Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1933.

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 47, 25 February 1933, Page 10

Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1933.

Whether in peace or in War, whether with tongue or with pen, whether in office or in Opposition, whether as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who can make light of an £800,000,000 Budget and compel the House of Commons to see that even an extra sixpence or two on the income tax is quite a good joke if you only take the right point of view, or as the irresponsible free lance who sets the House "on a roar" with his gaiety and his happy phrases; whether as the undaunted champion of a lost cause in India or as the candid hospital patient who hastens to assure the Press that the accident which brought himthere was entirely his own fault— at all times and under whatever conditions and in whatever capacity Mr. Winston Churchill never fails to be interesting, and we are glad to note that it is not in the last of these capacities but as a writer that he is now claiming attention. On the authority of the "Daily Tele f - graph" we were .informed -on Wednesday that it ia understood that Mr. Winston Churchill has agreed to write a history of the English-speaking peoples and that Cassell and Co. are paying £20,000 for the copyright. This sounds like good news for all parties. It is good for the Eng-lish-speaking peoples that their history is to be written by a man who has proved his capacity not merely to write history but also— what so many of die craft have never learnt—to make it readable. Though, except Nin those early days of which he ■ has written quite frankly,1 Mr. Churchill has never suffered from "that eternal want of pence" which is supposed to vex public men, he will doubtless be. able in, these hard times to find a good use for another £20,000. And Messrs. Cassell and Co. may reasonably be supposed to know enough of their own job and of the business aide of Mr. Churchill's brilliant successes as an author during the quarter of a century divides his Life; of his father from the last of his War volumes, It is of "course a commonplace that the best books are not always the best sellers, and that, while the scholar begs his bread, the man who writes the right kind of rubbish is always sure of a market. ■ ■ Learning hath gained, most, writes Thomas Fuller, by those bookß by which .the Printers have lost. Arias Montanus, in printing the Hebrew Bible (commonly calied the Bible of the King of Spain) much wasted himself, and was accused in the Court of Borne of his good deed, and being cited thither> "Pro tantorum laborum praemio vix yeniam impetravit" (As the reward for his great labours had difficulty in obtaining pardon). Likexrise Christopher I'lantin, by printing of Tils curious interlineary- Bible in Antwerp, through the unseasonable exactions of the King's officers, sunk and almost ruined his estate. ■ It is, fortunately not necessary to speculate on the possibility that Mr. Cnurehill may share the fate of the pious and learned editor of the Antwerp Polyglot and after "much wasting himself" have difficulty in justifying his good deed before the Court of Rome or any other tribunal, or may even be compelled to seek a pittance from the Civil List. Nof need the House of Cassell fear that the part which was played for the great French printer by the cost of his interlineary Bible and the exactions of the King's officers will fall upon them through the thousands of Mr. Churchill's unsaleable volumes left on their hands. Among all his multifarious accomplishments Mr. Churchill does not seem to have acquired the art of writing an unsaleable volume. Whatever may be the verdict of posterity on his statesmanship, his position as a historian is already assured in the opinion of posterity and of contemporaries alike. The six. large octavos in which he has written of the Great War, its origin and its aftermath, under the title of "The World Crisis, 1911-1918," combines the solid qualities , that will last with,the brilliance, the vividness, and the variety of style that make them as easy reading as a novel. And it is surely one of the wonders of our time that no less than fiye of these volumes were pro-

duced between 1923 and 1929— seven years in which tile writer fought two General Elections and introduced five consecutive Budgets'. Of the impression that Mr. Churchill's "World Crisis" made upon the critics the following sentences from «ihe "Spectator's" review of the two volumes that appeared ill March, 1927, are fairly typical:— In these vohnncs Mr. Clnvrchill concludes his story of the Great War. They constitute, in our opinion, not only the best account of the moat tremendous convulsion the world has ever ■seen, but one of the most brilliant treatises on war that.have over bOOll written. ... He has told the story of the most tragic drama in thu history of mankind as no other living man could have told it. If, during thoso tremendous years he was unablo to play the part he might have played,, these volumes at least ensure to him a plac"b among the immortals. They will long be read, because it-is possible in their pages to catch a glimpse of that which enabled victory to be achieved in tho end—the soul of the British people. ' .We may remark in passing that in the work which Mr. Churchill is now undertaking—the "History of the English-speaking Peoples"— whatever may be its scale, he will have a theme that will stir him just as deeply, and that he cannot fail togive us something more than a glimpse of the soul of the British people and of their kindred beyond the seas, Reviewing Mr. Churchill's "Aftermath" volume in the "Saturday Review" (March 16, 1929), Mr. A. A. Baumann who, though a Conservative, is, we believe, no warm admirer of Mr. Churchill's politics, credits him with having written "a story of the Great War which, without flattery, will be a possession for ever," and we owe to him an admirable illustration of the lighter and popular aspects of Mr. Churchill's style. The volume opens with a contrast between a dream of what might have been and the grim awakening to post-war realities. Describing Mr. range of picturesque ■metaphor as "easy and unlimited," Mr; Baumann quotes from the realities as follows:— The removal of the paramount war motive made men conscious not only of ethaustioa bnt of party politics. The gale no longer ragea, and as the tide went out all the rocks and shallows, the stranded wreckage, the lobster pots, and local sewage outfalls became visible ia detail from the esplanade. On the ground that "every Brighton tripper can see that," Mr. Baumann declares this picture to be "artistically better than the sunrise on the mountains." That the popular taste has confirmed the opinion of the critics Js proved by the estimate of Mr. James Milne that in the spring of 1927 "there has been a turnover of more than £60,000 on three books —the Churchill book, the Lawrence book, and *Jew Suss.'" If Mr. Churchill's book, which is given the first place, merely got an even share [of the money, it was exactly the ! amount that Messrs. Cassells are staking on the new history. We. had hoped to illustrate the variety of Mr. Churchill's style, by appropriate, quotations, but must confine ourselves to a single example of his tragic vein. He opens his last volume with the remark that if we could exclude the fighting in France and Flanders from our minds the struggle on the Eastern Front must appear, "incomparably the greatest war in history," "the most mournful conflict of which there is record." - All the three Empires concerned', whether victors or vanquished, were ruined. "All the Emperors .or their successors were "slain- or deposed." The Houses of Romanov, Hapsbuig, and HohenzoUem were all "shattered and extirpated." These pages, Mr. Churchill ftontinu'es, recount flailing victories ana defeats stoutly made' good. They record the toils, perils, sufferings, and passions of millions of men. Their sweat, their tears, their Wood bedewed the endless plain. Ten million homes awaited the return, of the warriors. A hundred cities prepared to acclaim thoir triumphs. But all were defeated; all were stricken; everything that they had given' was given in vain. The hideous injuries they inflicted and bore, the privations they endured, the grand loyalties they exemplified, all were in vain. Nothing wa3 gained by any. They floundered in the mud, they perished in the snowdrifts, they starved in the frost. Those that survived, the veterans of countless battle-days, returned, whether with the laurels of victory or tidings of disaster, to homes engulfed already in catastrophe. Can the tragedy of war nave ever been described, more poignantly yet with greater dignity? Mr. Churchill belongs to the historical school of Gibbon and Green, of Macaulay and Trevelyan—the school which believes that the/historian should Write as well as record, and make his readers feel as well as think.