THE HISTORICAL WRITER
In an essay in _First and Last_, Mr. Belloc says:
... That earthwork is the earthwork where the British stood against
the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on their
bronze, the arms of Caesar. Here the river was forded; here the
little men of the South went up in formation; here the barbarian
broke and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded,
through devious woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here
began the great history of England.
Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I
think so.
There you have compactly and poignantly expressed a mood which is common
to all men who have any feeling for the past. It is a pathetic, almost a
tragic mood, a longing more pitiable than that of any fanatic for any
paradise, any lover for any woman, because it is quite impossible that
it should ever be satisfied. To see, to feel, to move among the
foundations of our generation--it is so natural a desire, and it is
quite hopeless.
It is a desire which one might naturally suppose to be common among
historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in
the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like
Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear
expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical
writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the
only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the
right motive of useful research. Acton had it not, Froude perhaps a
little, Maitland, one might believe, to some extent,[8] Professor Bury,
Lord knows, neither that nor any other emotion comprehensible in man. To
the don, indeed, the absence of the past is one of the factors in his
fascinating, esoteric game: were some astounding document to appear that
should make the origin and constitution of the mediaeval manor as clear
as daylight, the problem would lose its interest, the agile don would
find it too easy for him. The equipment of the ideal historian consists
of the attributes of practical and poetic man, the desire to gain some
present benefit, to learn some urgent lesson, and the desire to perfect
the spirit by contemplation of the past.
History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and
these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the
workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any
practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must
understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how
the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal
events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human
beings like ourselves.
We have expressed sufficiently in the previous chapter an opinion on the
value of Mr. Belloc's historical conclusions: we must now examine more
closely the method by means of which he presents these conclusions and
its effect on the reader.
His method, it goes without saying, is more lively. In the whole of the
_Cambridge Modern History_ (sixteen volumes of unbelievable dimensions)
you will not find one living character or one paragraph of exhilarating
prose.[9] Mr. Belloc's work, on the other hand, is full of both. But
this must not be taken, without further inquiry, to be an unqualified
merit.
The lively writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be
inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of
imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps,
in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little
is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his
convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic
circles, it is rather a reproach to say that a man writes in an
interesting way: they remember Macaulay and would, if they could, forget
Gibbon.
Mr. Belloc's writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either
to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a
good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true
literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal
passion, the passion for the past. He says himself[10]:
To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it
and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a
curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a
function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By
the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our
lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take
on body--are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed....
One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life
completed and a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace
of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.
Such a passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical
passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the
passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has
developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is always
practical.
It is also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in
the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political
development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but
the hot greed of a king and the astuteness of his supporters.
Acton speaks of "the undying penalty which history has the power to
inflict on wrong."[11] But how are we to fix a stigma, unless we know
the man's motives? How can we know his motives without an estimate of
his character? How can either of these be known unless we visualize him
as he lived?
Mr. Belloc has made his most conscious and determined effort at
visualization in a book which is not historical, but which falls more,
though not altogether, into the category of historical fiction. This is
the book which is called _The Eye-Witness_.
It consists of twenty-seven sketches of historical incidents ranging
from the year 55 B.C. to the year A.D. 1906. It begins with Caesar's
invasion of Britain, and goes by way of the disaster at Roncesvalles,
the Battle of Lewes, the execution of Charles I and the Battle of Valmy
to an election in England which was held on the issues of Tariff Reform,
Chinese Labour in the Transvaal and other topics. One might say--a
gloomy progress.
It falls partly into the category of historical fiction because much of
it is sheerly created out of Mr. Belloc's own head. The interlocutors in
most of the sketches (where there are interlocutors), the individual who
is the eye-witness (when there is one), these are imaginary. Mr. Barr,
who was held up in a crowd by the execution of Marie Antoinette and
suffered annoyance, the apprentice who saw an earlier royal head cut
off, the Christian who was killed in the Arena by "a little, low-built,
broad-shouldered man from the Auvergne of the sort that can tame an
animal in a day, hard as wood, and perfectly unfeeling," these are
characters of fiction.
But in the "stories" that make up the book there is no plot. There is
just a glimpse of a past life, sometimes, but not always, at a
significant moment. In one of Mr. Wells' stories there is a queer fable
of a crystal mysteriously in touch with a twin crystal on another
planet. Glancing into this, we get a glimpse of that different world.
Mr. Belloc's sketches are such crystals, suspended for a moment at a
time in centuries foreign to our own.
He has endeavoured passionately to be accurate in these. A passage from
his preface will show how this adverb is justified:
As to historical references, I must beg the indulgence of the
critic, but I believe I have not positively asserted an error, nor
failed to set down a considerable number of minute but entertaining
truths.
Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a regiment in _The Two
Soldiers_) _did_ sail under Caesar for Britain from Boulogne, and
from no other port. There _was_ in those days a great land-locked
harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to the Narrows, as the
readers of the _Gaule Romaine_ must know. The moon _was_ at her
last quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden by clouds is
but fancy). There _was_ a high hill just at the place where she
would have been setting that night--you may see it to-day. The
Roman soldiers _were_ recruited from the Teutonic and the Celtic
portions of Gaul; of the latter many _did_ know of that grotto
under Chartres which is among the chief historical interests of
Europe. The tide _was_, as I have said, on the flow at
midnight--and so forth.
The temper of that is the temper of the man who was at the pains, when
writing his life of Robespierre, to look up the reports of the Paris
Observatory, so as to be able exactly to describe the weather in which
such and such a great scene was played that hugely affected the fortunes
of Europe. It is the temper, too, of a man with an immense historical
curiosity, who will not be satisfied with less than all of the past that
can reasonably be reconstructed.
Mr. Belloc desires knowledge and experience of the past so earnestly
that he makes imaginary pictures of it, as it were to comfort himself.
Some men, in this way, when walking alone, make imaginary pictures of
their own futures, often to cheat the disappointments of a narrow life.
Too fervid political idealists make pictures of the world's future: you
think immediately of Morris and Bellamy and many another. Mr. Belloc is
not likely to give way to this temptation.
But the strength and disinterestedness of this desire guarantee the
reader of the book against the aridity of the pictures of past
civilizations which we all know: such as descriptions of how "the
_poeta_ (or poet) entered the _domus_ (or house), kicked the _canis_ (or
dog) and summoned the _servus_ (or slave)." It will be at all events a
living picture: it will be, to the best of the author's power, an
accurate and impartial picture. It will translate characters, language
and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own
times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into
the _opera-bouffe_ of, for example, Mr. Shaw's _Caesar and Cleopatra_.
There will also be no tushery.
The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is
cool and transparent. The emotion of the writer, as regards the
particular events he is describing, is suppressed, though the feeling of
eagerness to realize the past leaps out everywhere. It is only by great
steadiness of the vision and the hand that Mr. Belloc can secure the
effects he here desires to convey.
It is only by great care in writing that he can secure the easy, even
and real tone in which these glimpses of other centuries and other
societies can be presented. Should he err on one side, he is in the bogs
of tushery: on the other, he commits that fault of self-conscious,
over-daring modernization, of which Mr. Shaw has been so guilty.
Let us take a passage from the illuminating picture, "The Pagans," which
describes a dinner in a Narbonese house in the fifth century:
When it was already dark over the sea, they reclined together and
ate the feast, crowned with leaves in that old fashion which to
several of the younger men seemed an affectation of antique things,
but which all secretly enjoyed because such customs had about
them, as had the rare statues and the mosaics and the very pattern
of the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth and lineage. In
great established wealth and lineage lay all that was left of
strength to those old gods which still stood gazing upon the change
of the world.
The songs that were sung and the chaunted invocations had nothing
in them but the memories of Rome; but the instruments and dancers
were tolerated by that one guest who should most have complained,
and whose expression and apparel and gorgeous ornament and a
certain security of station in his manner proved him the head of
the Christian priests from Helena. When the music had ceased and
the night deepened, they talked all together as though the world
had but one general opinion; they talked with great courtesy of
common things. But from the slaves' quarters came the unmistakable
sing-song of the Christian vine-yard dance and hymn, which the
labourers sung together with rhythmic beating of hands and
customary cries, and through that din arose from time to time the
loud bass of one especially chosen to respond. The master sent out
word to them in secret to conduct their festival less noisily and
with closed doors. Upon the couches round the table where the lords
reclined together, more than one, especially among the younger men,
looked anxiously at their host and at the Priest next to him, but
they saw nothing in their expressions but a continued courtesy; and
the talk still moved upon things common to them all, and still
avoided that deep dissension which it was now useless to raise
because it would so soon be gone.
There came an hour when all but one ceased suddenly from wine; that
one, who still continued to drink as he saw fit, was the host. He
knew the reason of their abstention; he had heard the trumpet in
the harbour that told the hour and proclaimed the fast and vigil,
and he felt, as all did, that at last the figure and the presence
of which none would speak--the figure and the presence of the
Faith--had entered that room in spite of its dignity and its high
reserve.
For some little time, now talking of those great poets who were a
glory to them all, and whose verse was quite removed from these
newer things, the old man still sipped his wine and looked round at
the others whose fast had thus begun. He looked at them with an
expression of severity in which there was some challenge, but which
was far too disdainful to be insolent, and as he so looked the
company gradually departed.
We have quoted this passage at some length, because it is an almost
perfect example of Mr. Belloc's style in these sketches, and because it
touches on, is the visualization of, a cardinal point in his historical
theories. This point has been dwelt upon more fully in the preceding
chapter, and we cannot do more than mention it here. It expresses that
view of the gradual development and transformation of the Roman Empire
with which Mr. Belloc would replace the gloomy view of Gibbon and the
exaggerated horrors, to take a conspicuous but not now important
example, of Charles Kingsley's _Roman and Teuton_. He would represent it
as a period of wealth and order, full of menace, warning and change, but
no more prescient of utter disaster than our own time.
The sketch is a visualization of a short passage in the essay _On
Historical Evidences_:
You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running
down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax of
Charlemagne. Many of those names stand for some most powerful
individuality, yet all we have is a formula, a lineage, with
symbols and names in the place of living beings.... The men of that
time did not even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a
family tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish
its Roman origin and its long succession in power.
Mr. Belloc has endeavoured to see the reality of such a family, as he
believes, as that from which Charlemagne sprung. He fights,
paradoxically, for the unity of history against Freeman, who invented
that phrase and who yet thought that "Charles the Great" came from a
line of German savages.
He has endeavoured passionately to realize this thing; it would be
pathetic, were not his desire so triumphantly gratified. Observe the
ease and sincerity of that long passage quoted above. One forcing of the
note, one moment's wish to show too great a scholarship or to emphasize
the antiquity of the scene, would have ruined the effect. It is full of
emotion, the most poignant, the regret for passing and irrevocable
things, but the author is detached and cool. He is all bent on the
fidelity of his picture.
_The Girondin_ is very much a different matter and occupies a place in
Mr. Belloc's work difficult to discuss. It is frankly a novel, written
as novels are, to entertain, to edify and to perform the spiritual
functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it
contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's
imaginative writing.
In so far as it is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and
we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the
age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an
unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary
decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and
malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The
progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero
is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party which bore
that name.
The action moves from a town in the Gironde to the frontiers. The hero
is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy.
That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with
which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not
merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.
The matter of raising the armies was a matter of prime importance to the
Republic, and involved a task which even we, in this country, with all
our recent experiences, can hardly comprehend. The officers had
deserted, the men were not all to be trusted, all told there were not
enough for the pressing necessities of the State. A corps of officers
had to be improvised from nowhere, recruits had to be taught to ride as
they went to meet the Prussians. Such were the beginnings of the army
that afterwards visited the Pyramids, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.
All this Mr. Belloc has shown with sufficient vividness in isolated
passages. Even those who have played no part in the raising of the new
armies of England, can gain from his descriptions something of what that
business must have been. But in this book he is not merely writing a
sketch to visualize the past, he is writing a real story with a number
of living characters and a sort of a plot. And in some way the story and
the historical matter weaken one another. They go and come by turns. The
whole book is an irregular succession of detached incidents. The witty
Boutroux is a sport of chance and dies, fitly enough, not in action, but
by a mishap.
If we separate from the rest the incident of the girl Joyeuse, it is
extremely beautiful. Take by themselves the stratagems and the
conversations of Boutroux: they are extremely witty. Take by themselves
the military scenes: they are impressive. But these do not make the book
a whole or leave the impression that the author knew from chapter to
chapter what he was going to write next.
Frankly, then, _The Girondin_ is a disappointment, but, perhaps, only
because it held such possibilities and because we had reason to
anticipate that Mr. Belloc would surprise us with these possibilities.
His great historical novel is yet to come.
That he is qualified to write such a book, whether from the standpoint
of imaginative power or from that of historical knowledge, needs no
discussion here. Whether he can, should he choose, combine these
qualities, in an extended work, so perfectly that they do not clash, and
that neither transcends the other, is a question for the future to
decide.
But his imaginative power serves him already in the study, and in the
writing of pure history. It is a guarantee, we have said, that the
reader will be preserved from barren, unco-ordinated details, which are
set down without any reference to human purpose. It is also a guarantee,
and this is most important, of as much impartiality as is possible to
man. For the imaginative man does not seek fantasy in these things: he
can make that for himself in other and more suitable places. Here the
plain facts are enough to feed his spirit and to make it rejoice. The
most fantastic theories that diversify the page of written history have
sprung from the minds of barren dons, who sit in studies unhindered by
any realization of the world, and in whose hands the facts are wooden
blocks to be piled up in any shape of the grotesque. Mr. Belloc, with a
desire to realize and to know the past, a poetic desire that quite
overcomes any propagandist bias or routine of thought, is sure of this
at least: that he will see the past centuries as clearly and as truly as
possible, and with a vision that steadily resolves economic developments
and political movements into the actions, and the results of the
actions, of human beings.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: But Maitland, of course, was human. He lived some part of
his life away from Cambridge.]
[Footnote 9: We make this statement confidently without having read, and
not intending to read, the whole of the _Cambridge Modern History_.]
[Footnote 10: _The Old Road_, p. 9.]
[Footnote 11: _Inaugural Lectures: Lecture on Modern History_, p. 24.]