In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition.
Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and aristocratic institutions.
But the second defect was worse still. History may be scrappy and superficial and yet, on the whole, right; but if its whole orientation is warped by a wrong appreciation of the past, then, however detailed and full of research, it is worse than worthless; it is harmful and it had better not have been written at all.
These preliminary remarks apply to the history of Europe as a whole and especially to the history of Europe between the coarsening of the foundational Roman administrative system in the fifth century and the rise of modern culture in the seventeenth.
They do not apply to late local history. Late (post 1600) local history was thoroughly well done. The history of England itself, when it deals only with the England which sprang out of the completed Reformation century (still more the local history of the United States) was detailed and exact. What is more important than exactitude in detail, it was consonant with the spirit of the thing described. The writers on either side of the Atlantic, but especially upon the American side, understood the material with which they were dealing. Here in England (where I write this Preface) the work on later history was also national and well done, though it suffered from no small defect in that the original Catholic England (which was like a foreign country to the writers in question) lingered on as a dwindling minority till at least 1715 and somewhat disturbed the picture; so that our modern English historians are never really at home until they get to the Hanoverian dynasty. Before that they have to deal with a remaining remnant of the vigorous Catholic spirit, and they are perplexed and bewildered by it, so that it vitiates their conclusions. That is why they cannot write of the later Stuarts, and especially of James II, with any proper sense of proportion. They cannot conceive how strong nor even how widespread was the support of the national dynasty, because that support was mixed up with the (to them and in our time) utterly alien Catholic idea.
I say that the main task of an historian writing in the English language is the shovelling away of rubbish; and this is particularly true of the rubbish which has accumulated over the record of the Dark and early Middle Ages (A.D. 500 to 1000; A.D. 1000 to 1500).
From the very beginning of the affair popular history was warped by the spirit of ridicule (Voltaire’s creation propagated in the English language by Voltaire’s pupil Gibbon) against the formation of Christendom and that tremendous story of definition upon definition, council upon council, from which emerged at last the full Christian creed. The decisive conflicts of Nicea, of Chalcedon, were made a silly jest, and generations of boys and young men were taught to think of the most profound questions ever settled by the human mind as verbal quips and incomprehensible puerilities.
Next the gradual transformation of our Catholic civilization from the majestic order of our pagan origin to the splendid spring of the twelfth century was represented with incredible insufficiency as the conquest of the Occident by barbarian Germans, who, though barbarians, possessed I know not what fund of strength and virtue. Institutions which we now know to be of Roman origin were piously referred to these starved heaths of the Baltic and to the central European wilds. Their inhabitants were endowed with every good quality. Whatever we were proud of in our inheritance was referred to the blank savagery of outer lands at no matter what expense of tortured hypothesis or bold invention. This warping of truth was indulged in because the northern part of Europe stood (in the nineteenth century when this false “Teutonic” school had its greatest vogue) for a successful opposition to the rest of Christendom, and for a schism within the body of civilized men.
But the worst fault of all, worse even than the superficial folly of Gibbon’s tradition in our treatment of the great Christian foundation and worse than the Teutonic nonsense, was the misunderstanding of those four great centuries in which our race attained the summit of its happiness and stable culture—the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And of these, the greatest, the thirteenth, was in particular ignored.
Men did indeed (partly because it enabled them to “turn” the position of true history by concession to, partly from the unavoidable effect of, increasing historical knowledge) pay lip service in England, during the later part of the nineteenth century, to the greatness of the true Middle Ages. In his early period, Ruskin is a conspicuous example of a writer who, without in the least understanding what the Middle Ages were like, hating yet ignorant of the faith that was their very soul, could not remain blind to the vivid outward effect of their expression. Even Carlyle, far more ignorant than Ruskin and far more of a player to the gallery, could not altogether avoid the strong blast of reality which blew from those times.