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by Henry Hitchings

  Savile’s instructions had by 1765 gone through fifteen editions. They were widely read in the American colonies and were a staple of the colonial lady’s bookshelf. Often presented to an adolescent girl by her mother or father, in the same spirit as the original was presented by Savile to Elizabeth, the ‘New Year’s Gift’ became – as gifts so frequently are – a symbol of parents’ ambitions for their children. In the colonies, English manners seemed to represent a higher wisdom, unsullied by the realities of everyday life.

  The original recipient conformed to expectation. Lady Elizabeth Savile grew up to marry Philip Stanhope, third Earl of Chesterfield. Their son was Philip Dormer Stanhope, who inherited the title in 1726. The fourth Lord Chesterfield was supremely well-connected, but not blessed with physical advantages: he was squat, had poor teeth, and spoke in a manner others found shrieky. He had to work to endear himself to others. Along the way he learned lessons he was keen to pass on.

  Chesterfield’s first letter to his son seems to have been written in 1737, when Philip was five.4 In 1739 he adopted a new instructive tone, and it was the letters in this mode that later became famous; he wrote the last of them a few weeks before Philip’s death in 1768. The letters were not intended for publication, but after Chesterfield himself died, in 1773, a selection of them was published. The book was not cheap (its two volumes cost a guinea each), and many of those who read it took advantage of being able to obtain it from the increasingly numerous circulating libraries. Later editions helpfully organized Chesterfield’s advice under headings. Among the most popular was Principles of Politeness, and of Knowing the World, edited by John Trusler. One of its categories was ‘sundry little accomplishments’ – words that sum up the whole finicky business of etiquette.

  In 1775 the book was printed in America, where it was popular well into the nineteenth century. Objections to its moral ambiguity did not prevent its being adopted as a handbook for the aspirational. The hostility the letters provoked seemed a sign of their power. Samuel Pratt’s novel The Pupil of Pleasure, an attack on Chesterfield’s values that was published in Philadelphia in 1778 and Boston in 1780, was an especially vivid advertisement of the letters’ worldly allure. When the criticism grew louder, subtle amendments were introduced to make the text more palatable. The American Chesterfield (1827) is typical in being an expurgated version with extra text to suit it better to a female audience.

  The letters preached a practical and pragmatic approach to life. Chesterfield’s assumed audience was his illegitimate son, but he presents his thoughts in a way that suggests he foresaw reaching a wider readership – albeit an exclusively male one. In what he calls ‘good company’, there is ‘great variety’: among these richly varied people ‘morals are very different, though their manners are pretty much the same’. He says that ‘moral virtues are the foundation of society in general’, but it is a statement on which he quickly enlarges, explaining that the role of manners is to ‘adorn and strengthen them’. Besides, Philip’s concern should not be ‘society in general’. Chesterfield has in mind for him not what he calls ‘bare common civility’, but rather ‘engaging, insinuating, shining manners’.

  Lofty ideals were not on the agenda. Good conduct was more about careful imitation than deeply felt authenticity. ‘Good breeding,’ claimed Chesterfield, is ‘a mode, not a substance.’ In a piece that appeared in the World in August 1756 he observed that English had no term equivalent to the French moeurs. It was a word on his mind because the French philosopher-historian Voltaire, an Anglophile whom he knew well, had just published his Essai sur l’histoire générale, et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (translated into English in 1758 as An Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations). Chesterfield felt that manners was ‘too little’ a translation of moeurs, while morals was ‘too much’. His own definition was ‘a general exterior decency, fitness and propriety of conduct in the common intercourse of life’.5 ‘Exterior decency’ is a two-word summary of his concern with well-maintained surfaces.

  Haughtiness and shallowness are often evident in Chesterfield’s writings, but there is also a shrewd wit, a playful perceptiveness. He seems to have inherited the ideas of Francis Osborne, though he does not at any point mention him. He also appears indebted to Machiavelli, a writer he acknowledges but does not recommend. For both Chesterfield and Machiavelli, it is imperative to accommodate oneself to one’s surroundings. Inflexibility is fatal. Chesterfield expresses this view crisply when he writes that ‘A man of the world must, like the chameleon, be able to take every different hue.’

  For Chesterfield, there is a system of manners, akin to a machine, and it must be kept ‘oiled’. This idea of a system, of manners or of insincerities, puts nurture ahead of nature. Whatever one’s nature, it can be rescued or obscured. In this context it is relevant that Chesterfield refers again and again to ‘good breeding’. The noun breeding can appear on either side of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. It can denote a person’s parentage and extraction. Yet although Chesterfield refers to ‘natural good breeding’ and also ‘easy good breeding’, he regards breeding as the province of education. He can present it as ‘the result of much good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial’, but suggests a keener emphasis on precedent and formal training when he speaks of ‘the laws of good breeding’ and ‘the allowed and established models of good breeding’, as well as when he states that ‘in good breeding there are a thousand little delicacies, which are established only by custom.’ Breeding seems to be a technique masquerading as an inherent quality. The more he uses the word, the more slippery it becomes.

  Ready as ever with an aperçu, Mark Twain captures the essence of the matter in his Notebooks: ‘Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.’6 For Chesterfield and his many inheritors, the term breeding is usefully pliable, or even intangible. It appeals to those who want to talk about behaviour with imprecise hauteur: ‘His tendency to belittle others shows a lack of breeding.’ The language of manners is full of such weasel words: the vague passing itself off as the specific, spongy nouns that suck the life out of reasoned debate.

  From the outset, Chesterfield bombards Philip with exhortations that contain language of this kind. The letters insist on an appreciation of ‘the necessary arts of the world’, and he prescribes an ‘easy, civil and respectful behaviour’, comprising ‘a thousand nameless little things, which nobody can describe, but which everybody feels’. Sometimes he hits on a form of words that overcomes the usual difficulties of description. ‘You must dress; therefore attend to it … in order to avoid singularity,’ he insists: he is like the conformist schoolkid who tells his friend not to be different because it marks both of them out as weird. Avoid singularity. Fear of the aberrant is a cardinal part of why people believe in manners and of the ways in which they impose them. Singularity precipitates ill opinion. It is interesting that Harriet Martineau, writing about American society in the 1830s, comments that ‘The fear of opinion takes many forms. There is fear of vulgarity, fear of responsibility; and above all, fear of singularity.’7 Fast-forward to 1999, and it’s Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) in American Beauty saying to her husband Lester at a vile party, ‘Don’t be weird.’ As Lester (Kevin Spacey) replies – ‘I won’t be weird. I’ll be whatever you want me to be’ – and kisses her with wholly bogus passion, we sense that his oddness is professionally, socially and sexually uncomfortable.

  Even when Philip is nearly eighteen, Chesterfield is still asking if he has been sufficiently on his guard against ‘disgusting habits, such as scratching yourself, putting your fingers in your mouth, nose and ears’. He maintains an emphasis on the need for ‘attention’. ‘A man without attention is not fit to live in the world,’ he declares, and will be the sort of ‘awkward fellow’ who scalds his mouth when he drinks tea or coffee. Looking is mentioned again and again: Philip should be mindful of the perpetual observation
of others – ‘without staring at them’ – and should always pay attention to his appearance. Attentiveness is essential to learning, and inattentiveness causes oversights and accidents, but Chesterfield is urging hyperattentiveness, which in practice can be disabling, as the process of constantly scanning one’s surroundings blocks or hampers one’s engagement with them. It is hardly a surprise that Philip grew up to be awkward; the novelist Fanny Burney dismissed him in her diaries as a ‘mere pedantic booby’.8

  As this suggests, Chesterfield’s prescriptions were not easy to follow. He disapproved of quick fixes: spouting aphorisms and proverbs, which might have seemed a nice way to cut a dash, was condemned as gauche. ‘Many people come into company full of what they intend to say in it themselves, without the least regard to others; and thus charged up to the muzzle, are resolved to let it off at any rate’ – but anyone who does this is a bore. The use of the noun bore to denote a tiresome person seems to date from the beginning of the nineteenth century; as a verb meaning ‘To weary by tedious conversation or simply by the failure to be interesting’ (OED), bore sprang up around 1750. Chesterfield does not speak of bores, but he makes it clear that he deplores the type. For Philip, the goal was to dazzle (a word Chesterfield uses). The idea of dazzle is in essence cold: it is controlling a person by overpowering him, not engaging in healthy reciprocity. Dazzling is all about a brilliant showiness, a confounding excess.

  Among the arts to be mastered was sexual expertise, and Chesterfield urged the teenage Philip to make the most of his time in Paris: it was much better to enjoy ‘commerce’ with ‘a woman of health, education and rank’ than to consort with prostitutes, who were likely to be carrying infections. Women, he wrote, were ‘children of a larger growth’, incapable of acting or thinking ‘consequentially’ at any length. ‘A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child.’

  At his most nakedly strategic, Chesterfield writes that there are certain women, expert in ‘good breeding’ (but of course!), who decide a man’s social fortune, and urges Philip to pay ‘particular court’ to them, for ‘their recommendation is a passport through all the realms of politeness’. He evokes a scene that feels less like the sphere of good breeding than a thicket of prickly hazards, but he is always at his most cynical where women are concerned. He says, for instance, that women are all ‘either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly’, and ‘those who are in a state of mediocrity, are best flattered upon their beauty’. By contrast, ‘a decided and conscious beauty looks upon every tribute paid to her beauty, only as her due’; it is therefore much more effective to praise her thoughts, since she ‘wants to shine … on the side of her understanding’. And yet, ‘a man’s moral character is a more delicate thing than a woman’s reputation.’

  While many have been outraged by Chesterfield’s attitude to women and his cynical idea of the motives for manners, the letters were hugely popular. Editions appeared under promising titles such as The Art of Pleasing, and it is a mark of the letters’ fame that in 1791 there appeared a counterblast entitled The Contrast: or an Antidote to the Pernicious Principles Disseminated in the Letters of the Late Earl of Chesterfield. When a volume bearing the title The New Chesterfield was published in 1830, the editor emphasized the durability of the letters’ ‘valuable precepts’, which amounted to ‘a system of the most useful instruction’.

  Samuel Johnson memorably spoke out for the opposition. His distaste for Chesterfield ran deep. He had been poorly treated by the earl, who had cast himself as the patron of Johnson’s efforts to compile an authoritative dictionary of English. Two months before the work was finally published, in 1755, Johnson wrote to Chesterfield, dismissing his meagre assistance: ‘Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?’ It was no surprise that Johnson thought little of Chesterfield’s letters. If one could remove the immorality, they ‘should be put in the hands of every young gentleman’. (A bit like saying, ‘If they were better, I’d like them more.’) But as they stood, the letters were likely to ‘teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master’.9

  Johnson valued manners, regarding politeness as a form of ‘fictitious benevolence’ useful in allowing strangers to get on. The fiction he had in mind was not insincerity; it consisted of adopting a position of benevolence on the assumption that it was warranted, rather than adopting it despite thinking it unwarranted. Believing that manners were a means of achieving equability where there was perhaps not equality, he could not stomach Chesterfield’s tactical approach to the subject. One of Johnson’s tenets was that you should never take provisions to other people’s homes, because it implies that they are unable to entertain you adequately. Another was that asking someone a string of questions is not a recipe for civilized conversation; directed at his biographer James Boswell, this had a certain pointedness, for Boswell often inundated Johnson with queries in the hope of being able to transcribe the pungent answers. Eager to fit in, Boswell had disavowed what he thought was his fellow Scots’ ‘rough and roaring freedom of manners’, but he retained a puppyish quality that sometimes annoyed his companions.10

  It is apt that Johnson, whose pronouncements on manners were sturdy rather than silky, chooses to condemn Chesterfield for teaching ‘the manners of a dancing master’. Even though Chesterfield thought dancing ‘a very trifling, silly thing’, he acknowledged that ‘it is one of those established follies to which people of sense are sometimes obliged to conform’, and the first of his deliberately instructive letters to Philip declares that ‘It is very proper and decent to dance well.’ At times he speaks of society as if of a dance, in which control and fluency are crucial, as are one’s ‘footing’ and an air of ‘douceur’ (gentleness or smoothness).

  In Chesterfield’s reference to douceur we see another cause of Johnson’s hostility. Like many of his contemporaries, Johnson associated French culture with a debilitating effeminacy. The English aping of French manners was unpatriotic. Chesterfield, who adopted French words such as sang-froid, gauche, soi-disant and malaise, was a representative of the wider, modish enthusiasm for Gallic politesse, bons mots and intrigue – the atmosphere of the salon. In his Dictionary of the English Language Johnson appears to have made a point of excluding voguish words borrowed from French: bouquet, coterie, ennui, clique. The equation of Frenchness with posturing and fickleness was neither new nor fleeting, but it found some particularly violent expressions during this period. Thus George Edward Ayscough, a well-travelled soldier, writing in 1778: ‘I have studied the manners of the French nation, and I have found them volatile, even to a degree of childishness. To all rules there are, doubtless, exceptions; but a Frenchman is, in general, an unlettered prejudiced fop.’11

  The tendency to decry French culture was in part an expression of anxiety about the state of British culture, and in part a reaction to the air of sexual ambiguity and moral slackness that clung to the Parisian aristocracy. It was common to suspect that French patterns of behaviour were all very well in France but were impossible to transplant. John Brown in his popular An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757) noted the ‘vain and effeminate’ nature of French manners and saw them as ‘the very archetype from which our own are drawn’. But French ‘national spirit’ held firm because candidates for public office were ‘assiduously trained’ and imbued with ‘the principle of military honour’. The French were thus ‘women at the toilet, heroes in the field’ and ‘contemptible in private life; in public, formidable’. The English, said Brown, had aped only half of this, which threatened to be their ruin.12

  Arthur Young in his Travels (1792) writes that ‘In the art of living, the French have generally been esteemed by the rest of Europe, to have made the greatest proficiency, and their manners have accordingly been more imitated, and their customs more adopted than those of any nation.
Of their cookery, there is but one opinion;… it is far beyond our own.’ He cites as examples of the good manners prevalent in France the tendency of people of all classes to be ‘scrupulously neat in refusing to drink out of glasses used by other people’. What is more, ‘The idea of dining without a napkin seems ridiculous to a Frenchman.’13

  True to his enthusiasm for French idiom, Chesterfield thinks that a gracious, pleasing style is a matter of ‘je ne sais quoi’. One of its ingredients is a harmonious speaking voice; he is maintaining a tradition of thinking the voice powerful and in need of control (Giovanni della Casa had urged against shrillness, Thomas Elyot had stressed the need for clean enunciation). Other factors for Chesterfield are ‘pretty’ appearance, appropriate dress, ‘something open and cheerful in the countenance’ and a lack of laughter. He expands on this last point: ‘I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.’ He seems to have inherited this idea from Hobbes, who dismissed ‘those grimaces called laughter’ as ‘incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves … [and] are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men’.14 Chesterfield is less interested than Hobbes in the idea that people with great minds should free others from scorn, rather than adding to it. But he buys into Hobbes’s notion of laughter as distortion; it does unattractive things to the face, is a source of unpleasant noise, and, though he does not say as much, reveals the teeth.