Sage of the Minuet

LORD CHESTERFIELD AND His WORLD (456 pp.)--Samuel Shellabarger--Little, Brown ($5).

Samuel Shellabarger is a master of the histrionical romance. His Captain from Castile and Prince of Foxes bristled with swashbuckling Renaissance antics, and bustled down the old pay-dirt road to sales of more than 1,000,000 copies each. But before he became the darling of the cloak-and-swagger set, Author Shellabarger, a onetime Princeton professor, wrote sober-sided biographies. One of these. Lord Chesterfield and His World, published in Britain in 1935, is making a belated U.S. bow. Scholarly Author Shellabarger has taken a firm grip on a slippery subject: a man with the moral instincts of a chameleon and the temperament of an icicle.

Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, was a chilly 18th Century aristocrat, diplomat and wit, whose famous letters to his son, designed to make the lad a blue chip off the old block, immortalized their author instead. Reared in the Age of Reason, Chesterfield also became its perfect symbol: a man who saw his time steadily, but never saw through it.

In Chesterfield's emotional budget, sentiment was a luxury, style a necessity. "Do everything," the earl instructed a godson, "in minuet-time; speak, think, and move always in that measure." The irony of Chesterfield's own life was that he gracefully missed every other beat. He served George II ably as ambassador to The Hague, and was probably one of the few lord-lieutenants of Ireland whose blarney charmed the Irish. But solid triumphs abroad never netted him more than slim cabinet posts at home, and George II scornfully dubbed the diminutive earl a "dwarf-baboon."

The Duties of Women. He was friendly with greater men, like Voltaire and Pope, but his satiric wit was to theirs as a mosquito bite to a wasp's sting. Offered the chance to sponsor Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, he muffed it so badly that years later an embittered Johnson rebuffed him with a classic retort: "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?"

Though his fabulous Mayfair manor, Chesterfield House, took three years in the building, the earl never properly had a home. At 38, his personal fortune depleted by staggering losses at cards, he advertised for a wife ("I want merit and I want money"). He got the money from a middle-aged and somewhat vulgar countess who brought him -L-50,000 in dowry and -L-3,000 in annual income. After the wedding, they were rarely seen together.

Chesterfield took a dim view of women generally; he felt their proper function was "to suckle fools and chronicle small beer." But in an age of high manners and low morals, it was chic to have a mistress, even more chic to sire a bastard. The earl had both.

He seduced a plump little French governess, discarded her after a year or so, left her in his will "five hundred pounds as some compensation of the injury." The illegitimate son she bore him turned out to be the sad apple of his eye. The sage of the minuet had sired a clodhopper. But Chesterfield was the last to admit it.

The Training of a Slob. From the age of six, putty-brained little Philip was trained on Greek, Latin and the great books. At 14, he was sent Grand Touring for five years. In a chain of letters, the earl alternately lashed the boy into study and lectured him on the art of being worldlywise. "For God's sake, my dear boy, do not squander away one moment of your time ... I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments."

Though no rebel, young Philip occasionally fretted at the guide-strings. In Lausanne, while standing behind some intent card-playing senators, he "snipped the strings of their breeches" and clipped their flowing wigs to their chairs. Then he cried "Fire!" and the senators sprang up bareheaded and bare-bottomed.

What made the earl cringe was that Philip was such a slob. At a dressy dinner at Chesterfield House, he gobbled so earnestly at a plate of gooseberries topped with whipped cream that his face was soon lathered. Humiliated before his guests, Chesterfield quipped to Philip's servant: "John, why do you not fetch the strop and the razors? You see your master is going to shave himself." When Philip botched his maiden speech in the House of Commons, Chesterfield finally scrapped the dream that he would ever make a man, or even a manikin of distinction out of his son.

Increasingly deaf and forever ailing, the earl took to shuttling stoically between Bath and London, in one city drinking the waters, in the other, the bitter tea of a lonely old age. His reason had withered his faith in God and realism had whittled his faith in man, but nothing ever weakened his faith in manners. On his deathbed, his valet announced that a friend, Solomon Dayrolles, had come to see him. "Give Dayrolles a chair," croaked Chesterfield, and died.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.