Part 1

THE HISTORICAL NOVEL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: Fetter Lane C. F. CLAY, Manager

NEW YORK The Macmillan Co.

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA and MADRAS Macmillan and Co., Ltd.

TORONTO The Macmillan Co. of Canada, Ltd.

TOKYO Maruzen-Kabushiki-Kaisha

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THE HISTORICAL NOVEL ❦❦ AN ESSAY BY H. BUTTERFIELD FELLOW OF PETERHOUSE

CAMBRIDGE: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS: MCMXXIV

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

The following essay, which was awarded the Le Bas Prize for 1923, is an attempt to find some relation between historical novels on the one hand and history treated as a study on the other; and, further, to work out a method of critical approach. It does not defend historical fiction against the historian; it welcomes this form of art from his point of view, finding its justification in the character of history itself. It seeks to estimate the novel as a work of resurrection, a form of “history,” a way of treating the past. In this it does not pretend to be exhaustive, but puts forward one aspect of the problem and attempts to track down the peculiar virtue of fiction as the gateway to the past.

H. B.

_April 1924_

I

Wordsworth touches the true mood of romantic regret when he writes

“_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 the history 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 a deliberately 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 a true “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 song may 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 world can 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 preserve the 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. In _The 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, to renew 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 gather round 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, but precisely 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 his heart’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 remember an 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.