III

Molly was a handsome fool.... She lacked the historic sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of warehouses, jetties, and a church or two—an unfamiliar Wapping upon a river with a long name.

Maurice Hewlett’s heroine had known only Wapping and Wapping was her world. She could not think of Rome as being, so to speak, the blossom of another sort of tree—a place where the very sky looked different; but she must take Wapping as the pattern of things. Her untravelled mind could not see that Life as it strikes through the Earth, crystallising into towns and cities and breaking out in buildings and fashions and thoughts, is one thing here and another thing there, and ever finds fresh forms for its expression like an artist in his moods. Molly could not dream that all history—and, behind history, geography—had conspired to make Rome a different picture, a different mood, from the Wapping she had known. She “lacked the historic sense.” It was not that the warehouses of Rome might be different from those of Wapping, or its churches bigger, or all these set out in an unfamiliar way; it would have been wrong if it had been possibleto think of Rome as an unfamiliar Wapping, without warehouses, jetties and churches, all. The truth was that Rome was one poem, and Wapping was another poem; and each was the clothing of a Life. Each was a personality; in a way, a world in itself. Each had that sort of one-ness and identity which gave it an “atmosphere” of its own.

For a mind that is moulded to a locality the historical novel can come as travel and as an opening of the windows of the world. It is not a history-lesson, a book that sits to facts, a record of things as they actually happened; or rather, it may be all this and it has an added power if it is, but its appeal and purpose are not here. When a reader comes to the historical novel he is not, or ought not to be, ignorant of the fact that it is a form of fiction that he is reading, and that history in it is mixed with inventions in a proportion which he cannot be expected to estimate with any precision. The novel does not replace the history-book; it is a splendid thing if it drives us to the history-book, if it provides us with something—some sort of texture—in which the facts of the history-book, when we come to them, can find a context and a lively significance and a field that gives them play. The real justification of the novel as a way of dealing with the past, is that it brings home to readers the fact that there is such a thing as a world of the past to tell tales about—anarena of vivid and momentous life, in which, men and women were flesh and blood, their sorrows and hopes and adventures real as ours, and their moment as precious as our moment. The power of the novel is that it can give to people the feeling for history, the consciousness that this world is an old world that can tell many stories of lost years, the sense that the present age is the last of a trail of centuries. It makes history a kind of extension of our personal experience, and not merely an addition to the sum of our knowledge.

For the novelist therefore it is more important to depict the past as a world different from our own, and to show something of its character and colouring than to map out a particular path in that world and to track down a particular course of public events. It is more important for him to breathe the spirit of a bygone age, and make his book the stuff of its mind, and recapture its turns of thought, its fund of feeling, and all its waywardnesses than to chronicle events with precision and keep tight to big political happenings. The supreme thing for him is to catch the age as a synthesis, to reproduce its way of looking at the world, its acceptance of life, and the peculiar quality of its experience, rather than to relate things that actually happened. Looking to some distant time he does not, so to speak, see “notes,” and relations of notes, but catches a “tune”; he figures it, not as a heap of factsand happenings but as the World-life in one of its moods. He enumerates, describes, comments, perhaps; but the real secret of his art is that in doing all these things he disengages a subtle influence—does it as if by stealth—he breathes a thing that quickens and that is as spirit to the body; so that while he is describing or reflecting or narrating the age itself seems to conspire with him, and presents itself in its “atmosphere.”

Atmosphere eludes the analyst. It might almost be said that to define it would be to explain it away. Probably the novelist most successful in producing it would be unable to describe how the thing is done. It is part of its essence that you should not see its working; if you detect scaffolding anywhere there is disillusionment and you are back to earth again; if you discover the spell it revenges itself upon you and sulks, and though you may admire the cleverness of it, it is magic no longer for you. It likes you to forget it, and captures you unawares, and then you will recall how it was atmosphere that stole you; but hunt it, and you thwart it, and put yourself out of tune for it. You may remember that some book was a world, and that world showed itself in its atmosphere, and the atmosphere was everywhere, but you cannot put your finger upon a printed page and say “it is here.” In this it is worthy of its name, it defies immediate apprehension.It will not meet you in the face. It is a conspiracy.

Various ages of history have their atmosphere—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century; but atmosphere does not move in step with history, does not belong merely to epochs. Countries and localities have it—like the Highlands of Scotland, or Hungary; and the atmosphere of Puritan London is not that of the contemporary Paris. The peasantry of Scott and the racy story-world in which Dumas was himself, come to us with their atmosphere; and a monastery or a diplomatic circle or the court of some king may carry theirs in a similar way. These are definite areas that cover the lives of men, and they have not merely characteristics but characters of their own. They are not simply modifications of one another any more than Rome is Wapping with a difference. Each is a fresh canvas and in calling them to mind we mix our colours and our emotions differently every time; each leaps in turn as a whole into our minds, so that we think of them as being not merely varied groupings of notes, but different tunes altogether. Each, like a personality, has its particular way of looking at the world and its peculiar attitude to things, and this comes out in a particular twist of mind in men, peculiar tricks of thought and prejudices and shades of feeling. The peasantry of Scotland must havea different sort of jokes, a different range of allusions from the courtiers of Louis XIV. Various of these regions of life and circles of activity must have their special phraseology, even a kind of dialect of their own. Atmosphere belongs to a region that is a life, an identity, a world in itself, and a peculiar synthesis; and he who has the atmosphere must have found—or rather felt—the synthesis.

These various areas of life—ages of history, localities and circles of activity—may be viewed as being worlds in themselves and as having a life of their own; but that life only shows itself in its results, as for instance, in the prejudices and turns of thought and habits and peculiarities of speech of the members who make up the world. And just as a child learning to read at first spells out only letters, and consciously combines them into words and only gradually learns to see words as a whole and take them in at a glance—just as a learner in music at first only sees notes and has to use some effort in order to combine them into a chord, and only later comes to grasp a chord at sight—so the student of history at first sees only these isolated details and pieces of fact, and must gradually come to the point at which his mind can jump to a synthesis and see the one life that is the source of a variety of facts. The novelist consciously reproducing facts from history, copying its handwriting letter by letter, advancingby accumulation, and straining for a faithful presentation of details in the life of a people, can scarcely avoid betraying the mechanism with which he works; but the writer who has caught the principle that lies behind all these facts, and sees not merely men and actions and sayings, but a life underneath all these, has caught history at its source; he can throw down his scaffolding. Step by step he has followed facts and weighed his evidence and hung upon details, until there has flashed in upon him the something that gives light and meaning to them all, and changes them into a vision. The age of history is no longer to him a sum of information, but a world that has been won and appropriated. More facts and details that he may amass find their setting and significance, find a context in that world; they may also check, or change, or amplify his acceptance and appreciation of it; but to him, that age of history is a world in his mind, like a childhood’s scene half-remembered, and he may withdraw to it at will, retreading it in his thinking—crossing and recrossing, and playing upon it in his imagination, all the time recasting it in the process.

Behind a thousand sunsets there lies a world where men were full of the hunt and the anxious harvest-times, and slept with their swords near at hand. To them the Atlantic Ocean was a thing to raise terror, a place for strange storytelling; the demons were not yet driven fromthe woods; and earth was a precarious place in which the elemental forces seemed inexorable. It was a world of wild mythologies, and of simple things half-understood. It comes to us—we “remember” it—in fragments like this; and we try to piece it together again. The centuries have tiptoed and gone, and the things that people have been afraid of, the things that have raised a thrill, the things men have talked and joked and told easy lies about, have not always remained the same. Their logic has been different from our logic, as a schoolboy’s is different from a priest’s. The things which in their thinking they were always referring to, mirrored the world they knew. The ideas that were handy to their minds, the words that came soonest to their lips, the turn that was easiest to their talk, their whole fund of metaphors and expressions, betrayed their preoccupations and lit up the background of their lives. Perhaps the Sunday church-bell sounded differently to their ears and reached a hidden corner in their minds. Perhaps they had not learned to think of the stars as loveliness. For them there could be no evening silhouettes of chimney-pots and telegraph-wires against the glaring moon, no dream of long white roads that should shake with hurried, humming traffic—the pictures they felt at home with were not the same as ours. And just as, in a land where earthquakes are to be expected, the fact must give a twist to theart of building, the thoughts of architects, so, in those distant ages, the world that people knew, the things they felt at home with, a hundred significant details, moulded the forms of their thoughts, and conditioned the terms of their thinking, and made the maps of their minds. It is by entering into this fact that the novelist can do more than simply copy some recorded details of their world, and can recapture something of their life. In so far as he succeeds at all it is because the things which conditioned their thinking, he accepts for himself. He does not analyse them from the outside, but submits and surrenders to them, makes them in fact his own. Telling a tale of some far-off world, he will not speak of the stars with the love of the poet; he will remember that the astrologers had made them a dread relentless destiny, so that this would be an alien fact. He will explore things of this kind, and take them into his thinking, and make them part of his kingdom; for it is a surprise of facts such as this—which show the age true to itself in an unexpected way—and it is the cumulative effect of a host of them, that powerfully make for atmosphere.

And just as he enters into the things that conditioned the thinking of these men of former days, the novelist in a larger way fits life to the things which conditioned their experience, and moves within the framework of the age. It is the same human nature all the time, which heis describing, but it comes in different disguises, and is always finding fresh symbols for itself, fresh forms for its expression. The same essential fact, the same inner experience, takes different turns in its unfolding. The boy who runs away to escape the drudgery near at hand may be the same in every century; but to-day it will be the dullness of school-routine that brings unrest and the cinema that brings incitement; while in some bygone age it would be the cruelty of apprentice-life that became unbearable, and tales of high adventure on the Spanish Main that made the world inviting. This would lead to a different wayfaring. It is a fresh story altogether. Love may be ever the same but it will not blossom out into the identical facts, it will not raise the same issues, it will not lure to the same adventures, altogether it will not unfold its story in the same way, in various worlds of convention. The novelist who knows the experience must weave it to the pattern and run it into the mould of the century with which he is dealing, he must fit it to the machinery of life as it then was, he must translate it into the terms of the age. Present experience, in so far as it is eternal experience, can be referred back to a different world, where even to the farthest detail of its working it will run into different forms; and the facility, the inevitability with which this is done, so that you do not find a modern love-story transplanted into alien soil, patched intoan old tapestry, set in a mere background of mediaeval staging and dress, but the whole theme overhauled with insistent reference to the conditioning features of the age, by a mind that has not wearied of playing upon the implications of these things—is one of the things which make the age as reproduced in the novel come to us with conviction, and with atmosphere. Perhaps the lack of this constant way of running back to the past in thinking till everything has been remoulded is what makesThe Cloister and the Hearthfail in atmosphere, and seem like a story of modern convention merely clothed in an old-world dress and staged in mediaeval setting, without coming as a live blossoming of mediaeval life.

It is recalled in Henry James’sNotes on Novelistshow Robert Louis Stevenson made Edinburgh his “own.”

And this (we are told) even in spite of continual absence—in virtue of a constant imaginative reference and an intense intellectual possession.

In a similar way if at all—the historian wins over for himself, and comes to possess an age of the past; but whereas Stevenson in his absence could constantly shoot back in his mind to a distant, remembered Edinburgh, in the case of the historian it is in a peculiar sense an irrecoverable, and so to speak, only half-remembered world that is “referred” to, and theman cannot go direct to the original to confirm the mental picture he retains. He can never know the past just as Stevenson knew the city he had actually trodden, and there is more of himself, more of the personal element, in his appropriation of it—how much, he cannot tell, because he can never go behind his vision of the past to compare it with the reality. We who may hold some place as Stevenson did Edinburgh, and perhaps remember it as a distant thing we knew in the old days, and retread it in our imagination and refer to it in our thinking—we can return to the spot itself to verify the impression it has left in our minds and see if our picture is true; and returning we may be shocked to find how Memory has played us false, how the Edinburgh that was in our thoughts is out of touch with the real thing. Working with an equally imperfect “Memory” the historian cannot do this, cannot put back the clock to a distant age to see if the “world” he has created out of it in his mind has parted from reality. And yet, given that “world” of the past as he holds it, it is still true that he makes it peculiarly his own, in that he constantly traverses it in his imagination, it is as a magnet to his mind, he carries present things back into it and is for ever making calls upon it, till it becomes a part of his thinking. It was because Scott had worked like this upon the history that he knew so well, and because he had enteredinto the past in this special way and made it a country of his mind, that Hutton could write of him that “He had something like a personal experience of several centuries.”

The man who does this and can feel at home in a certain “world” of history, who saturates himself with the spirit of an age and breathes its very air, and having touched the life of a time has turned it over in his mind and has played upon it and pondered over it in his thinking—will learn to catch unawares the turns of thought that were current then, will reproduce in a spontaneous way the habits and modes of life of the past—the things he would otherwise have had to copy with servility—and will enter without effort into the very tricks of speech of some former day. Instead of transplanting facts and specific details direct from the history-book into the story-book, he will find expression for the life which he has made his own, letting it blossom out into its own appropriate “facts,” its inevitable manifestations. Atmosphere, though not merely the result of spontaneity, any more than the electricity is the result of the wire, demands this as its necessary concomitant, as electricity demands the completed circuit. Perhaps it may be said that atmosphere is the result of a conspiracy of details that come in an effortless way from a mind that has entered into the experience and made appropriation of the “world,” of some age in history. It belongs tothe past age in some sense; but it cannot be separated from the personality of the novelist himself. Charles Lamb steeped his mind in old writers until some of their quaintness and charm passed into himself and came out in his prose style; and in this way he caught history somehow into his personality. Similarly the historical novelist does not merely acquire information about the past, but absorbs it into his mind. Atmosphere comes out in his books as the overflow of a personality that has made a peculiar appropriation of history. It comes as part of the man himself.

This explains why Hewlett is at home in a peculiarly romantic and coloured world like that of Renaissance Italy, and Dumas is really himself when his books are in an atmosphere of court intrigue and racy adventure, and Scott is a king in his kingdom when he is in the peasant-world of Scotland or when he is concerned with those Covenanting days of which he wrote “I am complete master of the whole history of these strange times.” These writers breathe in their novels a life that they have made their own, and that has become part of themselves. It is not a particular period of history but rather a particular phase of life, a certain type of experience, a definite sort of “world” that these writers have come to possess and can so describe with all appropriate atmosphere; and it is not necessarily when they change theirperiod of history but when they move into a different world and concern themselves with a type of life and experience which they have not made their own by any “constant imaginative reference” that they find themselves out of their element. If they take up a fresh corner of life like this for their stories, they are unable to escape from the atmosphere that is really theirs, they cannot shake off the things that belong to the world which is their true world and which has become a part of their thinking; and either they give us no atmosphere at all, or (which is at bottom the same thing) they trail with them into this fresh world an atmosphere which is here alien and inappropriate but which has become part and parcel of themselves.

Moreover, when Hewlett inKing Richard Yea-and-Nayand Hugo inNotre Dame de Parisgive us the Middle Ages, although they both achieve a certain atmosphere, it is a different atmosphere in each case. Just as Hugo inNinety-Threereconstructed the French Revolution with his eye upon the conflict between the inexorable demands of the Cause at a moment of crisis and the generous, humane impulses of men who served the cause, he has restored the Middle Ages inNotre Damewith his eye upon the Cathedral that is the centre of his story. Wherever he looks he sees a gargoyle; his mind seizes upon the grotesque; and his mediaeval world shapes itself around this central fact.Hewlett reproduces the Middle Ages as they exist rather in the mind of the poet. Whether he tells of King Richard, or depicts Renaissance times, or relates the story of Mary Queen of Scots, there is always something in his atmosphere that is Hewlett himself, there is a melody in his style, a peculiarity in the very order of his words, that breathes a sort of romance; he gives us the past seen through the coloured windows of his mind. Hugo stands alone as a man who, strikingly aware of the power of accumulated detail, produces atmosphere in a conscious way, knowing what he is doing and how he does it; but he reveals the bent of his mind in the particular appropriation which he makes of the Middle Ages, and in the type of significant fact which he fastens upon. In Hewlett in a more subjective way, there is the mysterious communication of personality. But in every case there is a certain element in atmosphere that is communicated to the past and is imputed to a bygone age by the mind of the man who resurrects the past. His own experience of the past as he has learned to live in it, his own emotions as he looks at some distant century, are transferred to that century. The novelist does not merely reproduce the past any more than an artist merely copies nature; he loads it with something of himself, he cannot describe it without betraying his way of looking at it; and all this is true also of any historian whoachieves real resurrection and atmosphere. At its extreme it means a kind of “pathetic fallacy” with a scene in history instead of a scene in nature, shaping itself to the moods and the mind of a man. It is what Carlyle does when he turns to historic men and movements. It is what Turner did when he painted “Ulysses deriding Polyphemus” amid all the glow and colour of legend. It is what the grown-up writer does who gives us children’s tales and childhood scenes that seem so charmingly child-like to other grown-ups. It is what all of us do with far-off, remembered things.

And because of all this there is something in the make-up of a historical novelist’s mind, something in his temperament and outlook which finds its peculiar home in various corners of the world of the past. There is something in various ages of history, various phases of life and experience, various types of thinking, to which his mind naturally turns, and in which he finds his element. There is something in his own life which answers to its counterpart in history, and finds its own world there. A man like Jokai can catch the atmosphere of some revolutionary movement—as inThe Green Book—and can thrill a novel with the feelings and the subtle workings of a secret yearning for freedom, because in real life he lived this, and finding it in history found something of himself. Carlyle’s Cromwell, Carlyle’s Mirabeau havepassed through Carlyle’s mind and come out crooked; but there was in their way of thinking and in their wrestles with life a thing which Carlyle had in common with them, and which drew his thoughts to them and made their experience a thing he could enter into. That was why he could assimilate them so powerfully to himself. That also was why his interpretations of them were contributions to history, and not mere wild distortions.

And so, for the resurrection of the past and the true re-telling of the life of the past the novelist’s peculiar art has something to contribute. The virtue and power of the novelist’s depiction of men, is not that he observes perpetually and arranges data, but that he enters into the experiences of others, he runs his life into the mould of their lives, he puts himself under the conditioning circumstances of their thinking. He can feel with people unlike himself and look at the world with their eyes and grapple with the issues of life that meet them, because he can put himself in their place, that is to say, because his experience is not entirely and merely his own. It is precisely because personality is not cut off from personality, and a man is not entirely locked up within himself, with the depths of him completely hidden away from everybody else, that the novelist can so to speak transpose himself and catch life into a person other than himself. It is preciselybecause in the last resort a distant age of history is not its own secret, curled up in its own world, and cut off from the present day—because the men of the past had red blood in their veins and were a phase of a life that is universal and eternal—that History can recapture something of their struggles and yearnings and their particular experiences. The history of history-books gives us a glimpse of the men of the past, a chart of the facts that governed their world, an idea of the conditioning circumstances of their lives; but it withholds the closest human things, the touches of direct experience. And because life is all one, and essential experience ultimately the same, these are the very things which the novelist, better than most people, can read back into the past. These provide the peculiar place, the legitimate rôle for historical fiction. The novelist will inevitably colour his pictures of an age with something of himself, for the pictures are born of his thinking; but in so far as he does all this in tune, surprising us with facts that flash, and that light up the age in unexpected ways, and lure us into a “world,” he will have atmosphere; and in so far as he remains true to the chart which history gives him he will have the true historical atmosphere.

* * * * *

The historical novel, then, is one of many ways of treating the past and of wresting from it its secret. Given the facts of Nature a scientistwill make one use of them, and will do a certain kind of thinking around them; but the artist or the poet will turn a different light upon them and meet them in a different way. Given the facts of the past, the historian shapes them in one way, squeezes something out of them, hunts out a set of implications in them; the novelist uses them to a different purpose, organises them differently, and turns them over in his thinking with a different kind of logic. Given an event the historian will seek to estimate its ultimate significance and to trace out its influence, the novelist will seek merely to recapture the fleeting moment, to see the thing happening, to turn it into a picture or a “situation.” With a set of facts about the social conditions of England in the Middle Ages the historian will seek to make a generalisation, to find a formula; the novelist will seek a different sort of synthesis and will try to reconstruct a world, to particularise, to catch a glimpse of human nature. Each will notice different things and follow different clues; for to the historian the past is the whole process of development that leads up to the present; to the novelist it is a strange world to tell tales about.

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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