It is a singular fate that has overtaken Lord Chesterfield. One of the
more important figures in the political world of his time; one of the
few Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland whose name was afterward respected
and admired; the first man to introduce Voltaire and Montesquieu to
England; and the personal acquaintance of men like Addison and Swift,
Pope and Bolingbroke; the ally of Pitt and the enemy of three Georges;
though he married a king’s daughter and took up the task of the world’s
greatest emperor; yet the record of his actions has passed away, and he
is remembered now only by an accident.
Lord Chesterfield lives by that which he never intended for
publication, while that which he published has already passed from the
thoughts of men. It is one more example of the fact that our best work
is that which is our heart’s production. We have Lord Chesterfield’s
secret, and it bears witness to the strength of that part of him in
which an intellectual anatomist has declared him to be deficient--a
criticism which is but another proof of that which has been somewhere
said of him, that he has had the fate to be generally misunderstood.
Yet nothing is more certain than that Lord Chesterfield did not mean
to be anything but inscrutable. “Dissimilation is a shield,” he used
to say, “as secrecy is armor.” “A young fellow ought to be wiser than
he should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether he
really be so or not.” It is still worth while attempting to solve the
problem which is offered to us by his inscrutability, not only on its
own account, but because Lord Chesterfield is a representative spirit
of the eighteenth century.[1]