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    Great Contemporaries
    Great Contemporaries
    Great Contemporaries
    Ebook897 pages17 hours

    Great Contemporaries

    By Winston S. Churchill

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    Insightful biographical sketches of major historical figures of the twentieth century, from the incomparable British statesman.
     
    Winston S. Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on the strength of “his mastery of historical and biographical description.” Nowhere is that mastery more evident than in Great Contemporaries—which features Churchill’s profiles of many of the major figures of his time.
     
    These short biographies cover political and cultural personalities ranging from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Lawrence of Arabia, and Leon Trotsky to Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. This edition includes five previously uncollected essays and a number of photographs, plus an enlightening introduction and annotations by noted Churchill scholar James W. Muller.
     
    Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister, these essays focus on the challenges of statecraft at a time when the democratic revolution was toppling older regimes based on tradition and aristocratic privilege. Churchill’s keen observations take on new importance in our own age of roiling political change. Ultimately, Great Contemporaries provides fascinating insight into these subjects as Churchill approaches them with a measuring eye, finding their limitations at least as revealing as their merits.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 5, 2016
    ISBN9780795349676
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    Reviews for Great Contemporaries

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    • 3/5
      This began as a set of newspaper features that WSC fell back on as a money maker in between longer projects. He did have the advantages of knowing many of these people personally, from his aristocratic and political careers. the prose is workman like though ornate to the modern taste. Churchill was out of the cabinet at the time of publication, and some of these peces are illuminating from that point of view.
    • 4/5
      This is a collection of articles by Winston Churchill written in the 1930s about important, or at least well-known, men he had (usually) known --there are a few he had not met, notably FDR, whom of course he met later. They can be divided roughly into British politicians with whom he had served, often in the same cabinet, and about whom he could give personal anecdotes, military and foreign personages whom he knew less well, if at all, and few miscellaneous characters such as Chaplin and Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. The British statesmen generally belonged to a somewhat older generation, and are usually treated respectfully, with the partial exception of Lord Curzon. (the others are Lord Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain, John Morley, Asquith, F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead -- a much more positive impression than one gets from Chesterton's brilliant satirical poem -- Balfour, Philip Snowden, George V, Parnell, and Edward VIII (with no discussion of Churchill's support for Edward during the abdication crisis)). The military men include Sir John French, Hindenburg, Lawrence of Arabia, Foch, Haig, Lord Fisher (in a rather negative review of a biography by one of Fisher's supporters) , Baden-Powell, and Kitchener. Clemenceau as a war leader, though not military, falls into this group.So, in a sense, does the Ex-Kaiser, in a surprisingly sympathetic article suggesting that Wilhelm' s failings were due chiefly to his upbringing and position, and clearly feeling Germany (by the time this was written, under Nazi rule), could do, and had done, worse. The article on Hitler is curious, given Churchill's later eloquent denunciations of him --it recognizes that Hitler came to power by brutal means, but also salutes his success in restoring German power and suggests Hitler still has the choice of avoiding war and being a successful ruler --this reads almost as if it is aimed at persuading Hitler himself to make that choice, though I doubt Hitler ever saw it, or would have been impressed by it if he had. An article ion Alfonso XIII of Spain is much more favorable than most accounts I have seen, partly due to the king's fondness for sports like polo which Churchill felt were healthy. Again, the fact that Spain had fallen into civil war after Alfonso's abdication may have influenced it.The most frankly negative pieces are on those on the left --he admits the writing abilities of Shaw and H.G. Wells, but despises their politics, and is even more hostile to Trotsky, by then an exile seeking asylum in the west, which Churchill clearly felt he did not deserve, On the other hand, he writes respectfully of the Russian anarchist and terrorist Boris Savinkov, who had organized assassination against the Czarist regime, but later had worked with Churchill in trying to oppose the Bolsheviks, though he later had been lured back to Russia and destroyed. Apparently he is unaware of Chaplin's leftist politics, as his article is devoted to Chaplain's acting skills --though "talkies" had come in by this time, Churchill suggests there was still a place for silent movies, especially in countries where viewers did not know English.Kipling he naturally admired, as they shared a love for the British Empire in India and (at this point) opposition to changes that would give the Indian people more power.If he was aware that Kipling had plotted violent resistance to the Liberal government's Irish policy just before World War One --a government of which Churchill was a leading member -- he does not mention it. The view he expresses on Ireland (in his Parnell article) is that it is a good thing that there are no longer so many Irish members of the British parliament to disrupt it. His view of FDR is generally sympathetic, recognizing that FDR is dealing with a great economic crisis. I was surprised that one of his few criticisms is that income tax returns in the US had been made public. He was also doubtful that raising the position of American labor unions to the position already won by British unions would have good results, though he admitted British unions had generally behaved better than those elsewhere. As a former (very traditional) Chancellor of the Exchequer, he opposed deficit spending. Overall, these articles provide interesting views from a knowledgeable, if sometimes prejudiced observer, who, in particular with British statesmen, wrote from a position of helpful personal experience.
    • 3/5
      Here are 30 essays about famous men that Churchill knew, or knew about. Most were written in 1935 and this does give some added interest; so, for example, he begins the essay on Hitler with

      "Although no subsequent political action can condone wrong deeds, history is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods, but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler."

      Even in 1935, this seems kind to A.H. and there is considerable apology elsewhere in these essays: the Kaiser was misled because he had so many yes-men around him, "It is too soon to measure the military stature of Foch" [15 years after the armistice!], how Haig's "strength of will and character" permitted him to weather the various stresses to which he was exposed and that we will long continue to debate whether the "slaughters on a gigantic scale" were sometimes "needless and fruitless."
      Ultimately, I conclude, that many of these essays are not entirely about the great contemporary in the title, but about Churchill himself, e.g. Would the massive disaster of Gallipoli taint his future greatness? and so forth.

      The essays of most interest are those about the political figures of the late 19th century with whom W.C. started his political career and who knew his father, The Earl of Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain, Herbert Asquith and John Morley. These are figures about whom most of us will know very little unless we have specifically studied them, and Churchill's insights, even if prejudiced this way or that, give the impression of providing valuable inside information. [This is based on a Kindle edition that is not listed in the Goodreads database.]

    Book preview

    Great Contemporaries - Winston S. Churchill

    GREAT CONTEMPORARIES

    To hold "with honour

    the foremost station in the greatest storms"

    The genesis of Great Contemporaries:

    after dictating his essay on Clemenceau,

    Churchill revises the typescript for the Strand Magazine

    GREAT CONTEMPORARIES

    Churchill Reflects on FDR, Hitler, Kipling, Chaplin,

    Balfour, and Other Giants of His Age

    Winston S. Churchill

    Edited by

    James W. Muller

    with

    Paul H. Courtenay and Erica L. Chenoweth

    Copyright © Estate of Winston S. Churchill, 2012. Editorial matter © James W. Muller, 2012.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast, or online publication.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Churchill, Winston, 1874–1965.

                        Great contemporaries : Churchill reflects on FDR, Hitler, Kipling, Chaplin,

    Balfour, and other giants of his age / Winston S. Churchill ; edited by James W. Muller with Paul H. Courtenay and Erica L. Chenoweth.

                        p. cm.

                        Originally published: London : Butterworth, 1937.

                        Includes bibliographical references and index.

                        ISBN 978-1-935191-99-5

                        EPUB: 9780795349676

                        Kindle: 9780795349683

    1. Biography—20th century. 2. Great Britain—Biography. 3. Europe—Biography. I. Muller, James W., 1953– II. Title.

    D412.6.C5 2012

    920.009’041—dc23                                             2011049836

    Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for the illustrations used in this book:

    From the Typescript of Churchill’s Clemenceau Essay: Churchill Archives Centre, The Churchill Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge: Chartwell Papers, hereafter referred to as CHAR, 8/282A/3, reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill; The Earl of Rosebery as Prime Minister: 0/20/40 © Crown copyright, UK Government Art Collection; The Ex-Kaiser: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; George Bernard Shaw: © 1934, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Joseph Chamberlain: © 1908, Period Paper; Sir John French: scanned from Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1938), facing 79; The Author with John Morley: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 95; Hindenburg with Hitler: © 1933, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bundesarchiv, courtesy of William O. McWorkman; Savinkov with General Kornilov: RIA Novosti; Herbert Henry Asquith: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Asquith’s Letter to Churchill, April 8, 1908 (CHAR 2/34/7): scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), 142–43; Lawrence of Arabia: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 155; Augustus John’s Pencil Sketch: © National Portrait Gallery, London; Lawrence’s Inscriptions in The Seven Pillars: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), 163; ‘F. E.’: © National Portrait Gallery, London; Marshal Foch: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 187; Leon Trotsky: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Alfonso XIII: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 209; Earl Haig of Bemersyde: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 223; Arthur James Balfour: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 237; The Führer: © 1935, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Richard Freimark; George Nathaniel Curzon, 1920: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 273; Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Georges Clemenceau in Retirement: photo by Henri Manuel, Paris © Bettman/Corbis; His Majesty King George V: scanned from Great Contemporaries (1938), facing 319; Lord Fisher: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Charles Stewart Parnell: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection; Lord Baden-Powell: Mirrorpix; Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Wikimedia Commons; H. G. Wells: The Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; The Author with Charlie Chaplin: © Bettman/Corbis; Lord Kitchener: © 1916, The Illustrated War News, Wikimedia Commons; His Majesty King Edward VIII, as Colonel, Welsh Guards, while Prince of Wales, by George Boucas: 17869 © 1936 copyright reserved, Estate of George Boucas; Rudyard Kipling, by Thomas Johnson: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Every effort was made to obtain permission for all illustrations reproduced in this book.

    Electronic edition published 2016 by RosettaBooks

    Cover design by Alexia Garaventa

    Cover image of Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin on the steps of Chartwell, 1932, courtesy of the Broadwater Collection

    www.RosettaBooks.com

    Contents

    LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    INTRODUCTION

    EDITOR’S NOTE ON THIS EDITION

    PREFACE

    THE EARL OF ROSEBERY

    THE EX-KAISER

    GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

    JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

    SIR JOHN FRENCH

    JOHN MORLEY

    HINDENBURG

    BORIS SAVINKOV

    HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH

    LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

    ‘F. E.’ FIRST EARL OF BIRKENHEAD

    MARSHAL FOCH

    LEON TROTSKY, ALIAS BRONSTEIN

    ALFONSO XIII

    DOUGLAS HAIG

    ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

    HITLER AND HIS CHOICE

    GEORGE NATHANIEL CURZON

    PHILIP SNOWDEN

    CLEMENCEAU

    KING GEORGE V

    LORD FISHER AND HIS BIOGRAPHER

    CHARLES STEWART PARNELL

    ‘B.-P.’

    ROOSEVELT FROM AFAR

    ADDITIONAL ESSAYS IN THIS EDITION

    H. G. WELLS

    CHARLIE CHAPLIN

    KITCHENER OF KHARTOUM

    KING EDWARD VIII

    RUDYARD KIPLING

    NOTES

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    List of Illustrations

    *

    FRONTISPIECE: FROM THE TYPESCRIPT OF CHURCHILL’S CLEMENCEAU ESSAY*

    THE EARL OF ROSEBERY AS PRIME MINISTER

    THE EX-KAISER*

    GEORGE BERNARD SHAW*

    JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

    SIR JOHN FRENCH

    THE AUTHOR WITH JOHN MORLEY

    HINDENBURG WITH HITLER*

    SAVINKOV WITH GENERAL KORNILOV*

    HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH*

    ASQUITH’S LETTER TO CHURCHILL, APRIL 8, 1908

    LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

    AUGUSTUS JOHN’S PENCIL SKETCH*

    LAWRENCE’S INSCRIPTIONS IN THE SEVEN PILLARS

    ‘F. E.’*

    MARSHAL FOCH

    LEON TROTSKY*

    ALFONSO XIII

    EARL HAIG OF BEMERSYDE

    ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR AS FOREIGN SECRETARY

    THE FÜHRER*

    GEORGE NATHANIEL CURZON, 1920

    PHILIP SNOWDEN, CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

    GEORGES CLEMENCEAU IN RETIREMENT*

    HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V

    LORD FISHER*

    CHARLES STEWART PARNELL*

    LORD BADEN-POWELL*

    FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT*

    ADDITIONAL ESSAYS IN THIS EDITION

    H. G. WELLS*

    THE AUTHOR WITH CHARLIE CHAPLIN*

    LORD KITCHENER*

    HIS MAJESTY KING EDWARD VIII, AS COLONEL, WELSH GUARDS, WHILE PRINCE OF WALES*

    RUDYARD KIPLING*

    * Where possible, this edition reproduces the illustrations that accompanied each essay in the second edition of Great Contemporaries (1938). In cases where that edition indicated their provenance, original sources are reprinted below them in this new edition; current credits for such illustrations are listed on page iv. The alternate illustrations that have been substituted in some cases are marked by an asterisk in this list. Other illustrations added in this edition are also marked by an asterisk. The letter from Asquith and the inscriptions by Lawrence, which appear in the second edition, are not included in the corresponding list in that edition.

    Introduction

    We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.

    —Winston Churchill to Violet Asquith, 1906

    What Winston Churchill said to the future prime minister’s daughter at dinner on a summer’s night, likening human beings to worms yet finding in himself his own glow,¹ raises the central question of Great Contemporaries. In an essay on Churchill in his own book of contemporary sketches, our author’s colleague F. E. Smith tells us

    that a friend once lent him Welldon’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, with a particular request that he should carefully study what that friend (rightly or wrongly) believed to be the greatest book in the world. Winston read it (or read part of it) and is reported to have said that he thought it very good. But, he added, it is extraordinary how much of it I had already thought out for myself.²

    In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discovers moral virtue, distinguishing eleven cardinal virtues and their corresponding vices. Among them he finds two peaks, two virtues that sum up the moral virtues: one from the standpoint of the city, which is justice, and the other from the standpoint of a human being, which is megalopsychia, or greatness of soul.³ It is characteristic of Churchill that in an age when ‘one man is as good as another—or better,’ as his friend John Morley once ironically observed (101 {101}),⁴ he still wants to know what greatness is, and looks for it in people he knows.

    Lest his reader miss the importance of the question of greatness in a book called Great Contemporaries,⁵ Churchill raises the question explicitly in the first sentence of the preface, which tells us that the essays are on Great Men of our age (1 {9}). In the second paragraph, he refers again to the great men of whom he writes (2 {9}). Greatness in his subjects, real or at least reputed, was a requirement for admission to the pages of Great Contemporaries. He also insisted that his subjects be contemporaries: he joked about including an essay on Moses, but published it in another volume of interwar essays instead.⁶

    By the time Churchill wrote Great Contemporaries, he had mastered the art of telling his story and tracing a man’s character in a few telling anecdotes, as he had also done repeatedly in his autobiography, My Early Life.⁷ Great Contemporaries offers Churchill’s judgments on leading figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deftly and epigrammatically, tantalizing the reader rather than trying his patience. In the preface, Churchill explains that his essays cast light upon the main course of the events through which we have lived, illustrating some of its less well-known aspects. He aims to present not only the actors but the scene, and perhaps to offer his reader the stepping-stones of historical narrative (1 {9}).

    For a book composed of twenty-five discrete portraits, Great Contemporaries has a singular unity. Churchill’s characters speak French, German, Russian, and Spanish as well as English; they are men of state, of letters, and of war; and they range from Lawrence of Arabia to Adolf Hitler, from King George V to Leon Trotsky. All of them are men, though Churchill describes a few women in passing, notably Lady Astor and Lady Violet Bonham Carter; and all are involved in politics. All of the Englishmen and most of the others were known to him personally, though he never met Hitler and considers Franklin D. Roosevelt—whom he met just once, and not memorably, before his prime ministry—only from afar (359 {371}). Among his countrymen, Churchill avoids writing about any who are still living, not from want of material or appreciation but because there is greater freedom in dealing with the past (1 {9}). Thus there is no essay on David Lloyd George, although Churchill offers striking remarks about his Welsh colleague in passing. He dispenses with this delicacy in dealing with foreigners, portraying both elder statesmen and coming men abroad.

    The quality of the essays included in Great Contemporaries is high: the best of them, polished and thought-provoking, belong with Churchill’s finest writing and have depths that repay very careful reading, yet some essays are longer and fuller than others. The essay on B.-P., Lord Baden-Powell, added in the second edition, is shortest and slightest of all,⁸ and the essays on Hitler and Roosevelt (the latter also among those added in 1938) are disappointingly smaller than their subjects, though each has a serious purpose. The appreciation of T. E. Lawrence—painstakingly crafted, full of interest, and memorable for its claim that he was one of Nature’s greatest princes (157 {157})—although clearly important to Churchill, who had already published it in a book of tributes (155 note {155 note}), is marred toward the end by the author’s description of his friend in almost the same terms he had used near the beginning (158 {157}; cf. 166 {166}), an uncharacteristic blemish that should have been excised by his copy editor.

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    But, unlike most compilers of books of essays, who leave it to the reader to discover which essays are better than others, almost immediately our author singles out half a dozen from the rest. In the preface Churchill tells us that the central theme of Great Contemporaries

    is of course the group of British statesmen who shone at the end of the last century [the nineteenth] and the beginning of this [the twentieth]—Balfour, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Morley, Asquith and Curzon. All lived, worked and disputed for so many years together, knew each other well, and esteemed each other highly. It was my privilege as a far younger man to be admitted to their society and their kindness…. Those to whom these great men are but names—that is to say the vast majority of my readers—may perhaps be glad to gain from these notes some acquaintance with them. (1–2 {10})

    All six of these essays are longer than average⁹ and written to a high standard. Their subjects are all British and all eminent statesmen—half of them prime ministers and the others leading men in Parliament, in party councils, and out of doors. All belonged to an earlier generation and were personally known to Churchill by his precocity or by their acceptance of a younger man.¹⁰

    Churchill begins with Lord Rosebery,¹¹ who he tells us was probably my father’s greatest friend (6 {14}). Lord Randolph’s son inherited this friendship, or rather the possibility of renewing it in another generation (7 {14}). Churchill enjoyed talking to Rosebery about many things, especially about his father. His work on the official biography of Lord Randolph drew them often together, and in the first decade of the twentieth century both were out of sympathy with their parties and vainly seeking middle courses, which made them closer (8 {15}). Their friendship lasted long after Rosebery’s political career was over: Churchill tells us elsewhere how the aged statesman encouraged him to write the life of Marlborough by teaching him that Macaulay’s slanders against his ancestor had been refuted.¹² One theme of Great Contemporaries is friendship: friendship that transcends political differences, which Churchill observed in his father and the parliamentarians of his generation; and friendship that transcends generations, which often takes the form of the old offering encouragement to the young. At first, Churchill recalls, Rosebery did not seem to approve of me, but after the Boer War and his election to Parliament the statesman showed him marked kindness (7 {14}).

    The other notable case of this encouragement arose also in connection with the biography, when the Tory arch-protectionist Joseph Chamberlain, whose cause was opposed by Churchill, invited the young man to read Lord Randolph’s letters at his house, Highbury, in the Birmingham district of Molesey. They dined alone, accompanied by a bottle of 1834 port. Chamberlain endorsed Churchill’s decision to join the Liberals, remarking that he was sure to receive abuse, but if a man is sure of himself, it only sharpens him and makes him more effective. Most of their conversation was about Lord Randolph, and they sat up until two talking. Churchill was struck by the older man’s generous detachment (75 {74}) from political differences and wonders in his essay on Chamberlain whether the English tradition of not bringing politics into private life has often been carried much farther (76 {74}). The benefits of friendship among men of different generations can flow in both directions: in his essay on John Morley, Churchill explains how their years together in cabinet had made him so prize the older man’s counsel that, when Morley retired from the India Office, Churchill wrote Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith to urge that he be given another place in the cabinet (101–3 {3}).

    Aristotle tells us that the characteristic activity of friendship is conversation,¹³ and nothing is taken more seriously in Great Contemporaries, which reads like a series of conversations between the author and his gentle reader (30 {34}). Churchill’s six statesmen are all notable for their conversation. Rosebery comes first, and his conversation

    ranged easily and spontaneously upon all kinds of topics ‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe.’ Its peculiar quality was the unexpected depths or suggestive turns which revealed the size of the subject and his own background of knowledge and reflection. At the same time he was full of fun. He made many things not only arresting, but merry…. He was keenly curious about every aspect of life…. In lighter vein he flitted jauntily from flower to flower like a glittering insect, by no means unprovided with a sting. And then in contrast, out would come his wise, matured judgments upon the great men and events of the past. (9 {16})

    Churchill was particularly taken with Rosebery’s air of ancient majesty (9 {17}), for often, when listening, one felt in living contact with the centuries which are gone, and perceived the long continuity of our island tale (9–10 {17}). By the 1930s, Churchill’s own conversation offered this acquaintance with Britain’s history to younger friends, and in writings like Great Contemporaries he performed the same office for his readers.

    Chamberlain is second among the six statesmen, with a manner of speaking always most forthcoming and at the same time startlingly candid and direct (74 {73}); the young Churchill was pleased to be talked to as if I were a grown-up equal (74 {73}). Chamberlain spoke about Lord Randolph with an animation, sympathy and charm which delighted me (75 {74}).

    Third comes Morley, and Churchill has others with whom to compare him:

    Rosebery was often more impressive in conversation; Arthur Balfour always more easy and encouraging; Chamberlain more commanding and forceful; but there was a rich and positive quality about Morley’s contributions, and a sparkle of phrase and drama which placed him second to none among the four most pleasing and brilliant men to whom I have ever listened. (97 {97})

    Churchill calls Balfour the best-mannered man I ever met—easy, courteous, patient, considerate, in every society and with great and small alike. His manners gave him an urbane and graceful air that seemed to rub off on his companions in conversation (232 {240}). He could say whatever had to be said—even hard things if they were necessary—but he was always the most agreeable, affable and amusing of guests or companions; his presence was a pleasure and his conversation a treat. Of Balfour, Churchill writes that he had not perhaps in conversation the vivid, vibrant qualities of John Morley, nor the brilliance, often disconcerting, of Rosebery; but he excelled both in the pleasure he gave. His art of conversation was always to appear interested in any subject that was raised, or in any person with whom he was talking (232 {241}), so that "all who met him came away feeling that they had been at their very best. He knew how to rule general conversation and so contrived that no one was left out, and it never degenerated into ‘damned monologue’ " (233 {241}). In this he varied from Churchill, whose idea of a good lunch was one with good company, good food and drink, and good conversation dominated by himself—but Churchill did like interlocutors who disagreed with him if they made good arguments and manfully stood their ground.

    The last two of the six statesmen, Herbert Henry Asquith and George Nathaniel Curzon, are missing from Churchill’s list of favorite conversationalists, though both were presidents of the Oxford Union. Churchill made more of an impression on Asquith by the written than the spoken word, and Asquith was markedly silent in cabinet, saving his breath for the summing-up (140 {140}). In approving Churchill’s request to move the navy to its battle station just before the Great War broke out, Asquith limited his reply to a sort of grunt (148 {148}). When they steamed together in the most agreeable circumstances in Churchill’s admiralty yacht Enchantress, Asquith maintained a reserve on serious matters that was broken only once (144 {144}). Undoubtedly he preferred feminine company to male conversation.

    With Curzon, on the other hand, the picture is mixed. He attracted the young Churchill by the geniality, candour and fullness of his conversation. As viceroy in India, Curzon knew how to treat quite young men on absolutely equal terms in conversation, just as Chamberlain did—a habit that Churchill praises (265 {277}). He flattered Churchill by looking forward to his oratorical debut in the House of Commons. In a small circle of friends, Curzon was a charming, gay companion adorning every subject that he touched with his agile wit, ever ready to laugh at himself, ever capable of conveying sympathy and understanding (266 {277}). Yet the world thought him pompous (265 {277}). He was as hospitable to his guests as he was rude to his servants. Despite his majestic speech, Churchill explains that he never led (266 {278}).

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    The importance of friendship, or at least mutual respect, among parliamentarians is likewise a lesson of Great Contemporaries. In this era of waning aristocracy and incipient democracy, men came to Parliament by different paths, some falling into safe seats like Balfour and others fighting their way forward through education like Morley or local politics like Chamberlain. Churchill carefully studies how these new men advanced, but he remarks in words reminiscent of Tocqueville¹⁴ that

    the amount of energy wasted by men and women of first-class quality in arriving at their true degree, before they begin to play on the world stage, can never be measured. One may say that sixty, perhaps seventy per cent of all they have to give is expended on fights which have no other object but to get to their battlefield. (65 {63})

    Modern politicians have to win the esteem of their constituents, but when they finally get to Parliament they are judged by peers and have to find their places there. A man like Morley earned respect because of his repository of vast knowledge on almost every subject of practical interest (101 {101}). On the other hand, Curzon came to the House of Commons in the 1880s on the wings of such conspicuous success that he was notorious as ‘The Coming Man,’ but the House found something lacking in Mr. Curzon and quickly judged him a light weight. Later, at the height of Curzon’s political career, such reservations by Balfour cost him the prime ministry. In those days the House of Commons, which Churchill calls the most competent and comprehending judge of a man (263 {275}), could hold Curzon up to greater men and find him wanting; our author laments that such men are not found to-day (101 {101}).

    Churchill learned a great lesson about politics by observing these statesmen. In Asquith, Balfour, and Chamberlain he discerns that ruthless side without which great matters cannot be handled: Asquith based his conduct on William Gladstone’s saying that the first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher (141 {141}; cf. 64, 233, 240 {62, 242, 249}). Churchill does not notice this trait in Morley or Curzon, nor in Rosebery: Rosebery’s prime ministry was brief and marked by endless vexation, because he was of two minds about whether he wanted the position and allowed Sir William Harcourt to maintain a thriving rivalry (18 {24}).

    Smaller lessons matter too. In his essay on Rosebery, Churchill remarks on the time devoted to correspondence among the Victorians: What long, brilliant, impassioned letters they wrote each other about refined personal and political issues of which the modern Juggernaut progression takes no account! (16 {23}). Rosebery’s private letters are alive with Byronic wit and colour (23 {28}). From Morley our author received long and deeply-instructive letters commenting on his biography of Lord Randolph, all written in his magnificent handwriting (99 {99}). The extreme of Victorian letter writing was attained by Curzon, who wrote the absent Churchill a letter of certainly twenty pages in the midst of the Dardanelles crisis; our author remembers receiving this rather deadly document while he was in the line in France (269 {281}). Nor was this the limit. Curzon’s wife once showed Churchill a letter from her husband in India that was a hundred pages long! (268 {281}). Asquith’s disdain for the typewriter and the telephone, and the fact that he had never learnt to dictate (144 {141}), enforced on him an extensive correspondence in his handwriting at once beautiful and serviceable (144 {44}). But he made his letters rapid, correct and clear, using the fewest possible words (144 {144}). The approving Churchill offers an example in facsimile (142–43 {43}).

    Balfour avoided excess by replying to invitations only by telegram. It flattered the recipient, but Churchill also noticed that "you could dictate a telegram instead of having to write with your own hand a ceremonious letter" (242 {251}). So well did Churchill hearken to this lesson that his own wife once pleaded with him for a letter in his own paw instead of another beastly telegram.¹⁵ Our author borrowed Balfour’s disposition of the morning as well:

    He very rarely rose before luncheon. He rested in bed, unapproachable, transacting business, reading, writing, ruminating, and at week-ends appeared, whatever the crisis, composed and fresh shortly after one p.m. His work for the day was done; he seemed care-free, even at the head of a tottering Government, even in the darkest hours of the War. He would sit and talk gaily for a half-hour after luncheon; he hoped to be able to play a round of golf or in later years lawn tennis.

    But there are two differences. First, whereas Balfour worked through the morning to have the rest of his day free, Churchill followed his morning’s work with the habit he had learnt in Cuba of a siesta after lunch to give him a second working day in the late afternoon and evening. Second, Balfour disdained to read the newspapers, remarking, I have never … put myself to the trouble of rummaging an immense rubbish-heap on the problematical chance of discovering a cigar-end (242 {251}). But Churchill was a voracious reader of newspapers, going through half a dozen every morning and the first editions of the next morning’s newspapers in the wee hours before he went to sleep.

    A related difference was in Balfour’s hesitancy in writing, which was as marked as his fluency in speech: Churchill correctly attributes this to Balfour’s exaggerated academic respect for the tabernacles of literature. Balfour had a mind to weigh and balance, to see both sides, especially all the flaws and all the faults in his own case, but that made him reluctant to commit himself and left him at a loss in an emergency (243 {253}).

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    This criticism of Balfour is not unique in Great Contemporaries. If Churchill’s essays on the six statesmen have generally an admiring tone, suitable for the occasions of their original composition as eulogies, it is striking to see how many reservations he has. His study of their political careers taught him as many pitfalls to avoid as examples to follow. Churchill begins his essay on Rosebery with this arresting sentence: It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty (5 {13}). We soon discover what Churchill means by this enigmatic remark: Rosebery’s future appeared bright when he became prime minister in 1894, but that promise was dashed when his government fell in 1895. Still, he remained in political life for another ten years, until he declared himself against Irish home rule in 1905, and then his political career was closed for ever. Rosebery lived on as a has-been for more than twenty years, dying in 1929 (6 {13}). In short, the political career of this remarkable man was a failure, and Churchill means to discover why: he avers that Rosebery’s actions, and still more the character and personality which lay behind them, are worthy of most careful study, not only for the sake of their high merit, but at least as much for their limitations (6 {14}).

    The trouble with Rosebery in a democratic age was that he was not a democratic politician: he was essentially a survival from a vanished age, when great Lords ruled with general acceptance and strove, however fiercely, only with others like themselves (11 {18}). Rosebery was the last prime minister who never served in the House of Commons, which meant that he never fought an election. Churchill remarks:

    Whatever one may think about democratic government, it is just as well to have practical experience of its rough and slatternly foundations. No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections. Here you come in contact with all sorts of persons and every current of national life. You feel the Constitution at work in its primary processes. Dignity may suffer, the superfine gloss is soon worn away; nice particularisms and special private policies are scraped off; much has to be accepted with a shrug, a sigh or a smile; but at any rate in the end one knows a good deal about what happens and why. (10 {18})

    Rosebery was cut off from all this by being an earl. Churchill describes him as moody and ill at ease in a crowd, unable to win the hearts of ordinary voters, to express their passion and win their confidence (11 {18}). Our author concludes that in modern times one must go through laborious, vexatious and at times humiliating processes to achieve great ends, but Rosebery would not do it (12 {19}).

    Churchill traces the eventual rupture of Rosebery’s political career to this unwillingness to subject himself to the mechanism of modern democracy and to the exigencies of the party caucus. Lacking democratic experience, Rosebery also lacked the stomach for political fights such as his personal struggle with Harcourt. Had he been able to endure unpleasant and even humbling situations, in order to be master of something very big at the end of a blue moon (15 {22}), he might have succeeded in democratic Britain. But Rosebery magnified trifles, failing to distinguish them from important events, and toughness when nothing particular was happening was not the form of fortitude in which he excelled (16 {22}). Pondering Rosebery’s example, one can imagine Churchill resolving not to shrink from democratic politics.

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    In his essay on Chamberlain, Churchill seems not to criticize the great self-made man of Birmingham. When our author peered out of his regimental cradle and was thrilled by politics, he found Chamberlain incomparably the most live, sparkling, insurgent, compulsive figure in British affairs (74 {72}). There were two preliminary steps before Chamberlain’s parliamentary career—his dogged debut as a screw salesman, which gave him the means to enter politics, and his tenure as reforming mayor of Birmingham, which earned him the permanent loyalty of its denizens. The young Churchill, with a famous name but little money, followed Chamberlain’s example in making a tidy fortune before he entered Parliament, though he did it with books and speeches instead of screws, and his famous name and daring escape from a Boer prison in South Africa took the place of Chamberlain’s apprenticeship in local government. When Chamberlain first came to the House of Commons, his aims were entirely radical. But soon he perceived that the remorseless unfolding of events had proved contrary to the expectations both of his youth and of his prime, and thenceforth he spent his life fighting against the forces he had himself so largely set in motion (67 {66}). Churchill clearly admires the determination it took this self-made man from the middle class to make his way in politics (64–67 {65}), the generosity with which he treated political opponents (71–72, 75 {70, 73–74}), and his fortitude in changing parties (71–74 {72}).

    Thus we have both Chamberlain the uncompromising radical and Chamberlain the unbending defender of monarchy and empire. One might therefore tax him with inconsistency, but Churchill, in the spirit of his essay Consistency in Politics in Thoughts and Adventures,¹⁶ in which Chamberlain is a prime example, argues that all followed naturally and sincerely from the particular pressures and environment affecting an exceptional being at one stage or the other of his life (64 {62}). Unable to countenance the growing protectionism championed in the Conservative Party by Chamberlain, the young Churchill broke with his party and joined the Liberals, just as in 1886 Chamberlain had abandoned the party of Gladstone to oppose Irish home rule. Chamberlain’s about-face left him at odds with erstwhile friends, and some were very bitter. Yet all his life he kept in touch with others across the political divide, notably Morley, as Churchill notices and admires. The one failing Churchill mentions is that Chamberlain was the prime mover in events which led to the Boer War (68 {66}).

    The essay on Chamberlain is remarkable for its opening passage, unique in Great Contemporaries, which makes him Churchill’s exemplar of a great man:

    One mark of a great man is the power of making lasting impressions upon people he meets. Another is so to have handled matters during his life that the course of after events is continuously affected by what he did.

    Churchill notices that Chamberlain, three decades after his last public pronouncement, still passes both these hard tests: all who knew him are conscious of his keenly-cut impression; and all our British affairs to-day are tangled, biased or inspired by his actions (63 {61}). There is a criticism of Chamberlain implicit in the young Churchill’s departure from the Conservative Party, compounded by the doubts Churchill records in My Early Life about the advisability of measures the great ‘Joe’ encouraged regarding the Boers in South Africa.¹⁷ Yet Churchill, who spent much of his early career pondering Chamberlain’s example, writes in Great Contemporaries in the spirit of the words he put into his father’s mouth a decade later in his posthumously published story The Dream: There is only one Joe, or only one I ever heard of.¹⁸

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    Churchill sat next to Morley in cabinet and in his essay recalls six years of constant, friendly, and to me stimulating propinquity (100 {100}). But the essay finds in Morley a trust in the permanency of liberal progress that ends up causing political irresponsibility. Like his countrymen, Morley was sure that much was well, and that all would be better (96 {95}). He was an active reformer, holding Victorian Britain up to the mark that would have been prescribed by John Stuart Mill. He was in favor of peace, frugality, and a clear field open to the talents of every class; he sought to avoid foreign entanglements and wanted to allow wealth to fructify in the pockets of the people (96 {96}). Our author tells us that in John Morley’s prime the course was clear and conscious, and the issues not so large as to escape from human control (101 {101}).

    But Churchill’s essay leads inexorably to the moment when Morley had to face the reality of the Great War. Morley was no doctrinaire—he realized Britain’s interest in keeping Germany’s fleet from her doorstep (104 {104})—but he was dwelling in a world which was far removed from the awful reality. Unable to comprehend the new scale and violence of the modern world, he sought to prevent the outbreak of war, even after it had become imperative to mobilize the British fleet (103 {103}). At one point he thought he had beaten Churchill and the war party, but our author writes that it was not me he had to beat: he would have had to beat the avalanche, the whirlwind, the earthquake (105 {105}). When Morley resigned, he raised unavailing hands of protest and censure against the advancing deluge (106 {106}). Though Churchill respects Morley’s devotion to the peaceable world of the Victorians, he sees that Morley was disabled by the sudden descent of the world into Armageddon.

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    Churchill’s essay on Asquith, who was always very kind to him and was responsible for his repeated advancement to great offices (140 {140}), is frankly framed as critique. Our author focuses on Asquith’s flaws as a statesman, explaining that he knew where he stood on every question of life and affairs in an altogether unusual degree, scorning arguments, personalities, and even events which did not conform to the pattern he had with so much profound knowledge and reflection decidedly adopted (137 {137}). Churchill considers this massive finality, which was Asquith’s greatest characteristic (137 {138}), as a limitation:

    The world, nature, human beings do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it. Conditions are so variable, episodes so unexpected, experiences so conflicting, that flexibility of judgment and a willingness to assume a somewhat humbler attitude towards external phenomena may well play their part in the equipment of a modern Prime Minister. (137 {137})

    In this most theoretical statement in Great Contemporaries, Churchill implies that the variability, uncertainty, and complexity of political life require a statesman carefully to examine each situation rather than to rely on general conclusions. To hit the mark, the statesman must steadily devote thought and discussion to questions posed by new circumstances. Churchill also notices Asquith’s dislike for talking ‘shop’ out of business hours—unlike Balfour, Chamberlain, Morley, and Lloyd George, who were always ready to talk politics (141 {140})—and considers it in some respects a limitation, remarking that he communed deeply with himself less than most men at the summit of a nation’s affairs and seemed to throw off his work too easily, too completely, almost as if it no longer appealed to him (141 {141}).

    Asquith was Churchill’s chief during the Dardanelles campaign. Though Churchill portrays him as a vigorous, decisive leader, he recalls that Asquith did not thrust to the full length of his convictions (148 {148}). In the last paragraph of the essay, Churchill contrasts Asquith with Lloyd George, suggesting that Asquith was a fine prime minister in time of peace, but in war he had not those qualities of resource and energy, of prevision and assiduous management, which ought to reside in the executive. His successor had all the qualities which he lacked, and the nation, by some instinctive, almost occult process, had found this out (150 {151}). Reading this comparison, published in Great Contemporaries only a few years before Churchill’s wartime prime ministry, one cannot help considering how similar Neville Chamberlain’s limitations were to Asquith’s, and how far Churchill owed his executive ability to reflection on Lloyd George’s success.

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    Of the essays on the six British statesmen, the one on Curzon most pointedly lays out the man’s faults. In his autobiography Churchill tells us how, as a young man, he met Curzon at an 1895 Devonshire House reception, just after the other man had been made an undersecretary in Lord Salisbury’s government.¹⁹ Churchill was impressed, but in Great Contemporaries, where he also recalls how he first cast an admiring, measuring eye upon Curzon (265 {277}), he explains that Curzon’s undersecretaryship was actually a definite defeat (264 {276}). In My Early Life, Churchill ironically observes of his fellow students at Harrow School that many found in its classrooms and upon its playing-fields the greatest distinction they have ever known in life;²⁰ a like judgment applies to Curzon, whose six years at Eton were the most enjoyable of his life (262 {273}), but who never achieved his ambition afterward. Indeed, his disappointment and his failings are the themes of Churchill’s essay. For all of his promise and precocity, Curzon failed to achieve the central purpose of his life—to be prime minister. Churchill asks why and how he failed, remarking that in this limited sphere no inquiry could be more rich in instruction (261 {273}).

    Curzon’s Indian viceroyalty, which Churchill calls his greatest period (266 {278}), ended in a row with Lord Kitchener in which the viceroy got the worst of it.²¹ Churchill judges that Curzon was right on the merits, but tells us that in craft, in slow intrigue, in strength of personality, in doubtful-dangerous manœuvres, the soldier beat the politician every time. Curzon resigned in indignation just as Balfour’s government was collapsing, nursing a grudge for years afterward (266–67 {279}).

    Churchill contrasts Curzon with Lloyd George during the Great War: the Welshman had the ‘seeing eye,’ a deep original instinct which peers through the surfaces of words and things—the vision which sees dimly but surely the other side of the brick wall or which follows the hunt two fields before the throng. For all his industry, learning, scholarship, eloquence, social influence, wealth, reputation, … ordered mind, … [and] pluck, Curzon could not match this: put the two men together in any circumstances of equality and the one would eat the other (268 {280}). Lloyd George took advantage of Curzon but never admitted him into his inner councils.

    Our author had only one public dispute with Curzon, which reveals the other man’s character (269 {281}). At a dinner party at Churchill’s house, Curzon agreed to go along with Lloyd George and others in an appeal to the country against Stanley Baldwin and the Conservatives. But then Curzon sided with the Conservatives and retained the foreign ministry under Andrew Bonar Law’s administration, which excluded his fellow diners of a few weeks before. Churchill, recalling Curzon’s cordial promise to us all (270 {282}), criticized his defection in a tart public letter, to which Curzon replied in the Times. For most of a year they did not see each other, but when they met again, Curzon threw out his hand in a most magnificent, compulsive gesture which swept everything away. Here, Churchill concludes in a generous assessment of Curzon or perhaps human nature, was the real man (270 {283}).

    The flaws Churchill identifies in Curzon are evident in the last episode of the essay, about the older man’s failure to win the prime ministry in 1923. Bonar Law’s health failed and he decided to resign as prime minister. It is the king’s constitutional prerogative to select a prime minister when the administration changes without an election—a situation that would also arise when Churchill became prime minister in 1940. As Churchill notes, There was no doubt in Curzon’s mind that the king would name him as the new prime minister (273–74 {286}). But Bonar Law had come to the conclusion that Curzon would not do (271 {284}). The presumed successor had displayed poor judgment, writing a hectoring letter about a petty matter (272 {285}). Other elder statesmen in the Conservative Party harbored similar doubts about Curzon. When Balfour was summoned to advise the king, he left his sickbed in Norfolk against his doctors’ orders, feeling that he had a duty to perform. He told the king that in these days a Prime Minister must be in the House of Commons, confining his argument strictly to this point (274 {287}). That was enough to sink Curzon’s chances. Stanley Baldwin, who had never made an important speech in Parliament, became prime minister instead.

    There was an irony, which also bears a relation to Churchill’s situation in the 1930s, in that Curzon might still have replaced Baldwin as party leader when the new prime minister stumbled later in the year, had he not swallowed his pride and agreed to retain the foreign ministry under Baldwin. Curzon played his part loyally in the new team, which was creditable to his character, but Churchill observes that this was one of those cases in which virtue is not its own reward. The final irony was that Curzon was replaced as foreign minister in 1924. So for him the morning had been golden; the noontide was bronze; and the evening lead (275 {288}).

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    One is struck by the contrast between Curzon’s awkward hopefulness and Balfour’s deft deflection of his ambitions, and it is interesting that this incident is one of two that Churchill mentions in the preface to Great Contemporaries. The other incident, which also shows Balfour to advantage, is the story of the resignations from his cabinet in 1903. The story bulks large in Churchill’s essay on Balfour. Our author claims that he presents to the public what is I believe for the first time a correct account (2 {10}). He writes to dispel the accepted view that Balfour, with his cabinet fracturing over the question of protective trade policies and tariffs, concealed the resignation of protectionist Joseph Chamberlain from the free-trade ministers until their own resignations were already effective. Churchill points out that Chamberlain actually announced his intention to resign at a cabinet meeting in the presence of the free-trade ministers. He also reveals that Balfour wrote to the leader of the free-trade ministers, the eighth Duke of Devonshire, to inform him of Chamberlain’s resignation; Devonshire simply did not read Balfour’s letter in time to prevent his friends’ resignations from becoming effective. So Balfour achieved his objects not by underhanded maneuvers, but by management and by accident (239 {248}).

    Yet the prime minister’s efforts to save his government came to naught. Devonshire, whose free-trade friends thought he had betrayed them by remaining in the cabinet, became eager to leave it, and ten days later Balfour delivered a speech that gave him an excuse to resign. With that, all Arthur Balfour’s well-meant house of cards fell to the ground; and the Conservative Party drifted hopelessly forward to shattering defeat (240 {249}).

    Balfour’s political career did not end with his prime ministry, and Churchill has reservations about his ability to conduct an administrative and directly executive post like the Admiralty (246 {256}): as the French premier Georges Clemenceau discerned in a conversation with Balfour, he was not good at making practical choices (244 {254}). But our author admires the dispassionate, cool, correct and at the same time ruthless manner in which Balfour threaded the labyrinth without reproach during the transition from Asquith to Lloyd George in 1916: nothing, he writes, is more instructive. He likens Balfour in that crisis to a powerful graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather muddy street (240 {249}). It is an attractive image of the statesman in politics.

    Churchill calls Balfour a being high-uplifted above the common run (246 {256}). He concludes his essay with a memorable testament to the significance of great men: Churchill avers that the death of such a man is tragic, since it robs the world of all the wisdom and treasure gathered in a great man’s life and experience, and hands the lamp to some impetuous and untutored stripling, or lets it fall shivered into fragments upon the ground (247 {257}). Political virtue is fragile and rare.

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    Churchill’s subjects in Great Contemporaries are not equally great. He accounts for the fecklessness of the ex-kaiser Wilhelm II (36 {38}), whose political judgment he impugns in a devastating essay, by pointing to the inherent triviality, lack of understanding and sense of proportion, and, incidentally, of literary capacity in the German emperor’s memoirs, which reveal his true measure. The irresponsibility that launched the Great War belonged to a very ordinary, vain, but on the whole well-meaning man, with no grandeur of mind or spirit (41 {42}), who had nonetheless been ceaselessly flattered and made to believe he had been raised far above ordinary mortals (29 {33}).

    Churchill portrays the kaiser surrounded by courtiers impatient with mildness, determined for their country to have its share of imperial hegemony, demanding that the world lay a place at the table for the German Empire (32 {35}). One by one Wilhelm estranged each of Germany’s traditional allies. Then, in 1914, he gave Austria a free hand to punish Serbia for the Sarajevo murders and went away for three weeks on a yachting cruise (39 {40}). Yet responsibility for the war belongs not only to the kaiser for his carelessness but also, or even more, to the German people, who worship Power, and let themselves be led by the nose. Churchill criticizes not only the kaiser but also the German regime, contrasting it to the perfection of an hereditary monarchy without responsibility for government in the British Empire, which he deems a more sagacious arrangement (41 {41}). Churchill asks his gentle reader to judge whether, in Wilhelm’s position, he could have resisted the pressure to go to war (30, 33 {34, 36}). Wilhelm is partly excused for his enormities by the fact that he is only a blunderer (36 {38}): Churchill makes it clear that the All-Highest kaiser has no claim to be called great (29 {33}).

    The critique of the German regime continues in the essay on Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, which explains that the great advantage he and General Erich Ludendorff enjoyed in their rise to power during the Great War was that they had only to fight against Russians (114 {114}). Churchill explains that when they assumed the entire direction of the German war machine in 1917 (117 {117}), they made the fatal error of insisting on unlimited submarine warfare, which provoked the American declaration of war upon Germany. Hindenburg, who had engrossed power outside the military sphere in which he and his colleagues were expert, was able to overrule the kaiser, the chancellor, and the Foreign Office (118 {118}). His underrating of the power of the United States and Britain’s ability to defeat the U-boats, which lost the war for Germany and cost the kaiser his throne, did not prevent the Germans from turning to Hindenburg some years later and making him president of the German Republic. Churchill does not credit him with a distinguished record. He paved the way for the accession of Hitler, though our author excuses him for thus opening the floodgates of evil upon German, and perhaps upon European, civilization, because he had become senile (121 {121}).

    No such excuse can be made for Hitler, and one jarring feature of Great Contemporaries is that Churchill made room for such a man in a book about great men. No doubt Hitler meets the neutral qualifications for greatness set out in the essay on Chamberlain: he made a lasting impression, and events afterward were affected by what he did. The beginning of Churchill’s essay Hitler and His Choice claims that such a public figure cannot be justly judged until his life work as a whole is before us and seems to allow the possibility that Hitler might be one of those who rise to power by stern, grim, and even frightful methods but then enrich the story of mankind. This opening raises the question whether Churchill, when he wrote his essay in 1935, thought Hitler might restore honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation, rather than unleashing another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb. After he had already imputed evil to Hitler in the Hindenburg essay, Churchill seems to pull his punches in this essay, writing of the Führer that if we are forced to dwell upon the darker side of his work and creed, we must never forget nor cease to hope for the bright alternative (251 {261}). At the urging of the British government, Churchill did soften in Great Contemporaries some of his most unfavorable judgments about Hitler.²² What he wrote was always politic, and, as he emphasizes by including the word choice in the title of his essay, Churchill would not have wished to foreclose the possibility that Hitler might finally choose a more decent course. But did he really hope, as late at 1935, that that man might somehow redeem himself? Must we conclude, despite his reputation as an unwelcome herald of the dangers from Hitler, who warned his countrymen to the detriment of his own popularity, that Churchill was too optimistic about Hitler’s intentions?

    Despite a few statements that, quoted out of context, might seem to lend color to such a claim, no fair-minded reader of the essay could suppose that Churchill harbored illusions about Hitler. If his tone is diplomatic, his purpose is monitory and his message urgent. Churchill tells us that when Hitler began, Germany lay prostrate at the feet of the Allies, but he may yet see the day when what is left of Europe will be prostrate at the feet of Germany (252 {262})—a much more likely eventuality than that Hitler might mellow. Neither the foolishness of the careless and imprudent Allies (256 {266}), who neglected the danger from Hitler, nor his ferocious persecution of the Jews (257 {267}) escapes Churchill’s criticism. Toward the end of the essay, our author charges Hitler with loosing frightful evils (257 {268}). He concludes the essay by pointing out that, while some of Hitler’s speeches are candid, moderate, and reassuring,

    meanwhile, the great wheels revolve; the rifles, the cannon, the tanks, the shot and shell, the air-bombs, the poison-gas cylinders, the aeroplanes, the submarines, and now the beginnings of a fleet flow in ever-broadening streams from the already largely war-mobilized arsenals and factories of Germany. (258 {269})

    Hitler’s way of ensuring full employment for Germans was to put them to work making weapons. Churchill makes it clear that the only prudent course for his neighbors is to look to their defenses.

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    In a century when most politicians in the liberal democracies, with their own predilections left and right, were too friendly to tyranny of the left or the right, Churchill was equally opposed to communism and fascism. He examines the new Soviet regime in Russia in the trio of essays on George Bernard Shaw, Leon Trotsky, and Boris Savinkov. Churchill admires Shaw as a playwright, calling him the greatest living master of letters in the English-speaking world (60 {57}). He has no truck with Shaw’s politics, calling him an irresponsible Chatterbox (54 {51}). Shaw’s liking for leftist politics led him to make a trip to Soviet Russia, with Lady Astor as his traveling companion. They toured the country with hosts eager to show them the successes of the new communist society and took home favorable impressions. Long before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn drew back the curtain on the cruelty and oppression of communist rule in Russia, Churchill recognizes it as a state nearly half-a-million of whose citizens, reduced to servitude for their political opinions, are rotting and freezing through the Arctic night; toiling to death in forests, mines and quarries, many for no more than indulging in that freedom of thought which has gradually raised man above the beast (59 {56}). He concludes that our British island has not had much help in its troubles from Mr. Bernard Shaw (59 {57}).

    In "Leon Trotsky, alias Bronstein and Boris Savinkov, Churchill considers Soviet communism from the viewpoint of leading Russians. He describes Trotsky’s mastery of the communist drill-book" (196 {200}), his desertion of his family, and his unwonted ambition to rule: Every system of government of which he was not the head or almost the head was odious to him (197 {201}). By the time Churchill wrote his pen portrait, Trotsky was in exile, grinding his teeth at his displacement by Stalin and complaining of inhospitable liberal governments in the countries of his exile. An earlier demise befell Boris Savinkov, a Russian Nihilist devoted to the freedom of the Russian people, whom Churchill presents much more sympathetically as a Terrorist for moderate aims (126 {126}). After fighting against the Czar, he fought the Bolshevik Revolution, recognizing in the Czar and Lenin the same tyranny in different trappings. Churchill points out that Savinkov might have lived happily as a native of Britain, France, the United States, Scandinavia, or Switzerland, but his birth in Russia led to a life of torment (127 {127}). He defended the liberal government in Russia after the 1917 Revolution and fought the communists, with Churchill’s support, in the ensuing Civil War, but after the Soviet victory was lured back to Russia, tried, tortured, and executed. Savinkov’s story is for Churchill a cameo of the tragedy of life under communism: few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people (133 {133}).

    Something of the same tragic fate in exile attached to Alfonso XIII, the last king of Spain before the establishment of the Spanish Republic. Alfonso was born on the throne and reigned for almost forty-five years before his throne was abolished. The king was a sportsman who had many friends in England. Churchill knew him. He had received from Alfonso’s own hands a medal marking his presence in Cuba as a young subaltern in 1895, when he had accompanied Spanish troops attempting to suppress the insurrection that later led, with American help in the Spanish-American War, to Cuban independence. Churchill found the king a practical, genial man of the world, with a noble air, but without a scrap of conceit or humbug, whose attractive nature was not unequal to the strains of ruling his country—for his was no mere constitutional monarchy (204 {210}). Spanish politicians in a succession of weak governments lacked the sort of strict convention, which is a bond of honour in all parties in Great Britain, to shield the Crown from all unpopularity or blame (208 {214}). Stirred up by agitators, the people lost confidence in the monarchy and wanted to rule themselves. Alfonso had to abdicate. In the sequel, the fight between communists and their opponents plunged Spain into the hideous welter that Churchill rued in his essay on Trotsky (196 {200}), in which the Spaniards are tearing each other to pieces (212 {219}). Alfonso’s experience illustrates the effect of a failing regime on an individual life: Churchill asks, Are we dealing with the annals of a nation or with the biography of an individual? (210 {216}).

    ❧ ❧ ❧

    In Churchill’s essays on Ferdinand Foch and Georges Clemenceau we see his admiring portrait of France. In his remembrance of Foch, he emphasizes the marshal’s devotion to the French constitution and his magnanimity. Of the defeated Germans, Foch said, They have fought well, let them keep their weapons (quoted at 184 {188}). Churchill’s most vivid memory of Foch is of his energy and his captivating manner during the war: He was fighting all the time, whether he had armies to launch or only thoughts (186 {190}). In his essay on Clemenceau, Churchill describes the postwar and nearly posthumous quarrel between Foch and Clemenceau: Foch flings the javelin at Clemenceau from beyond the tomb, and … Clemenceau, at the moment of descending into it, hurls back the weapon with his last spasm (290 {2}). It is the occasion for a Churchillian plea for truth rather than decorum in political controversy. Some held that the quarrel should be hushed up, but Churchill cannot agree:

    The Muse of History must not be fastidious. She must see everything, touch everything, and, if possible, smell everything. She need not be afraid that these intimate details will rob her of Romance and Hero-worship. Recorded trifles and tittle-tattle may—and, indeed, ought—to wipe out small people. They can have no permanent effect upon those who have held with honour the foremost stations in the greatest storms.

    Our author is confident that in a generation or two—a century, certainly (289 {301})—the two men will be understood in their true proportions (290 {301}).

    Aside from their personal differences, Foch and Clemenceau exemplify for Churchill the duality in the French nation since the Revolution. For Churchill, Clemenceau embodied and expressed France. Nicknamed the Old Tiger, he represented all that was best in the French Revolution, the French people risen against tyrants. He was anti-clerical, anti-monarchist, anti-Communist, anti-German, in keeping with the dominant spirit of France (290 {302}). The other France, Churchill says, is the France of Foch—ancient, aristocratic (290–91 {303})—the France of chivalry, Christianity, and monarchy, which is, above all, the France of Joan of Arc (291 {303}). When the two halves of the French soul come together in comradeship, as Clemenceau and Foch did during the war, France can be saved from mortal peril.

    To French politics Churchill attributes an intensity, an intricacy, and a violence unequalled in Great Britain. He describes the life of the French parliamentary body, the Chamber of Deputies, as hectic, fierce, poisonous (293 {305}). Never, he says, has so polite and civilized a society nursed such hideous wounds (294 {306}). What does Churchill admire in Clemenceau? He was a man who was fighting, fighting all the way (291 {303}). His enemies accused him of corruption, but his poverty refuted their charge. Then, when they accused him of being in the pay of England, he

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