CORPORAL JOHN
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By BONAMY DOBREE IT is a grimly sad story which Mr. Churchill unfolds in this last volume of his life of Marlborough, gloomy not only in the retrospect as a tale of human folly, misunderstanding, and greed, but also because it gives birth to melancholy reflections upon humanity at the present day. Perhaps, we feel, Swift, who saw at close quarters the actual scene here described, and saw it in its main lines so clearly, was after all right in suggesting that mankind was " the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." If the details do not correspond, if our manner at least has improved so that we feel a greater need for justification, we cannot be sure that it is anything better than a more elaborate system of pretences that dis- tinguishes us from our ruthless, unscrupulous, power-famished ancestors of some two hundred years ago.
Yet it is possibly a little Mr. Churchill's fault that we should feel so Swiftian, for he never gives the other side of the case. It is only too easy for us, who cannot, and do not wish to, withhold our admiration from the great Duke, even at this distance to allow warm partisan feeling to colour our vision ; and we are, besides, impregnated with the Whig view of history. Marlborough was, certainly, a very great man indeed, as well as being a great captain ; his failings are but the foibles of humanity, and even his worst flaw, his inordinate love of money, was not so monstrous as is usually made out ; nor was he to be bought, though he would accept gratifications after the manner of his age. Mr. Churchill has, indeed, while ad- mitting most of the charges, successfully cleansed them of any sinister significance, so that he stands out, a magnificent imperial figure, in many ways the darling of the gods, and we are so often pervaded by the feeling of " If only . . ." when some particu- larly stupid thing impedes his splendid progress, make him so much the hero of a dazzling romance, that we are apt to forget that there is something to be said on the other side.
Because, of course, we are in this volume concerned with the Peace of Utrecht, and all that led up to it. Mr. Churchill easily disposes of the idea that Marlborough wished to continue the war for the sake of his own aggrandisement, but he never suggests that the Whig-Tory tussle at this point was not merely one for power, but the clash between two principles of which the actors themselves were, possibly, not altogether aware. Marlborough, himself no Whig, busied in working out his campaigns, immersed in the colossal task of keeping the Alliance together, cannot have realised exactly what he represented ; nor had he the type of mind to make the analysis. For what brought about the Tory reaction of 1710 was not the low back-stairs intrigue of a mean power-hunting creature with " a dirty chambermaid," but the growing sense of the country that the interest being served in this prolonged war was not that of the country as a whole, but that of the money- power. Swift was magnificently lucid on this point in The Conduct of the Allies. As a devoted Churchman, representing the old order as against the new, he realised that : " The great traders in money were wholly devoted to the Whigs, who had first raised them," and disliked and feared the system of credit by which " one part of the nation is pawned to the other, with hardly a possibility left of being ever redeemed." Natur- ally, as is always the case, the whole issue was very confused, and Harley's South Sea scheme was the friendly brother, not the opponent, of the Bank of England.
But at all events it was by no means altogether a question of personal ambition and the rancour of party politics. The peace had to come ; and it was, as it turned out, a good Marlborough, His Life and Times. Volume IV. By the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill. (Harrap. 25s.) peace, obtained by arbitration rather than by force. We did, indeed, lose our honour to gain the asiento (which Mr. Churchill consistently mis-spells), and nothing can excuse the way in which the peace was obtained ; the whole story constitutes a permanent blot on England's fame. Yet it was not all quite so black as Mr. Churchill makes out, and, as Professor G. M. Trevelyan insists, William III adopted much the same method to bring about the Peace of Ryswick as Harley was to attempt in this instance. It was really St. John who made it so vile, betraying the allies in the field by his " restraining orders," which he communicated to his friends their enemies, as well as in the closet. There will be few to defend St. John in the details of his procedure. He may be as black as Mr. Churchill paints him, but there is a great deal more to be said for Harley than is suggested in this book. If not of commanding stature, the new Lord Oxford was, in his way, a great man, greater than the methods he partly loved to and partly was forced to employ. Politics may have been merely a splendid game, the " endless adventure," for St. John, but for Oxford it also meant caring for his country. Swift was, it is true, somewhat gullible, and a little intoxicated by the position he found himself in, but the man whom he called " the most virtuous minister and the most able that ever I remember to have read of " cannot just have been the man Mr. Churchill would have us believe that he was. It is true that Mr. Churchill thinks little of Swift, while paying him lip-service, for he classes Mrs. Manley and the author of Gulliver together as " kindred minds." Thus though the Life is written with no more of partisan spirit than in the circum- stances is right and proper, though the hero of. the story is not made too much of, his enemies are not given a fair deal. While one accepts Mr. Churchill's Marlborough, the description of his antagonists must be adopted with reserve.
It is a great task which Mr. Churchill has accomplished, carried out with a thoroughness worthy of his great ancestor. The picture is clear and firm, the facts very well documented : it will no doubt be the standard Life for some years. This volume is the best of all the four ; it is free both from the slightly gawky jibes and the disastrous pieces of " fine writing " which a little injured the earlier volumes. It is true that Mr. Churchill's style is inevitably that of the public orator rather than that of the disciplined writer, a style involving repetitions which are apt to irritate the reader though they are welcome to the listener. Here and there Mr. Churchill drops into a hazy vulgarism : " The peace discussions wended onward," or allows himself a clumsy sentence. But such lapses are rare in this volume : and though the descriptions of the battles are as good as ever, they are even bettered by Mr. Churchill's account (allowing for the bias already noted) of the political movements between 1709 and 1714: only an experienced politician who knows how things happen could have written it.
The dramatic tension is well sustained throughout this volume. At Malplaquet one feels that Marlborough is failing ; there is no longer the imaginative genius of Blenheim, but a tired man repeating himself, depending on the sheer weight of superior numbers. But then there is the astonishing re- covery, the brilliant operations of the Ne plus ultra lines and the siege of Bouchain, while all the while the great captain was harassed by betrayals at home, disloyalty at the front, was worried by his wife and tortured by headaches. It is at this period, more than at any other perhaps, when so much depended upon him, that his giant's nature is best revealed. It was humiliating for him to act as he had to act, yet his loyalties Impelled him to it, and Corporal John comes out all the more nobly for his abnegation and freedom from pettiness.
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