Books: A Great March

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Brave Popularizers. Rousseau apart, the brio of the age sings through its people—Gluck and Burke, Goethe and Charles III, Sheridan and Mirabeau, Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great—who occupies a chapter of special delight. The volume is scattershot with fascinating and sometimes trivial notes: Mozart early in his career used to send obscene letters to relatives; in 18th century London, privies were called Jerichos; Boswell went to bed with Rousseau's wife precisely 13 times. The Durants can scarcely resist an anecdote or an aphorism. The borrowed ones are usually the best, as for instance Diderot's Encyclopédie distinction between the words bind and attach: "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." But the authors also do reasonably well on their own, as when they say of Louis XV that he "lacked the art of dying in due time."

The Durants are not original historians in the sense of having a particular slant on history, except for a broad humanistic sympathy. They do not view events through the prism of philosophy or economics or ideology. Their method is sometimes closer to journalism than to formal academic history. Yet in recent years the academic attacks on the Durants have diminished—perhaps partly because in the U.S. the writing of history in general has begun to free itself from the 19th century Germanic mold, in which color was suspect and wit was heresy.

The Durants are sometimes superficial: they are bound to be, considering the scope of their enterprise. But they have also achieved depths and insights lacking in many academic works. The charge that they are popularizers is meaningless. Of course they are popularizers—and great ones. It is apt that in this last volume they write of an age when to be a popularizer was still considered something brave and even glorious. As Will Durant once said: "History is baroque. It smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules." And with the Durants as guides, it also gives uncommon pleasure.