I discovered flipping through the Sudelbücher trying to locate likely passages to distribute for collective translation practice that one of them concerns Lord Chesterfield and his letters, of which Samuel Johnson claimed that they teach a permutation of the title to this post. My father being a fan of Chesterfield, I thought it would be interesting to produce the below, or rather, I thought it would be interesting to produce a decent englishing and the below was the best I could do.
(Much of this went to Herr Professor Feder)
Lord Chesterfield certainly never thought that his letters would appear in print. One can gather from the character of the lord, which he sought meticulously to maintain before the world, that if he had published a treatise on upbringing, it would have turned out quite differently than the plan for upbringing that could be sketched from his letters. Most of the difference is in how justly they accord with the individual circumstances of the young Stanhope, and there, where he finds his nature recalcitrant, he tries to give to many of his rules a weight which they would not be able to have in a general system. Of course he insists as a man of the court on grace and good manners in a young man whom he wishes to make into a man of the court, but that he does it in such a manner as we see in his letters, where he speaks so often of dancing-masters, of carving [? vorschneiden] and nail-clipping and always brings the graces, the graces to his tongue, this must be explained by the special character of young Stanhope. Perhaps the following can contribute something to that. The anecdotes which now come are first-hand; I read Lord Chesterfield's letters in Lord Boston's country home, where at the time a certain Scottish lady, Mrs Walkingshaw, was also visiting, who not only knew the young Stanhope very well, but had also had much contact with his mother. According to the description of this lady Mr Stanhope was a good, fat, comfortable youth, who had learned much, but possessed little of the pride and burning ambition which his father, twenty years after begetting him, hoped to instill in him; nothing of the strong force of Bolingbroke, whose acts were represented to him as a model, though perhaps he had more thorough learning at a younger age. It would perhaps have been more fitting for him, I feel, to publish a few authors or Acta pacis [? Westphalia what?] as a private individual and to make himself a good father and husband, for he was in the highest degree sloppy, as many bookish men are, and was accustomed, in society, to stand with his left foot on his right, like the youngest Talbot. The following story might serve as a demonstration of how deep this tendency lay in him. When his father called him home one time to see how his son and the graces stood with each other (you [ie Feder] will remember that time from the letters), his father held a great banquet, to which all the foreign ambassadors were invited, to bring his son into contact with them. The young Stanhope, however, was more concerned with his plate than with the whole gathering, and called, and not in a polite way, three times for some of a tart which he liked, which greatly angered his father. When the servants finally were to remove the dish, he called to them and took the last large piece right off the dish with his fingers, and without first setting it on his plate bit into it and got butter on his face up to his ears. He did this despite his father's calling out to him, "the graces, the graces", and finally he married, again against his fathers will, an excellent woman (the publisher of the letters) with whom he certainly lived more happily than he would have if his father, as certainly would have happened, placed his marriage in the political firmament. Don't you find it much preferable that we have these letters, than a book on upbringing that the Lord might have prepared for Dodsley? This way we have his arcana. There is already a summary of the work in English organized into some sort of system. On this something from Lavater's Physiognomical Atlas.
(In attempting to discover if "physiognomisch" should be rendered "physiognomical" or "physiognomic" I discovered that there exists a paper called "Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face".)
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