THE AMATEUR HISTORIAN

There is a joke with which we are all familiar, about the rustic who relates some local legend, as of a hero who hurled a huge rock into a river, and who says that it must be true because the rock is till there. As is commonly the case in the small talk of a scientific age, the satire is directed against popular ideas. As is also commonly the case in such an age, the satire is really very shallow. When the critics mock a man for saying `I believe it because I have seen the rock,' nine-tenths of them could not give any sort of reason for their own historic beliefs, beyond saying, 'I believe it because I saw it somewhere set out in printer's ink by somebody I never knew, referring to evidence I have never seen, and telling a tale which I cannot test in any way whatever, even by the look of the landscape.' The rustic does not rely merely on the rock but on the traditionthat is, the truthfulness of a certain sort of people, many of whom he has known. But at least the rock and the river do fit in with the tradition; and to that limited extent consistency is corroboration. It is far more superstitious to assume that print is proof. So far as print is concerned, the whole of history might be as utterly imaginationary as that mazy river and that dancing rock in the dizzy pipe-dream of `Kubla Khan'.

But there are others whose state of mind is still more extraordinary. They not only do not need the landscape to corroborate their history, but they do not care if the landscape contradicts their history. They are not content with the very reasonable statement that the existence of the rock does not prove the existence of the hero. They are so anxious to show that there was no hero, that they will shut their eyes and say there is no rock. If the map marks the place as a waterless desert, they will declare it is as dry as a bone, though the whole valley resound with the rushing river. The whole huge rock will be invisible, if a little book on geology says it is impossible. This is at the opposite extreme to the irrational credulity of the rustic, but it is infinitely more irrational. It is not inferring something from the rock that the rock does not prove; it is denying what the rock does prove. Or rather it is denying what the rock is; that ultimate and terrible rock of reality, that veritable rock of offence, against which all delusions will dash themselves to pieces. This great delusion of the prior claim of printed matter, as something anterior to experience and capable of contradicting it, is the main weakness of modern urban society. The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one anything that he could not find in the other. One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself; he was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed too hasty a disposition to tear the book up, or toss the book away. But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of faith. He could believe his eyes.

William Cobbett was pre-eminently a man with eyes in his head. He had of course other human attributes; such as a tongue in his head. Many considered it a merely bitter or blasphemously seditious tongue; but it was a tongue that could sometimes be for great mobs like the tocsin from a great tower. But when all emotional effects of such demagogy or deafening sensationalism have died away, the impression that will remain longest in the mind is the quiet and constant use that he made of his eyes. It is as if, after all passions had chased each other like shadows across his face, we saw his face at last in repose and realised that he had the eyes of a sailor; the eyes that can see a dot or speck on the distant horizon. But he could see dots and specks in the foreground as well. He could focus his sight at many different ranges; an organic power which is the point of what Carlyle said of somebody else that he had eyes and not merely spectacles. Because his eyes were sharp they were clear; because his sight was exact it was even subtle. At its best it could really measure things, and even the degrees of things. It could place anything from the face of a stranger to the strength of a horse; from the shade of ripeness in a cornfield to the shade of rottenness in a Cabinet Minister. The ultimate impression of his personality is not so much of violence as of vigilance. So strong is this impression, that any one who has been long in his literary company cannot shake off an uncanny impression of being watched. He cannot help fancying that this man who has been dead a hundred years has his eye on events in England and may suddenly speak probably not in an amiable manner. It is as if, in some elfin tale, those strange eyes in one man's head were stars that could survive him.

But there is one particular form of this faculty in Cobbett which is not so sharply apprehended; and perhaps is not so easy to apprehend. For in this sense it is a faculty which few people, if any people fully possess in the urban population of to day. It is destroyed rather than helped by the urban education of to day. Cobbett was very far from being an enemy of education. He was, as has been said elsewhere, a great educationist. He published French and English grammars of his own composition, and exhorted all young people to learn. Here and there he even showed a touch of that too crude and earnest respect for education which so often marks the self educated man. But for all that, he had a native power or piece of good fortune which education never gives and sometimes destroys. In one thing he was a very lucky and lonely mortal.

He could see before he could read. Most modern people can read before they can see. They have read about a hundred things long before they have seen one of them. Most town children have read about corn or cattle as if they were dwarfs or dragons, long before they have seen a grain of wheat or a cow. Many of them have read about ships or churches, or the marching of soldiers or the crowd cheering a king, or any other normal sight, which they have never seen. By a weird mesmerism which it is not here necessary to analyse, what people read has a sort of magic power over their sight. It lays a spell on their eyes, so that they see what they expect to see. They do not see the most solid and striking things that contradict what they expect to see. They believe their schoolmasters too well to believe their eyes. They trust the map against the mountain. Cobbett was a man without these magic spectacles. He did not see what he expected to see, but what he saw. He liked books; but he could not only read between the lines but through the book.

Now, in nothing is this more vivid than in his vision of history. Most of us know what was the accepted general version of English history when we were at school; at anyrate when I was at school, and still more, of course, when Cobbett was at school-in so far as he ever was at school. England had emerged out of a savage past to be the greatest empire in the world, with the best-balanced constitution in the world, by a wise and well-timed progress or series of reforms, that ever kept in mind the need of constitutionalism and of balance. The Barons had extorted a constitutional charter from the King, in advance of that feudal `age' and a foundation for parliamentary freedom. The Commons came into the struggle for parliamentary freedom when it was waged against the Stuarts. By that time the Revival of Learning had led to the Reformation or sweeping away of the superstition that had been the only religion of the ruder feudal time. This enlightenment favoured the growth of democracy; and though the aristocrats still remained, and remain still, to give dignity to the state with their ancient blazonry of the Conquest and the Crusades, the law of the land is no longer controlled by the lords but by the citizens. Hence the country has been filled with a fresh and free population, made happy by humane and rational ideas, where there were once only a few serfs stunted by the most senseless superstitions. I ask any one if that is not a fair summary of the historical education in which most modern people over forty were brought up. And having read it first, we went to look at the towns and castles and abbeys afterwards, and saw it or tried to see it. Cobbett, not having read it, or not caring whether he had read it, saw something totally different. He saw what is really there.

What would a man really see with his eyes if he simply walked across England? What would he actually see in the solid farms and towns of three-quarters of the country, if he could see them without any prejudice of historical interpretation? To begin with, he would see one thing which Cobbett saw, and nobody else seems ever to have seen, though it stared and still stares at everybody in big bulk and broad daylight. He would find England dotted with a vast number of little hamlets consisting entirely of little houses. Considered as little houses there is much that might be said about them both critical and sympathetic. They are generally picturesque cottages; they are often what is described as picturesque tumbledown cottages. They are the most beautiful houses in the world for all appreciative people who have ever been outside them. For the less obvious and outstanding people who have always been inside them, it would be an exaggeration to say that they are the most beautiful houses in the world. About these people inside also a great deal that is good and bad might be said; they are kindly and full of English humours and all the virtues that belong to an atmosphere of ale. But they are not citizens and do not want to be; they have hardly even heard of the word. They can no more imagine the vanishing of the squire than the vanishing of the sky; though they may grumble at the moods of both. But anyhow the point is that their houses are little houses, and' especially low houses; so that a tall man walking past them would sometimes have to stoop down under the eaves to peer into the front window, as if he were travelling in a town of the dwarfs. And the town is a very little town; often only a handful of houses to be counted on the fingers.

In the midst of this little cluster or huddle of low houses rises something of which the spire or tower may be seen for miles. Relatively to the roofs beneath it, the tower is as much an exception as the Eiffel Tower. Relatively to the world in which it was built, it was really an experiment in engineering more extraordinary than the Eiffel Tower. For the first Gothic arch was really a thing more original than the first flying-ship. And indeed something of its leap and its uplifting seems to make architecture akin to aviation. Its distant vaulted roof looks like a maze of mathematical patterns as mysterious as the stars; and its balance of fighting gravitations and flying buttresses was a fine calculation in medieval mathematics. But it is not bare and metallic like the Eiffel Tower or the Zeppelin. Its stones are hurled at heaven in an arc as by the kick of a catapult; but that simple curve has not the mere cruelty of an engine of war. The whole building is also a forest of images and symbols and stories. There are saints bringing their tales from all the towns and countries in Europe. There are saints bearing the tools of all the trades and crafts in England. There are traces of trade brotherhoods as egalitarian as trades unions. There are traditions of universities more popular than popular education. There are a thousand things in the way of fancy and parody and pantomime; but with the wildest creative variety it is not chaotic. From the highest symbol of God tortured in stone and in silence, to the last wild gargoyle flung out into the sky as a devil cast forth with a gesture, the whole plan of that uplifted labyrinth shows the mastery of an ordered mind.

It is the parish church, and it is often very old; for it was built in the days of darkness and savage superstition. The picturesque cottages are all of much later date; for they belong to the ages of progress and enlightenment.

If people saw the Great Pyramid and found scattered about its base a few patchwork tents of a few ragged Bedouins, they would hardly say there had been no civilisation in that land until the Bedouins brought it. Yet a Pyramid is as plain as a post of wood compared with the dizzy balance and delicate energy of the Gothic. If they had seen some dingy tribe of barbarians living in their little mud huts, when high above their heads went the soaring arch of a Roman aqueduct almost as remote as the rainbow, they would hardly say that the Romans must have been savages and that the savages alone were civilised. Yet the round Roman arch is really rudimentary compared with the prism of forces in the pointed Gothic arch. But the truth is that the Catholics, having some humility even in their hatred, never did make this absurd pretence that paganism was barbaric, as their enemies afterwards made the absurd pretence that Catholicism was barbaric. They denounced the wickedness of the world, but they recognised the Pyramids and the Coliseum as wonders of the world. It was only the great medieval civilisation whose conquerors were base enough to pretend that it had not been a civilisation at all. But that is not the aspect of the ease immediately important here. The point immediately important here is that this solid stone object did and does stand up among the others like a mountain among molehills; and that nobody could see it but Cobbett. We talk of not seeing the wood for the trees; but one would think anybody could see a poplar-tree in spite of the presence of six rhododendron-trees. Yet we may repeat, in a spiritual but most realistic sense, that nobody except Cobbett could see the church spire.

He did not by any means see all that was to be seen in the church, or all that has here been noted in the church. For that he would really have required more education; and not the sort of education that he could then have got merely by being educated. He was a simple man in a rationalistic age, and he saw something. It was something very primitive and elementary; but he saw it. He saw the size. He tells us again and again that he has found a village of which the whole present population could be put into the porch of the village church, leaving the whole vast and varied interior as empty and useless as Stonehenge. What had become of all the people? Why should anybody, in any age, pay to build a church serving two thousand people when he only had to serve twenty people? Was it true, could it be true, after all, that the population of England had so hugely increased from what had once been a mere handful? Was it only that the new towns had hugely increased, leaving the countryside a mere wilderness? And could it be true that the men who built such things were a sort of Pictish dwarfs or troglodytes of the twilight, when what they had left looked so like the houses of a generation of giants, which could not even be filled with a generation of dwarfs?

These doubts had much to do with historical and social views of Cobbett to be considered in their order; but in the first place they are to be noted as a working model of his power to see things simply and as they stand. Hundreds of elegant essayists and artists had traced the more graceful proportions of Gothic buildings, vaguely regarding them as ruins. The end of the eighteenth century is full of these painters in watercolours and first cousins to the Earl of Cork. What Cobbett saw was not the graceful proportions but rather the disgraceful disproportions. He saw a colossal contrast; the contrast between a village that was hardly a hamlet and a village church that was almost a cathedral. It was the biggest and baldest of all the facts; and yet it was the fact that nobody else saw. The others did not see it because they had been educated not to see it; because they had been educated to see the opposite. Since liberty and light had come to the Commons with the Whig revolution, the Commons must somewhere or other be free and enlightened; they could not still be living in hovels under the shadow of a huge old church. There had been nothing before that revolution but feudal ferocity and priest craft. So, somehow or other, somebody had built the church by sheer ferocity; or priest craft can be made a complete substitute for every other craft, including the craft of the sculptor and the stonemason. But Cobbett began with the big fact that he could see with his own eyes, and with that he contrived, with tremendous reconstructive power, to turn all English history upside down.

His view involved another truth that may be symbolised by another building. When we said that there was nothing but small houses to compete with the church, we meant of course that there was nothing else within the immediate circuit of the church: that the village church was the only big building in the village. There was another very big building at some distance from the village which bulked very much larger in the minds of the villagers. Indeed, it might be said that they lived in the material shadow of the church and in the moral shadow of the country house. Now the example of the squire's house is yet another which illustrates the illusion that is general and the realism that is exceedingly rare. All that Cobbett could have read in books, all that he could have learnt at school, would have taught him a view of the manor-house or country seat which is still a commonplace in novels and newspapers. It is almost literally a view; in the sense of a landscape seen in the mind's eye. But men only see that sort of view by shutting their eyes. Cobbett formed his views by opening his eyes. The universal impression or illusion was that the Tory squires were an ancient aristocracy, full of feudal notions and Norman blood; and from this it followed logically that they lived in castles or at anyrate in moated granges, Tudor manor-houses, and other ancient and appropriate haunts. If Cobbett had believed in historical novels, or in the histories that were all on the same model as the historical novels, he would have gone about looking for the Castle of Otranto in the valleys of England: and never seen the little temple that Horace Walpole really stuck up for himself on the top of Strawberry Hill.

But Cobbett had this strange power of faith: he could believe his eyes. Most people cannot believe their eyes; it is the very last thing in which they can believe. They can believe in the wildest creeds and the crudest philosophies; similarly they can believe in a past made up of The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho. But they cannot believe in the present; in the thing present to their sight; in the thing in whose real presence they stand. But Cobbett really had this unearthly detachment, this dry light of reality, this vision of a man from the moon. In that light he probably saw what the country houses are really like; as he certainly saw what the parish churches are really like. Here and there, there is really a castle; now generally a show place. Here and there, there is really an old Tudor manor, often preserved as carefully as a model in a museum. But the house of the squire dominating a hundred countrysides all over England is something quite different; something quite unmistakable; and something to a large extent uniform. It is emphatically a rule, where the romantic castles and manors are exceptions. It is a rule in more senses than one; for the populace has the squire for a landlord, for an employer, and, it may be added, for a judge; for the magistracy is made up of the gentry. Anyhow, the house has a positive character which amounts to a pattern.

It really looks rather like a large public building from a large city exiled in the provinces. It looks like a Town Hall taken away on the wings of the fairies, and set down far away in the woodlands. It looks like a Palais de Justice rusticating for some reason or other and taking a ramble in the country. It is not only very large, but it does not look like a private house at all. It is like something conscious that it is a seat of government and power over menas it is. It is nothing like so cosy as a castle. It is rather open in the same sense as a law-court. Above all, it is built in the same style as the average modern law-court. What makes that style important is its date. Very few of the real countryseats are really of a Tudor type; hardly any are of a medieval type. The type and pattern of them is of a sort that bears the stamp of a subsequent and clearly marked epoch of society. Generally they are Georgian houses; often they are rather earlier, and correspond to the quainter style of William of Orange and Queen Anne. But nearly all belong to what the French call the Classic Age; meaning that stretch of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the full result of the Renaissance worked itself out, becoming if anything more and more classical until its shell was broken by the Romantic movement and the French Revolution. In short, the whole architecture is the recent creation of a rationalistic age. It belongs as much to the Age of Reason as the books of Voltaire.

But people were blinded to this fact by books they knew better than those of Voltaire. Every novel and novelette told them that a bad baronet lived in a castellated tower; and they could not see that he lived in a sort of comfortable classic temple. Tennyson, calling in his youth on the Lady Clara Vere de Vere, suffered the delusion of seeing a lion on her old stone gates. Most probably it was really a nymph or an urn. For that matter, Tennyson would probably have made some curious discoveries if he had looked more closely into Lady Clara's claims to Norman blood, however it might be with her claims to coronets. But for the moment I am speaking simply of things seen, or rather of things not seen. I am speaking of the veil which our version of history hangs between us and the real facts about our fathers, even the facts in front of our eyes. Very few people saw that the aristocratic country house is commonly a comparatively new building, and looks more like a General Post Office than a feudal fortress. Such ornament as it has is a curious cold exuberance of heathen nymphs and hollow temples. Because it stands for the age of the sceptics, its gods are not only dead but have never been alive. Its gardens are full of shrines without idols or idols without idolaters.

Finally, as has been hinted already, there does exist a third historic memorial and variety of architecture or the use of architecture. Among these aristocratic houses and estates, setting aside such curiosities as castles, there does appear fairly commonly one type of country house that really is old and really is medieval. The medieval part of it is often in ruins, and only valued because it is in ruins. But the ruins have the same soaring and skyward lines as those of the large and empty parish church. Yet the house as a whole is by no means a ruin, but is turned into a country house quite as comfortable, or rather luxurious, as the more common pattern of the Georgian houses. But the very name of that house of luxury remains a medieval name; and a very queer name too.

We should think it rather odd if a profiteer had a country house that was called The Cathedral. We might think it strange if a stockbroker had built a villa and habitually referred to it as a church. But we can hardly see the preposterous profanity by which one chance rich man after another has been able to commandeer or purchase a house which he still calls an Abbey. It is precisely as if he had gone to live in the parish church; had breakfasted on the altar, or cleaned his teeth in the font. That is the short and sharp summary of what has happened in English history; but few can get it thus foreshortened or in any such sharp outline. Anyhow, this third type of monument of the past does offer itself visibly to the eye like the other two. The romantic reactionary at the end of the eighteenth century might not often find the Bad Baronet in a castle, but might really find him in an abbey. The most attractive of all such reactionaries, Miss Catherine Morland, was not altogether disappointed in her search for the Mysteries of Udolpho. She knew at least that General Tilney lived in an abbey; though even she could hardly have mistaken General Tilney for an abbot. Nor was she wrong in supposing that a crime had been committed by that gentleman in Northanger Abbey. His crime was not being an abbot. But Jane Austen, who had so piercing a penetration of the shams of her own age, had had a little too much genteel education to penetrate the shams of history. Despite the perverse humour of her juvenile History of England, despite her spirited sympathy with Mary Stuart, she could not be expected to see the truth about the Tudor transition. In these matters she had begun with books, and could not be expected to read what is written in mere buildings and big monuments. She was educated, and had not the luck to be self-educated like Cobbett. The comparison is not so incongruous as it may seem. They were the four sharpest eyes that God had given to the England of that time; but two of them were turned inward into the home, and two were looking out of the window. I wish I could think that they ever met.

Anyhow, all this is written in large letters of stone and clay across the land; in a giant alphabet of arch and column and flying buttress. And these three striking things stand out to tell the main talc of English history, even to a man who had never opened a book. The first is a very ancient and artistically beautiful parish church, far too big for its parish. The second is an aristocratic mansion of much later date, and looking like the palace of a German prince of the eighteenth century. The third is a similar palace constructed out of the ruins, if not of a similar parish church, at least of a religious building similar to the parish church. With those three solid facts alone a man might have pieced together the truth that no historians would tell him. Somehow or other there had once been a larger religious life which was also a popular life. Some­how or other its memorials had been taken over by a new race of men, who had become great lords in the land, and had been able to disdain alike the people and the religion.

Cobbett was an amateur historian in that sense; that he used his own wits. Those who sniff at such amateur history are not using theirs. They say the amateur's views cannot be correct, because they are not founded on research. In other words, they say he cannot see what is there, because he sees what is obviously there. He cannot have seen the sun, because he evidently did not have to extract the sunbeams from cucumbers. He cannot have really understood that two and two make four, because he understood it at once. But allowing for this, such academic characters underrate even the detailed information of men like Cobbett. It must once more be emphasised very strongly that Cobbett did not in the least despise books. He had far too much common sense to despise any common and convenient way of obtaining information. He was the very reverse of the sort of sentimental reactionary who thinks that all humanity would be innocent if only it were illiterate. But he did not allow what he read to contradict what he had seen. And when he really began to read, he found that what he read confirmed what he had seen.

I say he really began to read; for there is a distinction in this case. It is not merely a question of the books, but rather of the books behind the books. The fashionable book of history is at best little better than a leading article; it is founded on the documents as a leading article is founded on the news; in both cases a rather careful selection. Like a leading article the historical summary is generally partisan; and never quite so partisan as when it professes to be impartial. Cobbett had to go a little deeper than these superficial summaries to trace in the past the truths he had already discovered in the present. It was a fortunate coincidence that it was precisely at this time that the most learned and laborious of English historians produced the work on which so many other works have been founded. John Lingard was a very moderate man, but even the prejudices he was presumed to have gave him a detached position from the fashionable fallacies of that particular age. With a mass of material he established his own very moderate version of what had really happened in England; and by the use of that material Cobbett produced his own version, which some have hesitated to call moderate.

This was the celebrated History of the Reformation, published in 1824. The real question at issue about the History of the Reformation is not so much concerned with a certain state of things as with the right reaction to that state of things. What ought a man to do when he believes that public opinion has grown accustomed to repose confidently in a completely wrong picture of the past? A man might agree with Cobbett about the existence of the error, without in the least agreeing with Cobbett about the proper process of the enlightenment. The very name of Lingard is enough to prove the possibility. Lingard had a strong case, and deliberately understated the case to give a greater impression of impartiality. Cobbett had the same strong case, and deliberately flung away all such airs of impartiality to prove how completely he had been convinced. When Cobbett found that what he conceived to be a truth had been concealed by a trick, his reaction was a towering passion; and whether that or a more patient exposition be appropriate to controversy, there is no doubt about which is appropriate to Cobbett. He would have said that when he found a man robbing his hen-roost he called out `Stop, thief!' and not `Stop, philosophical communist invading the thesis of private property!' He would have said that when a man told lies he called him a liar, and not a person insensible to the value of objective reality. Yet it is probably true that many listened to Lingard who could not listen to Cobbett. And it is true to say that such persons could not hear him because he talked so loud. But as to questioning what he saidthat is quite different and much more difficult. Those who suppose that he must be talking nonsense because he was talking too loud are much less clearheaded and even cool-headed than he was. Veracity has nothing to do with violence, one way or the other. One historian may prefer to say, `The Emperor Nero set on foot several conspiracies against the life of Agrippina his mother, and expressed satisfaction when the final attempt was successful.' Another may say, `The bloody and treacherous tyrant foully murdered his own mother, and fiendishly exulted in the detestable deed.' But the second statement records the same fact as the first, and records it equally correctly. It is accurate to say, 'The Rev. Titus Oates declared on oath his knowledge of a Papist conspiracy; but his statements, which led to the execution of many Papists, were subsequently found to be fictitious.' But it is every bit as accurate to say, `The liar and perjurer Oates cruelly swore away the lives of innocent Catholics, blasphemously calling on God to witness to his murderous lie.' The violent man is telling the truth quite as logically and precisely as the more dignified man. It is a question of what we consider superiority of literary form; not of any sort of superiority in historical fact. And this was substantially the chief difference between Cobbett and Lingard; not to mention all the modern scholars who are pupils of Lingard.

Cobbett stated all his facts in one prolonged and almost monotonous fury. But if he was wrong, he was wrong in his fury, not especially in his facts. There are many mistakes in his History of the Reformation, as there are in most histories; though most people did not even know what they were until they were carefully discovered and tabulated by Cardinal Gasquet. I doubt if there are so many of them as could be found by so good a scholar in all the more cautious and constitutional historians. Cobbett did not begin with whole masses of obvious myth and romance, like those which Macaulay criticised in Hume. He did not depend on the expurgated extravagances of manifestly mad sectarians, like those which Aytoun criticised in Macaulay. The truth is that the general impression that Cobbett wrote a wild romance is really only a general impression. It does not rest, and it never did rest, on the discovery of the particular points in which he was wrong. The impression was one of paradox; the mere fact that he seemed to be calling black white, when he declared that what was white had been blackened, or that what seemed to be white had only been whitewashed. But the shock came from the moral comment or application rather than from the definite details. For the definite details even then, very often, were not in dispute. For instance, it is supremely characteristic of Cobbett that he reversed the common titles by talking of Bloody Bess and Good Queen Mary. He could always find a popular phrase for an unpopular opinion. For he was always speaking to the mob, even when he was defying it. But this is an excellent example; for it is not shaken by any particular controversy about facts. Everybody knew even then that Queen Elizabeth was bloody, if pursuing people with execution and persecution and torture makes a person bloody; and that was the only reason for saying it of Mary. Everybody knew even then that Mary was good, if certain real virtues and responsibilities make a person good; a great deal more indubitably good than Elizabeth. It was the too obvious and biased motive of the inversion that irritated people. It was not really Cobbett's history that was in controversy; it was his controversialism. It was not his facts that were challenged; it was his challenge.

Here we are only concerned with his controversy as a part of his character. And of this sort of challenge we may almost say that it was the whole of his character. We must see the situation very simply, if we would see it as he saw it. He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.

It is that ringing and arresting cry of `Murder!' wrung from him as he stumbled over those bones of the dead England, that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries. It is not the mere discovery of the bones, or in a sense even the study of them. It was not really, I repeat, the facts that were in dispute. The Gothic tower overhanging the modern cottage was as plain as a skeleton hanging on a gibbet. Some held that the bones were justly gibbeted; that the old England was fortunately dead. Others held that the bones were so old and decayed that they could now be the object of merely archaeological interest, like Egyptian mummies. What was peculiar to Cobbett was the way in which he treated this question of the past as a question of the present. He treated it, not as a historical point to be decided, but rather as a legal wrong to be righted. If he did not exactly answer the question, `Can these dry bones live?' he did say in another sense, `I know that their avenger liveth.' He was prepared to make those bones his business, like those of Paine; to be a detective in a mystery story, and present himself ex ossibus ultor. One might suppose a detective story would be more popular than an antiquarian essay; and a charge of crime more lucid than a meditation on archaeology. Yet this was not wholly so; and the paradox is relevant to the whole riddle of Cobbett. The cry that rang through the startled village was loud but hardly clear. It may be that it was too loud to be clear.

It is possible to speak much too plainly to be understood. Most men with any convictions in a confused and complicated age have had the almost uncanny sensation of shouting at people that a mad dog is loose or the house is on fire, to be met merely with puzzled and pain­fully respectful expressions, as if the remark were a learned citation in Greek or Hebrew. For men in such an age are used to long words and cannot understand short ones. This comic sort of cross-purposes was especially the ease with Cobbett. The world, in the sense of the ordinary political and literary world, could not understand him or what he said. People could not understand it because it was not obscure enough. It did not soothe them with those formless but familiar obscurities which they expected as the proper prelude to any political suggestion. He came to the point too quickly; and it deafened them like an explosion and blinded them like a flash of lightning. His rapidity produced all the effect of remoteness. People of this political and literary sort understood much better the speakers they were used to; or liked much better the speakers they did not understand. The pompous and polysyllabic felicities of the diction of Pitt seemed to them comforting if not comprehensible. The rich and loaded style of Burke seemed like some display of imperial wealth which could be admired though not calculated. It was the same with the literary as with the political utterance of the time. It was much easier to persuade people to listen to the merely romantic praise of the past as uttered by Scott than to the realistic praise of the past as uttered by Cobbett. Men vaguely felt that any sympathy with things thus lost in the mists of antiquity ought to be conveyed in more or less misty language, and with the air of one dealing with things not only dead but even unreal. It was more soothing to be told by a Great Enchanter what ghosts might haunt a ruined abbey than to be asked by a hard-headed bully of a yeoman how many people would fit into the porch of a parish church. Men found Melrose Abbey more visible by moonlight than their own parish church by daylight. The world will never pay its debt to the great genius of Walter Scott, who effected in European literature that second Renaissance that was called Romance. He opened those high dikes of mud that cut men off from the rivers of popular romantic tradition, and irrigated the dry garden of the Age of Reason. It is no disrespect to him to say that lie was, like his own hero, an antiquary and at the same time a sceptic. But he was fashionable because he assured men that medievalism was only a romance; and Cobbett was far less fashionable when he urged it as a reality. Scott was merely sentimental about Mary Stuart, as he was about Charles Edward Stuart; he was singing `Will ye no' come back again?' to people who would have been a horrible nuisance to him if they had come back again. But Cobbett was not sentimental about Mary Tudor; he did solidly believe that with her the good times went; and he did really want them to return.

Anyhow, when he revised history the revision really was a revelation. The revision may be revised, but it will not be reversed. The revelation may reveal itself further, but it will never hide itself again. Cobbett let the cat out of the bag; and this is nonetheless true because it was rather a wild cat when it came out of his bag. Nobody could pretend that because it was a wild cat it was a fabulous animal, when it was so obviously careering down the street. In other words, he drew attention to a fact; a fact which others have followed up and matched and balanced with other facts, a fact which others have restated more mildly or analysed more delicately, but still the original fact which he furiously asserted and his foes furiously denied. In so far as modern histories do really differ from the History of the Reformation, it is mostly because we have come to repeat with decorum what even he only dared to hurl with defiance. Ruskin and William Morris and many more pursued his path through that living labyrinth that had once been regarded as the dead shell of a village church. Maitland and Gasquet and many others justified by laborious study and annotation his wild but shrewd guesses about the greatness of medieval sociology. It. was easy for them to state the medieval argument more mildly; simply because the modern audience had become more mild. But Cobbett's dis­covery can never be undiscovered; that is, it can never be covered up again. And that for the reason stated at the starting-point of this chapter.

A city that is set on a, hill cannot be hid; a church set high above a city is even more hard to hide, when once it has been discovered. You cannot undiscover the elephant. That is why it is essential in this chapter to insist on the size and simplicity of the neglected thing, and the plain picture of the Surrey farmer standing staring at the village spire. Since Cobbett's historical conceptions have increasingly prevailed, there have been many attempts among the opponents of medieval ideals to get rid of this medieval renascence. There have been many efforts to explain away the elephant or minimise the cathedral. And they all fail by beginning at the trivial end and trying to chop inches off the elephant's tail; or seeking to set the ugliness of a gargoyle against the beauty of a cathedral. Thus they will pick this or that hole in the application of the Guild principle, without noticing that everything is conceded with the Guild principle itself; the simple fact that the principle of medieval trade was admittedly comradeship and justice, while the principle of modern trade was avowedly competition and greed. They will say that the Guild spirit was deficient in this and that; without beginning to touch the truth that we are deficient in the Guild spirit. In short, the attempts to rebut the revelations of medieval culture and creative reform are above all things trivial. They not only pick very small holes in a very large thing, but they do not seem to realise that the rest of the world can now look at the large thing as well as the small hole. But it was really William Cobbett, alighted from his horse, and standing for some idle moment in a church porch out of the rain, who first had a vision of this towering resurrection of a forgotten Christendom; and lifted up his eyes to things so lofty and remote that men had let them float unheeded over their heads like the tree-tops or the clouds. Perhaps the real story of Jack the Giant Killer is that Jack was the first man who was even tall enough to see the giant.