelcome in it; will consequently dislike it soon, afterwards renounce it, and be reduced to solitude, or, what is considerably worse, low and bad company.

IV.-The Fruits of Observation

London, September 22, 1752. The day after the date of my last, I received your letter of the 8th. I approve extremely of your intended progress. I would have you see everything with your own eyes, and hear everything with your own ears, for I know, by very long experience, that it is very unsafe to trust to other people’s, Vanity and interest cause many misrepresentations, and folly causes many more. Few people have parts enough to relate exactly and judiciously; and those who have, for some reason or other, never fail to sink or to add some circumstances.

The reception which you have met with at Hanover I look upon as an omen of your being well-received everywhere else, for, to tell you the truth, it was the place that I distrusted the most in that particular. But there is a certain conduct, there are certaines manieres, that will, and must, get the better of all difficulties of that kind. It is to acquire them that you still continue abroad, and go from court to court; they are personal, local, and temporal; they are modes which vary, and owe their existence to accidents, whim, and humour. All the sense and reason in the world would never point them out; nothing but experience, observation, and what is called knowledge of the world can possibly teach them.

This knowledge is the true object of a gentleman’s travelling, if he travels as he ought to do. By frequent good company in every country he himself becomes of every country; he is no longer an Englishman, a Frenchman, or an Italian; but he is a European. He adopts respectively the best manners of every country, and is a Frenchman at Paris, an Italian at Rome, an Englishman at London.

This advantage, I must confess, very seldom accrues to my countrymen from their travelling, as they have neither the desire nor the means of getting into good company abroad; for, in the first place, they are confoundedly bashful; and, in the next place, they either speak no foreign language at all, or, if they do, it is barbarously. You possess all the advantages that they want; you know the languages in perfection, and have constantly kept the best company in the places where you have been, so that you ought to be a European.

There is, in all good company, a fashionable air, countenance, manner, and phraseology, which can only be acquired by being in good company, and very attentive to all that passes there. There is a certain distinguishing diction of a man of fashion; he will not content himself with saying, like John Trott, to a new-married man, “Sir, I wish you joy”-or to a man who lost his son, “Sir I am sorry for your loss,” and both with a countenance equally unmoved; but he will say in effect the same thing in a more elegant and less trivial manner, and with a countenance adapted to the occasion. He will advance with warmth, vivacity, and a cheerful countenance to the new-married man, and, embracing him, perhaps say to him, “If you do justice to my attachment to you, you will judge of the joy that I feel upon this occasion better than I can express it.” To the other, in affliction, he will advance slowly, with a grave composure of countenance, in a more deliberate manner, and with a lower voice perhaps, say, “I hope you do me the justice to be convinced that I feel whatever you feel, and shall ever be affected where you are concerned.”

V.-On the Arts

Mr. Harte tells me that he intends to give you, by means of Signor Vincentini, a general notion of civil and military architecture; with which I am very well pleased. They are frequent subjects of conversation. I would also have you acquire a liberal taste of the two liberal arts of painting and sculpture. All these sorts of things I would have you know, to a certain degree; but remember that they must only be the amusements, and not the business, of a man of parts.

As you are now in a musical country [Italy], where singing, fiddling, and piping are not only the common topics of conversation but almost the principal objects of attention, I cannot help cautioning you against giving in to those-I will call them illiberal-pleasures, though music is commonly reckoned one of the liberal arts, to the degree that most of your countrymen do when they travel in Italy. If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you, but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light, brings him into a great deal of bad company, and takes up a great deal of time which might be much better employed.

I confess I cannot help forming some opinion of a man’s sense and character from his dress, and I believe most people do as well as myself. A man of sense carefully avoids any particular character in his dress; he is accurately clean for his own sake; but all the rest is for other people’s. He dresses as well, and in the same manner, as the people of sense and fashion of the place where he is. If he dresses better, as he thinks, that is, more than they, he is a fop; if he dresses worse, he is unpardonably negligent; but of the two, I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed-the excess on that side will wear off with a little age; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old.

As to the genius of poetry, I own, if Nature has not given it you, you cannot have it, for it is a true maxim that Poeta nascitur non fit. It is much otherwise with oratory, and the maxim there is Orator fit, for it is certain that by study and application every man can make himself a pretty good orator, eloquence depending upon observation and care. Every man, if he pleases, may choose good words instead of bad ones, may speak properly instead of improperly, may be clear and perspicuous in his recitals instead of dark and muddy, may have grace instead of awkwardness in his motions and gestures, and, in short, may be a very agreeable instead of a very disagreeable speaker if he will take care and pains. And surely it is very well worth while to take a great deal of pains to excel other men in that particular article in which they excel beasts.

That ready wit, which you so partially allow me, and so justly Sir Charles Williams, may create many admirers; but, take my word for it, it makes few friends. It shines and dazzles like the noonday sun, but, like that, too, is very apt to scorch, and therefore is always feared. The milder morning and evening light and heat of that planet soothe and calm our minds. Never seek for wit; if it presents itself, well and good; but even in that case, let your judgement interpose, and take care that it be not at the expense of anybody.