October ib, 1917 
LAND -& WATER 
%ift anti £errer0 * . 
By J. C. Squire 
15 
"W 
Secret History 
'E are the people of England who never have 
spoken yet," is the refrain of one of Mr. 
Chesterton's old songs, and the thesis of his 
Short History of England (Chatto and Windus, 
5s. net), which may be destined to be the most useful of his 
many useful books. Mr. Chesterton does not pretend to be a 
scholar, and he would probably not be surprised if he were 
told that there were numbers of inaccuracies in his book and 
numbers of important qualifications out of it. He will go 4 
little too far sometimes for an antithesis, a joke, or a climax ; 
and at some places in his history the learned may say, " This 
is all wrong." But what matters is that the general motive 
and arguments are all right. Mr. Chesterton has a know- 
ledge of human nature, a love of his countrymen, a belief 
in democracy, and, in spite of his strong opinions, a regard 
for truth. These are not always among the virtues of his- 
torians, and they frequently lack the convictions that 
men are not born on the earth for nothing (that is, that life 
is worth living) and that the test of ^ civilization is the sort 
of life that the majority of its members live. Mr. Chesterton 
has those convictions and he refuses to accept the common 
delusion that a civilization of 1900 must be higher than a 
civilization of 1800, because igoo is aftei i§oo ; he, on the 
whole, is compelled to plump for the brief zenith of the 
Middle Ages as the best period of a bad lot in the history of 
the English people. It is not sentimental medisevalism, and 
he is not blind either to the advantages we have over our 
mediaeval ancestors or to the still greater advantages we 
might have ifwe only decided to regenerate our society instead 
of fatalistically submitting to the operation of " economic 
forces " — which are usually other words for the unbridled 
greed or undirected energy of individual men whom we are, 
if we only care to, at complete liberty to control, silence, 
lock up, or smite hip and thigh. }f c looks at the past with the 
eyes of a decent man who maintains that men have souls and 
that they should be treated like Christians ; and by that test 
he judges what has and what has not been done.' 
* • * « * 
Never losing sight of that he gallops at top speed through 
English history ; he misses great spaces, but wherever his 
hoof touches it strikes out fire. Continually he tosses off a 
sentence, the product of a clear eye and an untainted heart, 
which will shatter the conventional reader's preconceptions. 
" The first half of English history," he says, " has been made 
quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt to tell it without 
reference to that corporate Christendom in which it took 
part and pride." There is no need for commentary on this : 
it is simple truth. And it is equally true that we cannot 
understand the struggle between Henry II. and Beckct 
unless we understand what the Church stood for as well as 
what the Plantagenet monarchy stood for. Becket did not 
lose favour and die merely in order that guilty clergymen 
should escape the proper reward of their crimes ; and the 
situation cannot be rightly assessed unless we consider 
Henry's action in going to be flogged at Becket's tomb, and 
the popular reverence of Becket together with the legal 
struggle that preceded the tragedy. The early legends — all 
our heroes, he notes, are anti-barbaric— the Reformation, the 
Civil Wars and (he Eighteenth Century are all trfeated, perhaps 
sketchily, but with a verisimilitude that convinces. At every 
point the orthodox narrators stand condemned ; and every- 
where they have failed to attempt to grasp the real mind 
of the masses of the people and even - if the period is distant 
enough— that of their governors. Nowhere is this more 
noticeable than in the common treatment of the Crusades. 
They were not fought for nothing. They were not fought 
for gain. They were not fought out of bigotry. There was 
good and evil mixed in them, but no wars in human history 
were fought for a better cause and none appealed more 
strongly to the souls of common men. No more, again, do 
our historians attempt to \isualisc the great buildings of the 
Middle Ages, and what was behind them : they merely say 
they are there and give the Middle Ages one good mark for 
them. Opinions such as these Mr. Chesterton maintains with 
his usual wit and his usual eloquence ; his jokes are seldom 
forced in this book, and in many places he rises into noble 
passages of EngHsh prose. He lets out with immense good 
humour and effect at pedants of all sorts, especially an- 
thropologists and Teuto-mongers ; and he gives by the way 
character sketclies. particularly two of Sir Thomas More and 
Richard III., which are both brilliant and plausible. And he 
drives home an obvious truth when he accuses us of magnify- 
ing the defects of the Middle Ag:es by telescoping our chronicles, 
if^t^"'^ if a man were to write in eight pages a history of 
the last century, mentioning principally the wars and the 
sweating, he could make us out one of the lowest lots on 
record./ And that without falling back upon the ugliness of 
our civilization and that mental plague which, as Mr. Chester- 
ton observes, has left us worshipping in children all that we 
have crushed out in men. 
* » * * * 
The book is not a history. It is an historical essay. It 
covers two thousand years in three hundred pages, and the 
general propositions leave little room for the ^f acts which 
might illustrate them. But it might well be used by a more 
laborious writer as the theoretical basis for a history on the 
grand scale. Every contention that Mr. Chesterton advances, 
every institution that he describes ; every trend of sentiment 
that he detects, might be documented from ruins and records, 
charters and songs, traditions and laws. The " evidences " 
for such a work lie scattered in thousands of books, buildings 
and memories, not to speak of the minds of living men ; the 
one place where you will never find them in large numbers 
is a formal history book. The manner of writing history has 
been subject to fashions. At first men compiled— and they 
were then, at least to some extent, in touch with humanity — 
very undiscriminating chronicles in which if battles received 
too much attention, at least they were battles and not merely 
episodes in economic development, and if legends received 
too generous an acceptance, at least there was no assumption 
that you could understand men's deeds without understailding 
their dreams. The scientific spirit grew and the develop- 
ment of institutions was given, quite properly, increased 
attention. The 1207 Parliament of Stow-in-the-Wold, the 
charter of Chudlcigli, the refusal of the Hemp Subsidy, and 
«tther such incidents became landmarks with whole pages to 
themselves. Anxious to know how the British Constitution, 
in its widest sen.se, had reached its present condition, men 
catalogued ancient laws without really bothering about their 
origins and objects, and stared hard at' ancient offices without 
visualising the men who occupied them. Political economy 
came into existence, and more was said about exports, im- 
ports, the mercantile theory, the discovery of the Mexican 
silver mines,- the trading companies, and the Enclosures Acts, 
t'lnally, it became a commonplace amongst the cnhghtened 
that too little had been said about the " condition of the 
people " throughout history. Green wrote, with a laudable 
ambition, a work, the title of which recognised this. Para- 
graphs on the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt began 
to be sprinkled with a few quotations from Langland ; 
attempts were made at a systematic study of oifr forefathers' 
wages ; and the excursus on the manners and pastimes of 
the multitude became common form. But whatever the 
narrative fashion of the age, and whatever the idiosyncrasies 
of particular historians, the real history of the English people 
remains to be written. There have been historians who have 
treated their subjects in a human way, and who have avoided 
quite openly the dry pseudo-scientific method. One wrote 
to celebrate the greatness of Tudor England ; another to 
celebrate the triumphs of Whiggerv-. They were entitled to 
their opinions and their heroes : but of none of them was the 
hero the English ])eople, and none of them were primarily 
concerned with the, opinions, the emotions and the experiences 
of the English people. Our histories are all histories of the 
crust : if kings and aristocrats are not the only people who 
matter, then ix)li,tiriaus and intellectuals are the only people 
who matter. The masses may be completely .disregarded or 
they may be regarded with a measure, great or small, of 
sympathy : but when they arc not forgotten they arc, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, patronised, and openly or by 
implication denounced. Above all our history has been run 
in the interests of Industrialism, and where Progress has 
failed to be progressive historians have, often so naturally 
that they were unaware of it, blinded themselves to good 
things we have lost and the manner of our losing them. 
English history is, in' effect, a whitewashing of the fait 
accompli. 
. * * * m * 
Those are Mr. Chesterton's contentions, just as they were 
the contentions of Mr. Maurice Hewlett's fine agricultural 
epic The Song of the Plow, the history of which bears a close 
resemblance to Mr. Chesterton's. It doesn't matter whether 
he tells the whole truth or not ; at any rate, he emphasises 
many truths commonly overlooked. And if he also has a log 
to roll it is, at any rate, a more important log than the others. 
