There are works of great authors manifestly inferior to their typical
work which are yet necessary to their fame and their figure in the
world. It is not difficult to recall examples of them. No one, for
instance, would talk of Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_ as indicating
the power that produced _Kenilworth_ and _Guy Mannering_. Nevertheless,
without this chance minor compilation we should not really have the key
of Scott. Without this one insignificant book we should not see his
significance. For the truth was that Scott loved history more than
romance, because he was so constituted as to find it more romantic than
romance. He preferred the deeds of Wallace and Douglas to those of
Marmion and Ivanhoe. Therefore his garrulous gossip of old times, his
rambles in dead centuries, give us the real material and impulse of all
his work; they represent the quarry in which he dug and the food on
which he fed. Almost alone among novelists Scott actually preferred
those parts of his historical novels which he had not invented himself.
He exults when he can boast in an eager note that he has stolen some
saying from history. Thus _The Tales of a Grandfather_, though small, is
in some sense the frame of all the Waverley novels. We realise that all
Scott's novels are tales of a grandfather.
What has been said here about Scott might be said in a less degree
about Thackeray's _Four Georges_. Though standing higher among his works
than _The Tales of a Grandfather_ among Scott's they are not his works
of genius; yet they seem in some way to surround, supplement, and
explain such works. Without the _Four Georges_ we should know less of
the link that bound Thackeray to the beginning and to the end of the
eighteenth century; thence we should have known less of Colonel Esmond
and also less of Lord Steyne. To these two examples I have given of the
slight historical experiments of two novelists a third has to be added.
The third great master of English fiction whose glory fills the
nineteenth century also produced a small experiment in the
popularisation of history. It is separated from the other two partly by
a great difference of merit but partly also by an utter difference of
tone and outlook. We seem to hear it suddenly as in the first words
spoken by a new voice, a voice gay, colloquial, and impatient. Scott and
Thackeray were tenderly attached to the past; Dickens (in his
consciousness at any rate) was impatient with everything, but especially
impatient with the past.
A collection of the works of Dickens would be incomplete in an essential
as well as a literal sense without his _Child's History of England_. It
may not be important as a contribution to history, but it is important
as a contribution to biography; as a contribution to the character and
the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his time. That he
had made no personal historical researches, that he had no special
historical learning, that he had not had, in truth, even anything that
could be called a good education, all this only accentuates not the
merit but at least the importance of the book. For here we may read in
plain popular language, written by a man whose genius for popular
exposition has never been surpassed among men, a brief account of the
origin and meaning of England as it seemed to the average Englishman of
that age. When subtler views of our history, some more false and some
more true than his, have become popular, or at least well known, when in
the near future Carlylean or Catholic or Marxian views of history have
spread themselves among the reading public, this book will always remain
as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure, healthy-minded,
essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which
characterised the Radicals of that particular Radical era. The history
tells us nothing about the periods that it talks about; but it tells us
a great deal about the period that it does not talk about; the period in
which it was written. It is in no sense a history of England from the
Roman invasion; but it is certainly one of the documents which will
contribute to a history of England in the nineteenth century.
Of the actual nature of its philosophical and technical limitations it
is, I suppose, unnecessary to speak. They all resolve themselves into
one fault common in the modern world, and certainly characteristic of
historians much more learned and pretentious than Dickens. That fault
consists simply in ignoring or underrating the variety of strange evils
and unique dangers in the world. The Radicals of the nineteenth century
were engaged, and most righteously engaged, in dealing with one
particular problem of human civilisation; they were shifting and
apportioning more equally a load of custom that had really become
unmeaning, often accidental, and nearly always unfair. Thus, for
instance, a fierce and fighting penal code, which had been perfectly
natural when the robbers were as strong as the Government, had become in
more ordered times nothing but a base and bloody habit. Thus again
Church powers and dues, which had been human when every man felt the
Church as the best part of himself, were mere mean privileges when the
nation was full of sects and full of freethinkers. This clearing away of
external symbols that no longer symbolised anything was an honourable
and needful work; but it was so difficult that to the men engaged in it
it blocked up the perspective and filled the sky, so that they slid into
a very natural mental mistake which coloured all their views of history.
They supposed that this particular problem on which they were engaged
was the one problem upon which all mankind had always been engaged. They
got it into their heads that breaking away from a dead past was the
perpetual process of humanity. The truth is obviously that humanity has
found itself in many difficulties very different from that. Sometimes
the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes
to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and
diffused; sometimes to prevent the growth in the State of great new
private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may
sometimes happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to
do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do. It may
be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can
find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking
into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. This was
exactly the position of all thinking men in what we call the dark ages,
say from the sixth to the tenth century. The cheap progressive view of
history can never make head or tail of that epoch; it was an epoch
upside down. We think of the old things as barbaric and the new things
as enlightened. In that age all the enlightened things were old; all
the barbaric and brutally ignorant things were new and up to date.
Republicanism was a fading legend; despotism was a new and successful
experiment. Christianity was not only better than the clans that
rebelled against it; Christianity was more rationalistic than they were.
When men looked back they saw progress and reason; when they looked
forward they saw shapeless tradition and tribal terror. Touching such
an age it is obvious that all our modern terms describing reform or
conservation are foolish and beside the mark. The Conservative was then
the only possible reformer. If a man did not strengthen the remains of
Roman order and the root of Roman Christianity, he was simply helping
the world to roll downhill into ruin and idiotcy. Remember all these
evident historical truths and then turn to the account given by
Charles Dickens of that great man, St. Dunstan. It is not that the
pert cockney tone of the abuse is irritating to the nerves: it is that
he has got the whole hang of the thing wrong. His head is full of the
nineteenth-century situation; that a priest imposing discipline is a
person somehow blocking the way to equality and light. Whereas the
point about such a man as Dunstan was that nobody in the place except he
cared a button about equality or light: and that he was defending what
was left of them against the young and growing power of darkness and
division and caste.
Nevertheless the case against such books as this is commonly stated
wrong. The fault of Dickens is not (as is often said) that he "applies
the same moral standard to all ages." Every sane man must do that: a
moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard. If we
call St. Anthony of Padua a good man, we must mean what we mean when we
call Huxley a good man, or else there is no sense in using the word
"good." The fault of the Dickens school of popular history lies, not in
the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all circumstances,
but in ignorance of the circumstances to which it was applied. It is not
that they wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved;
it is that they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a lifeboat to a
house on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens's time was to bring
justice up to date. The business of a good man in Dunstan's time was to
toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all.
And Dickens, through being a living and fighting man of his own time,
kept the health of his own heart, and so saw many truths with a single
eye: truths that were spoilt for subtler eyes. He was much more really
right than Carlyle; immeasurably more right than Froude. He was more
right precisely because he applied plain human morals to all facts as he
saw them. Carlyle really had a vague idea that in coarse and cruel
times it was right to be coarse and cruel; that tyranny was excusable in
the twelfth century: as if the twelfth century did not denounce tyrants
as much or more than any other. Carlyle, in fact, fancied that Rufus was
the right sort of man; a view which was not only not shared by Anselm,
but was probably not shared by Rufus. In this connection, or rather in
connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take
another figure from Dickens's history, which illustrates the other and
better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the
environment made him wrong about Dunstan. But sheer instinct and good
moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right
where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens's imagination could not re-picture
an age where learning and liberty were dying rather than being born: but
Henry VIII. lived in a time of expanding knowledge and unrest; a time
therefore somewhat like the Victorian. And Dickens in his childish but
robust way does perceive the main point about him: that he was a wicked
man. He misses all the fine shades, of course; he makes him every kind
of wicked man at once. He leaves out the serious interests of the man:
his strange but real concern for theology; his love of certain legal and
moral forms; his half-unconscious patriotism. But he sees the solid bulk
of definite badness simply because it was there; and Froude cannot see
it at all; because Froude followed Carlyle and played tricks with the
eternal conscience. Henry VIII. _was_ "a blot of blood and grease upon
the history of England." For he was the embodiment of the Devil in the
Renascence, that wild worship of mere pleasure and scorn, which with its
pictures and its palaces has enriched and ruined the world.
The time will soon come when the mere common-sense of Dickens, like the
mere common-sense of Macaulay (though his was poisoned by learning and
Whig politics), will appear to give a plainer and therefore truer
picture of the mass of history than the mystical perversity of a man of
genius writing only out of his own temperament, like Carlyle or Taine.
If a man has a new theory of ethics there is one thing he must not be
allowed to do. Let him give laws on Sinai, let him dictate a Bible, let
him fill the world with cathedrals if he can. But he must not be allowed
to write a history of England; or a history of any country. All history
was conducted on ordinary morality: with his extraordinary morality he
is certain to read it all askew. Thus Carlyle tries to write of the
Middle Ages with a bias against humility and mercy; that is, with a bias
against the whole theoretic morality of the Middle Ages. The result is
that he turns into a mere turmoil of arrogant German savages what was
really the most complete and logical, if not the highest, of human
civilisations. Historically speaking, it is better to be Dickens than to
be this; better to be ignorant, provincial, slap-dash, seeing only the
passing moment, but in that moment, to be true to eternal things.
It must be remembered, of course, that Dickens deliberately offers this
only as a "child's" history of England. That is, he only professes to be
able to teach history as any father of a little boy of five professes to
be able to teach him history. And although the history of England would
certainly be taught very differently (as regards the actual criticism of
events and men) in a family with a wider culture or with another
religion, the general method would be the same. For the general method
is quite right. This black-and-white history of heroes and villains;
this history full of pugnacious ethics and of nothing else, is the right
kind of history for children. I have often wondered how the scientific
Marxians and the believers in "the materialist view of history" will
ever manage to teach their dreary economic generalisations to children:
but I suppose they will have no children. Dickens's history will always
be popular with the young; almost as popular as Dickens's novels, and
for the same reason: because it is full of moralising. Science and art
without morality are not dangerous in the sense commonly supposed. They
are not dangerous like a fire, but dangerous like a fog. A fire is
dangerous in its brightness; a fog in its dulness; and thought without
morals is merely dull, like a fog. The fog seems to be creeping up the
street; putting out lamp after lamp. But this cockney lamp-post which
the children love is still crowned with its flame; and when the fathers
have forgotten ethics, their babies will turn and teach them.