Chapter Five
CHESTERTON AS HISTORIAN
The reason that Chesterton has written a history of England is that he says no member of the public has ever done so before. This is a thing to be supremely thankful for if true; but it is entirely untrue, for the very obvious fact that history has never been written by any one who is not a member of the public. Every historian is a member of the public. Let him imagine he is not, let him carry this imagination out to a logical conclusion, and he will have a good chance of landing in a prison for failing to pay the king's taxes.
The very best people to write histories are historians, but they will never deal with history in a popular way. This Chesterton laments. He wants a history that shall be about the things that never ordinarily get into history. If he is told about the charters of the barons, he wishes to hear of the charters of the carpenters. This, he thinks, would make history popular, that word which is always used to denote something rather slight and superficial. He exclaims that the people are ignored, whereas the historian really would not be one at all if he was guilty of this charge.
The fact of the matter is, that the whole of the history of England has been so misunderstood that Chesterton has come to the rescue and has told us what really happened—in fact, all we learnt at school was waste of time; poor Green really wrote an anti-history of this country. The Romans are not of the remote past; the whole of present-day England is the remains of Rome, which is merely to say that our civilization comes down from Rome, a statement that quite able historians have hinted at now and again. No one for an instant is so foolish as to think that the chief remains of the Romans consist of the few broken-up baths and villas up and down the country, when a splendid high road stares them in the face.
Chesterton pays enormous attention to the Middle Ages. They have, he thinks, been rather badly dealt with by historians. Too much attention is, he contends, paid to the time of the Stuarts onwards. Chesterton asks us to contemplate history as we should if we had never learnt it at school. It is, of course, true that we do not learn the essentials of our country in our schooldays. It is of no real importance that William conquered Harold in 1066, but it is of vast importance to know how he behaved as a conqueror, a fact seldom taught. But if we forgot all the history we ever knew, we should not be able to appreciate Chesterton's history, which aims to reconstruct all that we had believed while pouring over Green in the fifth form.
Chesterton covers so much ground in this book, his treatment is so intricate, his method so full of various peculiar contentions, that the only possible method in a chapter is to take some of the more important points he touches upon and try and discover what he feels about them. It will be well to realize at once that however he may differ from recognized historians, his history loses all its meaning unless the standard historians are known fairly well.
There are probably two tremendous turning points in history—the one occurred at the moment that the fatal arrow entered the eye of Harold at Senlac, the other when Henry VIII set fire to the ecclesiastical faggots that ended in the Reformation. That period which lay between them may roughly be called the Middle Ages, which part of history Chesterton thinks has been badly treated. Whether this is so is a question that opens up a broader one: Has the history of England ever received the attention it deserves? Has right proportion been given to the most important events? Should history be made popular in the modern sense of this much misinterpreted word? These are questions to which no adequate answer can be given in the space of a chapter, nor is it within the scope of this book.