* * * * *
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 littlefurther. 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 manifestingitself 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, ofsome 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 toThe Toilers of the Sea:
Religion, Society and Nature; these are the three struggles of mankind. These three struggles are at the same time his three needs; it is necessary for him to have a faith, hence the temple; it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary for him to live, hence the plough and the ship. But these three solutions comprise three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life springs from all the three.Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition,under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple fatality weighs upon us—the fatality of dogmas, the fatality of laws, the fatality of matter. InNotre Damethe author has denounced the first; inLes Misérableshe has described the second; in this book he points out the third.With these three fatalities that envelop mankind is mingled the inward fatality—the highest fatality—the human heart.
Religion, Society and Nature; these are the three struggles of mankind. These three struggles are at the same time his three needs; it is necessary for him to have a faith, hence the temple; it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary for him to live, hence the plough and the ship. But these three solutions comprise three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life springs from all the three.
Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition,under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple fatality weighs upon us—the fatality of dogmas, the fatality of laws, the fatality of matter. InNotre Damethe author has denounced the first; inLes Misérableshe has described the second; in this book he points out the third.
With these three fatalities that envelop mankind is mingled the inward fatality—the highest fatality—the human heart.
This quotation alone is sufficient to show that the conception of the Epic of Man rests, not upon the idea that the past is a new world for the novelist to range in, but on a fact that is equally true from its own point of view—the fact of the one-ness of experience and the unity of the past with the present. The historical novel that is a universal epic, therefore comes to men as an interpretation of Man’s experience in the world. It is cosmic in conception. Also it is the work of a man who is not merely novelist, but poet; for though experience is all one piece, it comes to us in fragments and we only know it in parts, and the man who wishes to understand it and to map out its meaning, must in looking at past and present find a one-ness that is not apparent in that mass of details and people and events that confront him; he must divine a synthesis. This seems to be the conscious aim of Hugo, and there is a tremendous power in his achievement that is not to be found in the interpretation of largehistory 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’sNinety-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’sNinety-Threeis 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 multitudeof 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 immenseprofile 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 forever finding a host of new ways of expressing itself.
Hugo described the Convention by heaping up a store of details, and burdening his whole chapter with a weight of concrete instances. Each of these was significant in itself and showed the Revolution in some way leaping out and leaving its mark in history; and the cumulative effect of the whole revealed the bewildering variety of the processes and the life of the Revolution. Before he closed the description, however, he wrote a few paragraphs that reveal the key-idea of the whole. He had been speaking of the men of the Convention, he had already turned aside to tell us that the Convention “had a life,” and he had piled up a host of instances of how that life had broken through into incident and action, and had mentioned the turbulent spirits that made up the life of the Assembly.
Spirits which were a prey of the wind (he continued). But this was a miracle-working wind. To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave of the ocean. This was true even of the greatest there. The force of impulsion came from on high. There was a Will in the Convention which was that of all and yet not that of any one person. This Will was an Idea, indomitable and immeasurable, which swept from the summit of Heaven into darkness below. We call this Revolution. When that idea passed it beat down one, and raised up another; it scattered this man into foam and dashed that one upon the reefs. This Idea knew whither it was going, anddrove the whirlpool before it. To ascribe the Revolution to men is to ascribe the tide to the waves....The Revolution is a form of the eternal phenomenon which presses upon us from every quarter, and which we call Necessity.
Spirits which were a prey of the wind (he continued). But this was a miracle-working wind. To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave of the ocean. This was true even of the greatest there. The force of impulsion came from on high. There was a Will in the Convention which was that of all and yet not that of any one person. This Will was an Idea, indomitable and immeasurable, which swept from the summit of Heaven into darkness below. We call this Revolution. When that idea passed it beat down one, and raised up another; it scattered this man into foam and dashed that one upon the reefs. This Idea knew whither it was going, anddrove the whirlpool before it. To ascribe the Revolution to men is to ascribe the tide to the waves....
The Revolution is a form of the eternal phenomenon which presses upon us from every quarter, and which we call Necessity.
This, then, is the idea that gives a synthesis to all the mass of details, this is the wind which reveals itself in the multitude of spirits which it moves. In this kind of thinking Hugo is trying to interpret man’s experience upon earth. His story is more than a narration. He has seen the epic in history.
Above all this, however, the French Revolution comes to us as the hero of the novel because of the remarkable way in which it is personified in the man Cimourdain, who seems to have caught something of its life into himself. “He saw the Revolution loom into life,” says Hugo; “He was not a man to be afraid of that giant; far from it. This sudden growth in everything had revivified himself.... From year to year he saw events gain in grandeur and he increased with them.” The year 1793 represents above all things the time when the “something” inexorable in the very idea of the Revolution became most marked, most pressing, and Hugo has made this the prominent feature in his characterisation of the year. The book is full of cruel alternatives, and of Councils and men torn between unreserved devotion to the Ideal, the Revolution, and generous impulses towardsmen, 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.