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Title: The historical novel
An essay
Author: Herbert Butterfield
Release date: December 11, 2023 [eBook #72375]
Language: English
Original publication: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924
Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORICAL NOVEL ***
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: Fetter Lane
C. F. CLAY, Manager
NEW YORK
The Macmillan Co.
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA and
MADRAS
Macmillan and Co., Ltd.
TORONTO
The Macmillan Co. of
Canada, Ltd.
TOKYO
Maruzen-Kabushiki-Kaisha
All rights reserved
THE HISTORICAL
NOVEL ❦❦ AN ESSAY
BY H. BUTTERFIELD
FELLOW OF PETERHOUSE
[Illustration]
CAMBRIDGE: AT
THE UNIVERSITY
PRESS: MCMXXIV
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
The following essay, which was awarded the Le Bas Prize for 1923, is an
attempt to find some relation between historical novels on the one hand
and history treated as a study on the other; and, further, to work out
a method of critical approach. It does not defend historical fiction
against the historian; it welcomes this form of art from his point of
view, finding its justification in the character of history itself.
It seeks to estimate the novel as a work of resurrection, a form of
“history,” a way of treating the past. In this it does not pretend to
be exhaustive, but puts forward one aspect of the problem and attempts
to track down the peculiar virtue of fiction as the gateway to the past.
H. B.
_April 1924_
I
Wordsworth touches the true mood of romantic regret when he writes
“_Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago._”
These words call us to the window that opens out upon the past, and
they set the mind thinking in pictures; for the mind of every one of
us holds a jumble of pictures and stories, shot through, perhaps with
sentiment, that constitute what we have built up for ourselves of the
Past, and are always ready to be called into play by a glimpse of some
old ruin that awakens fine associations, or by a hint of the romantic,
such as Wordsworth gives in those lines. A cathedral bell, or the
mention of Agincourt, or the very spelling of the word “ycleped” may
be enough to send the mind wandering into its own picture-galleries of
history, just as the words “Once upon a time--” waft us into the realms
of fairy-story; these things are symbols, keys that unlock a world in
our minds. Let a Pre-Raphaelite picture remind us of lost fashions or a
schoolboy sing “John Peel” and we are bridging the centuries; and only
a few key-words are needed to give the mind a clue, and we are with the
Elizabethans on the Spanish Main, or with King Harold, defending the
gate of England.
A hundred things have helped to build up this picture-gallery of
history--not merely history-books, but Bible-stories, and local
traditions and stories from opera; not merely biographies but the
border-ballads that the old gipsies would sing amid grim surroundings,
and the rant of politicians who talk of Magna Carta or Nelson, and the
picturesque advertisements of magazines and street-posters; out of all
these there has grown up a world in our minds and that world is what we
make for ourselves of the past. We may try to modify and correct it by
our conscious studies, but we cannot escape it. And not the least of
the sources of it is the Historical Novel.
Sir Walter Scott did not write historical novels because he wished
to teach history in an easy way or to get at a moral indirectly, but
because his mind was full of the past, just as the mind of a musician
is full of tunes; he made for himself a world out of the past, and
lived in it much; and he painted that world for his readers, and turned
it into a tale. Whatever connection the historical novel may have with
the history that men write and build up out of their conscious studies,
or with History, the past as it really happened, the thing that is the
object of study and research, it certainly has something to do with
that world, that mental picture which each of us makes of the past; it
helps our imagination to build up its idea of the past. After all the
history we have ever learned our first thought of Mediaeval England is
quite likely to be a picture of England as the setting for Ivanhoe and
Robin Hood, even if our second thought is that this is all wrong; and
though we may not seek to gather our historical facts from the novel,
there are more subtle things, unconscious prejudices and unformulated
sentiments that we take in unawares, there are pictures that haunt us,
there is an atmosphere that compels us, and if we find nothing else
we find the sentiment of history, the feeling for the past, in the
historical novel. On one side, therefore, the historical novel is a
“form” of history. It is a way of treating the past.
In this it is linked up with legend, and the traditions of localities,
and popular ballads; like these it goes beyond the authenticated data
of history-books, the definitely recoverable things of the past, in
order to paint its picture and tell its story; and like these it often
subordinates fidelity to the recovered facts of history, and strict
accuracy of detail, to some other kind of effectiveness. And these
legends and popular stories are related to the historical novel in
a way similar to that in which a snatch of folk-song is related to
the music of a cultured genius, or an anecdote or a piece of gossip
is related to some work of structure as well as of fiction, like the
novel. The one is a work of apparently popular, or at least anonymous
origin, the other is a deliberately artistic and organised production.
When we hear those legends we feel that it is Earth itself that throws
them out; it is this old World of ours telling a tale that she seems to
remember. These things ask to be believed; a local tradition claims to
be true, or it has no currency; but the historical novel is conscious
in its purpose and in its inventions. We do not say that we enjoy it
“although” it is not quite true to facts; the element of fiction in it
is avowed, and is part of the intention of the work; for the historical
novel is a “form” of fiction as well as of history. It is a tale, a
piece of invention; only, it claims to be true to the life of the past.
And so there is a double set of relations to be considered in any study
of the subject, arising out of the double character of the subject. On
one side the historical novel may be regarded simply as a novel with a
particular kind of background; a story set, say, in the Middle Ages,
just as a novel of modern times might find its setting in some far
country. But if this were the whole truth of the matter there would be
no point in giving it a special study. A fairy-tale is not merely an
ordinary kind of story set in fairy-land, but becomes a different kind
of story by being placed there; in the same way, although in a sense
every novel tends to become in time a historical novel, and there will
come a day when “Sonia” will be useful to the historian for a certain
kind of information, yet a true “historical novel” is one that is
historical in its intention and not simply by accident, one that comes
from a mind steeped in the past. Such a novel will have a special kind
of appeal.
When a composer picks up a piece of poetry and puts it to music he
weaves a web of invention around the words and amplifies them with
something that belongs to an art different from their own; in doing so
he will probably alter the swing of the poem and create rhythms of his
own, and in the music that he makes the original music of the words
themselves will almost certainly be destroyed; even when he is trying
to interpret the poem he may be changing its very character, making
a breezy thing desolate, or converting a majestic hymn into a joyful
anthem, and, unawares, he may be doing everything that would send the
poet crazy, and make men of letters indignant. The final result may
not be good as poetry, may indeed be a good piece of poetry spoilt in
the very things that make it good, the character of the original words
having been altered in a hundred subtle ways. Standing alone it may not
even be a good piece of music exactly. But it may be what it sets out
to be--a good piece of work in a form neither poetry nor music, but a
combination of the two, a new creation, something with an appeal of its
own. That is to say, it may be a good piece of song, that justifies
itself when it comes from the voice of the singer.
Like an opera, in which music and poetry and drama melt into one
another to produce what amounts to a new kind of art, with a purpose
and an idiom of its own; like a song, in which music and poetry are
interlocked, and become one harmony, the historical novel is a fusion.
It is one of the arts that are born of the marriage of different arts.
A historical event is “put to fiction” as a poem is put to music; it
is turned into story as words are turned into song; it is put into
a context of narrative which is like the result that is obtained
when words are printed between the staves of a vocal score. And just
as a composer in choosing a poem to set to music, accepts certain
limitations, volunteers a certain allegiance, and must in some way be
loyal to the poetry he has selected, so the historical novelist owes
a certain loyalty to the history of which he treats. But because this
is a marriage of the arts it is not a complete loyalty, and just as
poets complain because musicians modify the original rhythms of their
poems and the lilt of the words, so historians cry out because a Scott
tampers with history. For all arts that combine different forms of
art are beset with divided loyalties like these, and with causes of
disagreement and annoyance. The very appeal that they should make is a
thing to be discovered, a matter of controversy. And in the study of
them, every issue is a complicated one.
And, lastly, it may be said that a given song may be good poetry
if read in an armchair; the music of a song may be good in itself
if played over on some instrument; and yet the song may be a poor
thing when sung by anybody, if the two do not hang together, if the
marriage is not a harmony. In the same way, a historical novel may be
a good book but not a good historical novel. It may be a just piece
of history; or it may be a good story; but it may not be good with
the special goodness of a historical novel, it may not combine its
two elements in just the way that is needed. It is not exactly that
history and fiction should dovetail into one another to produce a
coherent whole; it is not simply that the story of the Popish Plot
can be rounded off by a piece of invention, or the tragedy of Mary
Queen of Scots depicted more fully and with more connectedness by
the interspersion of imaginary episodes; but it is rather that in
the historical novel history and fiction can enrich and amplify one
another, and interpenetrate. They can grow into one another, each
making the other more powerful. And they can make a special kind of
appeal to the reader.
* * * * *
The facts of the past, the stuff out of which men write their
Histories, are used for many things besides the manufacture of history.
The economist, the politician, the musician, the ecclesiastic--in fact,
specialists of all sorts, have their own use for the facts that make up
history; they make themselves more expert in their special departments
by studying the historical side of those departments, but they are not
historians any more than is the architect who tries to make himself
a better architect by finding out how houses used to be ventilated.
The theorist makes his generalisations out of the facts of the past,
and talks about the laws that govern the movements of history and the
things that determine progress and the goal to which human development
is moving--but he is not a historian any more than the priest talking
about Providence is a historian, although both these deal with
interpretations of history. They are simply philosophers trying to
interpret man’s experience of life to man. The Historian’s interest in
the past is not the economist’s or the philosopher’s interest in it, he
loves the past for its own sake and tries to live in it, tries to live
over again the lost life of yesterday, turning it back as one would
turn back the pages of a book to re-read what has gone before; and he
seeks to see the past as a far-country and to think himself into a
different world. And so the use that he makes of the accumulated facts
that tell about the past, is to recapture a bygone age and turn it into
something that is at once a picture and a story.
History, then, means the world looking back upon itself, and storing up
memories that are pictures. History is any tale that the old world can
tell when it starts remembering. It is just the world’s Memory.
The love of the past for its own sake, and the fondness for lingering
over those things that endure as relics or as symbols of the past, and
the regret for the things that are lost for ever are what one might
call romanticism. Gibbon and Gregorovius had this feeling when the
sight of the splendid ruins and remains of Rome drove them, each in
turn, to look into the story that lay behind monument and masonry, and
to be writers of history. All of us have this feeling when the glimpse
of some historic town, or the impressive sternness of an old castle,
or the sight of a Roman wall, awakens a world in our minds, and sets
us thinking on all the tales that stone could tell if only it could
speak the history that it stores. These buildings and remains are the
maimed survivals, the broken emblems, of a vivid thrilling life that
has been lived, and that we love to look back upon. Distance lends
enchantment, and the things of long-ago draw us with their strangeness,
and with a far-away, picturesque glamour that surrounds them; and there
is just the escape that we seek from modern life, in the possibility
that we have of thinking ourselves into a different world, which we
can suffuse with a romantic glow and which we can think of as having
more colour and adventure than our own world. But, most of all, the
reason why we love the ruins of an abbey, and preserve the flags that
are riddled with the bullets of Waterloo--the reason why we prize the
book in the margins of which Coleridge himself scribbled pencil-notes
of literary criticism, and keep a lock of Keats’s hair, is that these
things are like the stray flowers that cheat the scythe or like the
last stars that outdare the morning sun; they are the few things that
are saved from a shipwreck. The work of a historian is to reconstruct
the past out of the debris that is cast up by the sea from the wrecks
of countless ages.
Romanticism is at bottom a sigh for the things that perish, and the
things that can never happen again. It is like the soldier going over
the hill to fight, but always looking back and lingering. The things
that Time destroys we love with a love fed by romantic regret--the
sunset that will never just happen again, the snows of yester-year, the
beliefs that are being sapped, the days of our own childhood. In _The
Cloister and the Hearth_, Gerard at the beginning of his wanderings
is kindly treated by a woman and her husband; as he leaves them they
wish him “God speed,” and, says the author, “with that they parted,
and never met again in this world”; and nobody can read that sentence
without loving these people more. If some novelists had described this
incident, if, say Dickens had been writing this, it would have been
part of his way of working, it would have been in keeping with his
avowed theories of life, to renew the connection between Gerard and
his kind acquaintances later in life, and by some coincidence to make
the good woman and her husband turn up when we had forgotten their
existence. But Reade not only declines to do this, he goes out of his
way, beforehand, to tell us that he is not going to do this; he makes
these people pass out into the darkness and so he leaves us with a
feeling of affectionate regret for them. When we know a thing must
die, something comes to reinforce our love for it, and if we were all
told to take our last look upon this earth to-morrow, what worst of
world-haters would not ask again and again for “just one peep more”?
Universal literature is full of regrets for all the lovely things
that die. All history is full of movements that are born of romantic
reactions--of prophets stoned on one day and mourned the next, of
rejected leaders idolised when they have passed off the stage and soon
carried to power again by a mad romantic impulse that moves the people,
of kings beheaded and then loved when they have become a memory, of
Restorations, of returns from Elba, and of Jacobite risings. Every
generation cries that the world is going to the dogs and that things
are not as they have been, and two years before the Spanish Armada was
routed an Englishman could complain that English courage was on the
wane. All this is romanticism; and it is romanticism that makes old
men gather round a chimney-corner to tell a tale of old times, and
makes hardened heroes love to fight their battles over again. It is
this feeling that sends us treading again the haunts of childhood and
recapturing childhood scenes; that makes our imagination play around
historic sites and ancient buildings, peopling them with a life that we
have invented, and awaking them to their former activeness; and that so
thrills the heart with a sense of the great bygone things, that some
men cannot see the sun go down red without dreaming of battles long
ago, till the moors become alive with excited horsemen and with noises
that the hills turn into echoes, and the past seems to unearth itself.
It is possible to imagine a political theorist visiting Brazil to make
a study of political conditions there; or to think of a student of
public health going to Edinburgh to gain a knowledge of its drainage
system; but apart from these specialists there is the traveller who
will describe Brazil to men as a strange country, and there is the
Stevenson who will give a sketch of Edinburgh for the general reader;
and the historian is like these. He travels the past in a caravan; he
dips into it as one would dip into Edinburgh, peeping into the shadowy
slums and crooked streets, and hunting the eternal human things. He
describes the past not because it has connections with the present
that can be worked out, not because it holds a moral for to-day, but
precisely because it is a strange land, precisely because it is past,
and can never happen again; and he seeks to paint life as a whole--not
man on his economic side, or man as a political animal, but man in
all his adventures in living. Specialists and theorists may tread at
his heels to draw a moral or to make generalisations, but as for the
romantic historian, his is the mad human longing to see and to know
people, to feel with them, and to peep at the world they lived in,
and to understand their ways, their humours, their loves and fears.
As he looks to the deserted ruins of a hillside farm he wonders what
sentiments filled the hearts of men and women there when Jacobite
rebels rode past on their dismal return Northwards; when he sees the
old mill, where the tossing hill-streams meet and the twisted roads
come to a ford, he wonders what difference it made to the children
playing at the water’s edge, when Cromwell and his troopers passed that
way; and when he stands in the shadow of what was once a frowning wall,
he asks himself all the things that the wall must have overheard and
overlooked, and all the tales of joy and adventure, of trouble and of
treachery, that it might tell if it were not doomed to keep them to
itself. And once the romanticist has stared at this programme of his,
and has confessed his faith and has faced himself with this thing that
he is really seeking--once he has understood his heart’s longing, then
there must flash upon him the tremendous truth--the impossibility of
history.
To the politician, the important movements and striking decisions and
big crises that for him are “history,” are things within reach; the
military man has not much difficulty in recovering the noisy things
that for him are “history”; the diplomatist knows where to look for
the story of international tangles, and the mysteries of pacts and
treaties and the hidden sources of power in a state; court and camp
and parliament house are rich with documents and records; the things
that are played out in the limelight, the stately public events are,
in a way, simple to the historian, and the men who talk of democracies
and regiments and alliances, and who think of people in the mass
and can find food in statistics and budgets--these can discuss the
condition of England and the welfare of the people. But they are far
from life. Now the “huts where poor men lie” elude the world’s Memory.
The ploughman whom Gray saw, plodding his weary way, the rank and file
of Monmouth’s rebel crowd--every man of them a world in himself, a
mystery of personality, more wonderful than a star--the tavern-keepers
whom Puritan England strove to root out--these have left no memorial
and all that we know about them is just enough to set us guessing and
wondering. The things by which we remember an old friend--his peculiar
laugh, his way of drawing his hand through his hair, his whistle in the
street, his humour, and the sound of his footstep on the stair--these
things, at any rate, we cannot hope to recapture in history, any more
than we can recapture last night’s sunset, or hear again a song sung
by Jenny Lind. The most homely and intimate and personal things slip
through the hands of the historian. The history that the romanticist in
us longs for, the desire to touch the pulsing heart of men who toyed
with the world as we do, and left it long ago, is the quest for the
most elusive thing in the world. We who cannot know our own friends,
save in a fragmentary way and at occasional moments of self-revelation,
cannot hope to read the hearts of half-forgotten kings. We cannot hope
to get close to the lives of humble men who trod silently through the
world. These we cannot fasten upon at all; history is thwarted; Earth
cannot remember.
History can only make her pictures and rebuild the past out of the
things she can save from a shipwreck; she will piece together just so
much of the battle of Agincourt as the sea washes up to the shores.
The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap
of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through
the darkness. And so, history is full of tales half-told, and of tunes
that break off in the middle; she gives us snatches from the lives of
men, a peep at some corner of a battlefield, just enough to make us
long for a fuller vision. All history is full of locked doors, and of
faint glimpses of things that cannot be reached. The Middle Ages will
kick a heel into the twentieth century, in a Fountains Abbey--in some
straggling ruin--and will ask us to piece out its former, completed
grandeur for ourselves and to people it with a life of our own
imagining. History can seldom recover a given set of circumstances and
make us see a definite situation, a particular knot of human action at
a given place and a given time; if two diplomatists meet in a certain
room to settle a problem, and afterwards describe their proceedings to
their respective governments, or recall them in memoirs, if Napoleon
meets Metternich in time of crisis at Prague, we can only recover
a dim and faulty account of the interview from their conflicting
descriptions; and yet this is one of the most precise and clear
situations that a historian might wish to narrate. And when a Carlyle,
in the middle of a rugged description of the taking of the Bastille,
can break away to apostrophise, in a way that is sublime:
Oh evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fell slant
on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out in the silent main....
he is doing something, he is catching the moment, in a way that can
seldom be achieved in history, unless history brings in fiction to
help her. History, then, fails the romanticist. Its shortcomings become
apparent when we try to particularise, when say, we wish to see a
definite picture. About the closest human things, history only tells us
enough to set us guessing and wondering.
The history of text-books, the history that can be made out of the
recoverable facts of the past, is really little more than a chart to
the past. If people think of England there flashes in upon them a
panorama, of green fields and telegraph-posts, and intersecting roads
and clusters of houses. “England” comes home to us as a jumble of
pictures that melt into one another and that we have caught perhaps
from the windows of a railway-carriage as we have darted across
country. Similarly, if we unlock the past in our minds a score of
pictures leap before us, breaking into one another. And the history
that history-books can tell us bears a relation to that picture which
we make for ourselves of the past, something like the relation which a
map of England bears to that mental picture that we form of the English
countryside. And just as when we look at an ordnance map we can see
where a path runs and can tell where it strikes up hill or down dale,
where it touches a wood and where it follows a stream, but if we wish
to make a picture of the walk we must put in the hawthorn-hedges,
the pretty turns of the path, and the rocky edge of the stream for
ourselves--so when we read history, if we wish not merely to see great
figures strutting upon a stage, acting a public part, but to fill in
the lines of the picture with the robust life of the countryside, and
to catch the hundred human touches, if we wish, say, to see the vivid
life of three hundred years ago stirring in the crooked streets and
topsy-turvy houses that converge upon York Minster, we must charge our
history with some of the human things that are irrecoverable, we must
reinforce history by our imagination. The public life of great men is
before our eyes, some of their private life is open to us; but the life
that fills the street with bustle, that makes every corner of a slum a
place of wonder and interest, the life that is a sad and gay, weary and
thrilling thing in every hillside cottage, is a dim blurred picture in
a history. Because of this, history cannot come so near to human hearts
and human passions as a good novel can; its very fidelity to facts
makes it not perhaps less true to life, but farther away from the heart
of things. All the real history of people that a text-book could give
is like the chart of Treasure Island--just enough to set a wild heart
dreaming; the chart gives generalities, it describes the lie of the
land, but if we wish to _see_ a picture of Treasure Island we must make
the chart the jumping-off board for some play of the imagination.
There is a poem, called “The Old Ships,” in which Flecker tells of how
he has seen vessels, “with leaden age o’er cargoed,” sail “beyond the
village which men still call Tyre.” These ships, like everything that
survives from the past, are a hint to the imagination; they suggest a
story; and this is the kind of thinking to which they drive the poet:
“_And all those ships were certainly so old,
Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell-raked them, till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold--_
_But I have seen ...
A drowsy ship of some yet older day;
And, wonder’s breath indrawn,
Thought I--who knows--who knows--but in that same
(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new
--Stern painted brighter blue--)
That talkative, bald-headed seaman came
(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)
From Troy’s doom-crimson shore,
And with great lies about his wooden horse,
Set the crew laughing and forgot his course._
_It was so old a ship--who knows, who knows?_”
In these lines is shown the lure of all ancient things that store a
tale which they cannot tell.
There is a charm and mystery in unremembered things. There is something
fine in the sight of a ridge of hill against the sky when one does not
know what lies beyond or whether a surprise of rolling sea beneath a
sudden fall of cliff, or a panorama of wooded valleys, is in store
at the summit--so one can only guess and wonder. And, when, in some
border-village we look at hills that have watched centuries stride
by, and ask ourselves of distant scenes and old adventure that the
hills must have overlooked, and when we learn that these matters were
writ in water and that about them not history any more than the stern
hill-crags can break her everlasting silence--then here is adventure
for the imagination, and in our fancy we play around places that we
know and events that we have heard of, weaving around “What-has-been”
the things that might have been. We do the kind of thinking that is
needed to turn a map into a picture, the kind of thinking that might
translate last year’s National Budget into a drama of hearts and homes.
It is in this that there lies the first justification of the historical
novel, and one way of giving that particular kind of literature a
relation to experience. No infallible generalisation can give a key to
all historical novels and to everything that appears in them, but here
at least is a useful key that will fit many locks and will explain much
that there is in all these novels, and moreover will provide a system
of relations between these and the history that is a study. It cannot
be too strongly stated that the explanation of historical novels is
not to be found in the fact that history needs an admixture of fiction
to give it spice, to make it exciting, to relieve the boredom. Truth
is stranger than fiction and some of the most incredible episodes that
have been found in novels have been those which an author has too
foolishly taken straight from life. That there is a place for such a
thing as the historical novel is due to a certain inadequacy in history
itself. History is full of events and issues out of which a story
could be made, and of adventures that are exciting enough; it is not
wanting in incident, but these things are not stories, they have to be
transmuted into story; for there are irrecoverable things in history,
and these are the close, intimate personal things, the touches of
direct experience that are needed in story-making, the things that we
most remember in friends we used to have, what might be called “the
human touches.” In order to catch these things in the life of the past,
and to make a bygone age live again, history must not merely be eked
out by fiction, it must not merely be extended by invented episodes; it
must be turned into a novel; it must be “put to fiction” as a poem is
put to music.
When history tells us that Napoleon did a certain thing, it is the
work of each of us, in trying to bring history home to ourselves,
to amplify in our imagination what the history-book gives us, and to
_see_ Napoleon doing the action. It is all very well to be told that
a certain event took place, but the past strikes home in our minds
with immeasurably greater power if we can see it happening and can
catch it as a picture; and this is what we try to do for ourselves
when we read a history-book. The important thing is to see the past,
and not simply to hear somebody describe it. It is not enough to read
of a certain event; we must be there, watching--we must fix it into
a picture for ourselves, we must recapture the particular moment.
History does not do this for us; just the thing that it cannot do is to
catch the moment precisely; so we do this for ourselves; we complete
history in our supposition. Every man who has an idea of the woman
Mary Queen of Scots, or who can catch glimpses of what happened at
Waterloo, has added to history something from his own imagination, and
has filled in the lines for himself. The past as it exists for all
of us, the world of the past in our minds, is history synthesised by
the imagination, and fixed into a picture by something that mounts to
fiction. For history fails when a certain situation is to be recovered,
or a definite combination of circumstances is to be seized upon, or a
particular moment is to be caught. And yet it is a cold and bloodless
thing if these things cannot be achieved, and the life of the past is
not in any way resurrected without them. The chart must be turned into
a picture, if history is to be a recovery of the life of the past and
not a mere post-mortem examination. The imagination of the historian
does this for him; the most musty of parchments holds for him a story
and speaks to a world that exists in his mind; but everybody is not a
historian; so historical fiction does the work for all the world; it
fuses the past into a picture, and makes it live.
Again, any attempt to recapture the past is limited and inadequate if
it keeps a reader conscious of the fact that he is a modern creature,
looking at a distant world and comparing it with his own. It is not
enough to recover the facts of the lives that men lived long-ago and to
trace out the thread of event; we must recover the adventure of their
lives; and the whole fun and adventure of their lives, as of ours, hung
on the fact that at any given moment they could not see ahead, and
did not know what was coming. To the men of 1807 the year 1808 was a
mystery and an unexplored tract; they saw a hundred possibilities in it
where the modern reader only sees the one thing that actually happened;
they never knew what surprise awaited them at the next turn in the
road; and therefore, to study the year 1807 remembering all the time
what happened in 1808 and in the succeeding trail of years, is to miss
the adventure and the great uncertainties and the element of gamble
in their lives. It is not enough to know that Napoleon won a certain
battle; if history is to come back to us as a human thing we must see
him on the eve of battle eagerly looking to see which way the dice
will fall, with fears and hesitations perhaps, with a sense of all the
things that may happen in spite of all his calculations, and with an
uncertainty before all the range of possible things that may upset his
plans. The victory that is achieved on one day must not be regarded as
being inevitable the night before; and where we cannot help seeing the
certainty of a desired issue, the men of the time were all suspense,
and full of wonderings. History does not always give us things like
these, for they are irrecoverable personal things; but we know they
existed. They are the things that make life an experience. And they are
the very touches that are needed to turn history into a story.
These things are what are meant, then, when it is affirmed that the
history that Romanticism in all of us demands must be at once a picture
and story. And it is in this way that the history-book which belongs to
the “literature of knowledge” is transformed into the “literature of
power.”
In the opening chapter of _Ivanhoe_ there is a piece of writing that
illustrates the difference between the historian and the historical
novelist in the use that they make of the same historical material.
In the introductory part of that chapter Scott recapitulates, “for the
information of the general reader,” the conditions of the age with
which he is dealing, describing them in general terms as a historian
would.
Four generations (he writes) had not sufficed to blend the hostile
blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common
language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which
still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under
all the consequences of defeat.... At court and in the castles of
the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated,
Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the
pleading and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short,
French was the language of honour, of chivalry and even of justice,
while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned
to the use of rustics and hinds who knew no other. Still, however,
the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and
those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated,
occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt
the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render
themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this
necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English
language, in which the speech of the victor and the vanquished
have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so
richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and
from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe.
This is a history-lesson. A conflict of forces, a set of tendencies
is described in what might be a chapter straight from a history-book.
Scott is showing the position that the English language occupied at a
given period, and is making the sort of generalisation that it is the
historian’s business to make. We are not being treated to an essay
by Dryasdust; there is imagination in the depiction that is given;
but this is the historian’s way of treating historical facts; it is
essentially the past being described to later ages, it is not the past
telling its own tale, giving itself away; and it is a chart to the age
rather than a picture. Even in a further sense than this the historian
speaks in his peculiar idiom; for he not only describes the world as it
was at some time past, but he hauls this world into relationship with
the whole of subsequent development and puts it in its place in the
whole cinematograph-film that is History. In the concluding sentence he
gives the significance of that conflict of languages which he has been
describing, and sees it as a link in the whole story of our language.
And because of this the reader does not lose himself in the past; he
stands aside to compare it with the present. This part of the chapter
gives in reality the stage-directions of the novel, and it reminds the
reader that he is not in the past, and so breaks the spell.
In the ensuing dialogue, however, where Wamba and Gurth have to
contemplate “the swine being turned Normans,” this same historical
material is translated into terms of fiction. It is not stretched, or
varnished, or distorted. The novelist does not try to outdo history by
invention, or to round off the true historical position by a kind of
idealisation; at least the significance of the chapter does not lie
in any of these things. What is important is the fact that here the
same historical material is given to the reader in a different way,
and is treated with a different aim. Instead of the general there is
now the particular. Tendencies that were broadly described before are
given precision, we see what they mean when they are pinned down to
individual cases. Before, we were given the formula for the age; now we
see the forces that were described manifesting themselves at a definite
place, at a particular moment. Here the past speaks for itself. We
see it and are in it, we do not simply hear a man describing it. And
instead of that conflict of languages being put into its context in
the history of language, the novelist puts it into its context in the
whole life of the time, and hunts out a different set of implications
in it. All this comes with greater vividness to the reader. History is
reinforced by being written in the story-teller’s way.
This is one example taken from a chapter in which the historian and
the historical novelist chance to rub shoulders with each other, but
the idea is capable of being projected on to a larger canvas. In the
Introduction to _Ivanhoe_ Scott shows how all this can be extended
when, in terms of the historian, he again describes the set of facts,
which he has turned into fiction, the chart which he has changed into a
picture; this time on a bigger scale, covering the whole range of the
novel.
It seemed to the author that the existence of two races in the
same country, the vanquished distinguished by their plain, homely,
blunt manner, and the free spirit infused by their ancient
institutions and laws; the victors, by the high spirit of military
fame, personal adventure and whatever could distinguish them as
the Flower of Chivalry might, intermixed with other characters
belonging to the same time and country, interest the reader by the
contrast, if the author should not fail on his part.
This is a description of a mere relationship between classes of a
society. Scott sees in it a story. He divines in it just the situations
and issues out of which a story can be made. He sees its implications
in individual lives. Instead of contemplating its effects on future
generations he lays bare its workings in the scheme of life of people
who lived under it. Just as a prism catches the light and turns it into
colours he stands between the historical generalisation and his readers
and he breaks up the general into the particular and projects it as a
picture. The result is like the condensing of a cloud into raindrops.
Fiction is like the dust which creates a sunbeam and helps the sunlight
to show that it is there. And in this way Scott does something for
history that the historian by himself cannot do, or can seldom do; he
recaptures the life of an age, and resurrects a picture of the past.
The historical novelist receives his hint from history, but such
examples as these from _Ivanhoe_ are enough to make it apparent that
this hint need not necessarily be a story ready-made, a sequence of
events to be followed. Many historical novels are stories straight
from a history-book--the adventures of Guy Fawkes, the sorrows of Mary
Queen of Scots--amplified and rounded off by fiction perhaps, and
re-told with some variations. History may provide plot and adventure,
and fiction may just fill in the lines where history is inadequate
or idealise incidents and careers where history is incomplete or
disappointing. It is claimed of some of Jokai’s novels that, staged
as they are in lands where passion and action are intense and full
of colour, and drawn as they are from a history that is crowded with
romantic and thrilling episodes, they do not need an invention of
incident or a perversion of history to make them complete, but are just
a vivid re-telling of things that actually happened. The books of Dumas
are filled with incidents and situations that are picked straight from
history and are marvellously connected into an organised story. And
many writers have assimilated into the body of their novels incidents
that are true to fact or anecdotes from legend, and so have made
history and fiction fit into each other in dovetail fashion. All this
represents one way in which history can be incorporated into a novel,
but it is not the only way; and the particular fact that is brought to
light by the Introduction to _Ivanhoe_, as well as by other things,
is the fact that history does not merely inspire fiction by providing
a tale, a thread of incident, a network of action, to be re-told in
story-book fashion; it may only provoke a tale, it may just provide
situations and relationships and problems which give the right kind
of issue that is needed in story-making. Scott saw implicit in the
conditions of the age of Richard I a set of human relationships which
were materials for a novel. He had the power of divining the implied
story that was hidden beneath a description of Anglo-Norman relations a
few generations after the Conquest.
Everything in life is full of implied story. Every piece of coal
stores up history and a tale of marvel. Parish accounts that tell of
a leap in the amount of money spent upon “faggots” in the sixteenth
century hold a hidden story of persecution and martyrdom. There is
a tragedy that can be read into many a newspaper advertisement, and
there are people in the world who can see the adventure and the
wandering and the panorama that are locked up in a railway-guide.
The geography of Africa that might be a dull recapitulation of facts
and figures might be turned into narrative, into a story of travels
across an unknown continent. And if a politician wishes to bring home
to people the consequences of an unwelcome measure he has only to
work out a particular instance of hardship that may result from the
measure, giving it preciseness and turning it into a story, and he
will catch the imagination of electors far sooner than any logic could
convince their intellects. It is in this way that the novelist recasts
historical material into story-form, and it is in this way that history
is made more effectual than the history-book.
Here, then, are the two ways by which history passes into a novel. In
the one case it merely gives material that can be woven into story
in the same way as a geography-book can be translated into a book of
travel; in the other case it provides a story which a writer has to
work into his own fictions. The former method is, in a way, organic,
since what it prescribes is that a writer shall be true to the life of
the past in his inventions; it gives the key in which he must set his
tune. According to this, history supplies the metal and the novelist
creates the mould. He may invent the characters, the dialogues, the
whole range of incident through which it is his aim to make History
speak for herself; and he need not distort the characters of actual
historical people to fit them into his story, or do violence to the
chronological table in order to draw together the threads of his
plot. But the second method implies a further fidelity to the facts
of the history-book and to the sequence of public events, and it may
be called a comparatively “mechanical” method in that it means that a
story taken from history has to be dovetailed into the fictions of the
novelist; the business is one of adjustment, and sometimes a wrench
has to be given to history in order to subdue it to the demands of the
novel. And although seldom or never can a historical novel be found
in which either of these methods is completely isolated, yet they are
two separate things, representing a double set of demands that History
makes upon the writer of novels, and they yield some fruitful results
if they are regarded separately. Wamba and Gurth are representatives
of the one method; and in the same novel Richard I and Robin Hood
stand for the other method, since their existence implies stories from
history and legend that are required to be adjusted to the inventions
of the novelist.
To say therefore that Scott, in _Ivanhoe_, translated into terms
of fiction the piece of historical material, the set of human
relationships which in his Introduction he described as being the basis
of the novel, is only true in a general way. But this was the principal
thing that Scott did; and in it he showed his greatest power, and the
historical novel displayed its finest virtue. In the Introduction to
_The Monastery_ he makes a similar confession of the key-idea of his
novel.
The general plan of the story was, to conjoin two characters in
that bustling and contentious age, who, thrown into situations
which gave them different views on the subject of the reformation,
should, with the same sincerity and purity of intention, dedicate
themselves, the one to the support of the sinking fabric of the
Catholic Church, the other to the establishment of the reformed
doctrines. It was supposed that some interesting subjects for
narrative might be derived from opposing two such enthusiasts to
each other in the path of life, and contrasting the real worth of
both with their passions and prejudices.
Here again is a set of historical conditions which, even when described
in so rough and swift a fashion, are full of implied story. To turn
these into a novel necessitates no distortion of great historical
events; what the writer does is to hunt out those situations and
problems which are implicit in the life of the age and in the described
conditions, and which are the kind of issues that make good story. In
the same way the very title, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, suggesting
as it does a collision of loyalties and a human problem, is a
description of something in mediaeval life that cries out to be turned
into a tale.
The conditions of the life of the present-day, the current habits of
thought, the social relationships of men, the economic situation of the
country, the welfare of family and Church, and the relations of those
institutions and groups that make their conflicting claims upon the
loyalty and cover so much of the activity of individuals, are rich with
problems and anomalies, and situations and combinations of circumstance
which are peculiar to the age, and are the source of most of the issues
of the novel of the present-day. The entanglement of the individuals in
these conditions produces problems of experience that are peculiarly
modern. In the same way every set of circumstances produces its special
set of human issues, every age has its own life-problems; and the novel
of an age of monasticism will range through a different scheme of
problems from that of an age of divorce-law activity, and the world of
the Industrial Movement will show life dominated by issues different
from those of the age of Chivalry. The twentieth century differs from
the twelfth not merely in its language, its dress, its implements
and armour, but in its whole experience of life. It is not merely in
the suits and trappings that one age contrasts with another; and for
this reason the historical novel is justified, as something more than
picturesque scene-painting, for it treats of other ages’ experiments
in living, and depicts human nature breaking in upon a different
set of experiences, a different range of problems. When Scott in the
Introductions to _Ivanhoe_ and to _The Monastery_ summarises a state
of society therefore, and assumes a given set of human relationships
as the basis of a novel, he is carrying with these things the whole
range of experiences and issues that are involved in them and that
are peculiar to them, and his purpose is to turn these into story as
a present-day novelist turns the social conditions of the twentieth
century into fiction.
History, then, is not merely a taskmaster to the novelist. Too often
the historical novelist has been spoken of as being hampered by history
and tied down by chronological tables. He has been regarded as a
novelist working under limitations and with one hand tied, history
restricting his imagination, and setting him a boundary. But all that
has just been said implies that history is not merely the chain that
ties the novelist down; rather it is the wing that helps him to soar
into a new range of problems and experiences. It is his inspiration,
and not simply a tie. When Scott in his Introductions gave himself
a basis for his novels it is true that he was accepting certain
limitations and agreeing to work within a given set of facts, just as
an Arctic explorer agrees to accept the hardships of cold weather; but
at the same time he was opening up to himself a different world and a
life that rested on a different basis and that so provided him with a
host of fresh story-issues.
If the historical novelist regards his duty as being to avoid
anachronisms, history will seem to him a chain. The different condition
of things existing in the period of which he writes will be a source
of labour to him, and a pitfall. But to the true historical novelist
they are a glory, they are the whole point of his work, and what was a
weakness becomes a strength. If a writer wishes to “work up” a period
in order to set a story in it, he will feel history a fetter and every
unexpected fact may hamper the story he intended to tell. But if he
has steeped his mind in some past age, and has lived in that age,
turning it over and over in his imagination, realising the conditions
of affairs and the relationships of men and pondering over the
implications of these and so recasting the life of the age for himself,
then that particular age and those special conditions will suggest
their own story, and the historical peculiarities of that age will give
point to his novel and will become a power. There is all the difference
in the world between a man who has a story to tell and wishes to set
it in a past age and to adjust it to the demands of history, and the
man who has the past in his head and allows it to come forth in story.
There is an immense gulf between the man who works up a period in
history in order to tell his story without anachronisms, and a man
whose stories come from a mind steeped in the past. In the one case
history has to be laboriously gathered up around the story, and it is a
burden; in the other case the history is there to begin with, and the
story grows out of the history. In the true historical novel the writer
has learned to feel at home in the age with which he is dealing. Such
a novel comes out of a world of the Past that exists in the writer’s
mind. The history that it embodies will be true or inaccurate according
as the man has throughout his life built up that world in his mind on
true foundations, but in any case that history will come spontaneously;
and here the historical novelist is not a novelist working under
limitations, but one who has captured new fields of experience and of
circumstance and has conquered a new world for his art.
In all this, too, there can further be worked out a defence of the
historical novel against one of the charges that are sometimes brought
up against it. The historical novel is specially open to the temptation
of mere picturesqueness. The one thing that is essentially to be kept
in mind in the whole idea of history that has been described above, is
not that this method of treating the past is shallow, but that it is
specially liable to descend to shallowness without knowing and to be
satisfied with mere externals, and pageantry, and a veneer of history.
Popular literature is full of empty fiction that sets a conventional
story in a picturesque background and thinks it has done justice to
history when it has clothed its personages in coloured costumes
and given their language a touch of the obsolete, and raised up a
stage-setting of courts and camps and Gothic architecture; and the
drawback to the historical novel lies in the fact that the touch of
strangeness, the sense of the far-away, the hint of colour and romance
in all these, too often makes the emptiness of the show more tolerable;
the fine feathers disguise the worthlessness of the bird below. But
if it is remembered that every state of society has its peculiar
experience of life, that every age of history shows mankind breaking in
upon experience and upon the problems of life at different points, and
that each generation has its attitude to existence, and its peculiar
synthesis, then it must be seen that the charge of shallowness is not
one that can be made against the whole idea of historical novels, and
that these, like any other novel, may be rich with experience and
may touch human issues. A story that describes a Roman watching the
decay of the Empire that he had been taught would endure for ever,
and seeing a surging barbarian life flood into its borders like some
awful eruption of Nature before which human effort is futile and men
can only look helplessly on, may be a mere melodrama, unredeemed by
its pageantry and picturesqueness; but it can be more--the story of
a unique experience, and of one of the urgent moments in the life of
mankind. Shallowness is not the evil of the historical novel--it is
only its danger.
Lastly, it may be said that the inspiration of the historical novel is
not merely history, but also geography. To a person for whom history
did not exist at all a landscape would be merely a flat picture; to
one who can think history into it, it has a dimension in time. To some
people the ruins of Rome may be a poor heap of fragments, pieces of
broken art-ware; but to Gibbon and Gregorovius who brought to the place
a sense of the history behind, those ruins were the starting-point
of a trail that led back to the glories of ancient Rome and were the
clue to a story. If people re-tread the scenes of a distant childhood
it is not merely a flat picture that comes before their eyes, but
other scenes behind it, scenes that the memory has stored and that
are somehow locked up in the present one; the very landscape looks
different, and is richer because it breathes the past. To an architect
a building is not merely a dead weight of stone, but a mass of forces
striking in different directions and brought somehow to a poise; the
whole structure is thrilled with life and in every line of it there
is motion. To a historical mind similarly, a building must _look_
different. It has not merely length and breadth and height, but also
a certain “throughness,” an extension in time; behind the “Now” of
that building there is a long trail of Moments of the same building,
the place has not merely a few associations with the past but a whole
context in history; and the sight of the walls at the present time is
only the last picture of a cinematograph-reel which represents all the
hundred Yesterdays that are folded up within the stone. Our fleeting
“Now” is only the last term of an ever-lengthening series. Time is
locked up within scenery and buildings; and the aim of history is to
unlock it and to make it speak its secret.
What we call historic sites and buildings represent places in which
this secret has in some measure been recovered. They have not existed
longer than other places in geography, but they are places about which
History can remember things. The cinematograph-film which represents
their extension in time is not completely locked away from us; and the
historical mind means among other things the power to feel the film
there and to recall pictures in it at the mere sight of the place, on
the mere suggestion of geography.
In Sir Walter Scott this power of reading history into places existed
in real intensity.
To me (he said) the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the
source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated
landscape from the battlement of Stirling Castle. I do not by
any means infer that I was dead to the feeling or picturesque
scenery--but show me an old castle in a field of battle and I was
at home at once....
If he saw a scene about which tradition or the history-book had nothing
to tell, he still saw the history there, and tried to read the past
into the place. Someone wrote of him:
He was but half-satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he
could not connect it with some local legend, and when I was forced
sometimes to confess with the knife-grinder “Story! God bless you!
I have none to tell, sir,” he would laugh and say “then let us make
one--nothing so easy as to make a tradition.”
Such a story invented around a place, such an attempt to call up
history out of a scene, is really an act of homage, an offering made to
the place, a work of dedication.
History is rooted in geography, and the historical novel, which is a
novel that seeks to be rooted in some ways in actuality, finds one
of its roots in geography. The quotation made above from Scott’s
Introduction to _The Monastery_ is part of an explanation which the
author gives of the reason why he chose the celebrated ruins of
Melrose as the scene of his story, although he described the place
as “possessing less of romantic beauty than some other scenes in
Scotland.” Of Jokai it has been said “The world around him--Hungary,
Russia, and Turkey--breathed more romance and imagination than did the
Highlands to Scott or France to Dumas”; and here was the inspiration of
the writer.
Historical novels are born of romanticism of a kind; but they are a
romancing around objects and places; they have a basis in reality, and
their roots in the soil. In this way there is something more firm
about them than is found in the more vague and dreamy products of
romanticism--those dim romances of some undefined no-time, no-place,
which have a “stained-glass window” vision of a mediaeval past and lack
the link with earth, and can only be connected with the historical
novel in the way a fairy-story can, that is by the remote suggestion of
the past that is contained in the airy words “Once upon a time.”
And if in the historical novel there is devotion to locality and a
feeling for the history that breathes through the soil, all this
comes out large and most complete where geography and tradition, love
of place and pride in its heritage of story, combine in patriotism.
Patriotism that so often rings false is in this true, in that it
becomes the consciousness of belonging to a place and a tradition.
Even where it seems most local and confined, even where it contains no
sounding of the trumpets of nationalism, and where its author holds no
patriotic motive, the historical novel cannot help reminding men of
their heritage in the soil. It is often born of a kind of patriotism;
it can scarcely avoid always being the inspiration of it. In this way
it becomes itself a power in history, an impulse to fine feeling, and
a source of more of the action and heroism which it describes. The
historical novel itself becomes a maker of history.
II
It has been noticed that the ostensible theme of _The Cloister and the
Hearth_ is an instance of a human problem that came out in a particular
form in mediaeval life, but exists in some form in every society.
The problem is one of loyalties that cut across each other and pull
different ways. A modern novelist would be likely to treat this as a
study in human experience and would analyse the disruption it would
cause in the individual soul. Reade, however, is a Victorian, who lived
before the psychological novel had become the fashion, and he does the
Victorian thing; instead of treating this problem as the real theme of
his novel, he pushes it on one side, and makes it simply the excuse for
sending his hero on a journey, so that his story becomes very largely a
story of travel.
The simplest kind of novel is the novel of this kind, which gives a
string of happenings that befell the hero in his wandering through the
world. It is not the working-out of a plot, or the following-up of a
situation. It does not turn upon a definite set of relations which
provide a problem for the novelist to solve, a knot for him to untie;
it does not hunt down a given set of circumstances to some logical
issue. It is simply a chain of happenings, an accumulation of incident;
one episode does not grow out of another, each leading to something
deeper; but events merely succeed one another at various turns in the
road which the hero has to travel, and the only connection between them
is that they all happen to the same person. Dickens is an example of
this kind of novelist, who takes any excuse for sending his hero on his
travels, and narrates the various things that turn up on the journey.
The _Pickwick Papers_ belong to this class, for they do not represent
a scheme of action working to a certain issue, but are a chain of
episodes that never lead to anything and might continue for ever. In
the adventures of Pickwick, therefore, Dickens is really describing a
world in which his hero is wandering; just as in _David Copperfield_
he is not so much revealing a character as painting the world that
his hero passed through in his life’s journey. Such novels are really
tales of travel; the world of the story is not merely the background
for the hero, the setting for the story; rather the hero is the excuse
for describing the world. Sometimes that world is a topsy-turvy place,
like the one that bewildered Pickwick, or the fantastic “Wonderland”
that Alice found herself in; sometimes it is a Lilliput, or some
imagined future state of things, or it may even be modern society. In a
historical novel it will be some past age, described as a far-country.
The simplest form of treatment that can be given to history in the
novel is that of the story in which the hero travels a bygone age,
and the reader follows him as into a new world and peeps over his
shoulder to see what he sees. The age, the whole scheme of things
as it then existed, is described in the adventures of the wanderer
and at its point of contact with an individual life. This happens
to some extent in every historical novel. Apart from any conscious
description of the background of his story the novelist must always be
betraying the peculiar conditions of a particular century, since the
fate and fortunes of the actors in his drama are the result of their
entanglement in the affairs of the time and in the system of things
of the particular moment. But in a work like _The Cloister and the
Hearth_ all this is raised into a method and is the way adopted for
making history betray itself; the wanderings of the hero make the book
pre-eminently a descriptive one, and the fact that the novel is rather
a chain of incident than the working out of a particular process of
action, makes the world of the story more important than the plot. The
hardships of Gerard at strange inns, his illnesses, the brawls in the
countryside, the companions whom he meets, and the steps in his career
are simply the means by which the age manifests its character, and in
them history is speaking. There can be no simpler example than this of
the translation of history into story.
In so far as this method of treating the past is followed in _The
Cloister and the Hearth_ or in any novel, it means that an age is
regarded as a set of conditions, a system of things, that is looked
upon as static and is described at its points of contact with an
individual life set in it and, so to speak, entangled in its network.
That individual may be the creation of the novelist and his chain of
adventures may be pure invention. His life is a candle that lights up
corners of his age as it is brought into them, and the places at which
he touches his age and runs up against the characteristic circumstances
of his time, his points of contact with the machinery of society,
may be ideally chosen to show up the character of his time. His life
may then sum up his age in a way in which no actual individual life
that is ever lived can in itself sum up the peculiar conditions of
the age in which it is set. In _The Cloister and the Hearth_, at any
rate, a century is fixed for us as a picture, as a static thing. The
cinematograph-film of history is stopped there, and one particular
photograph on the reel is projected into the book.
All this, however, is elaborated when the set of conditions to be
described is regarded not as a static thing, but as dynamic. _Barnaby
Rudge_, by reason of its very faults, perhaps more than by virtue of
any greatness, is an example well calculated to illustrate this point.
The first section of this book is a love-story very largely
conventional. It is not a piece from a historical novel at all; the
slight references to history and the picturesqueness of background and
costume are not in themselves sufficient to give this story of homely
private life the character of historical fiction. Nothing that happens
is calculated to make a particular age of the past betray itself;
there is no chord that awakens a response from History. Nothing but
the slight element of colour and picturesqueness exists to prevent
this from being a story of any century; and at the most there is only
the suggestion of an indefinable Past such as is so attractive to the
shallow romantic novelist.
In the middle of the book, however, as if by an afterthought the reader
is introduced to that uprising of the people which is known as the
Gordon Riots. In the fervour of describing the riotous mass-movement
Dickens seems to forget his original plot and to lose sight of his
principal characters. The story loses itself in a vivid sketch of
the Gordon Riots, and the original problems of the book are only
solved in a perfunctory way at the close. The reader who has made
himself interested in the homely affairs of the Willets and Vardons is
irritated to find that these are pushed on one side, and that the whole
novel takes a swerve in a different direction.
And yet the bareness of the historical setting of the first section of
the book, and the lack of all suggestion of a political background or
of any complication of individual issues by larger political events,
sets out in more effective contrast the later theme of the novel, that
irresistible sweep of a great mob-action rushing like a blight over
any corner of life that lies in its path. If the Gordon Riots come like
a flood into _Barnaby Rudge_, playing havoc with the fortunes of the
story and swallowing up everything they meet, it is what they do in
real life. If the reader loses sight of the men and women in whose fate
he has become interested, and if all that he can catch is an occasional
glimpse of them, lost or helpless in a crowded surging stream of life,
it is what would have happened to them if the flood had carried them
away in actual existence. The very faults of _Barnaby Rudge_ as a piece
of construction, its irritating weaknesses as a story, are calculated
to intensify the effect that a historian of some popular upheaval must
always try to obtain--the effect of a sweeping, ravaging flood that
surges over the peaceful lives of individuals and swallows up men and
their homes and their little aims and concerns, and leaves a devastated
track behind.
A similar treatment of a historic movement occurs in _A Tale of Two
Cities_; but in this case, precisely because Dickens kept a closer hold
upon his story and fixed his eyes more steadily upon his principal
characters and his main issues--precisely because he did not lose
himself in the setting of his novel, in the “world” of his story--the
same cataclysmic result is not so apparent, the tremendous sweep of
the destroying storm is not so graphically reproduced. The story is
less irritating because we do not lose sight of the characters whose
fate is the theme of the novel, but the Revolution does not come so
powerfully as a devastating wave and at the same time it does not come
with the awful precipitancy of the Gordon Riots in _Barnaby Rudge_,
but it is anticipated and prepared for in advance. Still, even here,
the historical idea that stands out is the spectacle of a movement of
the people that is overwhelming in the havoc that it plays with the
individual lives and concerns caught within its orbit.
In these instances the set of conditions in which the individual is
involved are not static, but dynamic; and the character of them,
and the sweep of them, come out at their points of contact with
individual lives, and are revealed in the way they touch the concerns
of men and break in upon the personal fortunes of a few people. In
these instances, therefore, the wind is described by its effect on
the feather that drifts helplessly in it, and we follow the flood by
keeping our eyes on some particular object floating in it and swept
forward by it. All this would be sufficient to make a historical
novel and to justify it; for such a novel would in a way outstrip the
history-book in the telling of history, since it would not merely
describe a distant past to us, but would take us into it; it would not
be a telescope as history is, enabling us to see something far away,
but would be a bridge leading us over the gulf that divides past and
present, and so annihilating time. In such a novel we should see the
past from the point of view of the past, and recapture an age as it
comes to individuals in it; we should be not merely twentieth-century
spectators watching a distant scene, but would become contemporary
with the past, and having an inside knowledge of it. In all this the
historical novel would challenge the history-book in its own fields.
But this does not span the full range of this kind of novel; it omits
something that historical novelists almost always go out of their way
to achieve. Here the incidents and adventure of the novel may be purely
fictitious, and the characters may be inventions; and only the world in
which they are placed, the currents that sweep over their lives, and
the movements that overwhelm them need to be real; the novel is true
to the life of the past, and is faithful to the age with which it is
concerned, regarding the age as a set of conditions to be conformed
with. It is true to the spirit of the age; and may describe the past
as a far-country; but it may have nothing to do with the actual events
of the past, and with history regarded as a chain of story. Every
happening that it relates may be an invention; and it can do all that
has just been claimed for it without containing any specific incident
that ever took place. It may tell its history by revealing history
in its workings in an imaginary life set in it; in the same way as
a teacher may illustrate the force of gravity to children by talking
about its workings on an imaginary apple. It may be in a way true to
history without being true to fact.
If a story is told us about some spot with which we are acquainted,
then, although the story may not be true, it touches us somewhere, it
has a root in actuality and so makes us listen, in a way which would
be impossible if the story were told, so to speak, in the air. If we
hear some anecdote that is narrated about a friend of ours it holds us
even if we know it is a legend, in a way which it could not do if it
had not fastened itself upon something real. If a story can plant one
foot in actuality then it belongs no more to the clouds, and it gains
an added power from having established a connection with reality. It is
this kind of additional effectiveness that historical novelists seek
to obtain. They are not satisfied that the world of their story shall
be true to the world of the past, and that situations and incident
shall grow out of that world. Their novel is not merely background, but
story, and to them history is not merely the world as it once was, but
also a quarry of incident. And once a novel is regarded as a story, and
incidents or episodes are looked upon as the important thing, the units
in it, the things into which the chapters arrange themselves--then a
historical novel is still “in the air,” and is only historical in a
vague and unconvincing way, and lacks one of the strongest roots in
actuality, if its events are fictitious and its characters imaginary,
so that nothing in the story ever really “happened.” There is a great
difference between the novel that simply lights up the history of an
age, and illustrates the conditions of the time, and one which is
itself a piece of historical narrative. It is when the reader can feel
that the things that are being related actually took place, and that
the man about whom the stories are being told really lived although
the stories about him may not all be true; it is when the thread of
incident in the novel, as well as what might be called the texture
of the book, can in some way be called “historical,” that the work
is most effective in its grip on actuality. And if this is true, an
author looking at the life of the past and at the things that happened
in history is like the artist looking upon a scene in nature and
“longing to do something with it,” longing to turn it into something
and to recreate it, in such a way as to express himself as well as to
reproduce actuality.
In _A Tale of Two Cities_, then, Dickens was content to describe the
grim fires of the French Revolution not directly, but in the reflection
that they threw upon a few imaginary individuals; the events that were
“historical” in the sense of being memorable, the public events that
held the stage at the time, he was content to portray in their effects
upon the homely lives of one or two fictitious characters. But there
is a more direct and pointed way of transferring things from history
into the novel, and this method, when superimposed upon the other,
gives a story an added link with actuality. In any novel adventures and
incidents, exploits, intrigues, and fine action rich with character
may not merely be good fiction, but coming direct from history may be
like the cords which bound Gulliver in Lilliput, each of them a tie
holding the novel to earth, and fixing it in reality. To people for
whom incident is an important thing in the novel the historical value
of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ lies not so much in the picture that
it gives of an age of the past, as in the foundation that its story
can claim to possess in the life of the Father of Erasmus. In _Barnaby
Rudge_ it is the description of Lord George Gordon and his circle that
gives the novel a tangible connection with history; the story becomes
a story about somebody we know, a person we have met before; history
provides the writer not merely with the world of his story, but with
actual story itself. It is regarded not merely as a picture of things
as they once were, but as a store of narrative and of anecdote too.
History often gives the novelist the hint for story, since the
conditions and circumstances of an age are full of implied story,
and are enough to set anybody tale-telling. In a larger and more
direct way, as will be shown, it may further provide a theme for a
novelist; in the lives of people like Mary Queen of Scots, or Richard
I, and in affairs like the Gunpowder Plot or the Jacobite risings, it
may give not exactly a story to the novelist, but a fit subject for
novel-study, something to work upon, a problem to develop and solve;
for not only on their public side, but still more on their personal
side these things invite story; and history itself supplies a number of
incidents about them and a general outline of broad events which set
the key for a novel and fix the lines within which the novelist will
work. But beyond all these there is a mass of human experience, and a
wide circle of life, a whole World of People--and all these, just the
things that the novelist must most trouble himself about--concerning
which history, as has been shown, can tell only an inadequate story.
The novelist who deals with kings perhaps, but more often with ordinary
fighters and citizens--with courts and parliaments sometimes, but more
often with hearts and homes, looks to history for “things that really
happened,” regarding history as a storehouse of narrative, and finds
there only episodes. Things only come out of the darkness on brief
occasions, and many things are only hinted at, and many threads of
story are carried a short way and then broken and dropped; History
bursts out here and there in a few fine flashes of story; but very
rarely is there a consecutive flow of narrative such as would make a
true, but coherent and continuous story for a novel--a long connected
strand of story-issues only waiting to be re-told in fiction. This
history that is narrative comes in fragments, in mere snatches, to be
incorporated in fiction. The novelist who seeks to tell “things that
really happened” must clutch at episodes. It remains to be seen what
use he can make of them.
All novelists seem at times to introduce into their works situations
and happenings straight from life, or founded upon fact; sometimes
things that have been accounted incredible or unnatural in novels, have
been defended by authors as having been copied straight from nature.
No critic, however, would seriously admit that the appreciation of
any novel is at all influenced by a fact like this. The literal truth
of an incident is not sufficient justification for its inclusion in a
novel, and does not even make its presence in the work more valuable;
still less does it affect the worth of the whole novel as a faithful
representation of truth. It is clear that the same reasoning must apply
to historical episodes incorporated into fiction. The mere inclusion
of some actual happening in a story, the attempt to drag in a piece of
history and to patch it into a novel, is not justified by the addition
of a footnote informing the reader that “This incident actually took
place.” The fact may interest a reader, but it is a separate kind of
interest that it gives, and it does not affect the total appreciation
of the novel as a complete unity. The occasional and arbitrary use
of happenings from history, the sending of a few pistol-shots of
actual episode into a piece of work, does not alter the character of
the whole, and does not give the novel one foot in reality, a root
in actual life, any more than Dickens’s use of events from real life
brought his novels into closer touch with reality and with truth.
Yet there is an important use that can be made of historical incident
in fiction, and a more effective way of transferring anecdotes and
events from history into the novel. This time the author does not
exactly put his finger upon some particular period in history, and work
upon that, using the conditions of the time as the hint for story;
and does not apply himself specially to a certain wave of popular
movement or fix his attention upon particular historical characters;
these things he can never ignore, but here they are not his first
thought, and it is not around these that his work takes shape; his
unit is rather “the thing that actually happened”; his eye is upon
the incident, and he works upon that; and the result appears in the
existence of a peculiar type of episodical novel, which consists of
pieces of story, isolated episodes, loosely strung together upon a
thread of fiction, not worked into one another and fused together
by fiction; and succeeding one another in such a detached way that
sometimes the unity of the whole is very far to seek. The entire novel
tends to split up into particular knots of story, one cluster of
narrative having perhaps only the most accidental of connections with
another, and each being in a way complete in itself.
This kind of novel can only come from a history rich with the right
kind of episodes. It would seem that there are certain periods in the
world’s story, and in this case the Renaissance would be assuredly one,
and there are certain countries and localities like the Hungary that
Jokai depicted and the Highlands of Scotland, which are peculiarly
favourable to this method of treating history in fiction, since they
appear to throw out their history in the form of episodes that ask to
be turned into story. When life is adventurous and full of colour and
crowded with striking incident, when, against a romantic background,
there is the assertion of vigorous personality, resulting in novel
turns of action, and exciting combinations of circumstance; and, above
all, when these are the kind of things that are remembered in story and
tradition and song, so that history is a store of incidents, and a tale
of exploits and intrigues and adventures rather than a mere narrative
of social development and public events, then the _raconteur_ must find
this history a treasure-store of materials for a historical novel that
shall be a succession of brilliant episodes rather than the working-out
of some great theme, some large process. The by-ways of history, too,
the dusty corners of the past, away from the main course of broad
political movement and public event, are lit up by out-of-the-way
incidents and stories that the history of history-books misses in its
wide sweep; and these, although rooted in fact, are things that a
story-teller would love to have invented, and they ask to be re-told in
fiction. This, then, is the field of the novel of historical episodes.
In faults as well as in virtues many of the books of Jokai are striking
illustrations of the form; but many novelists have adopted it with
some variations; and even a book like Merejkowski’s _Forerunner_, in
spite of its unity in the character of Leonardo and in the spirit of
Renaissance, is only an example of this way of treating episodes; it
may work them into a finer whole, and centralise the interest of the
reader, and send one great idea throbbing through each; but it can
scarcely avoid taking shape before the eyes of the reader as a series
of fine flashes of incident, each in a way self-contained, and finding
their connection more in the fabrications of the novelist than in the
fabric of real history.
The first book of _The Forerunner_ is a key to this whole method of
abstracting episodes from history and setting them into a novel;
especially as it is one of the places where an author not only tells
his story, but at the head of his chapter reveals his authority for it
in contemporary writings, and so allows us to see just what was his
“hint from history” and what use he made of it. This incident of the
“White She-Devil” is a self-contained episode, one of the stray stories
that history can tell. The novelist fills in the lines of the brief
historical narrative. He does for it what an illustrator does for any
author--he adds detail and colour and gives preciseness and a certain
elaboration to the general outline, the vaguer description, that is
given him to work upon. More than this, fiction somehow amplifies the
whole bearings of the event, and enlarges its significance, making it
almost symbolic; and further provides links, that a reader can identify
and put his finger upon, slight links, just the necessary connections
that bring the affair into its place in the whole book, and so form the
excuse for its presence in the novel at all. But the most noticeable
thing of all is not merely the episodic nature of the material that
is taken from history to be incorporated in fiction but the episodic
treatment that is given to it. The stage is set for this particular
incident, and when it is completed the curtain falls and we are carried
away to a totally different scene. A wealth of historical detail is
grouped around this one episode; the episode is the thing that the
whole section of the book clusters around. When this anecdote has been
worked into a picture the author takes up an entirely new canvas, and
starts over again for the next, raising up a fresh historic background
for it. In this way one thing succeeds another like slides displacing
one another in a lantern, a shutter separating each; things do not run
into one another with the connectedness of a film. If the episodic
novel reaches a unity at all, its episodes are generally related to one
another as facets of a diamond, rather than as links in a chain; the
spectator changes his ground, his point of vision in passing from one
to another; he does not slide unconsciously from one episode to the
next.
In a complete and organised type of novel, episodes usher in one
another and grow out of one another, luring the reader to a prepared
climax, each carrying the architecture of the whole a step further,
and all conspiring to produce an event to which the whole novel is
tending. Such a novel comes to the reader as a process unfolding
itself, a theme being worked out. In the looser type of fiction that
_The Cloister and the Hearth_ represents, things follow one another in
a chain, and find their unity in the fact that they all happen to the
same person; so that the novel shapes itself round the hero, rather
than into a theme. But in the episodical novel it is not any unifying
theme that is the nucleus of the story, nor is it any particular
character, but it is the “episode.” Each chapter is in a way a fresh
inspiration and has its source in an isolated historical fact. History
supplies not so much a run of narrative for the whole novel, as
unrelated episodes which fiction may fasten together, but which stand
alone in their original historical setting. The whole method of taking
narrative itself straight from the history-book, in spite of its
pointedness in reproducing definite incidents that actually happened,
has its limitations in the fragmentary nature of history itself, or,
at least, of the history that deals with the personal human things of
story-interest. That history can only reach to episodes as a general
rule, so it is in danger of producing something that is not a novel at
all but a series of imaginative excursions into the past, a collection
of historical “sketches.” The conflict of loyalties in historical
fiction is seen here. A historical novel can not be made up of history
that is picked out in snatches, and of this alone. A collection of
episodes is disjointed narrative. It may be fused into running story by
the imagination and the inventions of an author; or it may still remain
in broken narrative, yet find a different unity in a novel that is
something more than a narration. But in either event fiction must help
out history.
* * * * *
The achievement of Dumas is sufficient to show what can be done in a
novel that is above all things a narrative. Dumas did not merely set
his novels in history and weave his stories around men who actually
lived; he took actual situations and events, incident and action from
history; and his greatness lies in the fact that he did not reproduce
these in a broken episodic fashion, putting each in its own frame, and
on a separate canvas, he did not merely patch them into fictions of
his own and sprinkle them in his works, but he worked them in with his
imagined episodes into a thread of running story.
He was lucky in the field of his labours. The history of the France
that he described flashes out in brilliant episodes, and is rich in
characters and situations that give the hint for more. It is the
history of the great--of kings and statesmen and of the first in the
land--but it is at the same time an extraordinarily personal kind of
history, not a tale of dry public events. It was set in scenes of
gallantry and colour, and was just distant enough to come to readers
with a glamour. And Dumas by the multiplicity of the characters whose
fortunes he intertwined in his novels laid a wide field of its incident
and adventure open to himself, and brought a large range of actual
recorded facts into the scope of his novels.
But it was his way of twining history and fiction into one another,
instead of tacking the one on to the other, and of making one story out
of them, that gave him his power. He ran the whole into one flowing
narrative. A list could be made of the incidents in his novels that
are taken from history but only a close student, and a man as learned
in the history of those times as Dumas himself, can detect the joint,
the place where the actual and the invented episodes fit into one
another. History and fiction cannot be disentangled in these novels,
and a separate rôle, a particular function in the combined work, be
assigned to each; they grow into each other, and reinforce one another;
each somehow gives its character to the other; so much in the novels is
actual history that this lends its character to the whole, and gives it
a root in actuality, so that the works come as a narrative of France, a
stream of national story, a kind of history themselves.
The works of Dumas, therefore, do not come as a series of shifting
episodes that displace one another. There is no stopping to set
the scene for an episode or an event. The story will run into the
Massacre of St Bartholomew and straight out of it, and there will be
no drawing of the curtain, no break in the action, while a stage is
being arranged. Exploits and adventures and intrigues come in quick
succession, and keep the reader on tip-toe. The result is an effect of
sheer movement. Everything seems in motion. The novels are pure story,
and Dumas is pre-eminently a teller of stories.
History may be regarded as a chain of ages that overlap, and run into
each other and then fold under--as an ocean of human life, generations
of peoples, coming in waves through the centuries. It may also be
regarded as a thread of narrative, a stream of story, winding through
time. Dumas more than anybody else has succeeded in turning history
into narrative like this. His works are a thread of story running
through centuries of the history of France.
They are not pictures of France. Dumas’s eye does not sweep the broad
landscape of France, does not see the whole of it. The deep sound of
the ocean of peoples does not reverberate through his books. The great
life of France is not in them, like a sounding-board against the noisy
events of court and camp. The ebb and flow of popular movements does
not surge through them; and only occasionally is the swelling tide of
some big heave of human effort let in, to hint at the mass-life of
France outside the pages of the story. Dumas does not stop to paint a
horizontal scene of France as a whole; and because of this his thread
of story keeps moving, but there are no broad landscapes of history.
There are courts and state-rooms, hunting-fields and street-scenes; but
these do not echo the sounds from mountains and plains and the larger
France. Dumas gives a trickle of narrative running through history; not
a surging flood. He deals with the men who in their day were the men
who mattered, the life which, while it was being lived, was considered
to be the life that counted in France; and he deals with the region
which stood out in high light above the dark masses in the past, and
about which, therefore, history could remember things.
* * * * *
The limit of the things that history can remember must determine the
range of most historical novels, and fix their choice of subject. It is
useful to see the bearings upon this of that slight differentiation in
meaning between the words “historic” and “historical.” A “historical”
event is anything that really happened in history, but a “historic” one
is a celebrated one--one that would not be forgotten and that made a
noise in the world. A “historic” character is a famous character, very
often a public man. And so history comes to mean, not the world living
out its centuries, but the stage upon which the big things happened and
were noticed, and upon which far-reaching issues were worked out. In
all the ages of the past there have been a few people who have moved
the world, and have cut a great figure in their day, and behind these
there has been the mass of people who did not lead, but followed, who
did not act, but watched, who were the material upon which the great
men worked, the instrument upon which the men in high station played.
They were spectators of the historic event, as much as we; but only the
actors in it belong to remembered history. History then becomes, as it
were, the limelight directed upon the arena of loud-sounding events and
brilliant action, leaving the whole theatre of spectators in darkness.
It is the platform for Cromwell and Caesar and Napoleon and Milton;
captains and kings and discoverers and heroes feel at home upon it; but
behind it are the people who watch and suffer and serve these Cromwells
and Caesars; they leave no memorial; and only occasionally at moments
of intense history-making, do they break through on to the platform,
and sweep across the stage, and show that they are there.
This arena of great “historic” event provides a more spacious theme
for the novelist than mere episodes abstracted from universal history
can do. Instead of wandering in the interesting by-ways of the past,
and finding surprises of thrilling episode in out-of-the-way corners,
the novelist may boldly face the full course of important events,
and plunge into the fate and fortunes of the great. The historical
novel then becomes an embodiment of historic things in the sense of
far-reaching, loud-sounding issues, and it has a wider canvas, an
ampler scope. Here it is not incidents merely that are taken from
history, but a whole block of action and happening, a whole act from
the mighty drama of the ages. History provides not merely snatches
of tune that have to be worked into some sort of connection with one
another, but a whole orchestral theme, which the novelist re-organises
and works out afresh. It gives a set of issues that are capable of
novel-study, and are full of human-meaning, and embody a problem in
experience. Only, it must be said, all this is limited, or at least its
character is determined, by the fact that this theme must concern men
who have been in the public eye, and events that have been enacted in
the sight of the world and so have been registered on the memory of the
world. And a novel that deals with public events and national affairs
and treats of people who are remembered in history because of their
part in the political movements of their time, presents a problem that
is peculiar in one respect.
The theme of a novel is human experience and the fate of human beings
in the world. It covers all the things that the heart has ever touched,
all the varied harmonies that it has happened to strike as it has
brushed against life. It may concern itself with the big events that
send their echo through the ages, it may feel the great heart that
pulses in the life of a whole continent, it may tell of movements that
have broken upon the world and changed the fate of peoples; but its
supreme interest is in a mere man. In a sense it is true that every man
is alone in the world, and feels himself stranded amongst “everything
else.” He is, and he cannot help being, the centre of the circle of
his own horizon; he must see his fellow-creatures as part of the
“everything else,” part of the world against which he stands out; and
that outer world must come to him as an experience and an adventure.
The one thing that exists for him is this experience of the world.
And that is the one thing that exists in him for the novelist. It is
the aim of the novelist to stand by the individual and feel life with
him. The waves of some political or historic movement may touch the man
and so come within the range of the novel, but they will not affect
the man any more than his own special, homely concerns--probably they
will only affect him through those little concerns. It is his own hopes
and ambitions and fears as he finds himself set up against the world
of men and things, his conflict with circumstances, his moods and his
glad moments, his risks, his falling in love, his bewilderments, his
relations with men, that make up a novel. Some writers, like Jokai and
Dumas and Stevenson, will be specially concerned with the adventure
of his life; the things that happened, the things he undertook, the
surprises and the thrills; these are the story-tellers whose novels are
narrations; but others, and especially the modern novelists, look more
to the experience, and regard it as a theme to be studied as well as a
story to be related. Perhaps these are the true historians, for they
record experience, and it is they who in the most intimate and personal
way capture life into the pages of a book.
The scope of the novel, however, is not limited to the life and affairs
of ordinary people, average humanity. There are people who have felt
life more intensely than others, and have reached loftier heights of
experience than most. Things may have come to them with greater power
than to the mass of people. Perhaps life is for ever a bigger thing
because they have lived and have swept new ranges of experience, and
have happened upon new chords, fresh harmonies of feeling, and have
in some way communicated these to the world. Then again, there are
men who, not because of any intrinsic greatness of mind or heart,
but by reason of what we mortals can only regard as the incalculable
thing, and can only call “chance,” have been placed in exceptional
circumstances and situations of novelty, and so have struck upon new
elements of experience, or fresh life-problems. In the careers of such
men life seems to come out in new forms, and in unexpected ways. If
they can be captured for the novel, then the novel can range over the
finest regions of life, and can communicate their experience to the
world, and so enlarge life for everybody else.
It might seem that these, the men of exceptional powers, and the
men who find themselves in unusual situations, are the very people
whom history does not forget; but this is only true with one great
limitation. They must be people whom exceptional powers or the
apparent accident of circumstances once brought into the public eye.
They must be “historic” people, as well as “historical,” if our
knowledge of them is to be more than fragmentary. If a man is memorable
in his public life, then the world will see to it that his private
life does not go unrecorded and unremembered; the personal things,
the experience of the man even, will become known in so far as they
are not specially concealed and in so far as such things in the life
of an individual are communicable to others. The novelist who can do
justice to these is widening the range of the novel, and bringing new
and intenser experience into the kingdom of the novel, and is exploring
life in its most intractable regions. He reaches life as it has been
lived, at some of its finest points, and at some of its most splendid
or most pressing moments. History, it has been seen, may give wing to
the novel, and may expand its range. What is true for the life of an
age or a people is here true also of the life of individuals. Biography
also may place new fields of experience within the scope of a novel.
Statesmen and kings and scientists, then, are not shut out of the
novel, but the novelist’s interest in them is not an interest in the
statesmanship, or in the rule, or in the science but in the whole
personality of the man behind these, and his theme is still a human
heart caught into the world and entangled in time and circumstance.
The politician, the economist, the philosopher and the psychologist are
all students of mankind in a way, and can claim that their studies are
human studies; but they only start with human nature, and they soon run
into theorems and formulas and lose themselves in their own categories,
and so are swept away from contact with flesh and blood. But the
novelist does not begin with men and then leap into abstractions. He
keeps his hand on a human pulse all the time. Political issues coming
into his work are put into their whole context in life and experience,
and instead of being abstracted into a realm of political science they
are fastened to men and women who are “political animals,” but are
something more as well. The novelist sees the whole of life, and he
goes one further, and one better than the scientific historian in that
men are to him (as they are to themselves) ends in themselves, not
merely servants of a process which consumes them, not merely means to
an end and links in the chain of history. A man may lose himself in
politics or mathematics but to the novelist it is still the man that
matters.
The things that are far-reaching and historic are not to him more
important than the things that are momentary yet external. He would
give more to catch a real glimpse of Mary Queen of Scots tapping her
foot in a moment of impatience than to possess a logical statement of
her political position at any time. He will not ignore the politics of
some Prime Minister of a former century, but he would love still more
to surprise him at play. A great political speech might come within the
scope of his work, but where a historian might be tempted to sum up
the whole event in terms of politics, he would notice too the headache
that made the statesman depressed and the heat of the building that
made him irritable, the private worries that he could not throw off and
that tormented his mind and perverted his judgment, and the sight of
a man sitting opposite whom he detested in private life and who wore
an annoying tie. The novelist would attempt to recapture the moment,
rather than to estimate its historic significance, and the things which
he would notice would be those which influenced the man at the moment,
though they did not always concern the politics.
There was once a day when kingdoms were a piece of family property that
could be sold, and the whole politics of a land depended on marriages,
and wars raged for years over some intricate point in a genealogical
table; in those days public events were part of the private concern
of a king, and as surely as the succession to a throne depended upon
family inheritance, the affairs of the kingdom depended upon personal
whims and private ambitions. There was a time when the religious system
of England had to be changed because a king wished to marry a lady
about his court. In the world that Dumas described so well, personal
prowess and individual exploits determined events, and private concerns
and the prejudices and feuds of families cut across the larger history
of a nation. There have been times when a slight offered to a king’s
mistress has been more tragic in its results than a lost battle or
a lost election; and who knows how much the history of a reign has
been affected by an influence like that which Buckingham had upon
Charles I, or the Duchess of Marlborough upon Queen Anne? In all these
things private life complicates even where it does not determine
public events, and all history is full of imaginable situations like
these that invite novel-treatment. When personality counts in public
affairs, and many things, other than purely political motives--even
things which seem trivial and accidental--determine the conduct of a
man at any time, then the mood of a moment, the personal discomfort
or family irritation that might have caused it, the perversities of
whim and arbitrary desire, and a hundred other things in a man may
affect history. The historical novel, not consciously perhaps, but
still demonstrably stands for this fact. It emphasises the influence
of personal things in history, it regards man’s life as a whole and
runs his private action and his public conduct into each other, as it
ought to do; and it turns the whole into a study of human nature.
Even when dealing with an action that seems purely political it will
root the action in personality, not merely in politics. Because every
public action that was ever taken can be regarded as the private act,
the personal decision of somebody, historic events can become materials
for the novel, in spite of the fact that public affairs and political
matters are not in themselves issues for a novel.
The novelist looking at a historic figure sees personality where the
scientific historian is tempted to see only the incarnation of a
policy. He feels flesh and blood where the ordinary history-reader
complains that he is given only abstractions. Every historic decision
that comes under his review has for him a context in the mind of the
man who made it and not simply in the politics of the day. Behind every
great name he sees a human being, with a peculiar experience of life;
even if history does not tell of the experience he knows it is there,
he thinks it into history and endows the man with it, and he completes
the personality in his imagination, bringing in fiction to supply what
history fails to give. That is true resurrection, that is the reason
why historical novels are full of life and of people, where history is
often bloodless and dead.
It is evident from all this that there are particular periods and
particular problems in history that are specially adapted to this kind
of novel-treatment. An age of riotous individualism and of aggressive
personalities is more suited to it than one in which corporate action
determines events. An age in which war is a game, an orgy of fun and
fine fighting, is better than one in which war is an intricate and
organised science. A king who governs by whim is more fitting than a
politician who is merely the mouthpiece of a party, the servant of
organised action. More and more as life increases in complexity and the
world becomes organised on impersonal lines, the historical novel that
treats of the action of personalities in history and the interaction
of private life and public events, must find its course intricate
and hard. Ultimately personality counts to-day as much as ever it
did in history; it is still the real power, but its influence is not
direct, and immediate, and palpable; things perhaps can be traced back
to the influence of individuals, but it is an ultimate influence,
an influence in the last resort, and it does not show itself on the
surface of life. It is fairly true to say that the historical novel,
where it deals with politics and public events, must seize upon those
periods of history and those phases of life in which personality not
only matters in the last resort, but makes an immediate impression and
stamps itself directly upon the world. The mental struggle of Charles
I before he consented to sacrifice Strafford to his enemies, and the
personal influence which immediately contributed to his decision are
a theme for the novel; but it would need a large admixture of fiction
and a wilful exaggeration of the interaction of private concerns with
political issues, and a perversion of history to treat a modern change
of ministry in the same fashion.
Nothing could be more suited to this idea of the historical novel than
a reign like that of Mary Queen of Scots, in which the whims of a woman
are a national concern, a direct and immediate influence upon historic
events, and history for a time hangs upon her moods and prejudices, and
her very love-stories have a kind of political significance.
Such is the sort of theme that a novelist can take from history--one
in which public affairs appear as somebody’s private concern, and so
can be treated in a personal way. A set of historic events or the
career of some historic figure is placed in its context in personal
experience, and is worked into a novel that may be a study as well as
a story. Somebody has said that every individual carries within him
at least one novel, the story of his own wrestle with life. It may be
added that every historic theme, every chapter taken out of the past
contains within itself not merely a story, but several stories, all of
them equally true, all of them representing the same set of events as
they came to the various people concerned and struck home in different
ways--all of them facets of the same truth.
What Browning did in _The Ring and the Book_ for the record of a
“sordid police case” historical novelists, taken all together, may be
said to do for history. Browning took his ground-work of incident and
related it nine different times, each time from the point of view of
different people concerned, and he showed that a tale re-told from a
different standpoint and around a fresh person is really a new tale.
The whole world of the story shifts round when a new point of vision is
adopted, the same set of events come differently and with a different
bearing. To relate a narrative from the point of view of the criminal
in it, and then from the point of view of the victim and then from
that of the hero is not merely to tell the same story in different
ways; it is something more striking than that, it is to give a new tale
every time. Events that are joy to one person are grief to another,
perhaps; one man’s glad story may be somebody else’s sad story, and
if the centre of sympathy has been changed everything in a narrative
must take a fresh shape around it. Nothing can better illustrate the
richness of history and the many-sidedness of life than this fact; and
the historical novelist represents it in his treatment of the past.
He may make a story out of the life of Mary Queen of Scots, and out
of the same set of facts he may make a totally different story, told
from the point of view of Bothwell or Elizabeth. He may enrich history
by bringing out its many-sided implications, and bringing to light the
variety and complexity of the significance of historic happenings.
But it is a bold thing and a tremendous venture, to write of the
intimate thoughts and experiences of the great, and even to guess at
the motives of their actions. Carlyle said that only a great man could
even recognise a great man. If this is the case, many must be tempted
to ask, How can the novelist pretend to do more than this, and to
understand a great man, even to re-create him in all his greatness?
How can he make the statesman statesmanlike, and the queen queenly,
and the prophet passionate and soul-stirring? To do this the novelist
must within his own mind sweep the range of experience not merely of
the ordinary man, not merely of the literary man--these things he might
be expected to do--but also of the mighty forgers of history and the
pioneers in experience; and he who very likely cannot understand the
moods and caprices of his own landlady and who has never pierced the
mystery of personality as it exists in her, must record the intimate
thoughts, the slightest wave of a mood that passes over the mind like
the wind over the grass, the half-conscious motives and the deep solemn
experience in people like Mary Queen of Scots or Oliver Cromwell or
Richard I who were in a way geniuses in living, and in particular
phases of life and experience. If the novelist does not do this
adequately, if his statesmen are not at least statesmanlike even though
not true to facts, if his kings are not at least royal in some way,
if he does not give great men the touch of greatness and the soul of
grandeur, his characters are merely pompous puppets, in fine dress and
on high pedestals, a piece of show, a mocking pageantry.
Perhaps the most impressive way of bringing great men into the
historical novel, is not the method which makes their lives and careers
the central theme of the book at all, demanding intimate treatment, and
close appreciation and analysis. Many historical novels are stories
of ordinary everyday issues in the lives of people, and deal with
some personal concerns of fictitious characters, and with the things
that make up the ordinary kind of novel; but these novels become
“historical” ones by the fact that their drama is played out as it
were in the shadow of great public events. Some well-known, historic
character looms in the background, larger historical issues cast
their shadow at times and perhaps at some point the narrow concerns
of the individuals whose fate makes up the story, cross the path of
these, and become interlocked for a moment with some piece of history.
In _Woodstock_ for example the homely problems of a few fictitious
characters, and the small vicissitudes of a locality occupy the centre
of the stage. Their story grows out of a set of historical relations as
it existed in the days of the Protectorate, and is a story born of the
conditions of the time in the way Scott suggested in the Introductions
to _Ivanhoe_ and _The Monastery_. The first chapter of the book brings
out history in the form of story, it is a peep at England in the days
of the Protectorate, it is a “sample,” a kind of specimen picture of
the age and the story is implied in the conditions of the time. There
is a suggestion of the awful omnipotence of Cromwell, and a feeling
that the distant sternness of his rule is coming near and will soon be
brought home to people, but the Protector himself is a solemn figure in
the background. There is a kind of impressiveness in the way the story
actually crosses his path. The reader is ushered into the presence of
the great man, and Cromwell is not treated familiarly--we do not pry
into his mind and we do not see through the man, but everything is as
though in an impressive moment in real life we had once met the man
and felt him greater and more distant than ever. When Charles II comes
into the book a similar thing happens; we peep at a corner of his
life, we catch one side of him, but the whole man is not laid bare,
and we know that there is a world within him that is not revealed. In
this way the feeling that to ordinary citizens of the country there is
something impenetrable in these great people is maintained. Life to
all of us is a chain of private aims and personal concerns and family
or homely issues that seem to be all the world to us as they come one
after another; but far above we can feel that larger historic issues
are being worked out oblivious of our petty concerns, and ignoring our
little lives. Only at times do our paths cross. A war or a popular
movement at some time may touch the family and even break up homes,
sweeping away the issues and affairs that were our little world,
but even this only accentuates our feeling that over our heads, as
it were, a great history-making is always going on; and in the days
when personalities like Cromwell moved the world directly, and held
an immediate sway over events, such men must have come to the minds
of ordinary human beings as distant peaks come to the traveller, as
objects of solitary impenetrable grandeur and of awful power. In
describing the world like this, the kind of historical novel of which
_Woodstock_ is only one of a whole variety of examples, depicts life in
a relevant and significant fashion.
* * * * *
In all these ways history can be translated into fiction and can gain
something in the process; but above them all there towers a form of
novel that is more sweeping in its treatment of history, more ambitious
in its interpretation of life, more bold in its way of looking at the
world. In it the novel reaches beyond itself, so that to call it any
longer a “novel” is to give it an inadequate title. It is a prose epic;
but because it is a way by which history is turned into fiction it
cannot pass unnoticed.
History has been taken to mean the world looking back upon itself,
and remembering things. But after memory comes experience and the
reflection upon experience. In our individual lives we are not content
to recall things that happened, we do not just have memories, and stop
there; but we relate these to one another, and see meaning in them and
work them into experiences, through which we come to see life as unity
and as purpose and as a process. In a similar way there comes a time
when history must be something more than reminiscence, something more
than memories of this age and that age, of one happening and another
happening, of a man here and a man there; it must be something more
even than a chain, a succession of these; it must be a web, a unity,
woven of them all. It must be the experience of Man on this earth,
face to face with Nature, warring with the elements, and lonely under
the sky--man at grips with Life through all the ages. It must be a
symphony, each orchestral part doing something to express the great
idea of the whole, and each moment, each year, each age adding a new
bar to the score, and carrying the architecture of the whole a little
further. History is not merely the story of men and of their deeds and
adventures; it is the Epic of Man.
If the past is looked at in this way the individual ceases to be
the centre of focus. Men and women and their lives become fragments
in the whole trend of things, mere ripples on the surface of a
great world-life. The surge of historic movement, the pulse of life
underneath all lives becomes the real theme of story; though this can
only manifest itself, can only become tangible in individual lives. The
artist who tries to capture the wind into a picture or into words knows
what this means. He may show the leaves scattered by the wind, and the
trees bent before it, and the countryside devastated by a hurricane;
but all this is not wind. He may paint a ship in full sail before a
breeze, or an ocean whipped to fury; but these are not the wind; he may
describe the delightful play of the wind in your hair, or the trail of
its fingers in the grass--but that weird mysterious thing, the wind,
that comes in whispers through the trees and sounds an organ-tone
deep and tremendous as an ocean as it sweeps over the heather, eludes
him every time. It can only be described in its results. And the
same is true in history. The epic in historical fiction describes
the tangible and the particular, and the concrete; but it suggests a
living principle behind these, working in these, and only manifesting
itself in them. The epic writer looking at the life of the past sees
an accumulation of events, of details, of instances, but in them all
he divines a synthesis, and sees one throb of the great heart of the
world; and behind them all he feels one life-principle working itself
out and carrying men with it as a tide carries the foam or as the
Spring brings the buds.
The power and awfulness of the wind are not to be recognised by a
glance at the weather-vane or at the thistle-down floating through the
air; it is the cumulative effect of a hundred different details, a
hundred different things touched and changed by the wind, that makes
the wind seem beyond escape; it is the suggestion of the broad spaces
and unlimited stretches through which the wind can range, that must
give the impression that it is everywhere; and it is the gentleness
of its touch here, and the crash of its irresistible rush there, that
must give the idea of its powerful yet subtle activities. The epic
that seeks to describe the heart that beats as one behind the life of
a whole people must point to the pulse throbbing in a hundred places.
It is the overpowering effect of accumulated detail and of all this
spread over a wide canvas, that must conspire to show some surge of
a deep-sounding tide in the lives of people, some breath that sweeps
through the life of a race; it is only in this way that the ubiquity,
the power beyond escape, the hundred varied ways of working, of some
life-principle behind the affairs of individuals, can be brought out.
The historical novel that is an epic, is, then, a mighty production,
a great conception minutely worked out, a piece of architecture. It
is the novel carried to a higher power. Its hero is not a man but a
force in men. Its vision of the past is one of titanic powers working
underground. It grapples with Destiny and dares to look the universe in
the face; and it spells out Fate and strikes at the stars.
The love of wide canvases burdened with significant detail; the large
vision of the past as one in texture with the present and as a sublime
urge of humanity rising above obstacles and fighting its chains; and
the poet’s power of synthesis, made Victor Hugo the great master of
this epic romance, as he was its conscious exponent. Nothing could
better illustrate his sense of the one-ness of history and the sublime
tragedy of Man’s experience in the world than his introduction to _The
Toilers of the Sea_:
Religion, Society and Nature; these are the three struggles of
mankind. These three struggles are at the same time his three
needs; it is necessary for him to have a faith, hence the temple;
it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary
for him to live, hence the plough and the ship. But these three
solutions comprise three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of
life springs from all the three.
Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition, under
the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple
fatality weighs upon us--the fatality of dogmas, the fatality
of laws, the fatality of matter. In _Notre Dame_ the author has
denounced the first; in _Les Misérables_ he has described the
second; in this book he points out the third.
With these three fatalities that envelop mankind is mingled the
inward fatality--the highest fatality--the human heart.
This quotation alone is sufficient to show that the conception of the
Epic of Man rests, not upon the idea that the past is a new world for
the novelist to range in, but on a fact that is equally true from its
own point of view--the fact of the one-ness of experience and the unity
of the past with the present. The historical novel that is a universal
epic, therefore comes to men as an interpretation of Man’s experience
in the world. It is cosmic in conception. Also it is the work of a man
who is not merely novelist, but poet; for though experience is all one
piece, it comes to us in fragments and we only know it in parts, and
the man who wishes to understand it and to map out its meaning, must
in looking at past and present find a one-ness that is not apparent in
that mass of details and people and events that confront him; he must
divine a synthesis. This seems to be the conscious aim of Hugo, and
there is a tremendous power in his achievement that is not to be found
in the interpretation of large history that Merejkowski seeks to give
in his trilogy. In such works as these history as well as the novel is
carried beyond itself, and raised to a higher power.
The national epic is not so broad in its sweep, not so consciously an
interpretation of universal experience as what might be called the Epic
of Man. Here again it is not an individual that is the hero of the
story, but something that might almost be personified, a force working
in the lives of men; only, in this case, the stage of the drama is the
Nation at some tremendous moment in its history. The quiver through
a whole people of some breath of national feeling is described like
the stir of the wind upon a pool; the throb of a whole nation in some
intense crisis is caught into story. And as this surge of feeling in a
people becomes most apparent at the point at which it meets resistance,
no theme is better for this kind of novel than that which describes in
a people the bitter sense of national liberty thwarted, and of national
aspirations refused, the growing consciousness of repression and an
increasing desire to resist the oppressor. Where these exist love
of liberty comes as a yearning and an aspiration and a vision; fine
impulses become conscious because they strike against an obstacle; and
they become aggressive since they feel themselves thwarted. Nothing
makes a more powerful motive for a novel.
This epic of national liberty is often itself inspired by the national
aspirations it describes. Perhaps it would be too much to identify
it with the historical novelists of Eastern Europe, especially since
Hugo’s _Ninety-Three_, the hero of which has been described as being
the Revolution, is admitted to be one of the best examples of it; but
it seems fairly true to identify it chiefly with those countries in
which the sense of national aspirations being thwarted has recently
existed and has been an impulse to art and literature, and a good many
of the historical novels of Eastern European writers are distinguished
by the throb of national feeling that strikes through them. And this
kind of novel is specially calculated to produce the precise feeling
that it describes, to stir readers to the aspirations which are its
theme, and to be a force for liberty itself. Such a result is even
aimed at by writers, so that the novel becomes in danger of developing
into a novel with a purpose.
Victor Hugo’s _Ninety-Three_ is a striking example of the epic of
national freedom; and it illustrates much of the mind of its author
and much of the character of this type of novel. It has been said
that its hero is not a particular personage in the story, but rather
the Revolution itself. Hugo had the powerful grasp of the character
of large and complex masses of detail, the genius for synthesis, the
eagle-like sweep of an imagination that can comprehend a multitude of
things and combine them in one principle--the very things that were
needed to make a gigantic movement of the masses the theme of an epic.
In his descriptions of the Vendée there is a chapter on “the spirit of
the place” which shows his way of thinking; he demonstrates in fine
flights of comprehensive statement that “the configuration of the soil
decides many of man’s actions and the earth is more his accomplice than
people believe...,” and he describes the difference that exists between
the mountain insurgent like the Swiss, and the forest insurgent like
the Vendean: “The one almost always fights for an ideal, the other
for a prejudice. The one soars, the other crawls. The one combats for
humanity, the other for solitude. The one desires liberty, the other
wishes isolation. The one defends the commune, the other the parish....
The one has to deal with precipices, the other with quagmires....” The
voice of Hugo is in all this, and whether it is true or false it shows
a mind that jumps to synthesis. There is much more of the same kind
of generalising in this book, _Ninety-Three_, and often Hugo seems to
be preaching when he turns aside to throw out some incidental flashes
of it. He sees not only the trees but the contour of the land, the
character of the forest; he grasps not merely maddening events and a
confusion of men bustling with action, but divines the whole curve of
the mass-movement. He can speak of “the immense profile of the French
Revolution,” thrown across “the deep and distant Heavens, against a
background at once serene and tragic.” It is significant enough that he
can think of the Revolution as something like that.
Those chapters of the novel, however, which describe “the streets of
Paris at that time,” the conversation between Robespierre, Danton, and
Marat, and the Convention itself, and the Vendée, are weighed down
by an accumulation of significant and often grim detail, a piling-up
of incident upon incident, and example upon example. In these the
Revolution is not only shown as having a character, a profile, but
also is revealed as being a living thing, a vivid many-sided creature,
betraying its character in a host of unexpected ways, flashing out in
a thousand fresh surprises, in a multiplicity of manifestations. It
is shown to be like Nature that sends out a crocus here, a daffodil
there, green buds and almond blossom somewhere else, and the song of
the birds everywhere, all of them saying in a number of ways that the
Spring has come. It comes to us like the wind that moves the grass
and the weather-vane, the smoke and the sailing-ship and the creaking
door--and in a score of different voices makes itself heard to men. The
mass of detail reveals the Revolution as an intricate thing, a complex
tangle perhaps, but most of all as a vivid many-sided life, a unity in
a hundred variations, a principle that is for ever finding a host of
new ways of expressing itself.
Hugo described the Convention by heaping up a store of details, and
burdening his whole chapter with a weight of concrete instances. Each
of these was significant in itself and showed the Revolution in some
way leaping out and leaving its mark in history; and the cumulative
effect of the whole revealed the bewildering variety of the processes
and the life of the Revolution. Before he closed the description,
however, he wrote a few paragraphs that reveal the key-idea of the
whole. He had been speaking of the men of the Convention, he had
already turned aside to tell us that the Convention “had a life,” and
he had piled up a host of instances of how that life had broken through
into incident and action, and had mentioned the turbulent spirits that
made up the life of the Assembly.
Spirits which were a prey of the wind (he continued). But this was
a miracle-working wind. To be a member of the Convention was to
be a wave of the ocean. This was true even of the greatest there.
The force of impulsion came from on high. There was a Will in
the Convention which was that of all and yet not that of any one
person. This Will was an Idea, indomitable and immeasurable, which
swept from the summit of Heaven into darkness below. We call this
Revolution. When that idea passed it beat down one, and raised up
another; it scattered this man into foam and dashed that one upon
the reefs. This Idea knew whither it was going, and drove the
whirlpool before it. To ascribe the Revolution to men is to ascribe
the tide to the waves....
The Revolution is a form of the eternal phenomenon which presses
upon us from every quarter, and which we call Necessity.
This, then, is the idea that gives a synthesis to all the mass of
details, this is the wind which reveals itself in the multitude of
spirits which it moves. In this kind of thinking Hugo is trying to
interpret man’s experience upon earth. His story is more than a
narration. He has seen the epic in history.
Above all this, however, the French Revolution comes to us as the hero
of the novel because of the remarkable way in which it is personified
in the man Cimourdain, who seems to have caught something of its life
into himself. “He saw the Revolution loom into life,” says Hugo; “He
was not a man to be afraid of that giant; far from it. This sudden
growth in everything had revivified himself.... From year to year he
saw events gain in grandeur and he increased with them.” The year 1793
represents above all things the time when the “something” inexorable
in the very idea of the Revolution became most marked, most pressing,
and Hugo has made this the prominent feature in his characterisation
of the year. The book is full of cruel alternatives, and of Councils
and men torn between unreserved devotion to the Ideal, the Revolution,
and generous impulses towards men, humanitarian feelings. Cimourdain
is the personification of this struggle between utter selfness
service to a cause and a heart’s loyalty to a friend. Hugo’s whole
characterisation of him hangs upon this feature of his character, this
cleavage in his soul. The theme of the whole novel is the life and
conduct of men like Lantenac and Gauvain as they are brought face to
face with the inexorable demands of their Cause. Lantenac, however,
is a Vendean; and Gauvain at the supreme trial sacrifices the Cause
to his feelings of generosity. Cimourdain alone is immovable, and is
devoted to his Ideal to the point of being inhuman. He personifies the
Revolution, therefore. He is more than a man, he is greater than a hero
of a novel, he is the central figure of an epic.
III
Molly was a handsome fool.... She lacked the historic sense;
and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of
warehouses, jetties, and a church or two--an unfamiliar Wapping
upon a river with a long name.
Maurice Hewlett’s heroine had known only Wapping and Wapping was her
world. She could not think of Rome as being, so to speak, the blossom
of another sort of tree--a place where the very sky looked different;
but she must take Wapping as the pattern of things. Her untravelled
mind could not see that Life as it strikes through the Earth,
crystallising into towns and cities and breaking out in buildings and
fashions and thoughts, is one thing here and another thing there,
and ever finds fresh forms for its expression like an artist in his
moods. Molly could not dream that all history--and, behind history,
geography--had conspired to make Rome a different picture, a different
mood, from the Wapping she had known. She “lacked the historic sense.”
It was not that the warehouses of Rome might be different from those of
Wapping, or its churches bigger, or all these set out in an unfamiliar
way; it would have been wrong if it had been possible to think of Rome
as an unfamiliar Wapping, without warehouses, jetties and churches,
all. The truth was that Rome was one poem, and Wapping was another
poem; and each was the clothing of a Life. Each was a personality; in
a way, a world in itself. Each had that sort of one-ness and identity
which gave it an “atmosphere” of its own.
For a mind that is moulded to a locality the historical novel can come
as travel and as an opening of the windows of the world. It is not
a history-lesson, a book that sits to facts, a record of things as
they actually happened; or rather, it may be all this and it has an
added power if it is, but its appeal and purpose are not here. When a
reader comes to the historical novel he is not, or ought not to be,
ignorant of the fact that it is a form of fiction that he is reading,
and that history in it is mixed with inventions in a proportion which
he cannot be expected to estimate with any precision. The novel does
not replace the history-book; it is a splendid thing if it drives us
to the history-book, if it provides us with something--some sort of
texture--in which the facts of the history-book, when we come to them,
can find a context and a lively significance and a field that gives
them play. The real justification of the novel as a way of dealing with
the past, is that it brings home to readers the fact that there is
such a thing as a world of the past to tell tales about--an arena of
vivid and momentous life, in which, men and women were flesh and blood,
their sorrows and hopes and adventures real as ours, and their moment
as precious as our moment. The power of the novel is that it can give
to people the feeling for history, the consciousness that this world is
an old world that can tell many stories of lost years, the sense that
the present age is the last of a trail of centuries. It makes history
a kind of extension of our personal experience, and not merely an
addition to the sum of our knowledge.
For the novelist therefore it is more important to depict the past as
a world different from our own, and to show something of its character
and colouring than to map out a particular path in that world and to
track down a particular course of public events. It is more important
for him to breathe the spirit of a bygone age, and make his book
the stuff of its mind, and recapture its turns of thought, its fund
of feeling, and all its waywardnesses than to chronicle events with
precision and keep tight to big political happenings. The supreme thing
for him is to catch the age as a synthesis, to reproduce its way of
looking at the world, its acceptance of life, and the peculiar quality
of its experience, rather than to relate things that actually happened.
Looking to some distant time he does not, so to speak, see “notes,”
and relations of notes, but catches a “tune”; he figures it, not as
a heap of facts and happenings but as the World-life in one of its
moods. He enumerates, describes, comments, perhaps; but the real secret
of his art is that in doing all these things he disengages a subtle
influence--does it as if by stealth--he breathes a thing that quickens
and that is as spirit to the body; so that while he is describing or
reflecting or narrating the age itself seems to conspire with him, and
presents itself in its “atmosphere.”
Atmosphere eludes the analyst. It might almost be said that to define
it would be to explain it away. Probably the novelist most successful
in producing it would be unable to describe how the thing is done. It
is part of its essence that you should not see its working; if you
detect scaffolding anywhere there is disillusionment and you are back
to earth again; if you discover the spell it revenges itself upon
you and sulks, and though you may admire the cleverness of it, it is
magic no longer for you. It likes you to forget it, and captures you
unawares, and then you will recall how it was atmosphere that stole
you; but hunt it, and you thwart it, and put yourself out of tune for
it. You may remember that some book was a world, and that world showed
itself in its atmosphere, and the atmosphere was everywhere, but you
cannot put your finger upon a printed page and say “it is here.” In
this it is worthy of its name, it defies immediate apprehension. It
will not meet you in the face. It is a conspiracy.
Various ages of history have their atmosphere--the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, the eighteenth century; but atmosphere does not move in
step with history, does not belong merely to epochs. Countries and
localities have it--like the Highlands of Scotland, or Hungary; and the
atmosphere of Puritan London is not that of the contemporary Paris. The
peasantry of Scott and the racy story-world in which Dumas was himself,
come to us with their atmosphere; and a monastery or a diplomatic
circle or the court of some king may carry theirs in a similar way.
These are definite areas that cover the lives of men, and they have
not merely characteristics but characters of their own. They are not
simply modifications of one another any more than Rome is Wapping with
a difference. Each is a fresh canvas and in calling them to mind we mix
our colours and our emotions differently every time; each leaps in turn
as a whole into our minds, so that we think of them as being not merely
varied groupings of notes, but different tunes altogether. Each, like
a personality, has its particular way of looking at the world and its
peculiar attitude to things, and this comes out in a particular twist
of mind in men, peculiar tricks of thought and prejudices and shades
of feeling. The peasantry of Scotland must have a different sort of
jokes, a different range of allusions from the courtiers of Louis
XIV. Various of these regions of life and circles of activity must
have their special phraseology, even a kind of dialect of their own.
Atmosphere belongs to a region that is a life, an identity, a world in
itself, and a peculiar synthesis; and he who has the atmosphere must
have found--or rather felt--the synthesis.
These various areas of life--ages of history, localities and circles
of activity--may be viewed as being worlds in themselves and as having
a life of their own; but that life only shows itself in its results,
as for instance, in the prejudices and turns of thought and habits
and peculiarities of speech of the members who make up the world. And
just as a child learning to read at first spells out only letters,
and consciously combines them into words and only gradually learns to
see words as a whole and take them in at a glance--just as a learner
in music at first only sees notes and has to use some effort in order
to combine them into a chord, and only later comes to grasp a chord
at sight--so the student of history at first sees only these isolated
details and pieces of fact, and must gradually come to the point at
which his mind can jump to a synthesis and see the one life that is
the source of a variety of facts. The novelist consciously reproducing
facts from history, copying its handwriting letter by letter,
advancing by accumulation, and straining for a faithful presentation
of details in the life of a people, can scarcely avoid betraying the
mechanism with which he works; but the writer who has caught the
principle that lies behind all these facts, and sees not merely men
and actions and sayings, but a life underneath all these, has caught
history at its source; he can throw down his scaffolding. Step by step
he has followed facts and weighed his evidence and hung upon details,
until there has flashed in upon him the something that gives light and
meaning to them all, and changes them into a vision. The age of history
is no longer to him a sum of information, but a world that has been won
and appropriated. More facts and details that he may amass find their
setting and significance, find a context in that world; they may also
check, or change, or amplify his acceptance and appreciation of it; but
to him, that age of history is a world in his mind, like a childhood’s
scene half-remembered, and he may withdraw to it at will, retreading it
in his thinking--crossing and recrossing, and playing upon it in his
imagination, all the time recasting it in the process.
Behind a thousand sunsets there lies a world where men were full of the
hunt and the anxious harvest-times, and slept with their swords near at
hand. To them the Atlantic Ocean was a thing to raise terror, a place
for strange storytelling; the demons were not yet driven from the
woods; and earth was a precarious place in which the elemental forces
seemed inexorable. It was a world of wild mythologies, and of simple
things half-understood. It comes to us--we “remember” it--in fragments
like this; and we try to piece it together again. The centuries have
tiptoed and gone, and the things that people have been afraid of, the
things that have raised a thrill, the things men have talked and joked
and told easy lies about, have not always remained the same. Their
logic has been different from our logic, as a schoolboy’s is different
from a priest’s. The things which in their thinking they were always
referring to, mirrored the world they knew. The ideas that were handy
to their minds, the words that came soonest to their lips, the turn
that was easiest to their talk, their whole fund of metaphors and
expressions, betrayed their preoccupations and lit up the background
of their lives. Perhaps the Sunday church-bell sounded differently to
their ears and reached a hidden corner in their minds. Perhaps they had
not learned to think of the stars as loveliness. For them there could
be no evening silhouettes of chimney-pots and telegraph-wires against
the glaring moon, no dream of long white roads that should shake with
hurried, humming traffic--the pictures they felt at home with were
not the same as ours. And just as, in a land where earthquakes are
to be expected, the fact must give a twist to the art of building,
the thoughts of architects, so, in those distant ages, the world that
people knew, the things they felt at home with, a hundred significant
details, moulded the forms of their thoughts, and conditioned the terms
of their thinking, and made the maps of their minds. It is by entering
into this fact that the novelist can do more than simply copy some
recorded details of their world, and can recapture something of their
life. In so far as he succeeds at all it is because the things which
conditioned their thinking, he accepts for himself. He does not analyse
them from the outside, but submits and surrenders to them, makes them
in fact his own. Telling a tale of some far-off world, he will not
speak of the stars with the love of the poet; he will remember that
the astrologers had made them a dread relentless destiny, so that this
would be an alien fact. He will explore things of this kind, and take
them into his thinking, and make them part of his kingdom; for it is a
surprise of facts such as this--which show the age true to itself in an
unexpected way--and it is the cumulative effect of a host of them, that
powerfully make for atmosphere.
And just as he enters into the things that conditioned the thinking of
these men of former days, the novelist in a larger way fits life to
the things which conditioned their experience, and moves within the
framework of the age. It is the same human nature all the time, which
he is describing, but it comes in different disguises, and is always
finding fresh symbols for itself, fresh forms for its expression.
The same essential fact, the same inner experience, takes different
turns in its unfolding. The boy who runs away to escape the drudgery
near at hand may be the same in every century; but to-day it will be
the dullness of school-routine that brings unrest and the cinema that
brings incitement; while in some bygone age it would be the cruelty of
apprentice-life that became unbearable, and tales of high adventure on
the Spanish Main that made the world inviting. This would lead to a
different wayfaring. It is a fresh story altogether. Love may be ever
the same but it will not blossom out into the identical facts, it will
not raise the same issues, it will not lure to the same adventures,
altogether it will not unfold its story in the same way, in various
worlds of convention. The novelist who knows the experience must weave
it to the pattern and run it into the mould of the century with which
he is dealing, he must fit it to the machinery of life as it then was,
he must translate it into the terms of the age. Present experience,
in so far as it is eternal experience, can be referred back to a
different world, where even to the farthest detail of its working it
will run into different forms; and the facility, the inevitability
with which this is done, so that you do not find a modern love-story
transplanted into alien soil, patched into an old tapestry, set in a
mere background of mediaeval staging and dress, but the whole theme
overhauled with insistent reference to the conditioning features of the
age, by a mind that has not wearied of playing upon the implications
of these things--is one of the things which make the age as reproduced
in the novel come to us with conviction, and with atmosphere. Perhaps
the lack of this constant way of running back to the past in thinking
till everything has been remoulded is what makes _The Cloister and the
Hearth_ fail in atmosphere, and seem like a story of modern convention
merely clothed in an old-world dress and staged in mediaeval setting,
without coming as a live blossoming of mediaeval life.
It is recalled in Henry James’s _Notes on Novelists_ how Robert Louis
Stevenson made Edinburgh his “own.”
And this (we are told) even in spite of continual absence--in
virtue of a constant imaginative reference and an intense
intellectual possession.
In a similar way if at all--the historian wins over for himself,
and comes to possess an age of the past; but whereas Stevenson in
his absence could constantly shoot back in his mind to a distant,
remembered Edinburgh, in the case of the historian it is in a peculiar
sense an irrecoverable, and so to speak, only half-remembered world
that is “referred” to, and the man cannot go direct to the original
to confirm the mental picture he retains. He can never know the past
just as Stevenson knew the city he had actually trodden, and there is
more of himself, more of the personal element, in his appropriation of
it--how much, he cannot tell, because he can never go behind his vision
of the past to compare it with the reality. We who may hold some place
as Stevenson did Edinburgh, and perhaps remember it as a distant thing
we knew in the old days, and retread it in our imagination and refer
to it in our thinking--we can return to the spot itself to verify the
impression it has left in our minds and see if our picture is true; and
returning we may be shocked to find how Memory has played us false,
how the Edinburgh that was in our thoughts is out of touch with the
real thing. Working with an equally imperfect “Memory” the historian
cannot do this, cannot put back the clock to a distant age to see
if the “world” he has created out of it in his mind has parted from
reality. And yet, given that “world” of the past as he holds it, it is
still true that he makes it peculiarly his own, in that he constantly
traverses it in his imagination, it is as a magnet to his mind, he
carries present things back into it and is for ever making calls upon
it, till it becomes a part of his thinking. It was because Scott had
worked like this upon the history that he knew so well, and because he
had entered into the past in this special way and made it a country of
his mind, that Hutton could write of him that “He had something like a
personal experience of several centuries.”
The man who does this and can feel at home in a certain “world” of
history, who saturates himself with the spirit of an age and breathes
its very air, and having touched the life of a time has turned it
over in his mind and has played upon it and pondered over it in his
thinking--will learn to catch unawares the turns of thought that were
current then, will reproduce in a spontaneous way the habits and modes
of life of the past--the things he would otherwise have had to copy
with servility--and will enter without effort into the very tricks of
speech of some former day. Instead of transplanting facts and specific
details direct from the history-book into the story-book, he will find
expression for the life which he has made his own, letting it blossom
out into its own appropriate “facts,” its inevitable manifestations.
Atmosphere, though not merely the result of spontaneity, any more
than the electricity is the result of the wire, demands this as its
necessary concomitant, as electricity demands the completed circuit.
Perhaps it may be said that atmosphere is the result of a conspiracy
of details that come in an effortless way from a mind that has entered
into the experience and made appropriation of the “world,” of some age
in history. It belongs to the past age in some sense; but it cannot
be separated from the personality of the novelist himself. Charles
Lamb steeped his mind in old writers until some of their quaintness
and charm passed into himself and came out in his prose style; and in
this way he caught history somehow into his personality. Similarly the
historical novelist does not merely acquire information about the past,
but absorbs it into his mind. Atmosphere comes out in his books as the
overflow of a personality that has made a peculiar appropriation of
history. It comes as part of the man himself.
This explains why Hewlett is at home in a peculiarly romantic and
coloured world like that of Renaissance Italy, and Dumas is really
himself when his books are in an atmosphere of court intrigue and
racy adventure, and Scott is a king in his kingdom when he is in
the peasant-world of Scotland or when he is concerned with those
Covenanting days of which he wrote “I am complete master of the whole
history of these strange times.” These writers breathe in their novels
a life that they have made their own, and that has become part of
themselves. It is not a particular period of history but rather a
particular phase of life, a certain type of experience, a definite sort
of “world” that these writers have come to possess and can so describe
with all appropriate atmosphere; and it is not necessarily when they
change their period of history but when they move into a different
world and concern themselves with a type of life and experience which
they have not made their own by any “constant imaginative reference”
that they find themselves out of their element. If they take up a
fresh corner of life like this for their stories, they are unable to
escape from the atmosphere that is really theirs, they cannot shake
off the things that belong to the world which is their true world and
which has become a part of their thinking; and either they give us no
atmosphere at all, or (which is at bottom the same thing) they trail
with them into this fresh world an atmosphere which is here alien and
inappropriate but which has become part and parcel of themselves.
Moreover, when Hewlett in _King Richard Yea-and-Nay_ and Hugo in _Notre
Dame de Paris_ give us the Middle Ages, although they both achieve a
certain atmosphere, it is a different atmosphere in each case. Just
as Hugo in _Ninety-Three_ reconstructed the French Revolution with
his eye upon the conflict between the inexorable demands of the Cause
at a moment of crisis and the generous, humane impulses of men who
served the cause, he has restored the Middle Ages in _Notre Dame_ with
his eye upon the Cathedral that is the centre of his story. Wherever
he looks he sees a gargoyle; his mind seizes upon the grotesque; and
his mediaeval world shapes itself around this central fact. Hewlett
reproduces the Middle Ages as they exist rather in the mind of the
poet. Whether he tells of King Richard, or depicts Renaissance times,
or relates the story of Mary Queen of Scots, there is always something
in his atmosphere that is Hewlett himself, there is a melody in his
style, a peculiarity in the very order of his words, that breathes
a sort of romance; he gives us the past seen through the coloured
windows of his mind. Hugo stands alone as a man who, strikingly aware
of the power of accumulated detail, produces atmosphere in a conscious
way, knowing what he is doing and how he does it; but he reveals the
bent of his mind in the particular appropriation which he makes of
the Middle Ages, and in the type of significant fact which he fastens
upon. In Hewlett in a more subjective way, there is the mysterious
communication of personality. But in every case there is a certain
element in atmosphere that is communicated to the past and is imputed
to a bygone age by the mind of the man who resurrects the past. His
own experience of the past as he has learned to live in it, his own
emotions as he looks at some distant century, are transferred to that
century. The novelist does not merely reproduce the past any more than
an artist merely copies nature; he loads it with something of himself,
he cannot describe it without betraying his way of looking at it; and
all this is true also of any historian who achieves real resurrection
and atmosphere. At its extreme it means a kind of “pathetic fallacy”
with a scene in history instead of a scene in nature, shaping itself to
the moods and the mind of a man. It is what Carlyle does when he turns
to historic men and movements. It is what Turner did when he painted
“Ulysses deriding Polyphemus” amid all the glow and colour of legend.
It is what the grown-up writer does who gives us children’s tales and
childhood scenes that seem so charmingly child-like to other grown-ups.
It is what all of us do with far-off, remembered things.
And because of all this there is something in the make-up of a
historical novelist’s mind, something in his temperament and outlook
which finds its peculiar home in various corners of the world of the
past. There is something in various ages of history, various phases
of life and experience, various types of thinking, to which his mind
naturally turns, and in which he finds his element. There is something
in his own life which answers to its counterpart in history, and finds
its own world there. A man like Jokai can catch the atmosphere of some
revolutionary movement--as in _The Green Book_--and can thrill a novel
with the feelings and the subtle workings of a secret yearning for
freedom, because in real life he lived this, and finding it in history
found something of himself. Carlyle’s Cromwell, Carlyle’s Mirabeau
have passed through Carlyle’s mind and come out crooked; but there was
in their way of thinking and in their wrestles with life a thing which
Carlyle had in common with them, and which drew his thoughts to them
and made their experience a thing he could enter into. That was why he
could assimilate them so powerfully to himself. That also was why his
interpretations of them were contributions to history, and not mere
wild distortions.
And so, for the resurrection of the past and the true re-telling of
the life of the past the novelist’s peculiar art has something to
contribute. The virtue and power of the novelist’s depiction of men,
is not that he observes perpetually and arranges data, but that he
enters into the experiences of others, he runs his life into the mould
of their lives, he puts himself under the conditioning circumstances
of their thinking. He can feel with people unlike himself and look
at the world with their eyes and grapple with the issues of life
that meet them, because he can put himself in their place, that is
to say, because his experience is not entirely and merely his own.
It is precisely because personality is not cut off from personality,
and a man is not entirely locked up within himself, with the depths
of him completely hidden away from everybody else, that the novelist
can so to speak transpose himself and catch life into a person other
than himself. It is precisely because in the last resort a distant
age of history is not its own secret, curled up in its own world, and
cut off from the present day--because the men of the past had red
blood in their veins and were a phase of a life that is universal
and eternal--that History can recapture something of their struggles
and yearnings and their particular experiences. The history of
history-books gives us a glimpse of the men of the past, a chart of
the facts that governed their world, an idea of the conditioning
circumstances of their lives; but it withholds the closest human
things, the touches of direct experience. And because life is all
one, and essential experience ultimately the same, these are the very
things which the novelist, better than most people, can read back into
the past. These provide the peculiar place, the legitimate rôle for
historical fiction. The novelist will inevitably colour his pictures
of an age with something of himself, for the pictures are born of his
thinking; but in so far as he does all this in tune, surprising us with
facts that flash, and that light up the age in unexpected ways, and
lure us into a “world,” he will have atmosphere; and in so far as he
remains true to the chart which history gives him he will have the true
historical atmosphere.
* * * * *
The historical novel, then, is one of many ways of treating the past
and of wresting from it its secret. Given the facts of Nature a
scientist will make one use of them, and will do a certain kind of
thinking around them; but the artist or the poet will turn a different
light upon them and meet them in a different way. Given the facts of
the past, the historian shapes them in one way, squeezes something out
of them, hunts out a set of implications in them; the novelist uses
them to a different purpose, organises them differently, and turns
them over in his thinking with a different kind of logic. Given an
event the historian will seek to estimate its ultimate significance
and to trace out its influence, the novelist will seek merely to
recapture the fleeting moment, to see the thing happening, to turn it
into a picture or a “situation.” With a set of facts about the social
conditions of England in the Middle Ages the historian will seek to
make a generalisation, to find a formula; the novelist will seek a
different sort of synthesis and will try to reconstruct a world, to
particularise, to catch a glimpse of human nature. Each will notice
different things and follow different clues; for to the historian the
past is the whole process of development that leads up to the present;
to the novelist it is a strange world to tell tales about.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Page 93: “selfness” may be a typographical error for “selfless.”
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