Churchill introduces My Early Life, his autobiography covering 1874 to 1904, with this observation: “I find I have drawn a picture of a vanished age.” The book is his odyssey. It describes his early wanderings and fortunes as a young officer, journalist, and member of parliament. It depicts not only the actions but also the opinions and convictions of his life as “a child of the Victorian era.” But it is never antiquarian; it does not present the author as a product of his times. Instead, the book seems meant to be a possession for all times—or at least an inheritance for “a New Generation,” Churchill’s dedicatee for the 1958 American edition. Perhaps the work is intended for all future youths with no memory of life before the World Wars. Certainly, Churchill’s My Early Life is meant for any youth whose soul responds with spiritedness to noble tales of “youthful endeavour.”
My Early Life is an exciting read; clearly, it is styled to attract a young audience. The book breathes the spirit of Kipling. All the same, it is not just a tale of adventure. The book recovers principles and ideals that the postwar acceleration of democracy and technology nearly obliviated. Churchill’s task is neither romantic nor nostalgic. It’s true that he reminisces about happy military days and old barrack songs. But he is never starry-eyed about the old ways. His object is to provoke, inspire, and form the kinds of souls whom Lincoln counts as part of “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.”
In the essay “Mass Effects in Modern Life” (published the year after My Early Life), Churchill rhetorically asks, “Are not modern conditions—at any rate throughout the English-speaking communities—hostile to the development of outstanding personalities, and to their influence upon events: and lastly if this be true, will it be for our greater good and glory?” Churchill there responds that Western democracy needs what it cannot provide by itself: namely, “a monarch peak” that only the great men will desire to scale. In My Early Life, he sets out to fill this void by sketching his own example.
My Early Life invites the reader to overcome the challenge of modern cynicism. Churchill presents himself as proof that one can find peaks of human and political greatness to scale even in modernity. He defends the life of aristocratic virtue and ambition against the dismissal of these ideals as anachronistic and vainglorious—mere values. At the same time, what makes Churchill’s account of himself so compelling and urgent is his capacity to accommodate modern conditions while pursuing pre-modern ends. My Early Life is “a picture of a vanished age,” but it is also an invitation for leaders to defend democracy while rejecting mediocrity and the assertion that all ways of life are equally excellent. In this way, My Early Life is a stubborn book that acknowledges the necessity of accepting modernity but aims to ennoble modern political life by directing modern leaders to aristocratic standards in war, politics, and even education.
Admittedly, Churchill is not sanguine about the possibility of great leadership in modern democracy. Equality of conditions is no easy obstacle for the great-hearted to overcome. Yet his example in the Second World War grounds reason for thinking that aristocratic leadership remains possible even in a democratic age. Published ten years before the start of Churchill’s premiership in 1940, My Early Life illustrates the love of excellence and the life of a noble, fighting spirit in a way that an aristocratic soul can emulate even under modern and democratic conditions. Provocatively, the book also sets out Churchill’s idea of an education that touches on both the political life of action and the contemplative life of philosophy—an education whose exemplar is (according to Churchill himself) “a very argumentative Greek” by the name of Socrates.
A Picture of a Vanished Age
Churchill’s adventures in My Early Life are mostly bound up with going East. “To the East—the expression struck me. … To that generation the East meant the gateway to the adventures and conquests of England.” Churchill recalls the thrill and charm of military expeditions for young men of the Victorian generation. “‘To the Front?’ they asked. Alas, I could only hope so.” Churchill looks warmly on his time in the British army, during which he visited Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa. This fond recollection of the “gay and lordly” army life does not eclipse the austerity and tragedy of war. Churchill is not quixotic about the battles he describes. He does not shy away from describing the casualties sustained in India’s Mamund Valley and at the last true cavalry charge at Omdurman in the Egyptian Sudan. But neither is he cynical about the bloody constraints of war. He aims at instilling the old aspirations and venturesomeness in a new generation. He is not so much pouring old wine into new wineskins as simply introducing wine to those who feel that modern life serves nothing but watery mediocrity.
Looking back on the days of colonial warfare, Churchill expresses the concern that the First World War might forever have removed nobility from armed conflict:
War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact, it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science. … We now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher’s bill.
In “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” Churchill compares the modern general to a stockbroker who trades in human lives instead of shares. He asks in the same essay, “Can modern communities do without great men?” In My Early Life, he responds to this problem with an encomium to young men: “‘The earth is yours and the fulness thereof.’ Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities. Raise the glorious flags again, advance them upon new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown.” This line smacks of the King James Bible—except that Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.” In this light, Churchill’s exhortation is perhaps closer to that of Machiavelli, who closes The Prince by calling his ambitious readers “to seize Italy and to free her from the barbarians.” Still, unlike Machiavelli, Churchill appeals to duty rather than to acquisitiveness. His wartime speech, “Their Finest Hour,” reflects this spirit, praising self-sacrifice and national honor for the defense “of Christian civilization.”
Churchill’s Socrates: The Education at Bangalore
Churchill’s chapter on his self-education while stationed in Bangalore discloses an additional (perhaps surprising) purpose of My Early Life. He tells his readers that he read for up to five hours every day after morning parade with his cavalry regiment. Churchill’s catalog of readings begins with Socrates, whom Churchill describes as a “competent teacher whom I could listen to and cross-examine” and whose teaching Churchill presents as “a moral bomb.” The chapter proceeds to focus on the broad list of books in Churchill’s Bangalore readings, and we never receive a full explication of Socrates’s teaching from Churchill.
Still, in one of the book’s most arresting discussions, Churchill sets out the thoughts he entertains on education when he is “in the Socratic mood and planning my Republic.” At sixteen or seventeen, aristocratic citizens of Churchill’s City in Speech spend their days practicing a manual craft and using their leisure for poetry and gymnastics. Only those who long for knowledge are given a university education: “It would be a favour, a coveted privilege, only to be given to those who had either proved their worth in factory or field or whose qualities and zeal were pre-eminent.” This passage concludes with the observation that such an educational reform would “upset a lot of things … and bring me perhaps in the end a hemlock draught.” Such are Churchill’s “Socratic” prescriptions for an aristocratic education within an imaginary republic.
My Early Life illustrates the spiritedness and reflection that remain possible even for a generation living under the domination of technology and egalitarianism.
Given the hierarchical division of education in Churchill’s Socratic Republic, it would not be strange to ask whether My Early Life is directed to multiple audiences, each of which would benefit in a different way from his account of himself. We know that Churchill writes with great care. (In Great Contemporaries, for example, he tells his readers that he refused a contribution to his father’s biography because “the literary integrity of a work is capital.”) In My Early Life, Churchill casts a wide net. He jokes at the expense of his own classical education, implying that Latin poetry and Greek epigrams did his peers little good in school. Yet he also observes that he annoyed colleagues by quoting in Latin during cabinet meetings. Churchill likewise confesses to having received the editorial criticism that “your philosophic reflections, while generally well expressed, often acute and sometimes true, are too devilish frequent.”
The most crucial of Churchill’s references to the classics comes when he tells his readers that a line from Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid perfectly represents the mode of thinking that directs his statecraft: “Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos” (“To spare the conquered and to battle down the proud”). Churchill joshes those who study the classics, appearing to make light of elite education. Yet, in the same work, he employs the Latin that was beaten into him and he gestures to Greek philosophy as the polestar of his statesmanship. How can the reader reconcile Churchill’s democratic mien with his aristocratic ideals?
Honor Under Liberalism: Ancient Politics in Modern Times
To understand Churchill’s rhetoric and purpose in My Early Life, it is necessary to consider some of his reflections on the modern democratic regime. This is fitting, given that Churchill highlights Plato’s Republic in both My Early Life and Savrola, (a novel he wrote while stationed in Bangalore) as an influence on his statesmanship.
Churchill frames his speculations on the ideal political education in terms of the Republic. These speculations conclude with the observation that the ideal is impossible. Accordingly, the distinctly political and historical complement to Churchill’s Socratic reflections is his reading of Gibbon’s and Macaulay’s writings on Rome. Churchill quotes Gibbon in the last lines of Savrola that history is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Both the City in Speech and the Imperial City, in all its victory and tragedy, occupy young Churchill’s thoughts in Bangalore. If Socrates is “moral dynamite” for the young Churchill, the Roman experience appears to ground Churchill in circumspect sobriety. The point of convergence for these Greek and Latin influences in Churchill’s soul is the virtue of prudence, which takes account of both excellence and limitation.
Churchill ascribes to modern democracy a decay in nobility. The lovers of victory who serve as leaders in aristocratic societies are strangers (if not sojourners) in a nation of shopkeepers and under a regime dedicated to the rights that secure commodious living in private. Paradoxically, Churchill’s greatest moral contribution as a democratic statesman is his recovery of aristocratic honor and ambition. Equality abhors the superiority that comes with standards of excellence. Yet, excellence and leadership are precisely what democracy needs to survive. (As unlikely an ally as C. S. Lewis makes this very argument in his essay, “Democratic Education”: “A truly democratic education—one which will preserve democracy—must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly ‘high-brow.’”) While liberalism inclines towards economic satisfaction (peace and the administration of things, instead of martial valor and rule over men), liberal democracy will survive only if protected by men who honor self-sacrifice over their natural rights of self-preservation. Such lovers of victory are not native to a regime dedicated to security and commerce.
Churchill’s great rhetorical accomplishment is to ennoble the liberal concern for survival with the sacred name of victory. The words of his “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat Speech” exemplify this accomplishment remarkably:
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
Churchill’s speeches demonstrate the possibilities of recovering greatness within liberal democracy. His example (and a nearly Homeric one at that) in My Early Life illustrates the spiritedness and reflection that remain possible even for a generation living under the domination of technology and egalitarianism.
My Early Life therefore offers a twofold education. On one hand, Churchill’s political injunction for youths to strive with might and main for finest hours is a necessary palliative to the enervating effects of modern life. Liberalism may tend to create specialists without spirit and voluptuaries without heart, but Churchill calls our attention to other possibilities inspired by understandings of political and human excellence that, admittedly, are more at home in the lays of ancient Rome than the twentieth-century West. On the other hand, Churchill briefly gestures to a road not taken when he speaks of his encounter with Socrates.
We hear from Churchill that his thoughts turn to a life of reformed education when he is “in the Socratic mood,” to a life of poetry and gymnastics, the keystone of which would be a university education dedicated to wisdom and not the too-often frivolous life of degree-seeking. This possibility is only briefly noted in My Early Life: “After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action.”
My Early Life serves a key political purpose for modern democracies, recovering a vision of nobility and political greatness for young readers. At the same time, this rich text can serve as a point of departure on an even narrower path of human excellence discovered by Socrates, whose students included statesmen and poets in the ancient agora—and a young British cavalry officer in the unlikely setting of Bangalore.
