The Victorian Churchill

...The clear superiority of the Victorians is questionable because the relative docility of the times in which they lived may have made their greatness possible...

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...The fiasco of the Norwegian campaign was principally a reflection of Chamberlain's inability to guide his Cabinet and infuse the war machine with a central impetus and a sense of purpose...

...Asquith's opinions were "cut in bronze...

...For it led to scorn for people and even for events which "did not conform to the pattern he had with so much profound knowledge and reflection decidedly adopted...

...Cosgrave's achievement that he demonstrates how self-deprecating that remark was...

...Nevertheless, the unmistakeable impression left by his book is that of the unfashionable truth that one of the most vital determinants of history is still the personalities, of its chief participants...

...Name (please print) Address City State Zip This is a ^ new ^ renewal subscription The Alternative is a lively, provocative, and intelligent magazine which I read faithfully...

...The art of government was exercised within a limited sphere...

...Asquith, a man of "vast knowledge, faithful industry, deep thought" "knew where he stood on every question of life and affairs in an altogether unusual degree...

...Their central theme is the "group of British statesmen who shone at the end of the last century and the beginning of this," and the book serves, Churchill tells us, as a commentary on the vast changes that have taken place in British politics since then...

...What long, brilliant, impassioned letters they wrote each other about refined personal and political issues of which the modern juggernaut progression takes no account...

...Cos-grave's book reminds us of the indispensable part Churchill played in making the correct decisions at the most critical moments...

...Roseberry flourished in an age of great men and small events...

...He allies himself, as it were, not with the political leaders of the thirties but with the leaders of "the old vanishing, and now vanished, oligarchic world which across the centuries had built the might and the freedom of Britain...

...Churchill, describing his own part in the war, ascribed victory to the lionheartedness of the nation...

...They never had to face, as we have done, and still do, the possibility of national ruin...

...This incapacity, however, may reflect as much on the new social order as on those whose horizons are too narrow but perhaps also too high to adapt...

...For all his silence about the less elevated aspects of nineteenth century life, Churchill explicitly recognizes the insufficiency of much of late nineteenth century Liberalism...

...On the other hand, Churchill writes that British trade unions have been on the whole a "stable force" compared with movements on the Continent, that they have brought to the forefront The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 11 "the point of view of the toiler" and his requirements, and that their sturdy patriotism in war was invaluable...

...Churchill, however, who considered as his contemporaries Roseberry and Chamberlain, not Attlee and Baldwin, did in fact "face the possibility of national ruin," and he mastered it...

...he chooses not to consider those men "who are with us today," in 1937, as his contemporaries, but rather those men than whom he was, in fact, "far younger...

...Similarly, the decision to destroy the French navy at Oran rather than let it fall into the hands of the Germans, and to send vital tank reinforcements to the Middle East at a time when Britain herself was in deadly danger, can be very largely attributed to the impact of Churchill's personality, in particular to his ruthlessness and steadfastness of purpose...

...Part of the achievement of the Victorian age lids in its preserving an essentially aristocratic form of government while encouraging the upward movement of "the men of the new middle class...

...but it has not been succeeded by that of the eminent...

...Yet the book as a whole is not polemical...

...There is nothing else quite like it on the American scene...

...Nowhere was this more apparent than in his appointment of Beaverbrook to overhaul aircraft production and of Bevin to obtain the enthusiastic and unwearying cooperation of organized labor in the common war effort...

...Churchill's Great Contemporaries could not deal with "the immense, fascinating, yet mysterious and unmeasured new growths which everywhere are bursting forth amid the ruins of the structure" they had known...

...Yet England's noble effort and glorious triumph in World War II appear not to have heralded the beginning of another golden age but rather to have been the last gathering together and exertion of the nation's historic resources, gathered together and exerted by a man for whom England's "Past stood ever at his elbow...

...Of Roseberry, for example, he says, "His life was set in an atmosphere of tradition...

...Their main foundations were never shaken...

...For example, Churchill maintains, on the one hand, that British trade-unionism "has introduced a narrowing element into our public life," and "has become the main foundation of a socialist political party, which has ruled the State greatly to its disadvantage, and will assuredly do so again...

...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...

...The pedestals which had for some years been vacant have now been demolished...

...Nevertheless, the world is moving on...

...I cannot see any figure which resembles or recalls the Liberal statesmen of the Victorian epoch...

...But in some respects this was a limitation...

...Churchill's portrait of the twilight of aristocratic England leads him to feel, he tells us in his Preface, "how much has changed in our political life," and although "we must all hope" that it is only an illusion that our ancestors were "wonderful giants" compared with us, Churchill seems to believe it is so...

...but "nature never draws a line without smudging it...

...Who are England's Great Contemporaries today...

...Irving Kristol THE ALTERNATIVE • P.O...

...Yet Roseberry, the last British Prime Ministernever to sit in Commons, was, as his career suggests, unsuited to the modern democratic age...

...Thus Churchill recognized correctly the need to prevent Axis domination of the Mediterranean and North Africa if Britain's trade routes and links with the Dominions were not to be imperiled and her strategy of containment destroyed, but he unjustifiably harassed Wave11 to take the offensive when the latter was hampered in his operations by lack of materials and equipment...

...Yet that age, whose destruction was ensured by World War I, was not entirely golden and was decaying before World War I. Although"Britain herself was universally envied and accepted as the leader in an advancing and hopeful civilization," the period was marred and warped by the way the Irish question came to dominate British political life, and it was with the Irish question that the great traditions of Parliamentary decorum and reasonableness began to seem irrelevant...

...To make head against the aristocratic predominance of those times, a Lancashire lad, the son of a Blackburn doctor without favor or fortune, had need of every intellectual weapon, of the highest personal address, and of all that learning, courtesy, dignity and consistency could bestow...

...We have entered the region of mass effects...

...More particularly, there can be little question that in the sphere of British politics such men, for example, as John Morley, are not to be found today...

...His voice was melodious and deep, and often, when listening, one felt in living contact with the centuries which are gone, and perceived the long continuity of our island tale...

...The work's dominant tone is one of melancholy...

...From the moment Churchill took over and was able to impose his will on the conduct of the war, the beneficial effects were quick to materialize...

...The "increasing darkness around" casts doubt on the beneficence of the "scourge of modernity...

...But that Churchill was perhaps the only man who could have saved England from mortal defeat suggests the superiority of the England which formed him to modern England...

...The Past stood ever at his elbow and was the counsellor on whom he most relied...

...The Victorians, for all their stature, were able to busy themselves and contend "about minor things...

...The leadership of the privileged has passed away...

...Asquith was unsuited to be a modern Prime Minister...

...It seems that the Victorians' "course was clear and conscious" at least partly because "the issues were not so large as to escape human control...

...In addition, Churchill had the ability to select brilliant subordinates and to delegate important responsibilities to them, which happily complemented his awareness of organizational weaknesses and the consequent need for energetic reconstruction...

...His realization that in a conflict between a continental power like Germany and a maritime power like Britain, the latter's central objective had to be one of blockade and containment (ultimately leading to an offensive strategy), combined with an unfortunate tendency toward excessive interference with the disposition of forces by commanders on the spot...

...The greatness of late nineteenth century England rested in and reinforced a strong feeling of confidence and even a certain restriction of horizon which rendered it incapable of coping with the issues of the modern age, much perhaps as Coriolanus is incapable of adapting to a new social order...

...In a powerful onslaught on the Dowding myth, Mr...

...But his sympathy and admiration for these "Great Men" isgoo4 iZe44e4v Great Contemporaries by Winston S. Churchill University of Chicago, $7.95 evident...

...and moving so fast that few have time to ask—whither...

...World-revolution, mortal defeat, national subjugation, chaotic degeneration, or even national bankruptcy, had not laid steel claws upon their sedate, serene, complacent life...

...Churchill's immense talent for crossexamination and administration blended with a depth of psychological insight which enabled him both to sense the mood of the nation, and to awaken its pride and patriotism...

...slowadays when 'one man is as good as another—or better,' as Morley once ironically observed, anything will do...

...the British regime maintained the elevated nature of a regime in which "the aristocratic circles .. . dominated the political scene" and pondered and debated the future of the nation, while allowing "the full fruition of outstanding capacity" of men like Peel, Disraeli, Chamberlain, and F.E...

...Box 877 • Bloomington, Indiana 47401 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974...

...Churchill's attitude toward most of his —and all of his British—Great Contemporaries is sympathetic...

...And to these few only a babel responds...

...Churchill counts himself as a Victorian, and parts of his accounts of his Great Contemporaries are remarkably applicable to himself...

...Churchill is not at all unaware of the improvements and progress that modern technological development and democratic politics have brought in many spheres, and he is also well aware of the limitations of his Great Contemporaries...

...Yet for all the improvements of the modem era, for all the "vast and rapid expansion" of the "knowledge, science, wealth, and power of mankind," not only have certain refined aristocratic virtues disappeared but anarchy and dictatorship seem more and more prevalent...

...Churchill is reminiscent of Tocqueville in his acceptance of the inevitability of the passing of the old regime and in his simultaneous doubts as to what will replace it...

...Cosgrave is far from painting an uncritical picture of Churchill the Warlord...

...And who are ours...

...Cosgrave shows how important Churchill's opposition to depleting the strength of Fighter Command in Britain (in the vain hope of propping up France) was in saving the Island from invasion...

...I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar...

...William Kristol The Victorian Churchill THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PREss has reissued, in celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth, his collection of twenty-five essays entitled Great Contemporaries, first published in 1937 and long out of print...

...Smith...

...At a time when it has become the fashion to criticize Churchill and minimize his personal contribution to victory, Mr...

...cal detail...

...Surely few in modern times have shared with Churchill and Tocqueville so acute an appreciation of both sides of the coin of political change...

...On the other hand, Churchill's extraordinary capacity for detecting and striking at the enemy's jugular vein—witness his plans to use naval power to cut Germany off from her sources of ore in Scandinavia and to mine German waterways in order to disrupt her internal communications—was prejudiced as much by the procrastination and chronic indecisiveness of his colleagues as by any personal rashness on his part...

...Churchill in a sense justified and ennobled in deed as well as in speech that age whose outlines he limns in Great Contemporaries...

...Churchill says of Rose-berry, in one of his most interesting essays, "He was often palpably out oftouch with [the modern] environment...

...The tidal wave of democracy and the volcanic explosion of the War have swept the shores bare...

...The book also includes essays on nonpolitical personages and on foreign leaders, and could well be read simply for its character sketches, of which Churchill's portrayal of "Leon Trotsky, Alias Bronstein," is perhaps the most famous, and which non-Trotskyite readers of this journal will undoubtedly enjoy...

...They dwelt in an age of British splendor and unchallenged leadership...

...He seemed to be attended by Learning and History, and to carry into current events an air of ancient majesty...

...perhaps that is no censure upon him...

...his ability in the supreme crisis of the twentieth century suggests his surmounting of the high but narrow horizon of his"contemporaries...

...It is Mr...