If we look at the result we must pronounce his experiment no less a
failure. The odds were too heavy in the first instance, and a man of
less energy and stability than Lord Chesterfield would not have dared
to have played at such high stakes. He ought to have considered what
an infliction he was casting upon his son, and respected the feelings
of others rather than his own ambition. He has reaped the harvest which
he had sown. When Philip Stanhope tried to obtain an appointment at
the embassy in Brussels the Marquis de Botta made so much to do on
the ground of his illegitimacy that his claim was disallowed. When
there was a chance of his receiving an appointment at Venice, the king
objected on the same grounds. Not one word of displeasure is handed
down to us in these familiar letters, but we know that both felt it
deeply and never forgave. But even Philip Stanhope himself must have
disappointed his father. When his widow, with her two children, walked
up the hall of Chesterfield House, where the Earl sat alone in solitary
childless grandeur, it must have seemed a strange answer to the
question which he had asked Time some thirty-eight years before. He may
well have grown weary of sitting at the table at which he had staked
his all and lost.
Vivacious, sincere, plain, and liberal-minded, his memory may well pass
down to posterity as that of a great man with mean aspirations. That
ambition was not wanting in his composition is true, and it was this
which encompassed his ruin. He reminds us of the melancholy structure
of S. Petronio at Bologna, begun in emulation of the Florentine Duomo
by the Bolognese. One sees the outline of the structure which was to
have been raised, but for two centuries it has stood uncompleted, a
monument to her greatness and her shame.
Careless of the interests of those around him; careless and callous of
what was demanded of man by men; careless of speech so long as he could
create a _bon mot_ or a well-balanced phrase, Lord Chesterfield’s life
is characteristic of his time.
Chesterfield, if we may make one more comparison, is like one of those
great trees that we see upon the banks of a river, which, while drawing
its nurture half from its native soil and the stream by its side, and
half from the sky above it, has had that very soil worn away by the
current of the stream, so that the tree, by its own natural weight and
under the force of adverse winds and circumstance, has bowed itself
over toward the waves, losing its natural height and grandeur for ever.
Dead to the higher interests of humanity; dead to the deeper influences
which keep us sober and thoughtful and earnest; dead, again, to any
ideal save such as might serve his own designs:--such was the man who
deemed himself called upon, or fitted, to perform the sacred office of
Education to his darling child.