Harvard's Higginson Professor of History, one of the country's leading chroniclers of its social and cultural growth, has east 75 pages of light on a fascinating phase of American striving: the etiquette book. Maintaining that "nothing that concerns human beings can fail to concern the historian," Mr. Schlesiner's Introduction dignifies the quest of good manners as "one aspect of the common man's struggle to achieve a larger degree of human dignity." Statements like these lead the reader to expect a thorough study of manners literature, its relation to and effect on American mores and ideals. What the reader gets, instead, is a short, delightfully styled, whimsey-packed hour's entertainment. But "Learning How to Behave" falls short of being the integrated study of convention that one inevitably feels the research and author's background made possible.

Beginning with the early colonial period, Mr. Schlesinger traces the evolution of manners. He describes the "minor morals" attitude of the earliest mentors, when American manners formed an adjunct to law and social structure, and punishment was swift for makers of ugly faces. With the Revolution and rise of republicanism, however, Mr. Schlesinger professes to see in manners the effort of common people to reach equality--a levelling process. A new conception of manners as a set of specific injunctions to be memorized developed, and a steady stream of manners books was demanded by the etiquette-hungry American people.

With the post-Civil War social and financial revolution came a change to ostentation and opulence as a way of life for the nation's "leaders" and an ideal for the masses. Looking back at a once-scorned Europe, special arbiters plumped for aristocratic living, and the nation clambered to imitate. The race kept up for a while, petered out just before World War I, and shifted then suddenly and violently to short, dresses, simpler dinner-parties, and fewer chaperons. During the twenties, manners became big business for the Posts and Dixes, and America's attention shifted from the age-old knife-fork-spoon controversy to the compatibility of good breeding and petting.

All this makes good reading, and, for the student of American society, provocative reading. When a history professor writes a short, humorous, learned and charming paper, hosannahs should surely drown out stuffy criticism. But Mr. Schlesinger has opened too many doors without searching the rooms: what of the dominance of the American woman in setting the etiquette pace and incidentally inhibiting much vigorous thinking through the centuries? What of the effect on a nation of having an etiquette before it has an ethic? Are not manners surface characteristics rather than molders of men and nations, interesting as they are accepted or not accepted as realities or aspirations? Although some of these points, and many more, are touched on by Mr. Schlesinger's introduction and summary, they are undeveloped by the text. Perhaps they call for another, longer, weightier book.