LITMIR.BIZ

      PREFACE.

      _______

      NEARLY all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past.

      The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when the wholesome reaction began.

      In the first place it was not thorough.

      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

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