I

Wordsworthtouches the true mood of romantic regret when he writes

“Of old, unhappy, far-off things,And battles long ago.”

“Of old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago.”

These words call us to the window that opens out upon the past, and they set the mind thinking in pictures; for the mind of every one of us holds a jumble of pictures and stories, shot through, perhaps with sentiment, that constitute what we have built up for ourselves of the Past, and are always ready to be called into play by a glimpse of some old ruin that awakens fine associations, or by a hint of the romantic, such as Wordsworth gives in those lines. A cathedral bell, or the mention of Agincourt, or the very spelling of the word “ycleped” may be enough to send the mind wandering into its own picture-galleries of history, just as the words “Once upon a time—” waft us into the realms of fairy-story; these things are symbols, keys that unlock a world in our minds. Let a Pre-Raphaelite picture remind us of lost fashions or a schoolboy sing “John Peel” and we are bridging the centuries; and only a few key-words are needed to give the mind a clue, and we are with the Elizabethans on the Spanish Main, or with King Harold, defending the gate of England.

A hundred things have helped to build up this picture-gallery of history—not merely history-books, but Bible-stories, and local traditions and stories from opera; not merely biographies but the border-ballads that the old gipsies would sing amid grim surroundings, and the rant of politicians who talk of Magna Carta or Nelson, and the picturesque advertisements of magazines and street-posters; out of all these there has grown up a world in our minds and that world is what we make for ourselves of the past. We may try to modify and correct it by our conscious studies, but we cannot escape it. And not the least of the sources of it is the Historical Novel.

Sir Walter Scott did not write historical novels because he wished to teach history in an easy way or to get at a moral indirectly, but because his mind was full of the past, just as the mind of a musician is full of tunes; he made for himself a world out of the past, and lived in it much; and he painted that world for his readers, and turned it into a tale. Whatever connection the historical novel may have with the history that men write and build up out of their conscious studies, or with History, the past as it really happened, the thing that is the object of study and research, it certainly has something to do with that world, that mental picture which each of us makes of the past; it helps our imagination to build up its idea of the past. After all thehistory we have ever learned our first thought of Mediaeval England is quite likely to be a picture of England as the setting for Ivanhoe and Robin Hood, even if our second thought is that this is all wrong; and though we may not seek to gather our historical facts from the novel, there are more subtle things, unconscious prejudices and unformulated sentiments that we take in unawares, there are pictures that haunt us, there is an atmosphere that compels us, and if we find nothing else we find the sentiment of history, the feeling for the past, in the historical novel. On one side, therefore, the historical novel is a “form” of history. It is a way of treating the past.

In this it is linked up with legend, and the traditions of localities, and popular ballads; like these it goes beyond the authenticated data of history-books, the definitely recoverable things of the past, in order to paint its picture and tell its story; and like these it often subordinates fidelity to the recovered facts of history, and strict accuracy of detail, to some other kind of effectiveness. And these legends and popular stories are related to the historical novel in a way similar to that in which a snatch of folk-song is related to the music of a cultured genius, or an anecdote or a piece of gossip is related to some work of structure as well as of fiction, like the novel. The one is a work of apparently popular, or at least anonymous origin, the other is adeliberately artistic and organised production. When we hear those legends we feel that it is Earth itself that throws them out; it is this old World of ours telling a tale that she seems to remember. These things ask to be believed; a local tradition claims to be true, or it has no currency; but the historical novel is conscious in its purpose and in its inventions. We do not say that we enjoy it “although” it is not quite true to facts; the element of fiction in it is avowed, and is part of the intention of the work; for the historical novel is a “form” of fiction as well as of history. It is a tale, a piece of invention; only, it claims to be true to the life of the past.

And so there is a double set of relations to be considered in any study of the subject, arising out of the double character of the subject. On one side the historical novel may be regarded simply as a novel with a particular kind of background; a story set, say, in the Middle Ages, just as a novel of modern times might find its setting in some far country. But if this were the whole truth of the matter there would be no point in giving it a special study. A fairy-tale is not merely an ordinary kind of story set in fairy-land, but becomes a different kind of story by being placed there; in the same way, although in a sense every novel tends to become in time a historical novel, and there will come a day when “Sonia” will be useful to the historian for a certain kind of information, yet atrue “historical novel” is one that is historical in its intention and not simply by accident, one that comes from a mind steeped in the past. Such a novel will have a special kind of appeal.

When a composer picks up a piece of poetry and puts it to music he weaves a web of invention around the words and amplifies them with something that belongs to an art different from their own; in doing so he will probably alter the swing of the poem and create rhythms of his own, and in the music that he makes the original music of the words themselves will almost certainly be destroyed; even when he is trying to interpret the poem he may be changing its very character, making a breezy thing desolate, or converting a majestic hymn into a joyful anthem, and, unawares, he may be doing everything that would send the poet crazy, and make men of letters indignant. The final result may not be good as poetry, may indeed be a good piece of poetry spoilt in the very things that make it good, the character of the original words having been altered in a hundred subtle ways. Standing alone it may not even be a good piece of music exactly. But it may be what it sets out to be—a good piece of work in a form neither poetry nor music, but a combination of the two, a new creation, something with an appeal of its own. That is to say, it may be a good piece of song, that justifies itself when it comes from the voice of the singer.

Like an opera, in which music and poetry and drama melt into one another to produce what amounts to a new kind of art, with a purpose and an idiom of its own; like a song, in which music and poetry are interlocked, and become one harmony, the historical novel is a fusion. It is one of the arts that are born of the marriage of different arts. A historical event is “put to fiction” as a poem is put to music; it is turned into story as words are turned into song; it is put into a context of narrative which is like the result that is obtained when words are printed between the staves of a vocal score. And just as a composer in choosing a poem to set to music, accepts certain limitations, volunteers a certain allegiance, and must in some way be loyal to the poetry he has selected, so the historical novelist owes a certain loyalty to the history of which he treats. But because this is a marriage of the arts it is not a complete loyalty, and just as poets complain because musicians modify the original rhythms of their poems and the lilt of the words, so historians cry out because a Scott tampers with history. For all arts that combine different forms of art are beset with divided loyalties like these, and with causes of disagreement and annoyance. The very appeal that they should make is a thing to be discovered, a matter of controversy. And in the study of them, every issue is a complicated one.

And, lastly, it may be said that a given songmay be good poetry if read in an armchair; the music of a song may be good in itself if played over on some instrument; and yet the song may be a poor thing when sung by anybody, if the two do not hang together, if the marriage is not a harmony. In the same way, a historical novel may be a good book but not a good historical novel. It may be a just piece of history; or it may be a good story; but it may not be good with the special goodness of a historical novel, it may not combine its two elements in just the way that is needed. It is not exactly that history and fiction should dovetail into one another to produce a coherent whole; it is not simply that the story of the Popish Plot can be rounded off by a piece of invention, or the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots depicted more fully and with more connectedness by the interspersion of imaginary episodes; but it is rather that in the historical novel history and fiction can enrich and amplify one another, and interpenetrate. They can grow into one another, each making the other more powerful. And they can make a special kind of appeal to the reader.

* * * * *

The facts of the past, the stuff out of which men write their Histories, are used for many things besides the manufacture of history. The economist, the politician, the musician, the ecclesiastic—in fact, specialists of all sorts, have their own use for the facts that make up history;they make themselves more expert in their special departments by studying the historical side of those departments, but they are not historians any more than is the architect who tries to make himself a better architect by finding out how houses used to be ventilated. The theorist makes his generalisations out of the facts of the past, and talks about the laws that govern the movements of history and the things that determine progress and the goal to which human development is moving—but he is not a historian any more than the priest talking about Providence is a historian, although both these deal with interpretations of history. They are simply philosophers trying to interpret man’s experience of life to man. The Historian’s interest in the past is not the economist’s or the philosopher’s interest in it, he loves the past for its own sake and tries to live in it, tries to live over again the lost life of yesterday, turning it back as one would turn back the pages of a book to re-read what has gone before; and he seeks to see the past as a far-country and to think himself into a different world. And so the use that he makes of the accumulated facts that tell about the past, is to recapture a bygone age and turn it into something that is at once a picture and a story.

History, then, means the world looking back upon itself, and storing up memories that are pictures. History is any tale that the old worldcan tell when it starts remembering. It is just the world’s Memory.

The love of the past for its own sake, and the fondness for lingering over those things that endure as relics or as symbols of the past, and the regret for the things that are lost for ever are what one might call romanticism. Gibbon and Gregorovius had this feeling when the sight of the splendid ruins and remains of Rome drove them, each in turn, to look into the story that lay behind monument and masonry, and to be writers of history. All of us have this feeling when the glimpse of some historic town, or the impressive sternness of an old castle, or the sight of a Roman wall, awakens a world in our minds, and sets us thinking on all the tales that stone could tell if only it could speak the history that it stores. These buildings and remains are the maimed survivals, the broken emblems, of a vivid thrilling life that has been lived, and that we love to look back upon. Distance lends enchantment, and the things of long-ago draw us with their strangeness, and with a far-away, picturesque glamour that surrounds them; and there is just the escape that we seek from modern life, in the possibility that we have of thinking ourselves into a different world, which we can suffuse with a romantic glow and which we can think of as having more colour and adventure than our own world. But, most of all, the reason why we love the ruins of an abbey, and preservethe flags that are riddled with the bullets of Waterloo—the reason why we prize the book in the margins of which Coleridge himself scribbled pencil-notes of literary criticism, and keep a lock of Keats’s hair, is that these things are like the stray flowers that cheat the scythe or like the last stars that outdare the morning sun; they are the few things that are saved from a shipwreck. The work of a historian is to reconstruct the past out of the debris that is cast up by the sea from the wrecks of countless ages.

Romanticism is at bottom a sigh for the things that perish, and the things that can never happen again. It is like the soldier going over the hill to fight, but always looking back and lingering. The things that Time destroys we love with a love fed by romantic regret—the sunset that will never just happen again, the snows of yester-year, the beliefs that are being sapped, the days of our own childhood. InThe Cloister and the Hearth, Gerard at the beginning of his wanderings is kindly treated by a woman and her husband; as he leaves them they wish him “God speed,” and, says the author, “with that they parted, and never met again in this world”; and nobody can read that sentence without loving these people more. If some novelists had described this incident, if, say Dickens had been writing this, it would have been part of his way of working, it would have been in keeping with his avowed theories of life, torenew the connection between Gerard and his kind acquaintances later in life, and by some coincidence to make the good woman and her husband turn up when we had forgotten their existence. But Reade not only declines to do this, he goes out of his way, beforehand, to tell us that he is not going to do this; he makes these people pass out into the darkness and so he leaves us with a feeling of affectionate regret for them. When we know a thing must die, something comes to reinforce our love for it, and if we were all told to take our last look upon this earth to-morrow, what worst of world-haters would not ask again and again for “just one peep more”? Universal literature is full of regrets for all the lovely things that die. All history is full of movements that are born of romantic reactions—of prophets stoned on one day and mourned the next, of rejected leaders idolised when they have passed off the stage and soon carried to power again by a mad romantic impulse that moves the people, of kings beheaded and then loved when they have become a memory, of Restorations, of returns from Elba, and of Jacobite risings. Every generation cries that the world is going to the dogs and that things are not as they have been, and two years before the Spanish Armada was routed an Englishman could complain that English courage was on the wane. All this is romanticism; and it is romanticism that makes old men gatherround a chimney-corner to tell a tale of old times, and makes hardened heroes love to fight their battles over again. It is this feeling that sends us treading again the haunts of childhood and recapturing childhood scenes; that makes our imagination play around historic sites and ancient buildings, peopling them with a life that we have invented, and awaking them to their former activeness; and that so thrills the heart with a sense of the great bygone things, that some men cannot see the sun go down red without dreaming of battles long ago, till the moors become alive with excited horsemen and with noises that the hills turn into echoes, and the past seems to unearth itself.

It is possible to imagine a political theorist visiting Brazil to make a study of political conditions there; or to think of a student of public health going to Edinburgh to gain a knowledge of its drainage system; but apart from these specialists there is the traveller who will describe Brazil to men as a strange country, and there is the Stevenson who will give a sketch of Edinburgh for the general reader; and the historian is like these. He travels the past in a caravan; he dips into it as one would dip into Edinburgh, peeping into the shadowy slums and crooked streets, and hunting the eternal human things. He describes the past not because it has connections with the present that can be worked out, not because it holds a moral for to-day, butprecisely because it is a strange land, precisely because it is past, and can never happen again; and he seeks to paint life as a whole—not man on his economic side, or man as a political animal, but man in all his adventures in living. Specialists and theorists may tread at his heels to draw a moral or to make generalisations, but as for the romantic historian, his is the mad human longing to see and to know people, to feel with them, and to peep at the world they lived in, and to understand their ways, their humours, their loves and fears. As he looks to the deserted ruins of a hillside farm he wonders what sentiments filled the hearts of men and women there when Jacobite rebels rode past on their dismal return Northwards; when he sees the old mill, where the tossing hill-streams meet and the twisted roads come to a ford, he wonders what difference it made to the children playing at the water’s edge, when Cromwell and his troopers passed that way; and when he stands in the shadow of what was once a frowning wall, he asks himself all the things that the wall must have overheard and overlooked, and all the tales of joy and adventure, of trouble and of treachery, that it might tell if it were not doomed to keep them to itself. And once the romanticist has stared at this programme of his, and has confessed his faith and has faced himself with this thing that he is really seeking—once he has understood hisheart’s longing, then there must flash upon him the tremendous truth—the impossibility of history.

To the politician, the important movements and striking decisions and big crises that for him are “history,” are things within reach; the military man has not much difficulty in recovering the noisy things that for him are “history”; the diplomatist knows where to look for the story of international tangles, and the mysteries of pacts and treaties and the hidden sources of power in a state; court and camp and parliament house are rich with documents and records; the things that are played out in the limelight, the stately public events are, in a way, simple to the historian, and the men who talk of democracies and regiments and alliances, and who think of people in the mass and can find food in statistics and budgets—these can discuss the condition of England and the welfare of the people. But they are far from life. Now the “huts where poor men lie” elude the world’s Memory. The ploughman whom Gray saw, plodding his weary way, the rank and file of Monmouth’s rebel crowd—every man of them a world in himself, a mystery of personality, more wonderful than a star—the tavern-keepers whom Puritan England strove to root out—these have left no memorial and all that we know about them is just enough to set us guessing and wondering. The things by which we rememberan old friend—his peculiar laugh, his way of drawing his hand through his hair, his whistle in the street, his humour, and the sound of his footstep on the stair—these things, at any rate, we cannot hope to recapture in history, any more than we can recapture last night’s sunset, or hear again a song sung by Jenny Lind. The most homely and intimate and personal things slip through the hands of the historian. The history that the romanticist in us longs for, the desire to touch the pulsing heart of men who toyed with the world as we do, and left it long ago, is the quest for the most elusive thing in the world. We who cannot know our own friends, save in a fragmentary way and at occasional moments of self-revelation, cannot hope to read the hearts of half-forgotten kings. We cannot hope to get close to the lives of humble men who trod silently through the world. These we cannot fasten upon at all; history is thwarted; Earth cannot remember.

History can only make her pictures and rebuild the past out of the things she can save from a shipwreck; she will piece together just so much of the battle of Agincourt as the sea washes up to the shores. The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through the darkness. And so, history is full of tales half-told, and of tunes that break off in the middle; she gives us snatchesfrom the lives of men, a peep at some corner of a battlefield, just enough to make us long for a fuller vision. All history is full of locked doors, and of faint glimpses of things that cannot be reached. The Middle Ages will kick a heel into the twentieth century, in a Fountains Abbey—in some straggling ruin—and will ask us to piece out its former, completed grandeur for ourselves and to people it with a life of our own imagining. History can seldom recover a given set of circumstances and make us see a definite situation, a particular knot of human action at a given place and a given time; if two diplomatists meet in a certain room to settle a problem, and afterwards describe their proceedings to their respective governments, or recall them in memoirs, if Napoleon meets Metternich in time of crisis at Prague, we can only recover a dim and faulty account of the interview from their conflicting descriptions; and yet this is one of the most precise and clear situations that a historian might wish to narrate. And when a Carlyle, in the middle of a rugged description of the taking of the Bastille, can break away to apostrophise, in a way that is sublime:

Oh evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fell slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main....

he is doing something, he is catching the moment, in a way that can seldom be achieved inhistory, unless history brings in fiction to help her. History, then, fails the romanticist. Its shortcomings become apparent when we try to particularise, when say, we wish to see a definite picture. About the closest human things, history only tells us enough to set us guessing and wondering.

The history of text-books, the history that can be made out of the recoverable facts of the past, is really little more than a chart to the past. If people think of England there flashes in upon them a panorama, of green fields and telegraph-posts, and intersecting roads and clusters of houses. “England” comes home to us as a jumble of pictures that melt into one another and that we have caught perhaps from the windows of a railway-carriage as we have darted across country. Similarly, if we unlock the past in our minds a score of pictures leap before us, breaking into one another. And the history that history-books can tell us bears a relation to that picture which we make for ourselves of the past, something like the relation which a map of England bears to that mental picture that we form of the English countryside. And just as when we look at an ordnance map we can see where a path runs and can tell where it strikes up hill or down dale, where it touches a wood and where it follows a stream, but if we wish to make a picture of the walk we must put in the hawthorn-hedges, the prettyturns of the path, and the rocky edge of the stream for ourselves—so when we read history, if we wish not merely to see great figures strutting upon a stage, acting a public part, but to fill in the lines of the picture with the robust life of the countryside, and to catch the hundred human touches, if we wish, say, to see the vivid life of three hundred years ago stirring in the crooked streets and topsy-turvy houses that converge upon York Minster, we must charge our history with some of the human things that are irrecoverable, we must reinforce history by our imagination. The public life of great men is before our eyes, some of their private life is open to us; but the life that fills the street with bustle, that makes every corner of a slum a place of wonder and interest, the life that is a sad and gay, weary and thrilling thing in every hillside cottage, is a dim blurred picture in a history. Because of this, history cannot come so near to human hearts and human passions as a good novel can; its very fidelity to facts makes it not perhaps less true to life, but farther away from the heart of things. All the real history of people that a text-book could give is like the chart of Treasure Island—just enough to set a wild heart dreaming; the chart gives generalities, it describes the lie of the land, but if we wish toseea picture of Treasure Island we must make the chart the jumping-off board for some play of the imagination.

There is a poem, called “The Old Ships,” in which Flecker tells of how he has seen vessels, “with leaden age o’er cargoed,” sail “beyond the village which men still call Tyre.” These ships, like everything that survives from the past, are a hint to the imagination; they suggest a story; and this is the kind of thinking to which they drive the poet:

“And all those ships were certainly so old,Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,The pirate GenoeseHell-raked them, till they rolledBlood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold—But I have seen ...A drowsy ship of some yet older day;And, wonder’s breath indrawn,Thought I—who knows—who knows—but in that same(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new—Stern painted brighter blue—)That talkative, bald-headed seaman came(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)From Troy’s doom-crimson shore,And with great lies about his wooden horse,Set the crew laughing and forgot his course.It was so old a ship—who knows, who knows?”

“And all those ships were certainly so old,

Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,

Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,

The pirate Genoese

Hell-raked them, till they rolled

Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold—

But I have seen ...A drowsy ship of some yet older day;And, wonder’s breath indrawn,Thought I—who knows—who knows—but in that same(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new—Stern painted brighter blue—)That talkative, bald-headed seaman came(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)From Troy’s doom-crimson shore,And with great lies about his wooden horse,Set the crew laughing and forgot his course.

But I have seen ...

A drowsy ship of some yet older day;

And, wonder’s breath indrawn,

Thought I—who knows—who knows—but in that same

(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new

—Stern painted brighter blue—)

That talkative, bald-headed seaman came

(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)

From Troy’s doom-crimson shore,

And with great lies about his wooden horse,

Set the crew laughing and forgot his course.

It was so old a ship—who knows, who knows?”

In these lines is shown the lure of all ancient things that store a tale which they cannot tell.

There is a charm and mystery in unremembered things. There is something fine in the sight of a ridge of hill against the sky when one does not know what lies beyond or whether a surprise of rolling sea beneath a sudden fall of cliff, or a panorama of wooded valleys, is in store at the summit—so one can only guess and wonder. And, when, in some border-village we look at hills that have watched centuries stride by, and ask ourselves of distant scenes and old adventure that the hills must have overlooked, and when we learn that these matters were writ in water and that about them not history any more than the stern hill-crags can break her everlasting silence—then here is adventure for the imagination, and in our fancy we play around places that we know and events that we have heard of, weaving around “What-has-been” the things that might have been. We do the kind of thinking that is needed to turn a map into a picture, the kind of thinking that might translate last year’s National Budget into a drama of hearts and homes.

It is in this that there lies the first justification of the historical novel, and one way of giving that particular kind of literature a relation to experience. No infallible generalisation can give a key to all historical novels and to everything that appears in them, but here at least is a useful key that will fit many locks and will explain much that there is in all these novels,and moreover will provide a system of relations between these and the history that is a study. It cannot be too strongly stated that the explanation of historical novels is not to be found in the fact that history needs an admixture of fiction to give it spice, to make it exciting, to relieve the boredom. Truth is stranger than fiction and some of the most incredible episodes that have been found in novels have been those which an author has too foolishly taken straight from life. That there is a place for such a thing as the historical novel is due to a certain inadequacy in history itself. History is full of events and issues out of which a story could be made, and of adventures that are exciting enough; it is not wanting in incident, but these things are not stories, they have to be transmuted into story; for there are irrecoverable things in history, and these are the close, intimate personal things, the touches of direct experience that are needed in story-making, the things that we most remember in friends we used to have, what might be called “the human touches.” In order to catch these things in the life of the past, and to make a bygone age live again, history must not merely be eked out by fiction, it must not merely be extended by invented episodes; it must be turned into a novel; it must be “put to fiction” as a poem is put to music.

When history tells us that Napoleon did a certain thing, it is the work of each of us, intrying to bring history home to ourselves, to amplify in our imagination what the history-book gives us, and toseeNapoleon doing the action. It is all very well to be told that a certain event took place, but the past strikes home in our minds with immeasurably greater power if we can see it happening and can catch it as a picture; and this is what we try to do for ourselves when we read a history-book. The important thing is to see the past, and not simply to hear somebody describe it. It is not enough to read of a certain event; we must be there, watching—we must fix it into a picture for ourselves, we must recapture the particular moment. History does not do this for us; just the thing that it cannot do is to catch the moment precisely; so we do this for ourselves; we complete history in our supposition. Every man who has an idea of the woman Mary Queen of Scots, or who can catch glimpses of what happened at Waterloo, has added to history something from his own imagination, and has filled in the lines for himself. The past as it exists for all of us, the world of the past in our minds, is history synthesised by the imagination, and fixed into a picture by something that mounts to fiction. For history fails when a certain situation is to be recovered, or a definite combination of circumstances is to be seized upon, or a particular moment is to be caught. And yet it is a cold and bloodless thing if thesethings cannot be achieved, and the life of the past is not in any way resurrected without them. The chart must be turned into a picture, if history is to be a recovery of the life of the past and not a mere post-mortem examination. The imagination of the historian does this for him; the most musty of parchments holds for him a story and speaks to a world that exists in his mind; but everybody is not a historian; so historical fiction does the work for all the world; it fuses the past into a picture, and makes it live.

Again, any attempt to recapture the past is limited and inadequate if it keeps a reader conscious of the fact that he is a modern creature, looking at a distant world and comparing it with his own. It is not enough to recover the facts of the lives that men lived long-ago and to trace out the thread of event; we must recover the adventure of their lives; and the whole fun and adventure of their lives, as of ours, hung on the fact that at any given moment they could not see ahead, and did not know what was coming. To the men of 1807 the year 1808 was a mystery and an unexplored tract; they saw a hundred possibilities in it where the modern reader only sees the one thing that actually happened; they never knew what surprise awaited them at the next turn in the road; and therefore, to study the year 1807 remembering all the time what happened in 1808 and in the succeeding trail of years, is tomiss the adventure and the great uncertainties and the element of gamble in their lives. It is not enough to know that Napoleon won a certain battle; if history is to come back to us as a human thing we must see him on the eve of battle eagerly looking to see which way the dice will fall, with fears and hesitations perhaps, with a sense of all the things that may happen in spite of all his calculations, and with an uncertainty before all the range of possible things that may upset his plans. The victory that is achieved on one day must not be regarded as being inevitable the night before; and where we cannot help seeing the certainty of a desired issue, the men of the time were all suspense, and full of wonderings. History does not always give us things like these, for they are irrecoverable personal things; but we know they existed. They are the things that make life an experience. And they are the very touches that are needed to turn history into a story.

These things are what are meant, then, when it is affirmed that the history that Romanticism in all of us demands must be at once a picture and story. And it is in this way that the history-book which belongs to the “literature of knowledge” is transformed into the “literature of power.”

In the opening chapter ofIvanhoethere is a piece of writing that illustrates the difference between the historian and the historical novelistin the use that they make of the same historical material. In the introductory part of that chapter Scott recapitulates, “for the information of the general reader,” the conditions of the age with which he is dealing, describing them in general terms as a historian would.

Four generations (he writes) had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat.... At court and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleading and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victor and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe.

This is a history-lesson. A conflict of forces,a set of tendencies is described in what might be a chapter straight from a history-book. Scott is showing the position that the English language occupied at a given period, and is making the sort of generalisation that it is the historian’s business to make. We are not being treated to an essay by Dryasdust; there is imagination in the depiction that is given; but this is the historian’s way of treating historical facts; it is essentially the past being described to later ages, it is not the past telling its own tale, giving itself away; and it is a chart to the age rather than a picture. Even in a further sense than this the historian speaks in his peculiar idiom; for he not only describes the world as it was at some time past, but he hauls this world into relationship with the whole of subsequent development and puts it in its place in the whole cinematograph-film that is History. In the concluding sentence he gives the significance of that conflict of languages which he has been describing, and sees it as a link in the whole story of our language. And because of this the reader does not lose himself in the past; he stands aside to compare it with the present. This part of the chapter gives in reality the stage-directions of the novel, and it reminds the reader that he is not in the past, and so breaks the spell.

In the ensuing dialogue, however, where Wamba and Gurth have to contemplate “theswine being turned Normans,” this same historical material is translated into terms of fiction. It is not stretched, or varnished, or distorted. The novelist does not try to outdo history by invention, or to round off the true historical position by a kind of idealisation; at least the significance of the chapter does not lie in any of these things. What is important is the fact that here the same historical material is given to the reader in a different way, and is treated with a different aim. Instead of the general there is now the particular. Tendencies that were broadly described before are given precision, we see what they mean when they are pinned down to individual cases. Before, we were given the formula for the age; now we see the forces that were described manifesting themselves at a definite place, at a particular moment. Here the past speaks for itself. We see it and are in it, we do not simply hear a man describing it. And instead of that conflict of languages being put into its context in the history of language, the novelist puts it into its context in the whole life of the time, and hunts out a different set of implications in it. All this comes with greater vividness to the reader. History is reinforced by being written in the story-teller’s way.

This is one example taken from a chapter in which the historian and the historical novelist chance to rub shoulders with each other, butthe idea is capable of being projected on to a larger canvas. In the Introduction toIvanhoeScott shows how all this can be extended when, in terms of the historian, he again describes the set of facts, which he has turned into fiction, the chart which he has changed into a picture; this time on a bigger scale, covering the whole range of the novel.

It seemed to the author that the existence of two races in the same country, the vanquished distinguished by their plain, homely, blunt manner, and the free spirit infused by their ancient institutions and laws; the victors, by the high spirit of military fame, personal adventure and whatever could distinguish them as the Flower of Chivalry might, intermixed with other characters belonging to the same time and country, interest the reader by the contrast, if the author should not fail on his part.

This is a description of a mere relationship between classes of a society. Scott sees in it a story. He divines in it just the situations and issues out of which a story can be made. He sees its implications in individual lives. Instead of contemplating its effects on future generations he lays bare its workings in the scheme of life of people who lived under it. Just as a prism catches the light and turns it into colours he stands between the historical generalisation and his readers and he breaks up the general into the particular and projects it as a picture. The result is like the condensing of a cloud into raindrops.Fiction is like the dust which creates a sunbeam and helps the sunlight to show that it is there. And in this way Scott does something for history that the historian by himself cannot do, or can seldom do; he recaptures the life of an age, and resurrects a picture of the past.

The historical novelist receives his hint from history, but such examples as these fromIvanhoeare enough to make it apparent that this hint need not necessarily be a story ready-made, a sequence of events to be followed. Many historical novels are stories straight from a history-book—the adventures of Guy Fawkes, the sorrows of Mary Queen of Scots—amplified and rounded off by fiction perhaps, and re-told with some variations. History may provide plot and adventure, and fiction may just fill in the lines where history is inadequate or idealise incidents and careers where history is incomplete or disappointing. It is claimed of some of Jokai’s novels that, staged as they are in lands where passion and action are intense and full of colour, and drawn as they are from a history that is crowded with romantic and thrilling episodes, they do not need an invention of incident or a perversion of history to make them complete, but are just a vivid re-telling of things that actually happened. The books of Dumas are filled with incidents and situations that are picked straight from history and are marvellously connected into an organised story.And many writers have assimilated into the body of their novels incidents that are true to fact or anecdotes from legend, and so have made history and fiction fit into each other in dovetail fashion. All this represents one way in which history can be incorporated into a novel, but it is not the only way; and the particular fact that is brought to light by the Introduction toIvanhoe, as well as by other things, is the fact that history does not merely inspire fiction by providing a tale, a thread of incident, a network of action, to be re-told in story-book fashion; it may only provoke a tale, it may just provide situations and relationships and problems which give the right kind of issue that is needed in story-making. Scott saw implicit in the conditions of the age of Richard I a set of human relationships which were materials for a novel. He had the power of divining the implied story that was hidden beneath a description of Anglo-Norman relations a few generations after the Conquest.

Everything in life is full of implied story. Every piece of coal stores up history and a tale of marvel. Parish accounts that tell of a leap in the amount of money spent upon “faggots” in the sixteenth century hold a hidden story of persecution and martyrdom. There is a tragedy that can be read into many a newspaper advertisement, and there are people in the world who can see the adventure and the wanderingand the panorama that are locked up in a railway-guide. The geography of Africa that might be a dull recapitulation of facts and figures might be turned into narrative, into a story of travels across an unknown continent. And if a politician wishes to bring home to people the consequences of an unwelcome measure he has only to work out a particular instance of hardship that may result from the measure, giving it preciseness and turning it into a story, and he will catch the imagination of electors far sooner than any logic could convince their intellects. It is in this way that the novelist recasts historical material into story-form, and it is in this way that history is made more effectual than the history-book.

Here, then, are the two ways by which history passes into a novel. In the one case it merely gives material that can be woven into story in the same way as a geography-book can be translated into a book of travel; in the other case it provides a story which a writer has to work into his own fictions. The former method is, in a way, organic, since what it prescribes is that a writer shall be true to the life of the past in his inventions; it gives the key in which he must set his tune. According to this, history supplies the metal and the novelist creates the mould. He may invent the characters, the dialogues, the whole range of incident through which it is his aim to make History speak for herself; and heneed not distort the characters of actual historical people to fit them into his story, or do violence to the chronological table in order to draw together the threads of his plot. But the second method implies a further fidelity to the facts of the history-book and to the sequence of public events, and it may be called a comparatively “mechanical” method in that it means that a story taken from history has to be dovetailed into the fictions of the novelist; the business is one of adjustment, and sometimes a wrench has to be given to history in order to subdue it to the demands of the novel. And although seldom or never can a historical novel be found in which either of these methods is completely isolated, yet they are two separate things, representing a double set of demands that History makes upon the writer of novels, and they yield some fruitful results if they are regarded separately. Wamba and Gurth are representatives of the one method; and in the same novel Richard I and Robin Hood stand for the other method, since their existence implies stories from history and legend that are required to be adjusted to the inventions of the novelist.

To say therefore that Scott, inIvanhoe, translated into terms of fiction the piece of historical material, the set of human relationships which in his Introduction he described as being the basis of the novel, is only true in a general way. But this was the principal thingthat Scott did; and in it he showed his greatest power, and the historical novel displayed its finest virtue. In the Introduction toThe Monasteryhe makes a similar confession of the key-idea of his novel.

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