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.