wning was, what he achieved, what his
essence was. The book is a masterly study--it lays claim to our
sympathies; and never more so than when our critic describes that moment
when Browning, alone in the room, saw his wife die.

_Chapter Five_

CHESTERTON AS HISTORIAN

The reason that Chesterton has written a history of England is that he
says no member of the public has ever done so before. This is a thing to
be supremely thankful for if true; but it is entirely untrue, for the
very obvious fact that history has never been written by any one who is
not a member of the public. Every historian is a member of the public.
Let him imagine he is not, let him carry this imagination out to a
logical conclusion, and he will have a good chance of landing in a
prison for failing to pay the king's taxes.

The very best people to write histories are historians, but they will
never deal with history in a popular way. This Chesterton laments. He
wants a history that shall be about the things that never ordinarily get
into history. If he is told about the charters of the barons, he wishes
to hear of the charters of the carpenters. This, he thinks, would make
history popular, that word which is always used to denote something
rather slight and superficial. He exclaims that the people are ignored,
whereas the historian really would not be one at all if he was guilty of
this charge.

The fact of the matter is, that the whole of the history of England has
been so misunderstood that Chesterton has come to the rescue and has
told us what really happened--in fact, all we learnt at school was waste
of time; poor Green really wrote an anti-history of this country. The
Romans are not of the remote past; the whole of present-day England is
the remains of Rome, which is merely to say that our civilization comes
down from Rome, a statement that quite able historians have hinted at
now and again. No one for an instant is so foolish as to think that the
chief remains of the Romans consist of the few broken-up baths and
villas up and down the country, when a splendid high road stares them in
the face.

* * * * *

Chesterton pays enormous attention to the Middle Ages. They have, he
thinks, been rather badly dealt with by historians. Too much attention
is, he contends, paid to the time of the Stuarts onwards. Chesterton
asks us to contemplate history as we should if we had never learnt it at
school.