On the Writing of History

There are three ways of writing history. The old Victorian way, in the books of our childhood, was picturesque and largely false. The later and more enlightened habit, adopted by academic authorities, is to think they can go on being false so long as they avoid being picturesque. They think that, so long as a lie is dull, it will sound as if it were true. The third way is to use the picturesque (which is a perfectly natural instinct of man for what is memorable), but to make it a symbol of truth and not a symbol of falsehood. It is to tell the reader what the picturesque incident really meant, instead of leaving it meaningless or giving it a deceptive meaning. It is giving a true picture instead of a false picture j but there is not the shadow of a reason why a picture should not be picturesque.

I will take one familiar example from the first pages of our first history-books. It happens to illustrate all three things especially thoroughly. When as children we read about the Battle of Hastings (possibly even before it began suddenly to be called the Battle of Senlac), most of us who have any imagination remembered one thing about it. Possibly it was the only thing that we did remember. It was the i8o

ON THE WRITING OF HISTORY i8i picturesque detail which says that Taillefer or Tailfer the Jongleur went in front of the Norman Army, throwing his sword in the air and catching it again, and singing of the Death of Roland. I was delighted with that story thenj I am delighted with it still. I did not know that a jongleur meant, among other things, a jugglery and therefore I missed about half the point of the gentleman's eccentric exercise. I was very vague about who Roland wasj and therefore I missed the whole meaning of the song and the soul of the man that sang it. Most of what was told me of the spiritual elements involved, I now know to be quite false. I was told that there was a great nation of Saxons, who were very noble because they were really Germans. I was also told there was another nation of Normans, who were also very noble because they were not really Frenchmen 3 they were Scandinavians, and therefore they also were really and truly Germans. I was told that a wicked man called the Pope, for malignant reasons of his own, supported the Scandinavians who came from France against the Germans who lived in England. But all this did not bother me very much, even before I found out that there is not a word of truth in it. I had got hold of something 3 I had seen Tailfer of the dancing sword j one flash of vigorous vision j one living gesture of the eleventh century.

Now, the later method of the learned, as adopted, for instance, in the Cambridge Modern History, consists simply in leaving Tailfer out of it. It involves merely avoiding any such picturesque things as swords and jugglers. The early Victorian writer put in the picturesque detail and gave no explanation of it. The late Victorian writer took out the picturesque detail and gave no substitute for it. What he did put in was a number of lists and catalogues and calculations of numbers, all tending to the suggestion that the whole affair had been much more trivial than tradition suggested. Lists of names, without attributes or allusions, appearing for the first and the last time in the congested narrative, were the only indications of human beings. But in so far as the story had any meaning or moral atmosphere at all, it was just the same sort of dead and dehumanized falsehood as the war between the Saxons and Scandinavians. Sometimes it implied that all wars arose from racej sometimes that they always arose from money. Sometimes it suggested that William rode bareheaded before his battle-line because he thought it would relieve a temporary trade depression j and that Harold got killed because his sound Saxon sense told him that getting killed is a good business proposition. The new histories were quite as unreliable as the old histories. The only difference was that the new histories were not only unreliable, but unreadable.

Now, what I wanted when I was a boy, what I still want now I am a man, is not to be told less about the sword-thrower, but to be told more about him. I ought to have been told all about Tailfer the Jongleur, and in that case I should really have been told a great deal about the eleventh century and the dawn of the Middle Ages. If I had been told anything at all about the song that Tailfer sang, or why he sang it, I should have been really introduced not only to the Battle of Hastings, but to a hundred battles beyond it — to one great battle raging over the whole hemisphere. To know something about the Song of Roland is to know something about Christendom. I should have realized that a great battle in the background, against barbaric and heathen religions, was what gave an indirect dignity to the fighting in all these feudal raids in the foreground. This is why Tailfer wanted, as it were, to bless the Norman battle with the nobler memory of a man who fell fighting for the Cross. So somebody might say to a French foilu, "They will tell you it is only a modern diplomatic squabble 3 but I advise you to forget them and think of Joan of Arc." Similarly the juggler himself would have introduced a whole procession of other living figures. The truth about jongleurs would mean the truth about troubadours. The truth about troubadours would mean the truth about Provence and all that fascinating southern civilization which contributed equally to the pessimist heresy of the Albigensian and the optimist orthodoxy of the great St. Francis. The saint and the heretic both began as troubadours. And it is in connexion with this last matter that I have just read one of the few historical studies so made that it really provides what I want and illustrates what I mean.

It bears what might seem the rather misleading title of The Inquisition. It has nothing to do with the Spanish Inquisition, which is what most modern people mean by the Inquisition. It is a very vivid and vigorous sketch, by Mr. Hoffman Nickerson, of the circumstances in which the first idea of an inquisition arose j and it arose, strangely enough, out of this same rich romantic land of Troubadours and Courts of Love. In that rather exaggerated world there had sprung up a school of philosophers of a strange and sinister but apparently attractive sort. They were pessimists, but apparendy very persuasive pessimists. They were highly civilized, and they certainly wanted to destroy civilization. It is no slander on them to say that they wanted to destroy civilization, for in one sense they admitted that they wanted to destroy everything. They were not merely in revolt against the Church, but against the universe — at any rate the material universe. They believed in the spirit 3 but they were undoubtedly pledged to destroy the sun and moon as soon as was practicable or convenient.

They held that our whole bodily existence is an evil in itself 3 that marriage is bad because it produces children 3 that sin is not so bad so long as it does not produce children. This cheery philosophy spread in the Midi and threatened a secession as formidable as Islam. A Crusade was launched against it like the Crusades against Islam. Out of that military campaign came what we call the Inquisition 3 it was originally a sort of martial law. Even the martial law was originally rather an improvement on mob-law. Now, to have that tale told clearly and completely, as Mr. Hoffman Nickerson tells it, is simply a clear gain to our culture and comprehension of mankind. He does not excuse the cruelties of the early Crusade, still less of the later Inquisition. But though he does not excuse, he does explain. Even fanatics are fanatical for something 5 they are not lunatics raving about nothing. But in most conventional histories the cruelties are not only without justification, but without motive. The author of this book (which is published by Mr. John Bale), by describing the wild heresy first and its wild persecution afterwards, does make some sense of the story. We can imagine men like ourselves persecuting an intellectual perversion like pessimism, and wishing to destroy those who wished to destroy the world. Meanwhile, there are most romantic revelations outside controversy. I wonder how many modern readers have ever heard of the Battle of Muret. I confess I had never heard of it in my life, though I knew the rough outline of the Albigensian story. The Battle of Muret was one of the most extraordinary things that ever happened in the world. A little band of northern knights, led by the father of our own Simon de Montfort, surprised and scattered by a single sudden manoeuvre a relatively enormous army of Spaniards and Southern French-men, led by great kings and princes. Mr. Nickerson narrates it with the topographical clarity of a military history j but he cannot prevent it sounding like a boy's adventure story. That is what I mean by the picturesque incident flus its significance; as distinct from the old picturesque history which left out the significance, and the new scientific history which leaves out both. That is what I meant by saying that the nursery tale about Tailfer the Jongleur could have been improved not by our being told less about the juggler, but by our being told more about him. The Battle of Muret is more and not less romantic when we realize that it was a war of philosophies — a fight between the mystical materialism of the sacramentalist and the disembodied idealism of the pessimist. But merely as a tale it is a marvellously romantic tale, and it is one of a myriad romantic tales that are never told.