A Spectator's Notebook
ItAve NOT read Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge's article welcoming the Queen to America, and since according to Mr. Muggeridge the extracts that have appeared distort his views, comment on it is impos- sible. I only hope that he is right and that his comparison, for example, between the Queen today and the Romano& in 1914 is rather more apt than it sounds (whom does he cast in the role of Rasputin, I wonder?); but his article on Sir Winston Churchill's History in the Sunday Dis- patch last week does not give much ground for optimism. Mr. Muggeridge began by saying that just because he has made history, Sir Winston is unfitted to write it. Having thus washed- out, apart from Sir Winston, Thucydides, Xenophon, Julius Cesar, Sir Walter Raleigh, Macaulay, Thiers and Guizot, he went on to describe Napoleon as 'an essentially commonplace little Corsican.' Now whether you admire Napoleon or not, whether you agree with H. A. L. Fisher that he had 'the grandest intellectual endowments ever vouchsafed to man,' or whether you don't, the one thing he was not was commonplace. To call him so is about as sensible as it would be to call Cleopatra chaste, Ramsay MacDonald dynamic, Voltaire dull, or Mr. Muggeridge reliable.
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