“_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.