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As usual, Durant writes better of the century's philosophers and men of science —Montaigne. Bacon. Kepler, Descartes—than he does of its poets and painters.
But if he has a major fault, it is the defect of a major virtue. The eye that he turns on the world is that of a gentle rationalist, and consequently he is forever poised between the "for and against"; he rarely raises his voice. The view is admirably balanced, but occasionally the reader must miss a sense of passion equal to the murderous events of the bloody century described. There is in Durant none of the messianic conviction of a Carlyle, say, or the obsessive pattern-making of a Toynbee. When he examines Elizabeth's execution of Mary Stuart, he can find, at last, nobody to blame. "Pardon is the word for all."
Murderous Nationalism. Will Durant's pages are filled with odd shapes and figures, arresting and contradictory facts; for history, Durant believes, "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 yet there was a pattern to the century, imposed by "the rise of murderous nationalism and the decline of murderous theologies." Under its great Queen, England was emerging as the world's leading mercantile power, and Historian Durant is nowhere better than in his description of the "Elizabethan Englishman," that "scion of the Renaissance" whose reckless ambitions and lusty style were shaped by the court of the "amorous virgin." Notes Durant wryly: "Rarely has a woman derived so much advantage from barrenness, or so much pleasure from virginity."
The energy that transformed a nation of 5,000,000 into a world power derived, Durant thinks, from a unique fusion of the Reformation and the Renaissance: while in France the Renaissance "rejected the Reformation" and in Germany the reverse happened, "under Elizabeth the Reformation triumphed; in Elizabeth, the Renaissance." Their mingling produced the complete Englishman, most ideally personified by Raleigh, who could excel in turn as soldier, poet, philosopher and explorer before going to his execution with a remark worthy of a martyr: "Let us dispatch. At this hour mine ague comes upon me; I would not have mine enemies to think I quaked from fear."
The century was really a curtain raiser, and it is on that note that Durant ends his survey. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, he points out, by strengthening the Protestant North, checked the Counter Reformation and "ended the reign of theology over the European mind," leaving faith "naked to rationalist winds."
Henceforth, the "thinkers of Europe—the vanguard of the European mind—would no longer be discussing the authority of the pope [but] debating the existence of God." The Age of Reason, as Durant might have added, was moving toward the point where superstition was derided and believed dead—but in which Reason itself all too often became a superstition.