Salubrious, Sprightly Bath

BATH--Edith Sitwell--Smith & Haas ($3.50).

When Richard ("Beau") Nash came to town, in the summer of 1702, Bath was simply a second-rate provincial spa, crowded with quacks and gamesters, sadly lacking in manners and fashionable society. Beau Nash made Bath quite the thing. Though Authoress Sitwell does not diagram the mechanics of the Beau's career, it hoisted him rapidly to be Bath's arbiter elegantiarum. A gamester by profession, he exercised a soothing influence on other gamesters. Dandy of dandies, by precept & example he made others toe the line. He published a set of rules, posted it in prominent places. When the Duchess of Queensberry appeared at a ball in a white apron, Beau Nash tore it off her, gave her a thoroughgoing reprimand. The Duchess apologized. After fighting a duel to show he was no coward, Nash banished duelling.

Sprightly, malicious Authoress Sitwell is partial to Beau Nash, likes his style, but she records one famed instance when his wit was bested. Revivalist John Wesley, come to Bath to spread Methodism, was publicly reproached by the Beau, who vowed that Wesley's preaching frightened people out of their wits. "Sir," said Wesley, "did you ever hear me preach?" He had not, the Beau admitted, but he judged of it by common report. Replied Wesley: "Sir, I dare not judge of you by common report."

In Bath's heyday, which was also Nash's, the world & his wife went there, not only to sip the vile-tasting water in the new Pump Room, flounder in canvas suits and dresses in the muddy King's Bath, but to gossip, gamble, dance, be seen of men. Thomas Gainsborough painted his first society portraits there; Actress Siddons trod the boards; Poets Pope and Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Horatio Walpole, the Earl of Chesterfield, James Boswell, even London-loving Samuel Johnson visited Bath in the season.

Authoress Sitwell, more interested in ghosts than in flesh-&-blood, has made of Bath's "long summer day" a diluted linear sketch, not a living picture. Though she gives tantalizing glimpses of the 18th Century town, onlookers are for the most part distracted by airy Sitwellian showmanship, Sitwellian gestures.

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