Mr. Churchill as Journalist and Essayist

MR. CHURCHILL AS JOURNALIST AND ESSAYIST HERBERT L. STEWART Where the Press is free and every man able to read, all is safe. THOMAS JEFFERSON Can it be maintained that a person of education can learn anything worth knowing from a penny paper? It may be said that people may learn what is said in parliament. Well, will that contribute to their education? LORD SALISBURY J OURNALISM has been called "a literary appetizer," the hors d'(JJuvres of a full literary meal. Its merit is to open rather than to complete inquiry, to be provocative of thought beyond all it has given. The essay, on the other hand, is--as the advertisement says about even a miniature flat-"self-contained." It is a small-scale treatise, presenting a complete picture, though in miniature. In both these types of composition Mr. Churchill has contributed notably. Step by Step and Great Contemporaries may be taken to illustrate his talent in journalism and the essay at its best. I Regarding his earlieSt performance in journalism, the dispatches he wrote as correspondent of the Morning Post with the British army in the South African War (later published in the volume London to Ladysmith via Pretoria) it is enough to use the familiar formula of restricted commendation-"Good of their class, second class." The newspaper wanted vivid, detailed letters from the front, especially for those readers who had a husband, a son, or a sweetheart in the forces landed at Table Bay for active service; and these descriptive pieces, like those of a later volume, The Malakand Field Force, furnished the gossip of an eye-witness in such literary form as suited well the needs of the editorial office. There is an occasional, quickly suppressed, note of misgiving about the merits of the quarrel. Doubt is promptly argued away: the Morning Post would have sharply edited sceptical paragraphs as out of place in an organ echoing Joseph Chamberlain's summons "Learn to think imperially." But the young writer, who was himself thinking imperially, to the exclusion of all other types of thought, needed no such editorial censorship. Our interest now in 109 Vol. XXI, no. 2, Jan., 1952 110 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY these dispatches lies in what they reveal of the beginnings of that power to watch, analyse, and interpret military movements which would, a quarter-century and a half-century later, yield the ~eat histories of the First and Second World Wars. There was a vast development between London to Ladysmith and The World. Crisis or The Grand Alliance. But the flair for examining tactics and strategy was present in the writer's earliest literary venture, and- as we read long ago in Silas Marner-"There must be many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.''' A distinct advance in power, but still the same order of composition, was shown in Mr. Churchill's next work, The River War. There, however, he is an historian rather than a journalist, and it is with his journalism that I am here concerned. This is seen to best advantage in the letters written every second week during the years 1936-9, and later collected in Step by Step. They are examples of journalism at its very best, containing a vivid, compact statement of essentials, satiric asides, startling similitudes, challenging dilemmas. Here are the products of an observer to whom the international sky was becoming continuously darker, and whose alarm was deepened by the ready popular reception of empty official reassurance. Would that they had served their purpose in time, rather than have now to be remorsefully remembered! Conspicuous topics in Step by Step are the fast increasing peril of German rearmament, the urgency of "putting teeth" into the League of Nations, the illusion about relative strength (especially in the air) with which such leaders as Stanley Baldwin had soothed a British public when they ought to have alarmed it. Such challenging events as the German violation of treaty after treaty, the civil war in Spain, Mussolini's outrage upon Abyssinia, Jew and Arab at strife over Palestine, India's ominously developing nationalism, were pressed upon the attention of the...