II
Ithas been noticed that the ostensible theme ofThe Cloister and the Hearthis 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 ofanother, 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. ThePickwick Papersbelong 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 inDavid Copperfieldhe 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 thereader 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 likeThe Cloister and the Hearthall 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 inThe Cloister and the Hearthor in any novel, it means that an age is regarded asa 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. InThe 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 backgroundand 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 irresistiblesweep 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 intoBarnaby 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 ofBarnaby Rudgeas 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 inA 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. Thestory 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 inBarnaby 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 abridge 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 workingsin 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,” andis 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.
InA 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 heldthe 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 ofThe Cloister and the Hearthlies 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. InBarnaby Rudgeit 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, andare 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; Historybursts 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 readerthat “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, notworked 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 theraconteurmust find this historya 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’sForerunner, 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 ofThe Forerunneris a key to this whole method of abstracting episodes from history and setting them into a novel; especiallyas 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 thebook 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 thatThe Cloister and the Hearthrepresents, 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 particularcharacter, 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.
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The achievement of Dumas is sufficient to show what can be done in a novel that is aboveall 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 listcould 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, generationsof 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 hedeals with the region which stood out in high light above the dark masses in the past, and about which, therefore, history could remember things.
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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, asit 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 worksout 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 againstwhich 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 peoplewhom 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 intothe 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 impatiencethan 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 Englandhad 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 todo; 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 inhistory 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 tosacrifice 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 peopleconcerned and struck home in different ways—all of them facets of the same truth.
What Browning did inThe Ring and the Bookfor 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 away 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. InWoodstockfor example the homely problems of a few fictitious characters, and the small vicissitudesof 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 toIvanhoeandThe 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 greatpeople 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 whichWoodstockis only one of a whole variety of examples, depicts life in a relevant and significant fashion.