Clark's historiography has had its epigones, but no enlargers. His concern with belief and faith has been debased into a warrant to apply the methods of political history to the body of churches. Instead of suggesting a variety of religious experience, the results chronicle another bureaucracy. Less happily still, Clark's style has found its imitators. John Molony's prose reads so much like Manning Clark's that it could have been written by John Ritchie.
Literary criticism has to deal with an apparent ubiquity of flaws in masterpieces.
Historiography faces a similar dilemma when its great names are also the most wayward. Certainly, such exemplars of scholarship cannot dislodge Blainey or Ward when they have synthesised their information around human purposes. The inheritors of those whom Clark has chastised as 'straightners' and 'measurers' tell their students that while Clark is a mighty phenomenon, he is not, strictly speaking, an historian. They, like Xavier Herbert, see him as a novelist who has failed to think of a plot. Elsewhere, these guardians have decided that Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle should not be on the reading list.