The Historical Novel

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:

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.

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.

III — Transcriber’s Notes

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.”

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.

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS