Books: A Great March

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION by Will and Ariel Durant. 1,091 pages. Simon & Schuster. $15.

After he had written the last line of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a labor that consumed almost 15 years, Edward Gibbon reached a melancholy conclusion: "The life of the historian must be short and precarious." In the final pages of this book, Will Durant, 81, and his wife Ariel, 69, reflect the same thought: "We know that a lifetime is but a moment in history, and that the historian's best is soon washed away."

The best of the Durants deserves to stand a long time against future tides, as a monument to their devotion, spirit and energy. Four decades ago, they set out to record the progress of man across the span of 20 civilizations. In a sense, it was a naive undertaking, but less so than H. G. Wells's attempt to do the same job in his two-volume Outline of History, and closer in spirit to the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment, who figure in the present book. Rousseau and Revolution, the tenth volume of the Durants' Story of Civilization, is the last.* They note wistfully that they would have liked to carry the project into the 20th century, but "we must reconcile ourselves to mortality" and leave the task to "fresher spirits." These will not be easy to find.

As succeeding installments came off the press, the grasp of the collaborators' research grew surer, the language more polished, the pace slower. This lengthy book covers only the 33 years between the Seven Years' War and the storming of the Bastille. Those who speak about the present as a time of unprecedented change might stop to ponder the changes that took place in this period. It led in a few short decades from Pompadour bewigged at Versailles to the Goddess of Reason crowned in Notre Dame. It led from the fleshy nudes of Fragonard to the pain-racked soldiers of Goya. It led from the aristocracy to the middle class, from mercenary forces under gentlemen officers to modern mass armies, from the last vestiges of a supranational order to nationalism in arms.