Tottering into Vogue

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 regime, 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.

His genius for letter writing aside, the son was a familiar type of cultivated societies--the fussy, dilettantish, delicately feline bachelor, a connoisseur of wit and, even more, of social oddities and human blemishes. Horace carefully examined every ointment, hoping to discover a fly in it, minutely tested every piece of armor, hoping to encounter a crack; yet in all this there was less malice than sense of metier. As Beau Brummell dressed for future ages, or Lucullus dined, Walpole peered into corners. But he had, too, his more special, often laborious pursuits: Strawberry Hill, the house he built to his own design at Twickenham, virtually ushered in Britain's Gothic Revival, as his novel The Castle of Otranto set going that revival in fiction.

Guided Tour. As a weathercock of taste, Walpole is more gilded than dependable. It soon becomes clear that he cultivates lesser things at the expense of greater ones, that his feeling for Gothic is really a love of the exotic, that his sense of the visionary is in essence a taste for the lurid, that Heaven for him is hardly more than a garden and Hell hardly more than a grotto. It was not so much that Walpole couldn't penetrate Dr. Johnson's mind as that he couldn't stomach his manners. Boswell, despite his talents, remained something of an upstart from Scotland. Walpole--who always arrived ceremoniously as a guest--could only sniff at someone who banged on the door as a stranger.

But if no sure guide to taste, Walpole conducted an unparalleled tour of society, from country house to pleasure gardens, from opera to masquerade, from a great ball to a midnight fire, from palace to Parliament, from England to France. It is a great one-man news chronicle with a beruffled-columnist flavor; now someone resigns, now someone elopes, now someone expires. Is military comment in order? "There ends another volume of the American war. It looks as if the history of it would be all we should have of it, except 40 millions of debts and three other wars that have grown out of it." Dramatic criticism? Cymbeline seemed "as long as if everybody in it really went to Italy in every act, and came back again." Interior decoration? "Blenheim looks like the palace of an auctioneer who has been chosen King of Poland." But there are the big set pieces too--the coronation of George II, the beheading of the Jacobite lords:

"Then came old Balmerino, treading the air of a general. As soon as he mounted the scaffold, he read the inscription on his coffin . . . and pulling out his spectacles, read a treasonable speech. ... He said, if he had not taken the sacrament the day before, he would have knocked down Williamson, the Lieutenant of the Tower, for his ill usage of him. . . . Then he lay down; but being told he was on the wrong side, vaulted around, and immediately gave the sign of tossing up his arm, as if he were giving the signal for battle."

City Virtues. Walpole wrote on for 60 years, in a medley of veins for a vast miscellany of correspondents. Yet perhaps none of them knew him so well as does Author Lewis, who for decades has lived not just with Walpole but with everything pertaining to him, or once belonging to him, in a Connecticut house --also called Strawberry Hill--crammed with Walpole letters, manuscripts, portraits, bibelots and books. And beyond writing intimately and appreciatively of him in this book, Lewis has edited the great Yale edition--which ran to 14 volumes--of Walpole's 4,000 extant letters. The large, expertly annotated volumes perforce lack one quality suited to their subject, companionableness, as their ivied academic air disputes, perhaps, Walpole's central statement: "There is not only no knowledge of the world out of a great city, but no decency, no practicable society--I had almost said no virtue."

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