Books: Bravura Performance

A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES, Vol. Ill: THE AGE OF REVOLUTION (402 pp.)—Winston S. Churchill—Dodd, Mead ($6).

Two typical qualities mark the third volume of Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples (there is a final volume on The Nineteenth Century yet to come). One quality is control; Churchill manages to grasp a huge and chaotic period (1688-1815) without ever letting a war, a revolution or a leading character get out of hand in the plot. The other quality is a kind of historical cosmopolitanism scarcely to be found in any other writer; Churchill ranges from English county politics to American economic discontents to the last stirrings of the Holy Roman Empire to French diplomacy to Oriental intrigues with a total ease that once again reveals him as a world figure with worldwide comprehension.

Mighty men stride the stage, and Churchill treats them as his equals; he writes about them with the sure instinct of a man who has more than once painfully sweated out decisions as great as any of theirs. Marlborough. Nelson. Napoleon.

Wellington, Washington, Clive. all appear here not as figures out of a distant past, but as men whose acts and words are still part of a living heritage.

It is a bloody period, with war almost incessant, and revolution flailing about furiously, uncontrollably. In England, the Catholic monarchy was brought to an end; in France the guillotine and Napoleon drowned liberty in blood; in the American, colonies a war was fought that brings distress to Churchill even now. An old hand at portraiture, he can cut down to size those who displease him. Of King George I: “Here on English soil stood an unprepossessing figure, an obstinate and humdrum German martinet with dull brains and coarse tastes.” When he describes combat, which is a good deal of the time, his ardent prose is apt to be high-flown: “The lure of gold and the sting of Cadiz inspired the leaders, and at last they let loose their brave men, who fought with indomitable fury.”

Churchill’s History is neither original nor exhaustive. The social and literary sides of life are notably skimped, but Churchill succeeds in what he set out to do: to give in broad outline a framework within which great men decide great issues and great events are triggered at decisive points.