Daily Inspiration Quote by Goldwin Smith

Try to cosplay the Middle Ages honestly and you immediately run into the problem Goldwin Smith is needling: authenticity is a performance held together by lies. "Real effort" is doing the heavy lifting here. Smith isn’t talking about medieval people; he’s talking about moderns who romanticize the medieval as a lifestyle choice, a moral reset button, a simpler time to retreat into when industrial modernity feels tacky or alienating.

"Perpetual prevarication" is a clinical phrase for what we’d now call curated self-mythology. To "live in the Middle Ages" in any meaningful sense would require constant falsification: hiding antibiotics and central heating, airbrushing away infant mortality, famine, debt peonage, and the brutal limits placed on most lives by class and custom. The medieval is not a costume; it’s an ecosystem of constraints. If you want the pageantry without the pathogens, you’re not time-traveling, you’re editing.

As a Victorian-era historian, Smith writes from the front row of modernity’s breakneck transformations - railways, factories, mass politics - when nostalgia was becoming a cultural industry. His jab anticipates a familiar pattern: every age invents a usable past to flatter its present anxieties. The line works because it makes sentimentality sound like a moral failure. It turns nostalgia into an ethical category: not just inaccurate, but dishonest, sustained by continuous, strategic evasions about what the past actually cost.