en the foolish things so
catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and
ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen,
burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where
their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The
English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long
despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered
history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years
into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of
politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic,
looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.

XVIII

CONCLUSION

In so small a book on so large a matter, finished hastily enough amid
the necessities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd to
pretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attempt
to correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but I
rather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspective
makes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giant
foreshortened with his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are of
clay. We see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, even when we
admire its colours; and the study of a man like Napoleon is too often
that of "The Last Phase." So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonable
to deal in detail with Old Sarum, and would think it ridiculous to deal
in detail with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens a
golden monument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected to
Alfred. English history is misread especially, I think, because the
crisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; and
many of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the same
visitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of the
Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also an epilogue.

I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really came
with the fall of Richard II., following on his failure to use mediaeval
despotism in the interests of mediaeval democracy. England, like the
other nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the death
of the ancient civilization as by its escape from death, or by its
refusal to die. Mediaeval civilization had arisen out of the resistance
to the barbarians, to the naked barbarism from the No