But Charles was to be neither of these. His nature, trained in isolation, was fluid against the first onset of attack; then there came a moment when the attack reached something quite different from the first fluid resistance—a stone wall. It was thus that he came to his death. Men were led on to think him pliable; when they came unexpectedly on rigidity, they were infuriated.
Now this distinction, I take it, between his fixity upon certain things, well defined in his own mind, and his indecision or rather lack of convinced cause for resistance on the rest—this quality in him which kept in reserve and hidden an ultimate power of complete refusal (even to martyrdom) took root, I say, in these very early years when he was compelled, almost against himself, to consider in private what remedy he could find for his defects.[43]
Belloc did not find the above in any written document, admitting of a learned footnote. He concluded to it, following on a study of all the available data. His moral judgment concerning Charles would be called “romancing” by historians of one brand of the Historismus school. If history is but surface phenomena or ideology, then these men are right. But if history has been caused efficiently, in part, by men acting in all their strength and failing in their weaknesses, then the Bellocian method is dangerously right: right, because without such a method history remains incomplete and even superficial; dangerous, because the humanist instrument is a delicate rapier and not one to be used without caution, skill, and human understanding. One cannot affirm that Belloc always kept the necessary balance, but he kept it steadily enough through a lifetime of historical labour to have bequeathed us a kind of history rarely written in these days, or in any day for that matter: history which respects tradition, both political and religious, and history which respects the human person in all the tissue of good and evil from whence proceeds human action.
Although the use of the technique of “converging probabilities” frequently issues into judgments that are humanist, i.e. judgments about men, Belloc used his method in the earlier years to establish historical truths that are only incidentally concerned with human personality. In these impersonal studies about battles, roads, rivers, etc., Belloc pointed up his polemic against the German Idealist school that refused to deal with things. The Stane Street, written in 1913, is possibly the most brilliant success he achieved in this kind of historical investigation. Although the book was severely written, with little of the high rhetoric associated with much of Belloc’s history, there are two passages that reveal Belloc’s attack against historical idealism.
Let me not be misunderstood; the repeated view that Britain was a sparsely inhabited and only partially Romanised province, is one which no one today with a care for historical truth will maintain. It arose in that hypothetical and North German school of history which prefers to accumulate facts rather than co-ordinate evidence; which delights to give guesswork an equal rank with record, and invariably to oppose that guesswork against the tradition of civilization ... there has grown up a deplorable academic habit which will build most readily upon the very absence of proof, and one must refute such falsehood before one can proceed to truth ... the mere lack of evidence is used for the purposes of confident negation ... it is the peculiar disease of our time in this province of inquiry.
For instance, we know nothing of London between the time when Imperial Rome still taxed and administered Britain and the seventh century, when, with the return of the Catholic Church, writing and record returned. Wherefore a whole school has risen which will solemnly maintain the fantastical theory that London in the interval did—what? why, ceased to exist!
No one who has had the good fortune to escape from the influence of the Universities will be ready to believe that they make themselves responsible for so amazing a statement. It is none the less true. Because we do not know what happened to London between one fixed date ... and another ... therefore it has been solemnly put forward under academic authority that London in the interval disappeared!
It is folly, of course. It is as clear an abandonment of common sense as it would be to deny the existence of our homes during the hours when we happen to be absent from them.[44]
It is amusing to note that one phrase in the above passage was repeated almost verbatim twenty years later, when Belloc wrote of his dead companion Chesterton, that “he had the singular good fortune to have escaped the University.” He wrote this phrase in a context dealing with Chesterton’s realism. This was the same Chesterton who had said that the only sin was “to call green grass grey.” It was the same Chesterton who saw with his friend that there is one, implicit, rarely articulated first principle behind the modern mind: things are not what they seem to be; the postulate of an impoverished universe, as it has been called. Whig history was one enemy; but the great enemy against which Belloc directed his historical guns was German Historismus, the child of Hegelian idealism, and the enemy of reality.
The development of historiography and the application of scientific techniques to historical evidence arose in Germany and was saddled from the outset by a philosophy that was utterly contemptuous of realism and of the common sense of mankind that accepts implicitly the proposition that “things are.” If historical method had grown up unencumbered by ideological weeds, the Western World would never have seen the great destructive attack made on Scripture in the last half of the nineteenth century by German scholarship. It seems reasonable to assume that the new scholarly techniques would have aided men like Belloc in exploding the older Whig myths. Things did not happen that way, because the academic mind behind the new method was corrupted with the pride of idealism. It was a mind diseased to the core that laid its hands on everything hitherto held sacred and true by the united conscience of Christendom. German historical research, around the last quarter of the nineteenth century, touched nothing that it did not negate: filial traditions, the lore of the old rooted peasantries of Europe, religious symbolism whose meaning had been settled for centuries, finally Scripture itself.