Books: Tottering into Vogue

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HORACE WALPOLE (215pp.)—Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis—Pantheon ($6.50).

If a man is the son of a Prime Minister, he has a very fair chance of getting somewhere himself. Indeed, if he shares his father's genius, as did the younger Pitt, he may become Prime Minister himself. But if, like Horace Walpole, he is as waspishly well-bred as his father was openhanded and bluff, he doubtless does better to observe than participate. As the great Sir Robert's son, Horace Walpole had a ubiquitous entree as well as a tireless eye and the great world's attentive ear. His letters, the most diverting in all English literature, provide a lasting mirror of the 18th century aristocracy that ruled Great Britain; forged, as at times it fettered, taste; commanded a style, established an attitude.

Walpole's letters are as steeped in temperament as they are crammed with information: from an enjoyable ambivalence of attitude, Walpole must mock what he delighted in, satirize what he succumbed to, and make plain that in chronicling society, a monocle is no mere class ornament but an actual sharpener of sight.

The Amateur. If Walpole seems today the very voice of the ancien régime, in his own time he had something of the avant-garde about him, even a touch of the enfant terrible. He invented his own fopperies, adapted his own fiction from the medieval, translated his own pleasures from the French. He had the ruling-class horror of being a professional, yet in his amateur way could claim with much truth that "no profession comes amiss to me." He was a printer, an innovating builder, an M.P., an antiquary, a historian, a novelist, a playwright, a collector of art.

As the supreme social chronicler of the age, he was not content merely to perambulate society himself; he recruited an eavesdropper for every dinner table, a spy for every drawing room. In his own way Walpole ran a factory of anecdote and gossip, with duchesses doing piecework and Cabinet ministers tying up parcels and ambassadors acting as delivery boys. But the products themselves were all personally hand-finished; the letters proved as durably elegant as Lamerie silver or Sheraton sideboards.

Pain into Pleasantry. Everywhere the letters bear Walpole's signature as well as his century's. "The first step toward being in fashion is to lose an eye or a tooth—not that I complain—it is charming to totter into vogue," could only beWalpole. Thus he turns pain into pleasantry, parliamentary battles into hair-pulling matches, the universe itself into a ballroom. With just as unillusioned a view, Horace's father became the most successful of British administrators. The father was as philistine as Horace could be exquisite, but they were not too unlike —a cynical common sense governed the father, a cynical worldliness his son.