Appendix A

I T would be a good thing if writers were allowed to review their own books, if only in the form of an appendix; for when the writer becomes a reader, he does in some sense become a reviewer, and often a somewhat unsympathetic reviewer. It may indeed be urged that if he really reviewed his books, he would not publish them. In any case, on re-reading these pages, I am conscious of two points on which I may have expressed myself badly; and I may save other reviewers some trouble about my meaning. Touching the story of the Iconoclasts, I am conscious of having fallen between two stools, rather as the Empire of the East and West fell between two thrones. The story, considered as a story, I have told with many digressions, and yet with the omission of many most picturesque and important details, so that it is at once too long and too short. For instance, the whole of that remarkable interlude, in which a Byzantine princess for a time assimilated the Byzantine to the Roman view, would make a most interesting passage in a story, and even in a romance. But it does not at all affect the general moral of my story, which is merely

APPENDIX A concerned with the general fact that Iconoclasm came from the East and was resisted in the West. On the other hand, some will probably suppose that I am trying to prove some theological or ecclesiastical point, which I should not dream of doing without going much more exactly and exhaustively into the rather confusing details of the controversy. I have remarked in the text that the images were, so to speak, taken out of their niches and put back again, in a way that affects the mind as wavering and even bewildering; but the only general inference that affects my thesis is that the Western defence of images coincided with the beginnings of the whole awakening of the West. I am not now concerned with a theological theory of the Pope's position, or even with proving that his position in this quarrel was right. I am quite content to maintain that, if he was wrong, the civilisation of Europe in which we live is a small result of his mistake.