Macaronies & Misery

KINGS & DESPERATE MEN--Louis Kronenberger--Knopf ($3.50).

> When Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke became England's Secretary of State the madam of a London bawdy house exclaimed: "Five thousand a year, my girls and all for us!"

> When George I arrived in England fresh from his native Hanover he brought along two mistresses: "spectrally thin" Madame Schulenburg, popularly known as The Maypole, and "monstrously fat" Madame Kielmansegge, popularly known as The Elephant. The first sight of them made London crowds hoot. Cried the Schulenburg: "Good pipple, what for you abuse us? We come for all your goots." A voice from the crowd: "Yes, and our chattels too."

> When Queen Caroline lay dying, George II was convulsed with tears. The Queen urged him to remarry. "No, no," sobbed the grieving King, "I shall have mistresses."

If Author Kronenberger had made freer use of such anecdotes, his reconstruction of 18th-Century England would be as lively as it is critically keen, sensitive, discerning and humane. But he has other purposes, which he makes clear by reviewing his own book succinctly in a prefatory note. "The chief aim of this book he says, "is to provide a picture of 18th-Century England until the time of the French Revolution. The whole thing lies much closer to a social chronicle than an orthodox history-book, and is more concerned with manners and tastes than with treaties and wars. All the same, I have certainly not sought to restrict the book to the merely decorative or picturesque it attempts a big canvas, deals seriously with human ideas and emotions, and seeks to portray human beings as truthfully as possible. Perhaps the book's character can be best summed up as concrete rather than abstract,' descriptive rather than analytical. . . . It deals with certain important men and women, not to provide much in the way of factual biography, but to express their feelings and ideas, their values and tastes."

Some of the men & women the book deals with: the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough ("the courtliest man of his generation had married its most abusive virago"); Robert Walpole ("a great spoke in the Philistine wheel and a heavy stone in the capitalist edifice"); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ("her personality, though it had its inconveniences while she lived, is exactly the sort that is welcomed in the dead"); John Wesley (who "was that fascinating type of fanatic--the 'rational' one ... 'I think,' said his father of him as a boy, 'I think our Jack would not attend to the most pressing necessities of nature unless he could give a reason for it' "); Charles James Fox ("the most delightful Englishman of his time"); William Pitt (". . . passing from Fox to Pitt . . . is like leaving a lighted house where there was companionship and dancing and supper, to walk home alone through streets solemn with midnight"); Pope ("Is it 'poetry'?"); Swift ("Swift's living brain was akin to other men's in dreams"); Defoe ("Defoe was less of an artist--by circumstances, temperament, or aspiration--than almost any other great writer in the range of English letters"); Dr. Johnson ("It is very wonderful that Johnson, throughout 50 years, should have gone on making comments that were invariably pointed, but seldom to the point").

These sharp etchings of Kings & Desperate Men are set off by broader and blander portrayals of the aristocrats; country gentlemen; the Universities; Bath ("Farewell, dear Bath," said a lady of fashion, "nowhere so much scandal, no where so little sin!"); of the male tops (macaronies) whose days were spent perfuming and prinking and whose powdered pompadours were sometimes almost as tall as their wearers; and of the poor, who sought escape from their horrible condition in gin-drinking--"at once the most pathetic and the most tragic of proletarian revolutions--an overthrow of order by the worst means, and toward the worst ends."

The 18th Century is Critic Kronenberger's century, and at its best his book succeeds brilliantly in recapturing its modes and moods. But that century still troubles him. Intellectually he is fascinated by it. But all that is humane in him, and that is a great deal, is still revolted by its superficiality, its grotesquely caparisoned brutality, and the vast half-buried body of its human misery.

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