SOURCE: “Mr. Churchill as Historian,” in Historian, Vol. 20, No. 4, August 1958, pp. 387-414.

[In the following essay, Lewis examines Churchill's canon of historical writings, finding that his tendency to eschew psychological investigations in favor of epic, mythologically flavored descriptions tells readers much about Churchill's own historical and cultural milieu.]

It was poetic justice that persuaded the trustees of the Nobel Prize to award it to Mr. Churchill on the ground of his contribution to literature rather than to world peace. If it is a grave distortion to say that the Great Commoner is a war-monger it is at least true to say that he has always seen in war, despite its horror, the great preservative of the best virtues in both men and nations, and that the most splendid passages of his historical writings are devoted to the description of those virtues. He can perceive the victories of peace, but it is mostly a theoretical perception. The passion of his thought is reserved for the zest of battle, for the great moment when the enemy lowers his sword, and for the fighting man's qualities—courage, the patient endurance of pain, the determination to transcend reverses, the faith that cannot even admit the possibility of defeat and which drinks, therefore, from a private stream of comfort no hostile force can pollute. Such a mind cannot embrace war, as did Hitler or Mussolini, in a mood of apocalyptic destructiveness. Yet it can still see it as a noble chivalry; and that fact separates it decisively from those who can only see war as the expression of the beast in human nature.

It is tempting, therefore, in the light of this, to define Mr. Churchill as a man of action. Yet the great man of action rarely writes great books. The achievement of Cortes was left to be catalogued by Oviedo and Las Casas; Wellington had all the distrust of the English officer-gentleman for the intellectual art; and Napoleon did not employ his Elba period as an opportunity to compose the Alexandrian autobiography he might have produced. Mr. Churchill, rather, is the man of letters deeply anxious to pose as the conquistador, the type of hero-figure in the Hemingway novel who secretly idolizes a cult of tough violence he cannot practice because his inner nature ill-equips him for the role. So, although he half-shares the value judgment of his own English aristocratic class which almost regards the authorship of a book as an index of curious intellectual aberration, he writes because his mental vigor and his gift of style will not brook denial. In part, then, his writing is a brilliant and evocative journalism, with the genius of the great newspaperman for grasping the telling story, the compelling headline, carrying a personal zest that is far removed from the Olympian detachment of a Gibbon or a Toynbee. In part, again, it is the belles-lettres tradition of the Augustan gentleman-writer, Poe perhaps, or Horace Walpole, polishing a phrase until it is a glittering perfection or shaping the sentence which can become a quotable gem for the historians of a later age. He is not, like the Webbs, a patient excavator of facts hitherto forgotten in trade union records or municipal files, nor is he, like Tawney, the scholarly annotator of the complicated movement of leading ideas. His historiography, consequently, is frequently grievously deficient. He can paint unforgettable pen-portraits, as his biographies of the great Duke and of his father testify, but he has little insight into the more obscure psychological factors that make up human nature in politics. He is at his best when, like Froude or Prescott, he is writing about the march of a nation or the drama of its collapse; and his worst emerges when he seeks to generalize upon the relationship of the common man to the national experience. By any critical standards of professional history-writing his work fails really to satisfy. Its supreme value, perhaps, lies in the fact that it is composed by a great statesman who is able to illuminate the problem of crisis and leadership in history from the vast storehouse of his own remarkable career.

II

The Churchillian contribution to history resides, first, in the volumes of his World Crisis and History of the Second World War and, second, in the four volumes of his History of the English Speaking Peoples. In the first we are listening to the great actor whose experience no historian will ever recapture. Like Lloyd George's Memoirs, those first two books are a Prime Minister's defense of a wartime politico-military strategy and necessarily one-sided, for if the Crisis seeks to justify the civilian politicians against the soldiers, the History of World War Two (as the recently published Alanbrooke diaries reveal) has the limitations of its author's own fierce prejudices. The History of the English Speaking Peoples, on the other hand, is an attempt to apply a personal perspective to the history of a thousand years. The two efforts are naturally interrelated, for if Gibbon gained much of his understanding of human nature from his captaincy in the Hampshire Regiment of his day, Mr. Churchill describes the great soldier or the decisive battle as one who himself has personally participated in war, from the Cuba of 1892 to the Marne trenches of 1917. The interrelation, of course, can at times produce dubious historical analogy; when the Tories who opposed the war policies of William III are compared with the Conservative isolationists of the Chamberlain period after 1932 it is evident that the historian has been supplanted by the politician.

The enterprise of the History of the English Peoples is generously conceived. It defies the historicist presumption that with the advance of specialization and research history in the grand manner is to be relegated to the historical lumber room. Lucid narrative, architectonic style, vivid description are married to a wisely tolerant spirit ready to forgive everything except the betrayal, in men or nations, of the ultimate verities within them. There is the perfect connection between form and substance naturally to be expected from the great orator. There is the power to describe in unforgettable phrase the deeper resolution of the national spirit; and it is not in itself without significance that the seminal moments of the combined Histories are those five momentous periods within the last four centuries when Britain has been challenged to defend herself against a continental rival—Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Imperial Germany and, last, the Axis Powers. There, Mr. Churchill rises to his supreme heights because nothing stirs him so profoundly as the sense of the British “mission,” half in Europe, half extending over the world, as it sets itself against mighty protagonists to reach forward to its opulence and dominion. He has all of the aristocrat's determination at once to defeat the enemy and yet to yield to him the gentleman's respect for an honourable opponent; so that the Prime Minister's act of stretching across the havoc of war in 1942 to acclaim the greatness of Marshal Rommel is matched by the historian's generous portraiture of men like Washington and Napoleon and Lee. Indeed, he can see in their defeat, when they are defeated, as Milton with Satan, the tragic majesty of their fall rather than an occasion for the victor's boast.

Yet we are all born a little lower than the angels, even the Churchills. So that if Mr. Churchill, as historian, has great virtues he also has great defects. To begin with, his framework of reference, implicit rather than ever explicit, is that of the great English Whig tradition. It is true that he is thereby saved from writing about the Stuart despotism, for example, in the Royalist manner of Sir Charles Petrie. It is equally true that he escapes some of the more obvious errors of constitutional Whiggism—he can dismiss the Victorian myth of the Anglo-Saxon genesis of English liberties, and he goes beyond May in writing what Maitland styled a “history of results” as distinct from a “history of efforts and projects.” Yet it remains the fact that, substantially, his world is still that of Hallam and Stubbs and Freeman. English history from the Conquest to the Glorious Revolution is once again presented as a struggle of popular liberty against the aggressions of arbitrary royal power. The device of a “constitutional Opposition” is again traced back to the Plantaganet period. The Victorian “Civil Service” begins, once again, under Henry I. Runnymede once more becomes the fount of national freedom rather than the effort of a feudal aristocracy to resist the growth of a strong monarchism. Men like Cromwell are presented, in the manner of Gardiner, as seventeenth-century anticipations of Gladstonian liberalism; 1689 is rewritten as Locke saw it and not as the political scepticism of Hume diagnosed it. We see the eighteenth-century struggle between George III and Parliament over again through the eyes of Burke, despite the fact that the classic work of Namier has revolutionized the assumptions of scholarship on the period; Mr. Churchill, indeed, seems to be unaware of the meaning of Sir Richard Pares' remark that only the consecration of party by the success of the two-party system in Victoria's day has deceived posterity into thinking that Burke had the better of the argument in his own generation. No historian, of course, can fail to bring his own scheme of values to the record he analyzes. He may be detached; he cannot hope to be absolutely impartial. Even a work as scholarly as Stubb's Constitutional History was profoundly influenced, as Vinogradoff has pointed out, by the rising tide of Victorian liberalism. But what is astonishing is that Mr. Churchill, sixty years after, can still uncritically embrace its moral and political assumptions as if the whole spirit of the age had remained unaltered. He can still conceive the story he relates as, teleologically, the gradual unfolding of a principle of political liberty which is, in Hallam's phrase, “the slow fruit of ages, still waiting a happier season for its perfect ripeness.” Like some other Marcus Aurelius, he puts together the matured collection of a philosophy at the very moment when the crumbling world around him testifies to its pathetic obsolescence.

It is even more curious that the constitutional gradualism basic to the Whig ethic is illogically fused with the Churchillian passion for conflict. If the germs of constitutionalism were already pregnant in the medieval past it is difficult to understand why their final consummation should have required the motive-forces of war and battle, yet Mr. Churchill obviously enjoys himself most when he is cataloguing the movement of war. The great events in English history for him are its foreign wars. The great soldier is the primary hero, even standing above the great political leader. The statesman who makes peace his final goal is almost contemptuously dismissed as pusillanimous or self-interested. In domestic politics, likewise, Churchill prefers the controversialist to the politician who seeks peace at any price; that is why he prefers Disraeli to Gladstone. Action for action's sake is the breath of history to him; and when the campaigns are over he writes with a sense of loss for which his consolation is the happy remembrance of the exhilarating moments they have brought. The glory of war half-blinds him to its terrible price. We are invited to admire the bloody campaigns of Marlborough which, in their own day, even shocked the conscience of a thick-skinned Europe. Modern historical judgment has certainly deterred the author from Carlylean adulation of the Cromwellian butchery in Ireland and Scotland, but it has not prevented him from retaining the curious assumption that the greatest battle is the one that produces the most frightful carnage. He is obsessed by the glamour of the British imperial epic; so that whereas he can smile ironically at the needlessness of the Mexican War of 1846 as an expression of American Manifest Destiny he cannot see that by the same token the British military adventures in Canada and Africa and India must be equally condemned. The French Revolution seems to have little meaning for him save as it sets the continental stage for the Napoleonic glory; its leaders, for him as for Burke, are contemptuous adventurers whose crime is only mitigated by the genius of the military leadership discovered in the Army of the Republic. He may deplore the Revolutionary War as an unhappy rupture of the Anglo-Saxon fraternity; but what moves him is not so much the opposition of Burke and Fox to the war (he dismisses that opposition, indeed, in one curious phrase) as the ineptitudes of the British military strategy, just as it is Napier's famous description of the death of Sir John Moore that constitutes for him the final comment upon the Peninsular War. Because war for him, however, ought to possess some great national purpose to give it nobility, he can be bitterly critical of misguided adventurism, as in his recognition of the fact that when Henry V revived the English claims to France he opened the “greatest tragedy in our medieval history;” but that does not deter him, even so, from a vivid and prolonged description of the famous battles of the Hundred Years Yar. He can even at times see the sheer imbecility of war—the mass slaughter of the Marne trenches, after all, left an indelible impression upon his mind—but in the final analysis he will conclude that it is the turn of Fate, the twist of Chance which determines these things, and men have little control over the wheels of destiny.

For Mr. Churchill is the eighteenth-century English gentleman, at once something of a moralist and something of a gambler. He is as much the partisan of the superb failure, the unlucky turn of the wheel, as he is of the glorious victory. Where the Victorian imperialist-historians, such as Froude, saw the enemy self-righteously as the villain, Mr. Churchill sees him gallantly as another worthy figure in the world drama. Thus, the figure of Lee becomes the Achilles of the American Civil War, and Lincoln only a brooding omnipresence over the battlefields. This sense of the throw of the dice is not always logically reconciled with the Churchillian belief in the irresistible forward march of liberty and empire, and if there is any philosophy of history at all in Mr. Churchill it oscillates between the twin doctrines of Accident and Purpose. What holds these two extremes together, perhaps, is the Churchillian conviction that, winners or losers, the decisive figures in history are those of the rulers of the world. He thinks of History in the graphic fashion of the ruler who may or may not comprehend the forces that have pushed him forward but who has, inexorably, to act and is caught between principle and fortune. So, the great statesman is the great parliamentary leader, like Peel or Gladstone, who deeply enjoys the fascination of great power yet also understands that it can have no healthy roots save as it is founded in the soil of democratic respect. Yet, at the same time, respect, in its own turn, must be that of the applauding multitude who compose the audience only, not the actors of the theatre of history. The historian may regret at times the sufferings of the multitude, but he is firmly convinced that they are necessary sufferings. He does not examine the “inarticulate major premises” of national action so much as analyze its military and diplomatic consequences. He cannot appreciate in any real sense the aversion to war that even a soldier like Wellington felt. He can applaud the religious mind so long as it leads to great action, as in the Princes of the Church, but as an inner mystic insight it is beyond his ken. He writes as if he were the general marshalling the forces of history, imperious, self-willed, magnanimous, but so set on victory as to be detached too frequently from the purpose for which the engagement is to be fought; as a result, the opposition to war of men like Fox or John Bright escapes his sympathy.

He is, in short, the chronicler of the British ruling class. He accepts the values of that class without question. Imperial expansion, the aristocrat's secret diplomacy, the British “mission,” all are taken for granted. Those who have challenged them are given short shrift, just as Mr. Churchill's account in his war memoirs of the formation of his War Cabinet of 1940 fails to give any real credit to the Labour Party's contribution to that episode. He can catalogue the liberalism of the English polity and the tolerance of the English constitutional tradition, but he misinterprets them as a conscious search on the part of the British governing class for their achievement, when in fact they have been simply a by-product of their possession. He dislikes really radical breaks with historical continuity; so that, for all of his American qualities, he cannot see that the greatest of the American traditions has been the inherent American power to make its traditions anew. His conservative historicism, typically, sees the personality, not the social class or the economic group, as the basic component of the historical process; that is why, as Prime Minister, he could conduct the Second World War as if he were re-enacting the role of Marlborough and Hitler that of Louis XIV. He may note the growth of rationalistic liberalism, but the fact that nearly one-third of his volume on the nineteenth century is devoted to the American Civil War clearly indicates his difficulty in identifying himself with the rationalistic ethic in any sympathetic fashion. The liberal attitude toward conflict, indeed, is anathema to his spirit; he would fiercely resent Bright's well-known assertion that “this foreign policy, this regard for the ‘liberties of Europe,’ this care at one time for the ‘Protestant interests,’ this excessive love for the ‘balance of power,’ is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain.” In the result, he has written the history of a great civilization only. He has not written about the enlargement of its boundaries because its ruling class, to which he belongs, believes that the final stage of the march forward has already been reached.

III

What the historian omits is oftentimes as suggestive as what he includes. It is true that he must select or else condemn himself to the omniverous collection of facts on the assumption, Germanic-wise, that all facts are born free and equal. The startling fact about Mr. Churchill's four volumes, however, is that they omit whole regions of the national experience that cannot be set aside as trivial or unimportant. In particular, they say very little either about socio-economic or intellectual history. Science and technology are almost wholly neglected; and there is no awareness that the invention of radio or the formation of the first trade union are in themselves as decisive events as Blenheim or Waterloo. We hear little of the novelist. The contribution of Dissent to the English character is largely slurred over by an author who belongs, in the climate of his thought, to the Augustan Establishment. Nor is it sufficient, to excuse these omissions, to say that he is writing not as a specialist but as a generalist, for an English history that omits such seminal topics is patently Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. By comparison, a volume such as Professor Hamilton's wartime History of the Homeland amply illustrates how politics and statecraft may be sufficiently treated without distorting the total experience of the national community.

The manner, thus, in which social and economic history are treated is eminently suggestive. The work of the great economic historians is recognizable in the chapter on the Black Death, but the Peasants Revolt of 1381 is seen as a struggle between “vulgar lawlessness” and “reconstructed authority,” and the observations on its leaders almost summon up the spectacle of an excited Mr. Churchill facing the General Strike of 1926. Just as little attention has been paid to Sir John Neale's definitive work on the Elizabethan parliaments, so, too, there is no recognition of Professor Nef's discoveries about the Tudor industrial revolution. There is a curt reference to the “deep-cutting convictions” of the left-wing elements of the 1640 Revolution, but no more, so that the calculated neglect of those elements by the Victorian liberal historians is inexcusably repeated. The economic causes of the French Revolution are duly noted, but its long-term economic effects are passed over. Indeed, the portrait of 1789 offered here differs very little from the grotesquely misleading interpretation of the event which Carlyle and Dickens imposed upon a Victorian middle class frightened by Chartism, and which the English public has never really quite given up. The Churchillian remarks on the Terror suggest that, granted space, he might have been able to generate some of that megalomaniac hatred for the Revolution which Taine was unable to exhaust in four massive volumes. There is little appreciation of the inhuman brutality in the life of the ordinary British sailor and soldier lying beneath the campaigns Mr. Churchill so lovingly traces, and that culminated in the naval mutinies of 1790. The terrible price, recorded in the books of the Hammonds, that the English worker and peasant had to pay for the victory of the Industrial Revolution is passed over as if it had never occurred. Altogether, the reader gains the impression that, in the Churchillian thought-frame, the “agitator” is applauded if he contributes, like Wycliffe or John Wilkes, to the rising tide of national feeling, and denounced if his sentiments challenge in any fundamental manner the basic contours of the social order. The prejudice can understand a political revolution, it recoils in horror from a social one. It can write at its most plangent and persuasive when it deals with a period, such as Victorian England, of political battles conducted by parliamentary leaders within a context of tolerant and enlightened civilization. The golden afternoon of the Victorian age, indeed, is appropriately the closing chapter of the story, only spoiled, perhaps, for its author by the emergence of the Labour Party as an ominous cloud to darken the horizon.

For Mr. Churchill, above all else, is a traditionalist to whom revolution of any serious quality is anathema. It is the flow of history, not its depth or its structure, that appeals to him. He is driven, consequently, perhaps half-consciously, to twist the evidence into a mould of spurious historical continuity. So, he presents the modern world, in the old-fashioned manner, as beginning with the Reformation. The notion, catalogued in the work of Tillyard, that the great Elizabethan world-picture was still half-medieval in its assumptions, the notion, further, made orthodox by Whitehead, that the real watershed separating the medieval from the modern world was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, are cavalierly ignored. The treatment of the great bourgeois revolutions reveals a similar blindness of perspective. The Revolution of 1688 is canonized into a conservative movement in the manner of Burke's famous defense of it in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, and the disciple of Burke no more than Burke himself appreciates that the deposition of the King by force was, in the eyes of such contemporary groups as the Non-Jurors, an outright violation of the doctrine of legitimacy. Similarly, the American Revolution is presented as an equally conservative movement based upon “an old English doctrine freshly formulated to meet an urgent American need,” whereas, of course, its break with legitimacy and its republicanism were regarded by British Tory and American Loyalist alike as a revolutionary ideology. Indeed, the publication of Paine's Common Sense marked the point where the movement became consciously a radical nationalism, rejecting the whole structure of British royal-parliamentary authority, as contemporary thinkers like Leonard and Boucher properly recognized. With Mr. Churchill, we are back once more in the patriotic mythology of Story and Bancroft before it was decisively shattered by the critical scholarship of Smith and Beard. It is the world of the English conservative mentality, sedulously cultivating the legend that political doctrine is a continental disease that the English character never catches. The legend is believable only so long as the historian reconstructs Anglo-American revolutionary history in such a way as to play down the theoretical debates—the Putney Debates, Filmer and Locke, the American natural law theories—that have accompanied it.

Here, indeed, is the cardinal example of the narrow frontiers within which the Churchill genius ranges. The adventures of ideas do not excite him. He views problems pragmatically, in much the same way as a Cabinet Minister deciding complex issues, but he too often fails to probe beneath the surface of problems to the body of theoretical assumptions that shape the response of men, consciously or unconsciously, to their challenge. The result is, oftentimes, a neo-Shakespearean myth of English history, for if Shakespeare could write a whole play on King John without mentioning Magna Carta, Mr. Churchill is capable of writing on the French Revolution with only a brief half-paragraph on the philosophies of the Enlightenment. He inhabits a universe of discourse wherein men act upon “practical” assumptions. Yet, in fact, all the “practical” assumptions are founded upon some theory of the universe. Men like Descartes, Newton, Hume, Hegel, Marx, have shaped mens' minds over the centuries far more than Richelieu or Cromwell or Wellington. For by their ability to define basic patterns of thought they map out the essential contours of practical behaviour. They interpret the universe and, by interpreting, help to shape it. The great thinker may not exert the instantaneous impact on his period of the great soldier or the outstanding statesman. But, as anyone who recalls the life of Marx will realize, men who never knew of him will, in the long run, move unconsciously in their lives to the measure of his thought. He confers, as no other type can, shape, rationale, meaning upon the chaos of experience. There is little enough of all this in the Churchillian history. The sociology of politics is foreign to its author, hence his impatience with the Namier analysis of eighteenth-century politics. The pen-portraits he composes show little evidence of having been aided by the discoveries of modern psychology. He knows little about the economic foundations of social movements. The basic causes of things are never really elucidated, except for the invocation of imprecise and unscientific phenomena such as “race” or “destiny” or “character,” never carefully defined or adequately defended. If, therefore, as Collingwood has urged, the task of the historian is at once to investigate both the “outside” and the “inside” of an event, Mr. Churchill fails to satisfy because the flat surface of events is only imperfectly illuminated by insight into their inner dynamics.

Confronted with this line of criticism, the historical conservative retreats into the argument of mystery. He urges that there are irrational realms beyond the comprehension of critical examination, that the impulsive factor in history is so large that we must be content, in Burke's phrase, to venerate what we do not presently comprehend. It is easy to perceive how much of this is a rationalization of the rule of the English political aristocracy, since if the secret of politics is its mystique, which can only be mastered over many generations, it follows that government by the aristocratic class is empirically justified. That explains why Mr. Churchill is uneasy in the presence of elements that have been opposed to that government in English history. It explains why, to take only one example, he gives no attention to the tradition of English Radicalism so ably expounded in the work of Professor Maccoby. Such realms of life he cannot think of as important, since he thinks in terms of the conflict of man with man rather than of the more permanent historic drives of which men are the instruments. He understands Andrew Carnegie but not capitalism, John Burns but not trade unionism, Cromwell but not revolutionary republicanism. He can see the superb courage of the ordinary Englishman as the common soldier at Crecy or Agincourt or Bosworth Field; but he cannot see that it is this same courage that, under different circumstances, went in quiet devotion to the establishment of the British trade union and cooperative movements.

Altogether, rigorous intellectual analysis, a priori, is something he studiously avoids rather than consciously rejects. For he sees man not so much as the master of Nature as the rebel against Nature. So, he only imperfectly appreciates the effort of thinkers, such as the philosopher-scientists of the age of genius, to conceive of science and philosophy as instruments whereby man may become the controller rather than the servant of the relations in which he is involved. He envisages man, not as a force mastering Nature but, Machiavellian-like, as a spirit juggling with Fate. Similarly, when he writes about his Great Contemporaries, it is to admire the Liberal statesmen of the last Victorian epoch before 1914—Rosebery, Morley, Asquith, Balfour—and to chide those, such as Shaw and Trotsky, who had criticized the foundations of society from the standpoint of a positive philosophy. Ideas, to him, are at best useful instruments of political warfare, at worst, subversive doctrines. He can shrewdly estimate a revolutionary leader, like Robespierre or Lenin, but will fail to explain their devotion to a theory for which they are prepared to sacrifice all. The theory of historical motive, accordingly, implicit in his narrative, is palpably inadequate since it omits the intellectual passion for great theoretical outlines present, in one way or another, in all the revolutions of history. Because he does not himself share that passion his History of the English Speaking Peoples is not held together, as are those of Gibbon or Mommsen or Toynbee, by a seminal intellectual principle that confers upon it unity and purpose, but rather is a chronological narrative that rises to its climactic moments when it arrives at the decisive battle, the grandiloquent gesture, the supreme challenge. It is not history in its greatest sense so much as a brilliant and panoramic journalism. Its author does not stand, as do the great historians, in an attitude of almost timeless detachment to his theme; instead, he enters with cavalier gusto into its disputes and identifies himself unashamedly with its partisans. His work, like that of Belloc or Froude, is utterly parti pris. It is, perhaps, the limitation of the active politician who has himself fashioned so much of contemporary history that he can rise only with difficulty above the political temper when he comes, as historian, to reconstruct the record of the periods that came before.

IV

Mr. Churchill, even so, does entertain certain general concepts, although they lack the architectonic coherence of a philosophical system. The most basic, of course, of those concepts is the idea of the Anglo-Saxon racial entity, the common destiny of the English-speaking peoples. The splendid embodiment, in his own figure, of the homo anglicanus, it is a theme that has been the sheet anchor of his life and thought. He is never so exuberant as when he is describing—as in his histories of the First and Second World Wars—the union of Britain and the United States against their common foes.

The union, for Mr. Churchill, is the product of a supposed English national “character” exported, along with the English language, to the Western hemisphere. Yet, here, too, it is not difficult to suspect the presence of dubious assumptions. For national character as a set of national behaviour-patterns, shaped by certain historical conditions and acquiring over a period of time an appearance of permanency, is one thing; as a collection of assumed racial virtues it is quite another. It is worth noting that during the time-span of the Churchill history the English “character” took on a number of kaleidoscopic changes. In the sixteenth century it was regarded by the rest of Europe as dangerously belligerent; by the nineteenth century it had become the paragon of Liberalism. Every student knows that the English had a national passion for classical music until it was destroyed by the victory of Cromwellian puritanism, and that they had a flair for theatrical comedy that was in its own turn crippled by the rise of the Victorian middle class. For what passes for national “character” is, in one way, the dominant traits of the ruling class of any society and, in another, the consequence at any one historical moment of circumstances that in the long run may turn out to be transistory. That explains why the French national reputation was one of Napoleonic Caesarism in the nineteenth century and one of intellectual civilization in the twentieth; and why Germany before 1870 was regarded by all Europe in terms of the romantic myth of Weimar and after 1870 came to stand for the worst in nationalistic paranoia. Nor is national character in reality the unifying cultural force that it plays in the Churchillian scheme, for otherwise it becomes difficult to explain an event such as the American Civil War. What that event indeed proves is that there was not one, but two, irreconcilable character-structures in the America of 1860, neither of them prepared to yield up their respective image of the American “mind” in the interest of a larger good. The fundamental defect, here, of Mr. Churchill's historical method lies in the crude fallacy of mistaking historical facts of culture and tradition for functions of biological facts such as race and pedigree. It consequently avoids the truth that types of social behaviour and character are constant only so long as the social order that environs them is itself constant. But social orders are themselves changing historical facts, and as they change so do the behaviour-patterns of the men who live in them. The change, moreover, occurs most fundamentally not so much with the political revolutions Mr. Churchill so much emphasizes as with the revolutions in technology and social structure that he tends to pass by.

This is especially so in treating of the concept of the Anglo-American world. For such a concept, to begin with, is based upon dubious racial assumptions. The ethnic composition of the American society has become far too polyglot to justify the presumption of its “Anglo-Saxon” character. There are far too many European elements in its population to see it only as an Atlantic extension of English civilization, and it can only be seen thus if attention is studiously restricted to the philo-British circles of the upper class of the Atlantic seaboard region. The Churchillian America is that of the world of George Apley, of an Anglicized coterie of rich and well-born, of an internationally-minded Eastern Republicanism; it rarely comes to terms with all of the America that is alien, even perhaps hostile, to those elements. Culturally and ethnically, America has grown less British since 1900, when Mr. Churchill first made its acquaintance, so that by now it has become a civilization sui generis. Mr. Churchill, in reality, tends to ignore the seminal differences between the two societies, and especially the most seminal of all, that the American tradition, historically, has been democratic while the British has been aristocratic. The entire paraphernalia of society and government reside, in America, upon the democratic principle, while in England the aristocratic principle is still sufficiently powerful to maintain pretty well intact, even in the welfare state, the social religion of snobbishness and caste. America has been shaped ineluctably—however imperfect practice may be—by the twin principles of the land of promise and the refuge for the oppressed; and it has produced, from the very beginning, a sense of the American as a “new man” divorced, culturally and psychologically, from the European heritage. The Churchillian thesis of Anglo-American “destiny” thus involves its author in the ironic paradox of logically accepting the magnificent audacity of post-1945 America posing as the final heir of European civilization when his whole spirit must rebel against the new Roman manner. The thesis, certainly, has stronger foundations than, say, the romantic myth of the Pan-American idea. But in its own way it is almost equally romantic, for it is plausible only so long as it underscores the really vital things that separate English and American values and habits. The record, indeed, of the deep gulf that divided President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill as Prime Minister in the years after 1940 on so many cardinal issues—Russia, the colonial empire, India, the purposes of the war, the very nature of liberty itself—is eloquent testimony to the powerful obstacles that obstruct Anglo-American understanding. For the President was a progressive Wilsonian liberal while the Prime Minister was a great aristocratic conservative who had wandered from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. The sole item capable of transcending their irreparable differences of thought was the common interest, negative in itself, of winning the war. Too much of the Churchillian discussion of this whole theme has in it the dull complacencies of the Chatham House mentality.

More than this. The emphasis upon Anglo-Americanism is part and parcel of Mr. Churchill's belief in a Western-centered civilization. His larger perspectives incline to be parochial just because they are really confined to the “Atlantic world.” That world, for him, appears as the climax of human experience. He is almost eighteenth-century in thus mistaking the transient conditions of one given historical age for the permanent conditions of human life. Oecumenical history in the Toynbeean manner is foreign to his spirit because it would not occur to him to believe that the golden ages of English history he describes might be part of a single civilization destined, like twenty others before it, to ultimate decline and disappearance. It has not been vouchsafed to him to experience the sort of Damascus Road illumination which in 1914 persuaded Arnold Toynbee of the grim contemporaneity of Thucydides or which, in 1943, proved to Geoffrey Barraclough that the Battle of Stalingrad emphasized the importance of the Russian and Byzantine strands in the net of history. Russia, Czarist or Soviet, he has always regarded as a barbarian outsider. His view of religion is Augustan, and he would be incapable of constructing a theory of history, as Toynbee has done, around an architectonic religious syncretism. Civilization, in his view, is a Christian phenomenon, as if there did not exist powerful world religions, such as Islam and Buddhism, that surpass in their tremendous followings the historic churches of the West. Implicit throughout his narrative is the claim that European history is in itself a microcosm of world events; he does not confront the possibility that a new age may witness the victory of non-European peoples and outlooks that may replace the European hegemony with new forms of power. Nor does he begin to comprehend that those new outlooks may view Europe with suspicion, and may indeed see the cause of their present discontents in what they view as the European spirit, with all of its characteristic attributes: ingenuity of mind, inventive power, lust for adventure and drive for expansion. He reserves his real excitement for the European conqueror, Clive conquering the Mahratta Empire, Cortes defying the Aztec world with his four hundred conquistadores, Livingstone opening up Darkest Africa, without appreciating that they brought with them fiercely destructive forces fatal to that stability and continuity it is the chief concern of Conservatism to defend. The consequence is that, in spite of the fact that fifty years of active politics have made him a “realpolitiker,” he is driven back into the consolation of romantic myths rather than confront those truths. Just as the French historians of the Right dream of the age of the Great King, he dreams of the period between 1689 and 1914 when his own class of Englishmen persuaded themselves that they were the natural rulers of the world.

The history of the English-speaking peoples thus in effect becomes the history of England from the viewpoint of that class. Scotland and Ireland are treated insofar as they provide a stage for English arms. America is seen as an outpost of Anglo-Saxon colonization. The Dominion peoples are described as the spokes that radiate out from the English axle. On India—the axis of empire—we hear once more the imperious defiance of any sort of criticism. The last word on the trial of Warren Hastings is in favour of that most successful of all the East India “nabobs,” for Mr. Churchill hardly sympathizes with Burke's insight into the meaning of a pre-European culture in India. It was the same absence of sympathy which stimulated him to approve of Lord Morley's refusal to apply to India the principles of Home Rule and self-government which that Victorian Radical had been willing to grant to Ireland and South Africa, and which later produced Mr. Churchill's fiercest quarrel with Rooseveltian liberalism. He is convinced that the non-European peoples still need the enlightened despotism of European rule. It was Mr. Roosevelt, rather than Mr. Churchill, who saw that liberty has international implications and that the “four freedoms” had to be offered to all nations and races if they were to mean anything at all. The perspective found it difficult, again, to understand that the Second World War, in one sense, was the return of the native in Africa and Asia; and the Churchillian response to the native's demand for emancipation was not inaptly summed up in the episode of the Yalta Conference where the Prime Minister suggested that the American plan for a United Nations system of international trusteeship for colonial territories might be sufficiently met by the internationalization of the Crimea as a summer resort. The same perspective suggests, too, why Mr. Churchill could terminate his History of the war with a sad commentary upon the folly of the English-speaking peoples in not knowing how to garner the fruits of victory. The truth is that war appeals to so much in his nature that he remembers only with difficulty that, one day, the swords must be turned into ploughshares, and it is with a scarcely concealed impatience that he listens to the critics who enquire for whom the field is to be tilled.

In all of this Mr. Churchill is true to his nature as an eighteenth-century historian. He understands, rightly enough, that power without responsibility is dangerous and his constitutionalistic instinct is fully alive to the awful cruelties it can exact in the hands of irresponsible men. But he is thoroughly eighteenth-century in his conviction, equally, that the responsibility can be made the outcome, not of democratic devices, but of a sense of trusteeship on the part of a governing class. He does not pause to enquire whether such a sense may be a guarantee against faults of personal conduct and yet fail to be such a guarantee against major errors of policy. History, for him therefore, is simply the art of splendid government. The structure behind the art is the great system of European states fashioned in the early modern period, a system that is not so much superseded as reinforced by his concept of a united federal Europe. It is not for nothing that he eagerly read Gibbon in his early days and defended him against the strictures of his Victorian editor Dean Milman, for, like Gibbon, he judges the historical present by contrasting it with a former golden age. For him, as for Gibbon, the best age of mankind is already behind and not before it. His intense Europeanism, combined with that nostalgia, makes it difficult for him to entertain the generalizing comparative method whereby different historical epochs are critically compared with one another, or to understand, further, the comparative method applied to the study of institutions, as it was adapted by the school of Sir Henry Maine in England and, later by the Max Weber school in Germany. His vision is linear rather than cross-cultural. He does not seize hold of one great leading intellectual principle and apply it methodically to the total complex of a civilization, as de Tocqueville did with the principle of equality in his work on America, for his imagination is too pictorial, too flamboyantly vivid, too caught up in the dramatic present. His mode of history, altogether, is not in the highest class because it is not philosophically conceived, except in the attenuated sense of promulgating certain axioms about conduct and purpose that are never consciously analyzed.

V

“When the historian of aristocratic ages,” wrote de Tocqueville, “surveys the theatre of the world, he at once perceives a very small number of prominent actors, who manage the whole piece. These great personages, who occupy the front of the stage, arrest the observation, and fix it on themselves; and while the historian is bent on penetrating the secret motives which make them speak and act, the rest escape his memory.” The passage is an apposite comment upon the Churchillian history, so preoccupied as it is with individual greatness. Mr. Churchill is the type of court memorialist—Froissart, St. Simon, Croker—who catalogues the achievements of the great and famous. The virtues he applauds—integrity, energy, courage, tenacity, truthfulness—are those of the outstanding individual. It is the model of Plutarch's Lives—to set before the reader examples of noble action, to disinter a moral tale for the benefit of a generation that has lost its sense of direction.

There are, of course, grievous pitfalls in this mode of historical writing. There is, to start with, no really satisfactory definition of greatness offered as a means of judging the hero-worship. This problem, indeed, pervades the entirety of the Churchillian argument, for his central thesis hangs upon it. At times, the answer provided appears to be the ability in a leader to refuse to bow to circumstances, even at the cost of enormous sacrifice. Thus, Lee is praised for continuing the fight after 1863, when it was clear that the South could never win and when his resolution could only mean the continuation of useless slaughter, indeed, the destruction of a whole generation in battle. Similarly, Mr. Churchill, as Prime Minister, could approve President Roosevelt's decision—based upon a half-remembered echo of an episode in the Civil War—to insist upon an “unconditional surrender” attitude in 1943, despite the fact that such an attitude can only have determined the enemy to fight on to the bitter end. At other times, again, greatness, for Mr. Churchill, seems to be nothing less than a romantic admiration for the mythical culture-hero, such as King Arthur and his knights, and he seems to be unaware of the truth, advanced in Lord Raglan's book on The Hero, that dramatic truth, rather than historical fact, has always been the basis for the mythology of the culture-hero. Then there are times, even further, as in the description of the Duke of Marlborough, when greatness, in the manner of Mr. Rowse's book on The Early Churchills, takes on the guise of an unscientific theory of family eugenics, as if its secret resided in the mating habits of lusty ancestors. Finally, the entire question of greatness is begged by the assumption that moral greatness is a function of historical fame. The consequence is that Mr. Churchill composes his history in the manner, as it were, of a playwright constructing a play, wherein each scene is depicted with the grand denouement already consciously present in the mind of the actors and the function of the author is that of a Grecian chorus declaiming the tragic lesson of the drama. Certain cosmic forces are continuously invoked. But they are of such a vague substance that the problem of how individual experience is related to their operation is never really explained or examined in any critical fashion.

Mr. Churchill's thesis of greatness seems to be, quite simply, one of historical accident. The great crisis always produces the great man; and the great man is the means whereby Providence raises a nation to greatness. Yet the thesis is profoundly inadequate and incomplete. The effect of personal talents and peculiarities upon historical development is undeniable; that both Henry and Elizabeth Tudor were strong-willed characters no doubt contributed much to the final victory of sixteenth-century England against the Catholic Reaction. But no less undeniable is the fact that the impact of such individual characteristics can only occur in certain given social and cultural conditions. It is the total parallelogram of social forces which at any given moment explains the influence any individual person exercises upon historical development. The character of an individual, however outstanding, is a factor in that development only to the degree that social relations permit it to be such. It is true that, granted such permission, the special gifts of the individual will be a contributing factor; so that when Mr. Churchill emphasizes the tireless aspiration to power, the daemonic energy, the ruthless ambition of men like Henry VII or Wolsey or Cromwell he is utterly right in the emphasis. At the same time, before those gifts can in any measure influence the course of events they must, first, be conformable to the primary social needs of the time and, second, fully deployable under the existing social order. If, to take only a single example, Napoleon had possessed the literary gifts of Tolstoi instead of his own military genuis, he would not, of course, have become the Emperor of the French; similarly, had the ancien regime survived another fifty years in France he would most certainly have died an obscure though talented officer of the royal armies. Likewise, Nelson would have lived out an obscure career in the West India or the Mediterranean naval stations had not the urgent social needs of France given rise to a revolutionary nationalist movement which, in its turn, came to challenge the imperial and commercial supremacy of Great Britain. It is misleading and unhistorical, then, to see the great individual as the prime shaper of events. He is, rather, the product of impersonal forces. He may take the initiative in certain directions of thought or action; he may see further than others; he may dramatize the requirements of a new class or a new nation. But, all along, he is the agent, albeit unconsciously, of the inherent logic of social forces and social relationships. Because Mr. Churchill neglects this necessary relationship between the individual and society he is able to write still as one of those eighteenth-century historians for whom casual phenomena and the personal traits of celebrated people were more important than general causes.

The problem is not only one of historical science: it is, even more, one of historical morality. The Acton-Creighton correspondence immediately comes to mind as one reads Mr. Churchill on the great and famous of history. It is not so much that the Churchillian historical concept objects to Acton's dictum that the historian must be judge as well as witness, for there is sufficient Victorian moral earnestness in the Churchillian make-up to ensure his hearty agreement with the injunction. It is not so much the validity of judgment as the particular use that the author makes of it which is at issue. For throughout the four volumes there is a distinct readiness to excuse the moral shortcomings of those who fill the Churchillian Pantheon. If Creighton failed to pass adequate moral judgment upon the persecuting efforts of the medieval Papacy, Mr. Churchill cannot bring himself even to echo the criticisms of contemporaries such as Erasmus and More upon the Machiavellian statecraft of Henry VIII. He does not note the moral limitations of the policy of war, as even Frederick the Great could see the fallacies involved in the pursuit of Power and Authority. The drive of imperial expansion, Pitt's aim to “make the Union Jack supreme in every ocean,” is taken for granted. The arts of civilization, altogether, are identified with the arts of war, and success in that art as a justification, too frequently, for its undertaking. Against such a view of history at least three points of criticism might be directed. The first is historical: it does not provide us with a veracious portrait of the past. The second is ethical: it is not an elevating view of history which commends the art of conflict as its supreme achievement; for civilization, as Whitehead has insisted, is the replacement of force by persuasion. The third is utilitarian: it is by no means a self-evident truth that the qualities that went into the creation and establishment of English nationalism and nationality are the qualities most needed in a world that has been totally transformed and, in particular, wherein both the institutional forms and the sentimental passions of nationalism are at once obsolete and, if they survive in any strength, dangerous to the growth of peace and civilization. For in the twentieth century men are entering a new world as surely as they did in the sixteenth. The lessons of the old world, especially as they are interpreted by Mr. Churchill, may no longer have any value left in them to guide men as they move forward to the future.

VI

In the final analysis Mr. Churchill writes as an Englishman and as an Englishman of a special social class. He writes with all of Macaulay's pride about the national political and constitutional achievement. He is quite certain that England has stood always for progress and her national enemies for retrogression, so that he has no difficulty in viewing history as a recurrent conflict between “civilization” and “barbarism.” Liberty is presented, in turn, as a basically politico-constitutional concept, and although the idea of Tory Democracy is remembered, in the portrait of Disraeli, for example, it is the Liberal view of freedom as absence from governmental and social constraint that prevails. There is a marked reluctance to concede any distinctly continental influence; thus, we are assured, in a brief reference to the Fabians, that Marx had no influence at all upon them when it is apparent to any reader of the two essays by Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw in the original Fabian Essays that the Marxian influence was real and profound, at least dating from the impact of the Paris Communards upon English left-wing thought after 1871. Both war and peace revolve around the idea of the national honour; that is why Mr. Churchill can describe all of the great wars of the national history as if every one was a dynastic war of the eighteenth century.

That social religion of honour, of course, is the social religion of his own gentleman-class. It has produced fine qualities, not least of all a sense of justice in dealing with the national enemies. For Mr. Churchill never has been a protagonist of the master-nation idea. It is doubtful, however, whether he has ever ceased to be a protagonist of the idea of the master-class. Other classes may share in the national destiny, but they must do so on the terms set by their governors. The national achievement is assessed through the giant figures thrown up by the gentlemen of England; just as the national character is weighed from the habits of the great eccentrics of the same class. Idea-systems that have challenged the rule of that class are treated with open disdain. Indeed, Mr. Churchill writes of them at times as if they still constituted a threat to the contemporary system, just as Renan could write about the ancient Hebraic prophets in his History of Israel as if they were the conscious forerunners of the French socialists of 1848 and just as Jowett, in his Introduction to Plato's Republic, could write with intellectual sympathy about the idea of communism only so long as it did not possess any immediate and practical danger for the Victorian social order. And in adopting this attitude it is worth noting that the Churchillian traditionalism joins hands with the conservative and cautious temper of the present age. Thus, it is symptomatic that whereas Froude's romantic distortion of Anglo-Saxon and Teuton was properly destroyed by the full criticism of professional historians like Freeman in his own day, Mr. Churchill's comparable historical romanticism has been applauded, with few exceptions, by the professional historians of present-day Britain. It is equally suggestive that those historians have had little criticism to make of the static and traditionalist lessons the Churchillian history is anxious to purvey, while a generation ago they were prepared to scoff at H. G. Wells' great History because its whole tone was militantly radical. In this fashion, Mr. Churchill's history-writing is not only a record of the past; it is also a commentary upon the present.