Mr. Churchill
By REYNAL & HITCHCOCK $3.00
NEARLY twenty years ago a friend whose brilliant leaders were the swan song of unrepentant Toryism in the Morning Post remarked that, while the late war had not been able to produce an unsinkable ship, it certainly had invented an unsinkable politician. That was a true word. If ever there was a man whom moving accidents by flood and field conspired in vain to thwart, it was Winston Churchill. Mad Mullahs and Boers couldn’t stop him. Prison couldn’t hold him. Plane accidents couldn’t spill him. Three times politics knocked him down, but he was always up again and at it. Never was such an indestructible career.
Death is the proper colophon of all Lives, and to write finis to the biography of a man still climbing toward the topmost pinnacle is a hazard of the first order. Mr. Guedalla has brought more than courage to his task. He has brought perception, perspective, and an intelligent enthusiasm which holds objectivity in respect. No good Life can be written unless the biographer loves his subject, but the barrier between affection and idolatry must be high and wide. Mr. Guedalla knows this. True, the reader sometimes wishes his style were less titivating. The unfriendly might call it pert and jaunty, and the impartial must admit that his clever paragraphs never lose consciousness of themselves. His trick of facetious understatement is less noble than irony and much more irritating. But when that is said, this reviewer acknowledges that he wouldn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t lay the book down until he had come plumb upon the index.
Mr. Churchill’s eloquence is the very Trumpet of Victory. Acknowledged as the authentic voice of Britain, it is recognized in America as the utterance, unequivocal and just, of the aspirations of the English-speaking world. Whence did it come, this noble, rhythmic prose, haunted with echoes ot Old Testament prophecies, and swelling to a religious confidence in the triumph of the right ? Mr. Guedalla gives us the key. Churchill’s brilliant and mercurial father, Chancellor of the Exchequer in his own exciting day and, in his own right,
’something more than a gadfly and something less than a major prophet,’ patterned his unquestioned eloquence on the august prose of Gibbon. ’The Decline and Fall was his education and the education of his son, who, as a wiser and a greater man, prudently crossed this majestic strain with the more manageable periods of Macaulay. To those of us who look on Gibbon as the most exalted of our architects in prose, it is satisfactory to realize that only out of excellence can excellence be begotten.
It was but a dozen years ago that Mr. Churchill’s future was all behind him. He was out of office. Worse than that, he was out of favor. Still in early prime, he could look back upon almost every ministerial office — Board of Trade, Home Office, Admiralty, War Office, Munitions, Colonial Office, Treasury; but the ripest fruit of all was above his reach for another decade. It was good for him, this season of fasting and prayer, for it is not the busiest of us who think the most; and the depth it gave to his character is clearly brought out by Mr. Guedalla. He pondered over India, over history, over the destiny of his race. Yet, profound and serious as was his thinking, it did not prevent him from following his trades of bricklaying and lecturing, his art of painting, his profession of writing. During this passive period, Churchill produced nine large volumes of the permanent prose of our generation. Not bad for an idler out of harness.
Any excursion into Churchill biography is an exhilarating experience. With Mr. Guedalla for a guide, it makes us conscious that, in a world dedicated by the historian to economic determinism, it is men who count supremely, and this man of men is seen ‘a demi-Atlas of this earth.’ E.s.