CHAPTER XII

THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES

Mr. Wells’s _Outline_ continues in good proportion and lucid in his general description of what we call, in Christian history, “The Dark Ages”: that is, the period between the first spread of the Mohammedan disaster (which he, of course, regards as a benefit because it destroyed or wounded the Catholic Church in the areas occupied by Mohammedans) and the German capture of the Papacy towards the year 1000.

The general tone is that of the ordinary textbooks written in the anti-Catholic vein; although there is a rather more violent irritation than usual against the Faith in Mr. Wells’s general position and occasional references, it occupies little of this division. To the errors I will allude in a moment, but I must first point out the merits of this passage which brings us up to the eve of the Crusades and takes us from the end of Book V to the midst of Book VI.

Apart from his general lucid and vigorous presentation of a long period very difficult to summarize, there is an excellent metaphor upon page 396 comparing the fragmentary cohesion of society in the Dark Ages, and the gradual formation of feudalism in their most disturbed period, to the physical formation of crystals. The author is naturally a little confused about his general dates, because he has not had occasion to read History seriously. Thus he strangely considers the _Fourth_ and _Fifth(!)_ centuries to have been particularly chaotic in territorial arrangement, and immediately afterwards uses the term “Feudalism.” That is, of course, a complete misunderstanding of comparative dates and a misapprehension of the length of the period and the great changes which took place in such a length. In the _Fourth_ century the Western world was entirely united and ordered from Rome, though there was the usual heavy local fighting and difficulty in guarding the frontiers from irruption. In the _Fifth_ century there were armed bands raiding across the frontiers in not very large numbers, and accepted as soldiers of the Empire, one very bad Asiatic invasion _en masse_, which was beaten, and, at the end, the disassociation of the Western part of the Empire into separate vast regional governments under local generals.

_Feudalism_ was an altogether later thing; as much later as _we_ are later than the Wars of the Roses. It was a thing which became established in the _Ninth_ century, though you can already see it forming (unconsciously) in the _Eighth_. It was the break-up of society into a mass of local governments, very unsystematic and held together only by personal bond of overlord and vassal. To talk of it in connection with the _Fourth_ and _Fifth_ centuries is like talking of industrial capitalism in the same breath with the peasants’ revolt of 1381.

Nevertheless, though the centuries are wildly wrong, the metaphor of crystals as applied to feudal groupment and regroupment is very good, and is an excellent example of Mr. Wells’s powers of analogy and illustration.

I should not quarrel either in this commentary upon Mr. Wells’s general acceptance of the old-fashioned History which is still conventional in most of our official teaching here in England, although it is already badly out of date. Were I writing a commentary upon the book treated seriously as an essay on European history, I should be more severe upon this simple acceptation of stuff on which most of our students are still fed, but which, in the light of modern scholarship, especially of French scholarship, has the effect of Crinolines and Pegtop Trousers.

I am concerned here with the much more important business of Mr. Wells’s anti-Catholic motive in writing, and though the false conventional history which we are still largely taught in England is ultimately anti-Catholic in motive, yet it is so largely accepted, and the connection between it and the ultimate religious motive behind it is so much disguised, that it would hardly be fair to ridicule an old-fashioned statement save where it is so thoroughly and admittedly out of date that not even a best-seller ought to admit it into his popular writing.

For instance, one cannot be surprised to find this popular history, written in England and depending upon English encylopædias, talking of an Anglo-Saxon conquest of this country at the beginning of the Dark Ages—nearly all educated Englishmen even now still speak in those terms, and have a vague idea at the back of their minds that a number of Germans, called Anglo-Saxons, came over the sea in boats, centuries ago, killed all the people who then lived in England, and started everything over again. And there is a great deal to be said (though I think it is wrong) for the conventional derivation of Viking from the word for “bay.”

I will even admit that writing of Charlemagne as speaking Frankish (that is, a sort of Flemish) as his habitual tongue is not a thing to carp at in a popular history, though it is almost certainly wrong. All the last generation believed that kind of thing, and it is still conventional teaching in England and Germany. Mr. Wells also has the imagination to see that Charlemagne must have known the Latin tongue as well, and admits that his talking literary Latin is “open to discussion.” A more detailed knowledge of the period makes it clear that a man in Charlemagne’s social position _must_ have talked and thought in Latin, though it is true that a writer of the time talked of the old Frankish speech as being the “ancestral tongue” of that great man.

In the same way the description of the changes in the Papacy of the tenth century is the conventional description of from one hundred and fifty to fifty years ago—a virtuous German reform of wicked Italians—and it is natural that the modern scholarship which shows the real struggle to have been between an attempted renewal of Byzantine influence and the counter Western Imperial influence should never have been presented to our author.

All that, though out of date, may pass. But there are certain extreme statements in what I have called this “old-fashioned conventional history” which really are too much out of date to go without notice.

For instance, Mr. Wells quotes, quite innocently, as though it were history, the ridiculous sentence from some other popular history or other, that “to practise medicine was forbidden by the Church, which expected cures to be effected by religious rites.” He probably means that the strong general feeling of the day against _dissection_ of the dead had clerical support. But to think that there were no doctors in the Dark Ages is really going a little too far in old-fashionedness: it is not even 1850. It is 1820.

In the same way the idea that Austrasia and Neustria were the German and French speaking halves of the Frankish dominion is really too antiquated. The people who believed that kind of thing and yet could claim to be scholars have been dead, even the longest-lived of them, many years since, and to use such language is rather like talking (as some people still do talk) of the United States as though they were a colony of Englishmen. The truth is, of course, that the two divisions were purely administrative, an eastern and a western; the area being too great for permanent single rule. They were obviously made without any consideration of language. Who cared about language in the seventh and early eighth centuries? They were designed to give fairly equal burdens and resources. The majority of people living in Austrasia had probably never heard German speech. The only thing in Austrasia that was German was the broad Eastern fringe, very ill-populated, with no cities that were not Roman, and with all the culture and the wealth—save Alsace and the Cologne-Aix, Rhine and lower Moselle region—romance in speech. After all, Rheims was in Austrasia, and perhaps its most important city.

In the same way, to talk of the “subject population” after the defeat of Syagrius by his fellow-general, Clovis, is beyond the limit of what is tolerable in the way of exploded mid-nineteenth century convention. Everybody knows, since Fustel, that there was no trace of a conquering and a subject race. The Gallo-Romans, the Flemish-speaking Franks in the very beginning of the business, sundry German-speaking adventurers and nobles, chance soldiers from the extreme East, a great many from the South of Gaul, a mass of clerics, made up that society. It was never divided by race at all or by speech. That was the quite gratuitous assumption of people who thought noble Protestant Prussia to be the modern example of Franks, and decadent Catholic “Latins” to be the modern example of Gallo-Romans. It has no relation to reality. The social divisions of the sixth and seventh centuries were between free and unfree, between those belonging to the Curia and those governed by it, and (much the most prominent division of all) between Christian and non-Christian.

This impossible old idea about a German Austrasia has serious consequences in Mr. Wells’s History, for it makes him still talk of the two divisions as the origins of modern France and Germany; just as they used to talk in 1870! Nowadays that kind of thing won’t do.

Nor is it tolerable to speak of Mercia as “holding out stoutly against the priests and for the ancient Faith and ways.” We leave all that kind of thing to John Richard Green. The conversion of Mercia naturally came later than that of Kent and Northumbria because it lay further inland, but Penda of Mercia marched with the army of Christian Welsh Princes, and Sussex and the Isle of Wight were evangelized much later than Mercia.

To talk of Pepin of Heristal as “conquering Neustria” has been inadmissible for the better part of fifty years. And it is still wilder to speak of “but small racial or social difference” between the “Anglo-Saxon, Jute, or Dane.”

The civilized Christian England of the Dark Ages was utterly different socially, and very different racially, from the Pagan, Saxon or Scandinavian; it felt so and it said so the whole time. The languages were similar, though the similarity can be exaggerated: the mind was different. As for the “Normans,” if the word is used in the sense of the Northmen of the old pirate raids, then they were simply Scandinavians; but used as it is on page 400, after mention of the Conquest, it is quite wrong. The Norman of the Conquest was a Frenchman, much like any other—short, stocky, round-headed, and with all the French violence, all the French vice of partizanship and fighting against one’s neighbour, all the French instinct for simple mechanical order in building and measurement and legal system, and much of the French fun. Even the families of known Scandinavian origin were by that time French. William the Conqueror himself had but one-sixteenth of Scandinavian blood.

Still, these bad errors are after all no more than errors of the conventional old textbooks, written in the days when all History had the Protestant air, and any man who has to fill up a popular history in a hurry from our enyclopædias will naturally be behind the times to that extent. What is less excusable is a series of chance sentences which show real ignorance of essentials on which not even the popular textbooks would go wrong. For instance, the Comitatus of which Tacitus speaks as surrounding a German chieftain has nothing whatever to do with our words “Count” and “County.” These come from the Roman official, the “Comes.” Or, again, to talk of the Roman roads (p. 395) as being “destroyed” as early as the eighth century, is to show that the writer knows nothing of the lines of marching or even the sites of battles. The Roman roads remain the great means of communication much later than that. Take a map of Roman roads in Western Europe, put pins in it for the sites of the great religious foundations, the new markets, and especially for the battles up to, say, 1200, and you will see what their meaning was.

In the same way, to talk of the Scandinavians “becoming bolder and ranging further at sea from the _Fifth_ century” is absurd. We know nothing appreciable about them as pirates or long-voyage men until the end of the _Eighth_, and the very fact that we know nothing about them is proof that they did not early or regularly take these very long voyages.

The worst and most inexcusable direct error is again here in connection with the Filioque clause, on which, as we saw in my last chapter, Mr. Wells quite uncannily specializes in mistakes. He seems to think that this clause was put into the Creed through a sort of personal private whim of Charlemagne in the Council of Aix, and he compares that decree to some vulgar fancy or other of the “late Emperor William writing operas or painting pictures.” He knows that the Spaniards were the first to put it into the Creed, and he knows that the Pope delayed doing so; but he does not know apparently what the reason for the _Doctrine_ was, nor does he appreciate that the vital point at issue was the question of unity. The Greek-speaking half of the Church had never worried very much about the Procession of the Holy Ghost. The fact that the Procession was defined in the Creed as coming from the Father had nothing to do with the idea of excluding the double Procession. The Procession from the Father was only specifically stated in the Creed as against certain heretics who had denied that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father; and the real point about the schism is this: the Universal Church of the early Councils accepted the Primacy of Rome: of that there is no more doubt than of the Battle of Waterloo. But the official and State-ridden Church of the East tended to protest more and more against that Primacy as it developed into the strong Papal idea of the later Dark Ages and Early Middle. That is really the whole affair; and the Filioque was but a pretext.

There appear, of course, those phrases deriving from Mr. Wells’s own anti-Catholic theology, on which it would be tedious to linger after so many earlier examples. Thus the Nestorians—because they are anti-Catholic and far more heretical than the Byzantines—are called “more intelligent and active-minded than the Greeks,” and, of course, “on a much higher level of general education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the West.” Theology, when in a Catholic form, excites nothing but ridicule in minds of Mr. Wells’s level of culture—but when it is Persian—and, best of all, Pagan Persian—it becomes “intense” and “subtle.” The Blessed Trinity is something of which one “cannot make head nor tail,” while an obscure Eastern Heresy is respectable.

But the worst mixture of ignorance and sneering at Divine things combined is on page 386. It is something which I hope it it not too disrespectful to call balderdash. Because certain Mohammedans seem to have wondered whether the Koran had been always in the mind of God (I suppose it was—as all things realized have been in the mind of God), Mr. Wells immediately makes up out of his head an imaginary Christian convert to Islam who is introducing to that world the Gospel of St. John; he actually puts forward the phrase “The Word was God” as meaning that the Bible was God!

I confess I am bewildered. Mr. Wells cannot be ignorant of the term Logos—he cannot possibly be as ignorant as that. And yet here he is plainly thinking that Logos means Holy Writ. Ignorance is ignorance and muddle-headedness is muddle-headedness; but when they mix and reach that degree criticism must be silent.

There runs through the whole of this division the nineteenth-century idea of “progress.” It is taken for granted, in all its crudity, all its tautology, all its unproved and untrue postulates, and all its flagrant contrast with reality—for of all forms of mystical enthusiasm that of “progress” is the stupidest.

Here is an example from page 385. “Politically, Islam was not an advance, but a retrogression from the traditional freedoms and customary laws of the desert.” Retrogression towards what—in the name of Heaven, common sense and the rudiments of education? If I say a motor-bus is not an “advance” but a “retrogression” from the old horse bus, I must mean, I suppose, that I like the old horse bus better than the motor-bus (which I do). Does Mr. Wells mean that the Arab of the desert, unorganized, and doing what he liked, is his ideal? Then why does he give us his whole idea of progress as that people should get more and more together, and regard the stricter unity of mankind as a thing at once good and inevitable? What does he mean?

I doubt if he knows himself what he means. He had a vague feeling for the moment, as he wrote the sentence, that it would be jollier to be a free Pagan Arab playing about than an Arab bound down by a religious system. Instead of saying that the change was a change towards the “less jolly,” he calls it a “retrogression”—which simply means that he thinks the word “progress” means nothing more than “getting towards the kind of thing I like.” In this, though he may not know it, he is perfectly right—that _is_ about the only meaning the word “progress” has in the mouths of its faithful flock. But then, to use Progress as a universal philosophy is essential nonsense. For different people will always like different things. Until you have a rational and firm faith (or philosophy) as to what is best, you have no way of distinguishing between going forwards and going backwards.

I will not disappoint the reader if I quote, as a savoury, the most extravagant example of “progress” in this division. It is on page 393, and runs thus: “Hitherto men of reason and knowledge have never had the assurance and courage of the religious fanatic. But there can be little doubt that they have accumulated settled convictions and gathered confidence during the last few centuries. They have slowly found a means to power through the development of popular education and popular literature, and to-day they are far more disposed to say things plainly and to claim a dominating voice in the organization of human affairs than they have ever been before in the world’s history.”

So now we know that the anti-Christian of the best-seller, of the sexual novel, of the star article, and the cheap textbook, is about to take over the governance of mankind. God help us if he does! But he won’t.