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Froude's History of England By: Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) |
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FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND {1} by Charles Kingsley
There appeared a few years since a 'Comic History of England,' duly
caricaturing and falsifying all our great national events, and
representing the English people, for many centuries back, as a mob of
fools and knaves, led by the nose in each generation by a few arch
fools and arch knaves. Some thoughtful persons regarded the book
with utter contempt and indignation; it seemed to them a crime to
have written it; a proof of 'banausia,' as Aristotle would have
called it, only to be outdone by the writing a 'Comic Bible.' After
a while, however, their indignation began to subside; their second
thoughts, as usual, were more charitable than their first; they were
not surprised to hear that the author was an honest, just, and able
magistrate; they saw that the publication of such a book involved no
moral turpitude; that it was merely meant as a jest on a subject on
which jesting was permissible, and as a money speculation in a field
of which men had a right to make money; while all which seemed
offensive in it was merely the outcome, and as it were apotheosis, of
that method of writing English history which has been popular for
nearly a hundred years. 'Which of our modern historians,' they asked
themselves, 'has had any real feeling of the importance, the
sacredness, of his subject? any real trust in, or respect for, the
characters with whom he dealt? Has not the belief of each and all of
them been the same that on the whole, the many always have been
fools and knaves; foolish and knavish enough, at least, to become the
puppets of a few fools and knaves who held the reins of power? Have
they not held that, on the whole, the problems of human nature and
human history have been sufficiently solved by Gibbon and Voltaire,
Gil Blas and Figaro; that our forefathers were silly barbarians; that
this glorious nineteenth century is the one region of light, and that
all before was outer darkness, peopled by 'foreign devils,'
Englishmen, no doubt, according to the flesh, but in spirit, in
knowledge, in creed, in customs, so utterly different from ourselves
that we shall merely show our sentimentalism by doing aught but
laughing at them? On what other principle have our English histories as yet been
constructed, even down to the children's books, which taught us in
childhood that the history of this country was nothing but a string
of foolish wars, carried on by wicked kings, for reasons hitherto
unexplained, save on that great historic law of Goldsmith's by which
Sir Archibald Alison would still explain 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, that these
strictures are too sweeping; that there is arising, in a certain
quarter, a school of history books for young people of a far more
reverent tone, which tries to do full honour to the Church and her
work in the world. Those books of this school which we have seen, we
must reply, seem just as much wanting in real reverence for the past
as the school of Gibbon and Voltaire. It is not the past which they
reverence, but a few characters or facts eclectically picked out of
the past, and, for the most part, made to look beautiful by ignoring
all the features which will not suit their preconceived pseudo ideal.
There is in these books a scarcely concealed dissatisfaction with the
whole course of the British mind since the Reformation, and (though
they are not inclined to confess the fact) with its whole course
before the Reformation, because that course was one of steady
struggle against the Papacy and its anti national pretensions. They
are the outcome of an utterly un English tone of thought; and the so
called 'ages of faith' are pleasant and useful to them, principally
because they are distant and unknown enough to enable them to conceal
from their readers that in the ages on which they look back as
ideally perfect a Bernard and a Francis of Assisi were crying all day
long 'O that my head were a fountain of tears, that I might weep for
the sins of my people!' Dante was cursing popes and prelates in the
name of the God of Righteousness; Boccaccio and Chaucer were lifting
the veil from priestly abominations of which we now are ashamed even
to read; and Wolsey, seeing the rottenness of the whole system, spent
his mighty talents, and at last poured out his soul unto death, in
one long useless effort to make the crooked straight, and number that
which had been weighed in the balances of God, and found for ever
wanting... Continue reading book >>
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History |
Literature |
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