Mr. Churchill and History

Marlborough, His Life and Times. Vol. III. By the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, C.H., M.P. (Harrap. 25s.) MR. CHURCHILL'S new volume has been abundantly praised,

and for very good reasons. It includes all the necessary material, indeed rather more than is essential ; it is full of information and letters, some of the latter unpublished. It contains admirable portraits and some very good maps, some of them in colour, to which are added two facsimiles of docu- ments. It is, moreover, a good fat book, well printed and stoutly bound. And since the matter has stood fairly well the enquiry of historians, it may well be asked, " Is anything lacking ? " To this one can only reply, hesitantly, " Yes ; the indubitable marks that at the writing of this book there was present the spirit of Clio—a muse."

There are two main things that we demand in any history, or biographical history, that we read ; and the first is the proper grouping or massing of the material. It cannot be said that the enormous volume of matter is very satisfactorily presented in this book. It is admittedly difficult, when the scene changes from one place to another, to preserve con- tinuity of narrative, but the interest would have been more steadily maintained if for any one year Mr. Churchill had kept our attention fixed on one sphere of action, instead of scamper- ing us off from Flanders to Spain, then to England or Turin, and then back to Flanders. Something would have been lost ; it is a problem that confronted Gibbon, who solved it by abandoning chronology and adhering to geography : and though allowance must be made for difference in scale, if Mr. Churchill had adopted his method, he would have more than compensated the loss by making his story more stimulating to the imagination, and easier to read.

For this book is not easy to read ; the matter is absorbing, the story is epic, we should go up and down on waves of excitement ; but we do not. This is partly due to arrange- ment, but still more to Mr. Churchill's careless style, for the

second thing that we demand in history, treated as an art, is a happy handling of words. Of this Mr. Churchill is so, far from being a master, that one could almost accuse him of being amateurish. His treatment of the successive para- graphs is deadening ; they all begin with the same impact, preferably with a heavy stress on the second syllable (proper names are useful here, such as Godolphin, Cadogan), and end timidly, without motion, so that we are continually being jerked. The paragraphs themselves lack structure, and often one sentence simply tails on to another :

" This could only mean that they courted battle. The situation was instantaneously transformed. Doubt and despondency van- ished ; all became simple and dire. All the allied contingents were ordered forthwith to concentrate. Marlborough's first thought was for the Danes. He sent an urgent message to their general, the Duke of Wiirtemberg :"

Here the message follows.

" The whole region was familiar to both sides. It had long been regarded as a possible ground of battles. It was one of the most thoroughly comprehended terrains of Europe. . . ."

That is not writing ; it is jotting notes, a habit Mr. Churchill is given to, as when he says, " This letter is interesting because . . ." as though he were a history don addressing a small class.

More disturbing to the reader, perhaps, than this lack of life in the words, and the occasional bad sentence with words in an order which is wrong because it muddles the mind, is the uncertainty of the reader about his position in the scene. Sometimes he is above it, at others Mr. Churchill takes him arm in arm to the scene itself ; sometimes he is asked to dart a contemptuous look at modern generals, at others to survey mankind from some cloudy eminence, whence he can utter magniloquent generalisations :

" The majestic events of history and the homely incidents of didly life alike show how vainly man strives to control his fate. Even his greatest neglects or failures may bring him good. Even his greatest achievements may work him ill."

Mr. Churchill himself is unwilling to maintain any one position. Sometimes he used the royal " we," but sometimes the treacherous little word means you and he together, once at least without pause :

" ." . we reproduce on the opposite page a playing-card of the time.

We must now return to the British on the right."

thus when .the reader is offered a letter which " we " like as

well as any the Duke wrote to his wife, he hardly knows whether or not he is included.

Mr. Churchill has largely abandoned the rhetoric which

sometimes brought discomfort to the reader of the earlier volumes : there is nothing quite like " Many weary faithful feet that had trudged from the Thames to the Danube here came to rest " ; but it sometimes intrudes, and has spoiled a good battle-piece. " Wave after wave of charging horsemen, . each trooper seeking with his sharp sword to slay his foe, were hurled in mob violence one upon another." We can perhaps forgive the plural verb with the singular noun, but need we be told that people fighting try to kill each other, and that the troopers' swords were sharp '? In the excitement we might perhaps forgive it all ; but we are less ready to forgive the occasional appearance of Fortune, that overworked lady, and surely " Low, low lay the Tories in the trough of misfortune after Harley's fall " is unpardonable. Nor does this tone go well with the sprightly satire of :

" Harley's was a deliberate attempt to upset the whole Govern- ment, to detach men from both parties, and to form an entirely new ministry of the middle. Shocking ! "

There are a hundred and one things, stylistic horrors, errors in taste, shifting of the position, jerking the reader from one attitude of mind to another, that go to make this book a mediocre example of the writing of history as an art. And this is a pity, for the material is miraculously good, and when he likes Mr. Churchill can handle it ; and also, when he likes, Mr. Churchill can write. The end of Chapter X, for instance, is a model of what such things could lm. The fact is, of course, that Clio is a hard task-mistress ; and, after all, she has a right to insist that the writing of history is a whole-time job, and not one to be undertaken in the intervals of strenuously serving the State. Nevertheless Mr. Churchill can congratulate himself that he has given what is so far much the best portrait of his illustrious ancestor, even if there is now and again a little tot) much varnish on the picture, so that everyone will wish him a happy conclusion.