If philosophers cannot become kings, as Plato hoped they would, then probably the next best thing is for journalists to become prime ministers—like Winston Churchill. Then, no matter what the fate of their political careers—and they seem to make out no worse than others—they can at least leave a record for posterity to read and study. Such a record is supplied by Churchill’s war memoirs, four volumes of which have already appeared. In this article, Herbert Howarth examines Churchill as a literary man, with special reference to the famous and much admired “Churchill style,” and finds that such an examination tells us a good deal about Churchill the man and Churchill the political leader. His most recent article in COMMENTARY was “Flecker: The Poet and His East,” in the May issue.

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Frankly, the cult of Churchill as a writer, with the acclamations and awards as his successive volumes appear, is not likable. Many of his devotees worship him blindly; few really expose themselves to the climate of his writing. They resemble the “mechanicals” in a Shakespearean mob, who throw up their nightcaps when the rest do. And as no one understands and enjoys crowds better than Churchill, he tends to give them, in and out of season, the mannerisms they expect. There are quantities of bad, writing in him, and the popular Churchillian sentiment leads to their increase, while we lose sight of the other Churchill, a man capable both of practical achievements and wild fantasy, and, by the same token, of prophetic intuition.

It would be easy to lift passages from Churchill’s books and ridicule their inflated style, or equally easy to point out clear, vigorous chapters like his story of the field of Blenheim. Neither of these procedures recommends itself. But it is a worthwhile task to correlate the weaknesses and strengths of his prose when they appear together, and to interpret, however speculatively, the prophetic and mythical silhouettes which they jointly shadow forth.

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From the outset Churchill showed a capacity for being different and striking new trails. One of the few schoolboy memories that he has published makes this clear. He couldn’t translate his Latin, so he made an alliance with one of the seniors—who helped him out with the classics provided that in return Churchill composed the weekly essay which seniors wrote for the headmaster. Churchill recalls, in My Early Life, “I used to walk up and down the room dictating—just as I do now—and he sat in a comer and wrote it down in longhand.” Eventually the young orator did his work too well. The headmaster was attracted by the ideas put forward, and invited the senior to a discussion, which the latter found very trying, as he only half understood the sense of Churchill’s argument. Afterwards, Churchill was careful to meet this contract with more conventional ideas, but his natural bent had already manifested itself.

Yet in Churchill’s earliest published writings the insistence is on facts. He first made a mark in the world as a journalist. When he was commissioned by the London Morning Post to cover the war with the Boers in South Africa, he was already, a young man of twenty-five, in command of the highest fee known to have been paid to a British war correspondent up to that time. His skill lay in presenting campaigns and their problems for the public understanding.

Such a skill is never lost or laid aside. Through fifty years of work it has served Churchill. But since 1900 he has reared an immense Tower-of-Babel superstructure on this skill. Describing how he developed the distinctive features of his style, he has said, “I affected a combination of the styles of Macaulay and Gibbon . . . and I stuck in a bit of my own from time to time.” Macaulay and Gibbon have real literary interest, with a deep, almost Gothic individual violence of style, but Churchill borrowed from them only what they are more commonly admired for—their imposing surface edifice. Consequently, his writing often lacks sharp human exactitude, which is replaced by an ostentatious but vague and indiscriminate magnificence. Here is the music of the emerging Churchillian mythos.

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Why was he attracted to the rhetorical periods and coloring of the 18th-century pastiche that the world now identifies with his name? At his busiest as prime minister plus minister of defense in the recent war, he often discarded this ponderous style, but for the purposes of maintaining the Churchill legend he always exploits it. It exudes that mystery and aura of fear and hope that he has radiated to audiences in many countries.

This rhetoric seems bound up with an intuition of the movements of history. In all he does, Churchill appears to keep before him a picture of history flowing in a dynamic pattern. The images of tides, currents, fires, recur as he heaves up words to convey this picture to the audience; and sometimes, in the effort, he mixes them queerly, so that they make nonsense if submitted to strict analysis, but still they cumulatively suggest the intensity and violence of the picture obsessing him. Because this picture genuinely represents the world for him, it may be said that he really thinks freedom to be the, recognition of necessity. The man who can see the world pattern as completely as Churchill feels he can, this is the man who has a prospect of traveling on the crest of the tide, and so being successful, great, and free.

Some of his contemporaries have shared this outlook. H. G. Wells, for example, had a similar love of large, pioneer thinking, of images of titanic warfare and destructive battles in sea and sky. There was something similar in Arnold Toynbee’s attempt at a synthetic history and the charting of human patterns, including the pattern of the Prophets. The rhetoric of Smuts, once Churchill’s foe and then his friend and ally, is blood-related, dependent on the crystallization of monumental (and deceptive) simplicities, like the one that came to him as he flew over his continent from the Cape to Cairo, an intuition of “the greatness of Africa and goodness of man.” Possibly T. E. Lawrence’s vision of the “dream-palace” of the Semitic national idea belonged to the same trend. But T. E. Lawrence differed: in the end, by his failure in life itself and his subsequent self-punishment in exposure to pain, his feeling was utterly modified, tortured, and refined to a human and almost individual literary level.

Attempting like other eminent thinkers of his age to work on a grand historical canvas, Churchill went for help to the past. To evolve a medium for formulating and communicating his sense of history, he turned to Gibbon and Macaulay, as magisterial figures from whom he might wrest the power of the epic style, and use it to rally the public behind him. All his prose implies this call: “Follow me on the crest of the wave. I know where history is going, and any other way but behind me you are lost.” To redeem his people by magnetizing them to follow where he rushed forward, that must have been the unconscious aim of his theatricality.

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Furiously practicing his art, Churchill often employed it where it was unnecessary. With a self-critical humor that is one of his counterbalancing and most winning traits, he has written how a fellow journalist looked over his shoulder one day when he was completing an elaborate passage for The River War and burst into an irreverent laugh. “Finish it yourself then,” Churchill said, and walked away. When he came back to see how his colleague had solved the problem, he found “Pop-pop-pop-pop” in miniature handwriting, and then an enormous “BANG!” There were, and there are, these artillery salvos all over Churchill’s books. He was never willing to leave the cannon or the trumpets behind. As the self-appointed prophet of world crises, he needed them.

He lived for crises—to prophesy them, participate in them, and write their annals. For the prophet every moment is a crisis; the world is always about to rise or fall. And exaggerations inevitably creep in. For instance, when Churchill comments on the death of Gladstone, he describes it in a way which cannot seriously be justified, as a fateful crisis in the life of Parliament: “So long as his light lasted the House of Commons lived, and amid the fiercest passions and even scenes of violence preserved its hold upon the sympathies and imagination of the whole world; and at his death it sank at once, perhaps for ever, in public esteem.”

Churchill is highly conscious of his prophetic role. He has written an essay about Moses which is nothing but the retelling of the ancient story, with no raison d’être except the supposition on the part of the author—or some editor—that the public would like to read a prophet on a prophet. He likes to call on the Bible for prophetic metaphors. He is bad at describing trivia, and dodges the problem by enveloping them with verbal pomp and resonances. Only, when he has something really good to say, he is often brilliant at varying his tone between decisive factuality, impish humor, and the favorite prophetic clarion call.

His prevailing desire is to interpret immediate events in terms of panoramic history. He strains on tiptoe to peer into the future, and like his contemporary Wells, he glimpses in his vision both the unfolding of Utopia, and the preliminary terror of Og, Gog, and Magog stalking from the old Orient to blast the world. Churchill knows a good deal about the value of common sense, always applies it when actually handling a crisis, and in his oratory always extols it. But the inner Churchill is not deeply interested by common sense. He has imaginatively struck an alliance with the thoughtful and romantic Lord Percy who, as described in My Early Life: “. . . had travelled widely in the highlands of Asia Minor and the Caucasus, feasting with princely barbarians and fasting with priestly fanatics. Over him the East exercised the spell it cast over Disraeli. He might, indeed, have stepped out of the pages of Tancred or Coningsby.” He follows in the wake of Lord Percy, and other Englishmen, even statesmen, who responded to the appeal of the remote—and like them he imaginatively ranges the world for the Grail or the Messiah.

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So the world picture winking before him shows life as a desperate and ever-about-to-be-crucial struggle between Good and Evil, between Hope and Peril, between the Demons and the Messiah. Whoever expects the Messiah must expect the warring demons with him, and cannot be worthy of the one unless he dares experience the other. Churchill’s attitudes to the real world may often be understood as an attempt to make it correspond with the inner picture. In the global conflict of a decade ago he found an equation for the Demons which has become familiar to all the world: “. . . the demon genius sprung from the abyss of poverty, inflamed by defeat, devoured by hatred and revenge, and convulsed by his design to make the German race masters of Europe or maybe the world”—so he pairs Hider and the Demons in his history of the Second World War. But long before Hider he sought and found other equations. During the late 20’s and the 30’s he almost immunized Parliament, though not the people, by over-frequent repetitions of his image of alarm and fear: “the nameless beast so long foretold in Russian legend.” Putting on his prophetic mantle, he queried, “Who shall say that the world itself will not be wrecked, or indeed that it ought not to be wrecked? There are nightmares of the future from which a fortunate collision with some wandering star, reducing the earth to incandescent gas, might be a merciful deliverance. . . .”

But the negative conclusion of the passage just quoted is exceptional. The dominant idea is to see Armageddon as the unavoidable prelude to peace and order. To this extent Churchill has an absolute need of his enemies, his Hitler, his demons. We can see this rather beautifully demonstrated when he turns to other epochs than our own and looks around to identify the demons of that time. In the first volume of the biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, he fixes a gaze on Louis XIV: “No worse enemy of human freedom has ever appeared in the trappings of polite civilization. Insatiable appetite, cold, calculating ruthlessness, monumental conceit, presented themselves armed with fire and sword. The veneer of culture and good manners, of brilliant ceremonies and elaborate etiquette, only adds a heightening effect to the villainy of his life’s story. Better the barbarian conquerors of antiquity, primordial figures of the abyss, than this high-heeled, beperiwigged dandy, strutting amid the bows and scrapes of mistresses and confessors to the torment of his age.” It is exhilarating insult. And how significant it is. “Better the barbarian.” Better the Russian than the Frenchman; better Genghis Khan; better the legendary and bestial giants of Asia. He strains to approximate more and more to the image, which his heart and the common folk understand, of the monsters and their leap to the ultimate clash of history. In this sense, is any man nearer to the Marxist mind than the anti-Marxist Churchill?

The position is illuminated in a paragraph of Thoughts and Adventures where he pays homage to another literary soothsayer—to the Tennyson of “Locksley Hall,” who

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and
        there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in
        the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the
        south-wind rushing warm
With the standards of the peoples
        plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and
        the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation
        of the world.

Churchill writes a paean on this: “We may search the Scriptures in vain for such precise and swiftly vindicated forecasts of the future. Jeremiah and Isaiah dealt in dark and cryptic parables pointing to remote events and capable of many varied interpretations from time to time. A Judge, a Prophet, a Redeemer would arise to save his Chosen People; and from age to age the Jews asked, disputing, ‘Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?’ But ‘Locksley Hall’ contains an exact foretelling of stupendous events, which many of those who knew the writer lived to see and endure! The dawn of the Victorian era opened the new period of man; and the genius of the poet pierced the veil of the future.” The Tennysonian verses, like the messianic legend, admit destruction as the harbinger of peaceful unity. Only, one is bound to ask—seeing that peace is the aim of his struggle—why Churchill is less inspired by the problems of victorious peace than by the struggle itself and by his feeling that when the bombs fall, “It’s a grand life, if we don’t weaken.”

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To attempt an answer to this question, it may help first of all to single out certain overt aspects of Churchill’s thinking. There was an ardent Liberal phase in his life at the outset of the century. This Liberalism, not really gone even in his Tory old age, is a diluted expression of his primitive hope of world betterment. A stronger form of this hope is the bold Churchillian insight into factual problems, his willingness to throw habits and routine into the melting pot and forge completely new shapes, his resolute march, no matter whether befriended or alone, into untracked territories. A new invention or an ideal newly proclaimed—to either of these his warm imagination is receptive. He has today, at seventy-six, the plastic imagination of a young man.

It is as if he grew quickly out of childhood, and then his psyche sharply stopped growing. Men of advancing years often have vivid childhood memories and speak of children intimately. But if Churchill writes of children, it is ineptly, like a young man whose childhood memories are still blank. Like a young man, in the bad and the good sense, he writes and he lives, and abounds still in the élan, the untainted egoism, that gave allure to the bombast of his maiden speech. That speech was delivered on the barricades which had been erected, by certain prudes, on London’s Empire Theater promenade to divide it off from the music hall bar, and which barricades Churchill and his friends had that night physically torn down. He delivered his harangue, he has recorded, with pictures in his mind of the slaying of Julius Caesar and the taking of the Bastille. He harangues no differently today, whether against a foreign potentate or a minor grievance of home politics—his words pouring out of the youth fixated in him.

This lovable and dangerous Puck within, whom time has by-passed, lent him on the warring side his quick appreciation of scientific weapons and the strength to cut through red tape and get them developed, as he says about a high-frequency development of June 1940: “Being master, and not having to argue too much, once I was convinced about the principles of this queer and deadly game I gave all the necessary orders that very day in June. . . . Obedience was forthcoming with alacrity, and on the fringes all obstructions could be swept away.”

On the creative side the same Puck gave him the power to enter imaginatively into the personality of Chaim Weizmann, and to understand his longing to reverse and fulfill history. The comprehension that he freely gave, and the fire that he richly borrowed from Weizmann—the same exchange he was able in a different degree to make with Abdullah on the morning of the opportunist foray into Amman. He felt, reminiscing later over a single meeting, that he might have made the same exchange with Enver Pasha, “this fine-looking officer, whose audacious gesture had at the peril of his life swept away the decayed regime of Abdul Hamid, and who had become in one leopard-spring the hero of the Turkish nation.” Something in Churchill answered passionately the appeal of these men whose beginnings and whose mentality were so different from his. Among princely barbarians and priestly fanatics his senses vibrated, his mind braced itself to extra vigilance.

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Where was the root of his imaginative sympathy with the audacious of mind like Enver and the intense of hope like Weizmann? The root reaches down to his feeling for the movements of history. He could look forward so far because his inward eye could also range so far in the other direction—to the past, scrutinizing and sharing the lives of ancestors whose problems and actions were written in history. Looking backward had long been one of the pleasures of the Churchills. A former Sir Winston, driven into enforced leisure by the defeat of the Royalist party in 1646, had consoled himself by authorship and by study of his pedigree and arms. The zeal of the 17th-century Churchill continues as a deeply implanted drive in the 20th-century statesman. The earlier Winston was the father of the Duke of Marlborough, whose widow, when told of researches to establish the importance of his forebears, dismissed them with the comment, “I value nobody for another’s merit.” This sensible judgment is quoted and rebutted by the modern Churchill, who, as Marlborough’s biographer, urges the importance of hereditary genius, and says of the line begun in 1649: “The military strain flowed strong and clear from the captain of the Civil Wars, student of heraldry and history, and champion of the Divine Right. It was his blood, and not his pen, that carried the message.” The sense of family and of the voices of the past in the blood predominates in this house.

In the living representative of the house, who has rejected all titles and has insisted on remaining “Mr. Churchill,” this sense of heredity has been stimulated to hyperactivity. How? One can only guess; but any guess is likely to begin with the same important point. It is a commonplace of biography that he was devoted to the memory of his father. Thanks partly to the boarding-school system and pardy to his father’s preoccupations, he saw, as a boy, comparatively little of Lord Randolph Churchill, who, while the son traversed the school curriculum, traversed the political stage from promise and exaltation to disappointment and collapse. “I was his vehement partisan,” Winston says in My Early Life, and he also has to say, with pride and pain, “Three or four long intimate conversations [with my father] . . . are all I can boast.” The distance imposed by the family life of that class at that period doubled his profound response to his father’s personality, He felt fierce impulses to help him in his politicial struggle.

Lord Randolph died in 1895 just before the young man, almost twenty-one, was gazetted to the 4th Hussars. Churchill describes his death with absolutely unrhetorical sincerity. “I ran in the darkness across Grosvenor Square, then wrapped in snow. His end was quite painless. Indeed he had long been in stupor. All my dreams of comradeship with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support, were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.”

The main resolution of Winston Churchill’s life thus crystallized: to vindicate Lord Randolph’s political memory. Personal ambition brimmed in him, and his course might not have been much different if his father’s career had closed differently; but the nature of his drive was transfigured by the demand that life should give back the success withdrawn from his father. From this grew his restlessness, his unappeased striving always to do something more, the exertion of his strength beyond the capacities of other men, his eagerness. These qualities stretch into absurdity at times, and H. G. Wells had no difficulty in caricaturing them in The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930): “Mr. Brimstone Burchell seemed always to be coming in or going out or talking in much too audible undertones to someone while the Council was in session. No one had asked him; he just came. It was difficult to find an appropriate moment to say something about it. On the whole he seemed to be well disposed and eager to take entire charge of army, navy, air force, munitions, finance or any other leading function which might be entrusted to him.” At the bottom of this avid enthusiasm was the resolve born of pride in his father and family; and his energy, his egoism, his intuitions of the past, his sympathy for movements and ideals rooted in history—they may all be but complicated extensions of this.

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If it was his father’s decline that stung all the latent powers of the boy to life, it might almost be said that the failure of the one led to the success of the other. Churchill has himself interpreted the forging of the Duke of Marlborough’s genius in similar terms, tracing it to the restraints under which that hero’s father had lived when the Cavalier cause failed.

Lord Randolph’s failure was splendidly vindicated. But in such a situation the passionate effort to succeed on the father’s behalf was linked to a darker yearning to fail with the father. The joint operation of these impulses underlies one of the most pointed paragraphs in Churchill’s history of the recent war, a paragraph so consciously written for posterity in the style of Caesar that wit plays round its edges: “At the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the state, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.” So he is at once the father vindicated and the father dismissed, at once Caesar, the general and historian, and the slayer of Caesar (see the story of the Empire Theater above). And so he can never be the harvester of the victorious peace because failure, too, is one of his motives.

But there is an important limit to his acceptance of Lord Randolph’s failure. It is difficult for a son to assimilate the defeat of a father, and even Churchill cannot follow his model past a certain point in the curve of decline. Now, political decline is sometimes accompanied by great gains, in a literary as well as a spiritual sense. Has the younger Churchill forfeited the gains by hesitating to explore the final degrees of Lord Randolph’s sufferings? In his standard biography of his father, published 1906, he has made it clear, in richly documented narrative, that the “wit, abuse, epigrams, imagery, argument,” which marked the period of Lord Randolph’s ascendancy, and which he has always emulated, changed at the close. The verbal acrobatics of the time of success were somewhat showy; they were transmuted some years later by suffering and disease. The imagery took on genuine literary beauty; through the involuntary suffering of the man, it lost its humor and its debating pugilism for the beauty of the gargoyle and the vehemence of the garroter—for that tormented viciousness which distinguishes literature from rhetoric. Did Churchill dare follow his model thus far?

When, as biographer, he writes the story of one of Lord Randolph’s last great speeches, he recreates the scene and the isolation of the protagonist with skilful dramatic touches, but he balks at the actual repetition of the phrase with which his father reached the climax. Lord Randolph was attacking the government (his own side of the House) for proceeding to a commission of enquiry against the Irish leader, Parnell, on no better basis than a letter at last found to be the work of a forger, Pigott. “‘A Nemesis awaits a Government that adopts unconstitutional methods. What,’ he asked, ‘has been the result of this uprootal of constitutional practice?’ Then in a fierce whisper, hissing through the House, ‘Pigott!’—then in an outburst of uncontrollable passion and disgust—‘a man, a thing, a reptile, a monster—Pigott!’—and then again with a phrase at which the House shuddered, ‘Pigott! Pigott! Pigott!’” A phrase at which the House shuddered—that is a dramatic way of putting it, but it euphemizes the reality, which is relegated to an appendix. There it appears in a verbatim reprint of a memorandum by L. J. Jennings, who that night broke forever with his friend Randolph Churchill, hearing him accuse the government of calling into existence “the bloody, rotten, ghastly foetus, Pigott, Pigott, Pigott.” This zenith of a solemn speech is the terrible and genuine expression of an inner death and the abortion of all hopes. His son winces and pushes it aside; his father is not to be followed that far; Winston is determined to keep his mind young and ardent, free alike from corrosion and poetry.

What he could and did do to assimilate his father’s failure was to develop a world view characterized by the inclusion of great failure in close company with great success. He translated his problems into messianic imagery revealing failure and success in a single flash.

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There are exceptional times when Churchill tries to get away from failure and simply to evoke success, rectitude, orthodoxy. He is then at his worst as a writer. To take a sample. In his Marlborough he considers the question of the Duke’s married life; he was assisted in preparing this book by a most able research worker, and he prints wonderful passages from the Duchess’s letters to prove the reality of her love for Duke John. But he will not let the matter rest at that. He feels that something of his own is expected and trundles out a psalm: “These are tremendous facts, lifting the relations of men and women above the human scene with all its faults and cares. They rekindle in every generous bosom the hope that things may happen here in the life of the humblest mortals which roll round the universe and win everlasting sanction.”

The mishandling of orthodox themes like marriage is perhaps the obverse of his mishandling of such a subject as children. Churchill could not write sensitively about children because he has a youth’s blind spot that blacks out his childhood. He cannot write realistically about marriage because in a strictly psychological sense he has never grown out of the age of romance. He is indeed a fixated youth. And yet this candid youthfulness does provide him at times with a good alternative to the messianic rhetoric. It makes him master of a straight, quick, biting, factual freshness; something truly unorthodox; an intrusive unconventionality that thrusts its way past the handicaps of accepted doctrine.

So it is that in ministerial life he has always been able to look at practical problems completely anew. Some of the memoranda where this gift has been in action are, by purely stylistic criteria, among his best writings because free from style. Those published in his volumes on the Second World War illustrate the urgent, imperious qualities of good English. Take his note on the “sticky-bomb,” printed in Their Finest Hour: “Any chortling by officials who have been slothful in pushing this bomb over the fact that at present it has not succeeded will be viewed with great disfavour by me.” Where he has an immediate practical task in front of him, he abandons rhetoric and demonstrates the use of words to get things done.

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Is prose of this sort also literature? One might quote Gide’s Geneviève against the literature that forgoes truth for style, and argue that by Gide’s verdict the memoranda are above literature just as the bombast is beneath it. But the very act of mentioning Gide would show up the astronomical distance between Churchill’s writing and permanent literature. The best that can be said is that the deficiency of Churchill’s best writing is a deficiency of genre: he writes the literature of the Parliamentarian.

There is a passage in a letter of T. E. Lawrence to Edward Marsh: “Winston wrote me a gorgeous letter. Called his Crisis a potboiler! Some pot! and probably some boil, too.¹ I suppose he realizes that he’s the only high person, since Thucydides and Clarendon, who has put his generation, imaginatively, in his debt.” Now T. E. Lawrence went out to seek monastic suffering with at least a secondary hope that it would help him to write literature. Essays in literature, what else were the noble compliments to every sort of artist with which, in prolonged humility, he filled his correspondence? There was no successful creator in him. But there was a sharp, critical brain, and sometimes this made the compliments ambiguous. Such a critical irony may be present here. The catch in the eulogy of Churchill is the accent on high persons. Generally speaking, Britain’s legislators and senators are not distinguished as creative writers. They include able writers and imposing writers, whose work may now and again pass to posterity, but their labors are in this other genre which is millennia away from the literature of a Gide or an Eliot.

Churchill’s humorous passages are also Parliamentarian and perishable. But for that very same reason how enjoyable they can be, especially when the pungency of the memorandum style marries with the humor. For instance, his passage on the German decision to protract the defense of Tunisia: “While I always hesitate to say anything which might afterwards look like over-confidence, I cannot resist the remark that one seems to discern in this policy the touch of the master-hand, the same master-hand that planned the attack on Stalingrad, and that has brought upon the German armies the greatest disaster they have ever suffered in their military history.” However, the humor here is close to the pleasure of insult, which has a passionate side to it; and an equally significant aspect of Churchill’s humor is that it is often free from passion—his only manifestation of neutrality. It bespeaks an easy assurance and confidence in life. Several times Churchill has survived accidents that would usually have been fatal, like the air crash described in Thoughts and Adventures, and he has constantly exposed himself to hazards. The followers of Jung say that a man who emerges from accidents is a man who still has work to do, who is possessed of powers that he still has to use. A long sequence of close encounters with death seems to have led Churchill to apply this rule to himself. His sentences occasionally brim with pure pleasure of life; and if passages that carry this feeling are also stained with the special egoism of autobiographical understatement, they are lovable for their serene aplomb.

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Maybe one should admit that in less than a hundred years Churchill’s books will scarcely be read by lovers of literature, only by students of history. He commands attention today as a prophet, but prophecies may make dull reading in the aftertime, and the drama of Churchill’s style may be contrary to the taste of an age to come. He may be like another prophet, to whom he often refers: Disraeli. Disraeli’s writing, admired in his own day, has dropped out of currency and is hard work to the student now. But Disraeli remains in the national memory, not as an author, nor exactly as a statesman, but as a great image collecting in himself part of an epos. It is the figure of the prophet that survives instead of his prophecies; and so it may be with Churchill.

Or a fission may take place, to produce two separate Churchill myths: the myth of Churchill peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people, and the myth as formulated among other nations with quicker temperaments. Even at present, with the original still happily alive, his shadow self already appears, and it is already splitting, with the second version coming into existence the more rapidly of the two.

In Tel Aviv in 1945 I saw a “prototype” of the powerful legendary conception of Churchill that may coalesce from the hopes of men and women and replace the actual figure. It appeared in a play, Churchill’s Mission. The author had written it in German, using the pseudonym of “Alexander Ebenezer”: he was approaching his middle years; born in Poland; small, red-haired; tough of frame, yet nervous and touched with the unworldly benevolence of a hermit. Into a strange story built on documentary lines, showing crucial events of Churchill’s career—his capture by the Boers and his early meeting with Smuts; his acceptance of the leadership of Britain in 1940; the later war years and the meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin at Teheran—he wove allegorical material based on popular Cabalism. Tiny speeches and incidents were meant to illuminate the ancient past like lightning flashes. A journalist, discovered to be the incarnation of Daniel, moved across the scene with the haunting ubiquity of the Meshulach in The Dybbuk and admonished the statesmen to remember their obligations to history. The conference room at Teheran was transformed into the palace of Nebuchadnezzar and the writing on the wall flamed over the Big Three as they debated the degree of Jewish emancipation in their respective countries.

What this play suggests is that the messianic attributes of Churchill’s inspirational writing may be assumed by the man himself in the eyes of peoples who have real or spiritual irridenta before them. On him, once gone and altered to a great memory, the eyes of the oppressed may turn, of the oppressed who still cherish the dream of an individual divinely guided to bring order to the earth. Let there be no attempt to comment here on the danger as well as the beauty of this mythos, which may sometimes stimulate an individual to valuable action, but which may also excuse him for finding the Messiah in himself. Let it only be said that if this figure does form in the popular imagination, it will be the remarkable case of a statesman so completely projecting his inner picture through his writings that the world reflects it back on him even when the life and writings have ceased to glow.

Through such developments Churchill may retain his influence more as a character and an allusion in the books others write than by the books he has written himself. Yet possibly influence on that scale is not formed through print; or, if the formation of it is originally helped by print, print does not afterwards do most to carry it. It is the minds of men that irradiate it; and it is handed down, as this descendant of Marlborough liked to say of his family’s genius, “along the blood, not by the pen”—only, along the blood of all people in the mass.

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¹ Was Churchill echoing this when he captured the fancy of the Canadian parliament during the last war with “Some chicken! Some neck!”