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.