The historical novel
Date: 2023-12-11T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Historical fiction -- History and criticism

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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

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

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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Table of Contents

- THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
- PREFACE
- I
- II
- III
- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE