Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and OtherHistorical Essays” 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by DavidPrice,
There appeared a few years since a‘Comic History of England,’ duly caricaturing andfalsifying all our great national events, and representing theEnglish people, for many centuries back, as a mob of fools andknaves, led by the nose in each generation by a few arch-foolsand arch-knaves. Some thoughtful persons regarded the bookwith utter contempt and indignation; it seemed to them a crime tohave written it; a proof of ‘banausia,’ as Aristotlewould have called it, only to be outdone by the writing a‘Comic Bible.’ After a while, however, theirindignation began to subside; their second thoughts, as usual,were more charitable than their first; they were not surprised tohear that the author was an honest, just, and able magistrate;they saw that the publication of such a book involved no moralturpitude; that it was merely meant as a jest on a subject onwhich jesting was permissible, and as a money speculation in afield of which men had a right to make money; while all whichseemed offensive in it was merely the outcome, and as it wereapotheosis, of that method of writing English history which hasbeen popular for nearly a hundred years. ‘Which ofour modern historians,’ they asked themselves, ‘hashad any real feeling of the importance, the sacredness, of hissubject?—any real trust in, or respect for, the characterswith whom he dealt? Has not the belief of each and all ofthem been the same—that on the whole, the many always havebeen fools and knaves; foolish and knavish enough, at least, tobecome the puppets of a few fools and knaves who held the reinsof power? Have they not held that, on the whole, theproblems of human nature and human history have been sufficientlysolved by Gibbon and Voltaire, Gil Blas and Figaro; that ourforefathers were silly barbarians; that this glorious nineteenthcentury is the one region of light, and that all before was outerdarkness, peopled by ‘foreign devils,’ Englishmen, nodoubt, according to the flesh, but in spirit, in knowledge, increed, in customs, so utterly different from ourselves that weshall merely show our sentimentalism by doing aught but laughingat them?
On what other principle have our English histories as yet beenconstructed, even down to the children’s books, whichtaught us in childhood that the history of this country wasnothing but a string of foolish wars, carried on by wicked kings,for reasons hitherto unexplained, save on that great historic lawof Goldsmith’s by which Sir Archibald Alison would stillexplain the French Revolution—
‘The dog, to serve his private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man?’
It will be answered by some, and perhaps rather angrily, thatthese strictures are too sweeping; that there is arising, in acertain quarter, a school of history books for young people of afar more reverent tone, which tries to do full honour to theChurch and her work in the world. Those books of thisschool which we have seen, we must reply, seem just as muchwanting in real reverence for the past as the school of Gibbonand Voltaire. It is not the past which they reverence, buta few characters or facts eclectically picked out of the past,and, for the most part, made to look beautiful by ignoring allthe features which will not suit their preconceivedpseudo-ideal. There is in these books a scarcely concealeddissatisfaction with the whole course of the British mind sincethe Reformation, and (though they are not inclined to confess thefact) with its whole course before the Reformation, because thatcourse was one of steady struggle again