Molly was a handsome fool.... She lacked the historic sense;
and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of
warehouses, jetties, and a church or two--an unfamiliar Wapping
upon a river with a long name.
Maurice Hewlett’s heroine had known only Wapping and Wapping was her
world. She could not think of Rome as being, so to speak, the blossom
of another sort of tree--a place where the very sky looked different;
but she must take Wapping as the pattern of things. Her untravelled
mind could not see that Life as it strikes through the Earth,
crystallising into towns and cities and breaking out in buildings and
fashions and thoughts, is one thing here and another thing there,
and ever finds fresh forms for its expression like an artist in his
moods. Molly could not dream that all history--and, behind history,
geography--had conspired to make Rome a different picture, a different
mood, from the Wapping she had known. She “lacked the historic sense.”
It was not that the warehouses of Rome might be different from those of
Wapping, or its churches bigger, or all these set out in an unfamiliar
way; it would have been wrong if it had been possible to think of Rome
as an unfamiliar Wapping, without warehouses, jetties and churches,
all. The truth was that Rome was one poem, and Wapping was another
poem; and each was the clothing of a Life. Each was a personality; in
a way, a world in itself. Each had that sort of one-ness and identity
which gave it an “atmosphere” of its own.
For a mind that is moulded to a locality the historical novel can come
as travel and as an opening of the windows of the world. It is not
a history-lesson, a book that sits to facts, a record of things as
they actually happened; or rather, it may be all this and it has an
added power if it is, but its appeal and purpose are not here. When a
reader comes to the historical novel he is not, or ought not to be,
ignorant of the fact that it is a form of fiction that he is reading,
and that history in it is mixed with inventions in a proportion which
he cannot be expected to estimate with any precision. The novel does
not replace the history-book; it is a splendid thing if it drives us
to the history-book, if it provides us with something--some sort of
texture--in which the facts of the history-book, when we come to them,
can find a context and a lively significance and a field that gives
them play. The real justification of the novel as a way of dealing with
the past, is that it brings home to readers the fact that there is
such a thing as a world of the past to tell tales about--an arena of
vivid and momentous life, in which, men and women were flesh and blood,
their sorrows and hopes and adventures real as ours, and their moment
as precious as our moment. The power of the novel is that it can give
to people the feeling for history, the consciousness that this world is
an old world that can tell many stories of lost years, the sense that
the present age is the last of a trail of centuries. It makes history
a kind of extension of our personal experience, and not merely an
addition to the sum of our knowledge.
For the novelist therefore it is more important to depict the past as
a world different from our own, and to show something of its character
and colouring than to map out a particular path in that world and to
track down a particular course of public events. It is more important
for him to breathe the spirit of a bygone age, and make his book
the stuff of its mind, and recapture its turns of thought, its fund
of feeling, and all its waywardnesses than to chronicle events with
precision and keep tight to big political happenings. The supreme thing
for him is to catch the age as a synthesis, to reproduce its way of
looking at the world, its acceptance of life, and the peculiar quality
of its experience, rather than to relate things that actually happened.
Looking to some distant time he does not, so to speak, see “notes,”
and relations of notes, but catches a “tune”; he figures it, not as
a heap of facts and happenings but as the World-life in one of its
moods. He enumerates, describes, comments, perhaps; but the real secret
of his art is that in doing all these things he disengages a subtle
influence--does it as if by stealth--he breathes a thing that quickens
and that is as spirit to the body; so that while he is describing or
reflecting or narrating the age itself seems to conspire with him, and
presents itself in its “atmosphere.”
Atmosphere eludes the analyst. It might almost be said that to define
it would be to explain it away. Probably the novelist most successful
in producing it would be unable to describe how the thing is done. It
is part of its essence that you should not see its working; if you
detect scaffolding anywhere there is disillusionment and you are back
to earth again; if you discover the spell it revenges itself upon
you and sulks, and though you may admire the cleverness of it, it is
magic no longer for you. It likes you to forget it, and captures you
unawares, and then you will recall how it was atmosphere that stole
you; but hunt it, and you thwart it, and put yourself out of tune for
it. You may remember that some book was a world, and that world showed
itself in its atmosphere, and the atmosphere was everywhere, but you
cannot put your finger upon a printed page and say “it is here.” In
this it is worthy of its name, it defies immediate apprehension. It
will not meet you in the face. It is a conspiracy.
Various ages of history have their atmosphere--the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, the eighteenth century; but atmosphere does not move in
step with history, does not belong merely to epochs. Countries and
localities have it--like the Highlands of Scotland, or Hungary; and the
atmosphere of Puritan London is not that of the contemporary Paris. The
peasantry of Scott and the racy story-world in which Dumas was himself,
come to us with their atmosphere; and a monastery or a diplomatic
circle or the court of some king may carry theirs in a similar way.
These are definite areas that cover the lives of men, and they have
not merely characteristics but characters of their own. They are not
simply modifications of one another any more than Rome is Wapping with
a difference. Each is a fresh canvas and in calling them to mind we mix
our colours and our emotions differently every time; each leaps in turn
as a whole into our minds, so that we think of them as being not merely
varied groupings of notes, but different tunes altogether. Each, like
a personality, has its particular way of looking at the world and its
peculiar attitude to things, and this comes out in a particular twist
of mind in men, peculiar tricks of thought and prejudices and shades
of feeling. The peasantry of Scotland must have a different sort of
jokes, a different range of allusions from the courtiers of Louis
XIV. Various of these regions of life and circles of activity must
have their special phraseology, even a kind of dialect of their own.
Atmosphere belongs to a region that is a life, an identity, a world in
itself, and a peculiar synthesis; and he who has the atmosphere must
have found--or rather felt--the synthesis.
These various areas of life--ages of history, localities and circles
of activity--may be viewed as being worlds in themselves and as having
a life of their own; but that life only shows itself in its results,
as for instance, in the prejudices and turns of thought and habits
and peculiarities of speech of the members who make up the world. And
just as a child learning to read at first spells out only letters,
and consciously combines them into words and only gradually learns to
see words as a whole and take them in at a glance--just as a learner
in music at first only sees notes and has to use some effort in order
to combine them into a chord, and only later comes to grasp a chord
at sight--so the student of history at first sees only these isolated
details and pieces of fact, and must gradually come to the point at
which his mind can jump to a synthesis and see the one life that is
the source of a variety of facts. The novelist consciously reproducing
facts from history, copying its handwriting letter by letter,
advancing by accumulation, and straining for a faithful presentation
of details in the life of a people, can scarcely avoid betraying the
mechanism with which he works; but the writer who has caught the
principle that lies behind all these facts, and sees not merely men
and actions and sayings, but a life underneath all these, has caught
history at its source; he can throw down his scaffolding. Step by step
he has followed facts and weighed his evidence and hung upon details,
until there has flashed in upon him the something that gives light and
meaning to them all, and changes them into a vision. The age of history
is no longer to him a sum of information, but a world that has been won
and appropriated. More facts and details that he may amass find their
setting and significance, find a context in that world; they may also
check, or change, or amplify his acceptance and appreciation of it; but
to him, that age of history is a world in his mind, like a childhood’s
scene half-remembered, and he may withdraw to it at will, retreading it
in his thinking--crossing and recrossing, and playing upon it in his
imagination, all the time recasting it in the process.
Behind a thousand sunsets there lies a world where men were full of the
hunt and the anxious harvest-times, and slept with their swords near at
hand. To them the Atlantic Ocean was a thing to raise terror, a place
for strange storytelling; the demons were not yet driven from the
woods; and earth was a precarious place in which the elemental forces
seemed inexorable. It was a world of wild mythologies, and of simple
things half-understood. It comes to us--we “remember” it--in fragments
like this; and we try to piece it together again. The centuries have
tiptoed and gone, and the things that people have been afraid of, the
things that have raised a thrill, the things men have talked and joked
and told easy lies about, have not always remained the same. Their
logic has been different from our logic, as a schoolboy’s is different
from a priest’s. The things which in their thinking they were always
referring to, mirrored the world they knew. The ideas that were handy
to their minds, the words that came soonest to their lips, the turn
that was easiest to their talk, their whole fund of metaphors and
expressions, betrayed their preoccupations and lit up the background
of their lives. Perhaps the Sunday church-bell sounded differently to
their ears and reached a hidden corner in their minds. Perhaps they had
not learned to think of the stars as loveliness. For them there could
be no evening silhouettes of chimney-pots and telegraph-wires against
the glaring moon, no dream of long white roads that should shake with
hurried, humming traffic--the pictures they felt at home with were
not the same as ours. And just as, in a land where earthquakes are
to be expected, the fact must give a twist to the art of building,
the thoughts of architects, so, in those distant ages, the world that
people knew, the things they felt at home with, a hundred significant
details, moulded the forms of their thoughts, and conditioned the terms
of their thinking, and made the maps of their minds. It is by entering
into this fact that the novelist can do more than simply copy some
recorded details of their world, and can recapture something of their
life. In so far as he succeeds at all it is because the things which
conditioned their thinking, he accepts for himself. He does not analyse
them from the outside, but submits and surrenders to them, makes them
in fact his own. Telling a tale of some far-off world, he will not
speak of the stars with the love of the poet; he will remember that
the astrologers had made them a dread relentless destiny, so that this
would be an alien fact. He will explore things of this kind, and take
them into his thinking, and make them part of his kingdom; for it is a
surprise of facts such as this--which show the age true to itself in an
unexpected way--and it is the cumulative effect of a host of them, that
powerfully make for atmosphere.
And just as he enters into the things that conditioned the thinking of
these men of former days, the novelist in a larger way fits life to
the things which conditioned their experience, and moves within the
framework of the age. It is the same human nature all the time, which
he is describing, but it comes in different disguises, and is always
finding fresh symbols for itself, fresh forms for its expression.
The same essential fact, the same inner experience, takes different
turns in its unfolding. The boy who runs away to escape the drudgery
near at hand may be the same in every century; but to-day it will be
the dullness of school-routine that brings unrest and the cinema that
brings incitement; while in some bygone age it would be the cruelty of
apprentice-life that became unbearable, and tales of high adventure on
the Spanish Main that made the world inviting. This would lead to a
different wayfaring. It is a fresh story altogether. Love may be ever
the same but it will not blossom out into the identical facts, it will
not raise the same issues, it will not lure to the same adventures,
altogether it will not unfold its story in the same way, in various
worlds of convention. The novelist who knows the experience must weave
it to the pattern and run it into the mould of the century with which
he is dealing, he must fit it to the machinery of life as it then was,
he must translate it into the terms of the age. Present experience,
in so far as it is eternal experience, can be referred back to a
different world, where even to the farthest detail of its working it
will run into different forms; and the facility, the inevitability
with which this is done, so that you do not find a modern love-story
transplanted into alien soil, patched into an old tapestry, set in a
mere background of mediaeval staging and dress, but the whole theme
overhauled with insistent reference to the conditioning features of the
age, by a mind that has not wearied of playing upon the implications
of these things--is one of the things which make the age as reproduced
in the novel come to us with conviction, and with atmosphere. Perhaps
the lack of this constant way of running back to the past in thinking
till everything has been remoulded is what makes _The Cloister and the
Hearth_ fail in atmosphere, and seem like a story of modern convention
merely clothed in an old-world dress and staged in mediaeval setting,
without coming as a live blossoming of mediaeval life.
It is recalled in Henry James’s _Notes on Novelists_ how Robert Louis
Stevenson made Edinburgh his “own.”
And this (we are told) even in spite of continual absence--in
virtue of a constant imaginative reference and an intense
intellectual possession.
In a similar way if at all--the historian wins over for himself,
and comes to possess an age of the past; but whereas Stevenson in
his absence could constantly shoot back in his mind to a distant,
remembered Edinburgh, in the case of the historian it is in a peculiar
sense an irrecoverable, and so to speak, only half-remembered world
that is “referred” to, and the man cannot go direct to the original
to confirm the mental picture he retains. He can never know the past
just as Stevenson knew the city he had actually trodden, and there is
more of himself, more of the personal element, in his appropriation of
it--how much, he cannot tell, because he can never go behind his vision
of the past to compare it with the reality. We who may hold some place
as Stevenson did Edinburgh, and perhaps remember it as a distant thing
we knew in the old days, and retread it in our imagination and refer
to it in our thinking--we can return to the spot itself to verify the
impression it has left in our minds and see if our picture is true; and
returning we may be shocked to find how Memory has played us false,
how the Edinburgh that was in our thoughts is out of touch with the
real thing. Working with an equally imperfect “Memory” the historian
cannot do this, cannot put back the clock to a distant age to see
if the “world” he has created out of it in his mind has parted from
reality. And yet, given that “world” of the past as he holds it, it is
still true that he makes it peculiarly his own, in that he constantly
traverses it in his imagination, it is as a magnet to his mind, he
carries present things back into it and is for ever making calls upon
it, till it becomes a part of his thinking. It was because Scott had
worked like this upon the history that he knew so well, and because he
had entered into the past in this special way and made it a country of
his mind, that Hutton could write of him that “He had something like a
personal experience of several centuries.”
The man who does this and can feel at home in a certain “world” of
history, who saturates himself with the spirit of an age and breathes
its very air, and having touched the life of a time has turned it
over in his mind and has played upon it and pondered over it in his
thinking--will learn to catch unawares the turns of thought that were
current then, will reproduce in a spontaneous way the habits and modes
of life of the past--the things he would otherwise have had to copy
with servility--and will enter without effort into the very tricks of
speech of some former day. Instead of transplanting facts and specific
details direct from the history-book into the story-book, he will find
expression for the life which he has made his own, letting it blossom
out into its own appropriate “facts,” its inevitable manifestations.
Atmosphere, though not merely the result of spontaneity, any more
than the electricity is the result of the wire, demands this as its
necessary concomitant, as electricity demands the completed circuit.
Perhaps it may be said that atmosphere is the result of a conspiracy
of details that come in an effortless way from a mind that has entered
into the experience and made appropriation of the “world,” of some age
in history. It belongs to the past age in some sense; but it cannot
be separated from the personality of the novelist himself. Charles
Lamb steeped his mind in old writers until some of their quaintness
and charm passed into himself and came out in his prose style; and in
this way he caught history somehow into his personality. Similarly the
historical novelist does not merely acquire information about the past,
but absorbs it into his mind. Atmosphere comes out in his books as the
overflow of a personality that has made a peculiar appropriation of
history. It comes as part of the man himself.
This explains why Hewlett is at home in a peculiarly romantic and
coloured world like that of Renaissance Italy, and Dumas is really
himself when his books are in an atmosphere of court intrigue and
racy adventure, and Scott is a king in his kingdom when he is in
the peasant-world of Scotland or when he is concerned with those
Covenanting days of which he wrote “I am complete master of the whole
history of these strange times.” These writers breathe in their novels
a life that they have made their own, and that has become part of
themselves. It is not a particular period of history but rather a
particular phase of life, a certain type of experience, a definite sort
of “world” that these writers have come to possess and can so describe
with all appropriate atmosphere; and it is not necessarily when they
change their period of history but when they move into a different
world and concern themselves with a type of life and experience which
they have not made their own by any “constant imaginative reference”
that they find themselves out of their element. If they take up a
fresh corner of life like this for their stories, they are unable to
escape from the atmosphere that is really theirs, they cannot shake
off the things that belong to the world which is their true world and
which has become a part of their thinking; and either they give us no
atmosphere at all, or (which is at bottom the same thing) they trail
with them into this fresh world an atmosphere which is here alien and
inappropriate but which has become part and parcel of themselves.
Moreover, when Hewlett in _King Richard Yea-and-Nay_ and Hugo in _Notre
Dame de Paris_ give us the Middle Ages, although they both achieve a
certain atmosphere, it is a different atmosphere in each case. Just
as Hugo in _Ninety-Three_ reconstructed the French Revolution with
his eye upon the conflict between the inexorable demands of the Cause
at a moment of crisis and the generous, humane impulses of men who
served the cause, he has restored the Middle Ages in _Notre Dame_ with
his eye upon the Cathedral that is the centre of his story. Wherever
he looks he sees a gargoyle; his mind seizes upon the grotesque; and
his mediaeval world shapes itself around this central fact. Hewlett
reproduces the Middle Ages as they exist rather in the mind of the
poet. Whether he tells of King Richard, or depicts Renaissance times,
or relates the story of Mary Queen of Scots, there is always something
in his atmosphere that is Hewlett himself, there is a melody in his
style, a peculiarity in the very order of his words, that breathes
a sort of romance; he gives us the past seen through the coloured
windows of his mind. Hugo stands alone as a man who, strikingly aware
of the power of accumulated detail, produces atmosphere in a conscious
way, knowing what he is doing and how he does it; but he reveals the
bent of his mind in the particular appropriation which he makes of
the Middle Ages, and in the type of significant fact which he fastens
upon. In Hewlett in a more subjective way, there is the mysterious
communication of personality. But in every case there is a certain
element in atmosphere that is communicated to the past and is imputed
to a bygone age by the mind of the man who resurrects the past. His
own experience of the past as he has learned to live in it, his own
emotions as he looks at some distant century, are transferred to that
century. The novelist does not merely reproduce the past any more than
an artist merely copies nature; he loads it with something of himself,
he cannot describe it without betraying his way of looking at it; and
all this is true also of any historian who achieves real resurrection
and atmosphere. At its extreme it means a kind of “pathetic fallacy”
with a scene in history instead of a scene in nature, shaping itself to
the moods and the mind of a man. It is what Carlyle does when he turns
to historic men and movements. It is what Turner did when he painted
“Ulysses deriding Polyphemus” amid all the glow and colour of legend.
It is what the grown-up writer does who gives us children’s tales and
childhood scenes that seem so charmingly child-like to other grown-ups.
It is what all of us do with far-off, remembered things.
And because of all this there is something in the make-up of a
historical novelist’s mind, something in his temperament and outlook
which finds its peculiar home in various corners of the world of the
past. There is something in various ages of history, various phases
of life and experience, various types of thinking, to which his mind
naturally turns, and in which he finds his element. There is something
in his own life which answers to its counterpart in history, and finds
its own world there. A man like Jokai can catch the atmosphere of some
revolutionary movement--as in _The Green Book_--and can thrill a novel
with the feelings and the subtle workings of a secret yearning for
freedom, because in real life he lived this, and finding it in history
found something of himself. Carlyle’s Cromwell, Carlyle’s Mirabeau
have passed through Carlyle’s mind and come out crooked; but there was
in their way of thinking and in their wrestles with life a thing which
Carlyle had in common with them, and which drew his thoughts to them
and made their experience a thing he could enter into. That was why he
could assimilate them so powerfully to himself. That also was why his
interpretations of them were contributions to history, and not mere
wild distortions.
And so, for the resurrection of the past and the true re-telling of
the life of the past the novelist’s peculiar art has something to
contribute. The virtue and power of the novelist’s depiction of men,
is not that he observes perpetually and arranges data, but that he
enters into the experiences of others, he runs his life into the mould
of their lives, he puts himself under the conditioning circumstances
of their thinking. He can feel with people unlike himself and look
at the world with their eyes and grapple with the issues of life
that meet them, because he can put himself in their place, that is
to say, because his experience is not entirely and merely his own.
It is precisely because personality is not cut off from personality,
and a man is not entirely locked up within himself, with the depths
of him completely hidden away from everybody else, that the novelist
can so to speak transpose himself and catch life into a person other
than himself. It is precisely because in the last resort a distant
age of history is not its own secret, curled up in its own world, and
cut off from the present day--because the men of the past had red
blood in their veins and were a phase of a life that is universal
and eternal--that History can recapture something of their struggles
and yearnings and their particular experiences. The history of
history-books gives us a glimpse of the men of the past, a chart of
the facts that governed their world, an idea of the conditioning
circumstances of their lives; but it withholds the closest human
things, the touches of direct experience. And because life is all
one, and essential experience ultimately the same, these are the very
things which the novelist, better than most people, can read back into
the past. These provide the peculiar place, the legitimate rôle for
historical fiction. The novelist will inevitably colour his pictures
of an age with something of himself, for the pictures are born of his
thinking; but in so far as he does all this in tune, surprising us with
facts that flash, and that light up the age in unexpected ways, and
lure us into a “world,” he will have atmosphere; and in so far as he
remains true to the chart which history gives him he will have the true
historical atmosphere.
* * * * *
The historical novel, then, is one of many ways of treating the past
and of wresting from it its secret. Given the facts of Nature a
scientist will make one use of them, and will do a certain kind of
thinking around them; but the artist or the poet will turn a different
light upon them and meet them in a different way. Given the facts of
the past, the historian shapes them in one way, squeezes something out
of them, hunts out a set of implications in them; the novelist uses
them to a different purpose, organises them differently, and turns
them over in his thinking with a different kind of logic. Given an
event the historian will seek to estimate its ultimate significance
and to trace out its influence, the novelist will seek merely to
recapture the fleeting moment, to see the thing happening, to turn it
into a picture or a “situation.” With a set of facts about the social
conditions of England in the Middle Ages the historian will seek to
make a generalisation, to find a formula; the novelist will seek a
different sort of synthesis and will try to reconstruct a world, to
particularise, to catch a glimpse of human nature. Each will notice
different things and follow different clues; for to the historian the
past is the whole process of development that leads up to the present;
to the novelist it is a strange world to tell tales about.