Part 2
History can only make her pictures and rebuild the past out of the things she can save from a shipwreck; she will piece together just so much of the battle of Agincourt as the sea washes up to the shores. The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through the darkness. And so, history is full of tales half-told, and of tunes that break off in the middle; she gives us snatches from the lives of men, a peep at some corner of a battlefield, just enough to make us long for a fuller vision. All history is full of locked doors, and of faint glimpses of things that cannot be reached. The Middle Ages will kick a heel into the twentieth century, in a Fountains Abbey--in some straggling ruin--and will ask us to piece out its former, completed grandeur for ourselves and to people it with a life of our own imagining. History can seldom recover a given set of circumstances and make us see a definite situation, a particular knot of human action at a given place and a given time; if two diplomatists meet in a certain room to settle a problem, and afterwards describe their proceedings to their respective governments, or recall them in memoirs, if Napoleon meets Metternich in time of crisis at Prague, we can only recover a dim and faulty account of the interview from their conflicting descriptions; and yet this is one of the most precise and clear situations that a historian might wish to narrate. And when a Carlyle, in the middle of a rugged description of the taking of the Bastille, can break away to apostrophise, in a way that is sublime:
Oh evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fell slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main....
he is doing something, he is catching the moment, in a way that can seldom be achieved in history, unless history brings in fiction to help her. History, then, fails the romanticist. Its shortcomings become apparent when we try to particularise, when say, we wish to see a definite picture. About the closest human things, history only tells us enough to set us guessing and wondering.
The history of text-books, the history that can be made out of the recoverable facts of the past, is really little more than a chart to the past. If people think of England there flashes in upon them a panorama, of green fields and telegraph-posts, and intersecting roads and clusters of houses. “England” comes home to us as a jumble of pictures that melt into one another and that we have caught perhaps from the windows of a railway-carriage as we have darted across country. Similarly, if we unlock the past in our minds a score of pictures leap before us, breaking into one another. And the history that history-books can tell us bears a relation to that picture which we make for ourselves of the past, something like the relation which a map of England bears to that mental picture that we form of the English countryside. And just as when we look at an ordnance map we can see where a path runs and can tell where it strikes up hill or down dale, where it touches a wood and where it follows a stream, but if we wish to make a picture of the walk we must put in the hawthorn-hedges, the pretty turns of the path, and the rocky edge of the stream for ourselves--so when we read history, if we wish not merely to see great figures strutting upon a stage, acting a public part, but to fill in the lines of the picture with the robust life of the countryside, and to catch the hundred human touches, if we wish, say, to see the vivid life of three hundred years ago stirring in the crooked streets and topsy-turvy houses that converge upon York Minster, we must charge our history with some of the human things that are irrecoverable, we must reinforce history by our imagination. The public life of great men is before our eyes, some of their private life is open to us; but the life that fills the street with bustle, that makes every corner of a slum a place of wonder and interest, the life that is a sad and gay, weary and thrilling thing in every hillside cottage, is a dim blurred picture in a history. Because of this, history cannot come so near to human hearts and human passions as a good novel can; its very fidelity to facts makes it not perhaps less true to life, but farther away from the heart of things. All the real history of people that a text-book could give is like the chart of Treasure Island--just enough to set a wild heart dreaming; the chart gives generalities, it describes the lie of the land, but if we wish to _see_ a picture of Treasure Island we must make the chart the jumping-off board for some play of the imagination.
There is a poem, called “The Old Ships,” in which Flecker tells of how he has seen vessels, “with leaden age o’er cargoed,” sail “beyond the village which men still call Tyre.” These ships, like everything that survives from the past, are a hint to the imagination; they suggest a story; and this is the kind of thinking to which they drive the poet:
“_And all those ships were certainly so old, Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese Hell-raked them, till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold--_
_But I have seen ... A drowsy ship of some yet older day; And, wonder’s breath indrawn, Thought I--who knows--who knows--but in that same (Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new --Stern painted brighter blue--) That talkative, bald-headed seaman came (Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar) From Troy’s doom-crimson shore, And with great lies about his wooden horse, Set the crew laughing and forgot his course._
_It was so old a ship--who knows, who knows?_”
In these lines is shown the lure of all ancient things that store a tale which they cannot tell.
There is a charm and mystery in unremembered things. There is something fine in the sight of a ridge of hill against the sky when one does not know what lies beyond or whether a surprise of rolling sea beneath a sudden fall of cliff, or a panorama of wooded valleys, is in store at the summit--so one can only guess and wonder. And, when, in some border-village we look at hills that have watched centuries stride by, and ask ourselves of distant scenes and old adventure that the hills must have overlooked, and when we learn that these matters were writ in water and that about them not history any more than the stern hill-crags can break her everlasting silence--then here is adventure for the imagination, and in our fancy we play around places that we know and events that we have heard of, weaving around “What-has-been” the things that might have been. We do the kind of thinking that is needed to turn a map into a picture, the kind of thinking that might translate last year’s National Budget into a drama of hearts and homes.
It is in this that there lies the first justification of the historical novel, and one way of giving that particular kind of literature a relation to experience. No infallible generalisation can give a key to all historical novels and to everything that appears in them, but here at least is a useful key that will fit many locks and will explain much that there is in all these novels, and moreover will provide a system of relations between these and the history that is a study. It cannot be too strongly stated that the explanation of historical novels is not to be found in the fact that history needs an admixture of fiction to give it spice, to make it exciting, to relieve the boredom. Truth is stranger than fiction and some of the most incredible episodes that have been found in novels have been those which an author has too foolishly taken straight from life. That there is a place for such a thing as the historical novel is due to a certain inadequacy in history itself. History is full of events and issues out of which a story could be made, and of adventures that are exciting enough; it is not wanting in incident, but these things are not stories, they have to be transmuted into story; for there are irrecoverable things in history, and these are the close, intimate personal things, the touches of direct experience that are needed in story-making, the things that we most remember in friends we used to have, what might be called “the human touches.” In order to catch these things in the life of the past, and to make a bygone age live again, history must not merely be eked out by fiction, it must not merely be extended by invented episodes; it must be turned into a novel; it must be “put to fiction” as a poem is put to music.
When history tells us that Napoleon did a certain thing, it is the work of each of us, in trying to bring history home to ourselves, to amplify in our imagination what the history-book gives us, and to _see_ Napoleon doing the action. It is all very well to be told that a certain event took place, but the past strikes home in our minds with immeasurably greater power if we can see it happening and can catch it as a picture; and this is what we try to do for ourselves when we read a history-book. The important thing is to see the past, and not simply to hear somebody describe it. It is not enough to read of a certain event; we must be there, watching--we must fix it into a picture for ourselves, we must recapture the particular moment. History does not do this for us; just the thing that it cannot do is to catch the moment precisely; so we do this for ourselves; we complete history in our supposition. Every man who has an idea of the woman Mary Queen of Scots, or who can catch glimpses of what happened at Waterloo, has added to history something from his own imagination, and has filled in the lines for himself. The past as it exists for all of us, the world of the past in our minds, is history synthesised by the imagination, and fixed into a picture by something that mounts to fiction. For history fails when a certain situation is to be recovered, or a definite combination of circumstances is to be seized upon, or a particular moment is to be caught. And yet it is a cold and bloodless thing if these things cannot be achieved, and the life of the past is not in any way resurrected without them. The chart must be turned into a picture, if history is to be a recovery of the life of the past and not a mere post-mortem examination. The imagination of the historian does this for him; the most musty of parchments holds for him a story and speaks to a world that exists in his mind; but everybody is not a historian; so historical fiction does the work for all the world; it fuses the past into a picture, and makes it live.
Again, any attempt to recapture the past is limited and inadequate if it keeps a reader conscious of the fact that he is a modern creature, looking at a distant world and comparing it with his own. It is not enough to recover the facts of the lives that men lived long-ago and to trace out the thread of event; we must recover the adventure of their lives; and the whole fun and adventure of their lives, as of ours, hung on the fact that at any given moment they could not see ahead, and did not know what was coming. To the men of 1807 the year 1808 was a mystery and an unexplored tract; they saw a hundred possibilities in it where the modern reader only sees the one thing that actually happened; they never knew what surprise awaited them at the next turn in the road; and therefore, to study the year 1807 remembering all the time what happened in 1808 and in the succeeding trail of years, is to miss the adventure and the great uncertainties and the element of gamble in their lives. It is not enough to know that Napoleon won a certain battle; if history is to come back to us as a human thing we must see him on the eve of battle eagerly looking to see which way the dice will fall, with fears and hesitations perhaps, with a sense of all the things that may happen in spite of all his calculations, and with an uncertainty before all the range of possible things that may upset his plans. The victory that is achieved on one day must not be regarded as being inevitable the night before; and where we cannot help seeing the certainty of a desired issue, the men of the time were all suspense, and full of wonderings. History does not always give us things like these, for they are irrecoverable personal things; but we know they existed. They are the things that make life an experience. And they are the very touches that are needed to turn history into a story.
These things are what are meant, then, when it is affirmed that the history that Romanticism in all of us demands must be at once a picture and story. And it is in this way that the history-book which belongs to the “literature of knowledge” is transformed into the “literature of power.”
In the opening chapter of _Ivanhoe_ there is a piece of writing that illustrates the difference between the historian and the historical novelist in the use that they make of the same historical material. In the introductory part of that chapter Scott recapitulates, “for the information of the general reader,” the conditions of the age with which he is dealing, describing them in general terms as a historian would.
Four generations (he writes) had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat.... At court and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleading and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victor and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe.
This is a history-lesson. A conflict of forces, a set of tendencies is described in what might be a chapter straight from a history-book. Scott is showing the position that the English language occupied at a given period, and is making the sort of generalisation that it is the historian’s business to make. We are not being treated to an essay by Dryasdust; there is imagination in the depiction that is given; but this is the historian’s way of treating historical facts; it is essentially the past being described to later ages, it is not the past telling its own tale, giving itself away; and it is a chart to the age rather than a picture. Even in a further sense than this the historian speaks in his peculiar idiom; for he not only describes the world as it was at some time past, but he hauls this world into relationship with the whole of subsequent development and puts it in its place in the whole cinematograph-film that is History. In the concluding sentence he gives the significance of that conflict of languages which he has been describing, and sees it as a link in the whole story of our language. And because of this the reader does not lose himself in the past; he stands aside to compare it with the present. This part of the chapter gives in reality the stage-directions of the novel, and it reminds the reader that he is not in the past, and so breaks the spell.
In the ensuing dialogue, however, where Wamba and Gurth have to contemplate “the swine being turned Normans,” this same historical material is translated into terms of fiction. It is not stretched, or varnished, or distorted. The novelist does not try to outdo history by invention, or to round off the true historical position by a kind of idealisation; at least the significance of the chapter does not lie in any of these things. What is important is the fact that here the same historical material is given to the reader in a different way, and is treated with a different aim. Instead of the general there is now the particular. Tendencies that were broadly described before are given precision, we see what they mean when they are pinned down to individual cases. Before, we were given the formula for the age; now we see the forces that were described manifesting themselves at a definite place, at a particular moment. Here the past speaks for itself. We see it and are in it, we do not simply hear a man describing it. And instead of that conflict of languages being put into its context in the history of language, the novelist puts it into its context in the whole life of the time, and hunts out a different set of implications in it. All this comes with greater vividness to the reader. History is reinforced by being written in the story-teller’s way.
This is one example taken from a chapter in which the historian and the historical novelist chance to rub shoulders with each other, but the idea is capable of being projected on to a larger canvas. In the Introduction to _Ivanhoe_ Scott shows how all this can be extended when, in terms of the historian, he again describes the set of facts, which he has turned into fiction, the chart which he has changed into a picture; this time on a bigger scale, covering the whole range of the novel.
It seemed to the author that the existence of two races in the same country, the vanquished distinguished by their plain, homely, blunt manner, and the free spirit infused by their ancient institutions and laws; the victors, by the high spirit of military fame, personal adventure and whatever could distinguish them as the Flower of Chivalry might, intermixed with other characters belonging to the same time and country, interest the reader by the contrast, if the author should not fail on his part.
This is a description of a mere relationship between classes of a society. Scott sees in it a story. He divines in it just the situations and issues out of which a story can be made. He sees its implications in individual lives. Instead of contemplating its effects on future generations he lays bare its workings in the scheme of life of people who lived under it. Just as a prism catches the light and turns it into colours he stands between the historical generalisation and his readers and he breaks up the general into the particular and projects it as a picture. The result is like the condensing of a cloud into raindrops. Fiction is like the dust which creates a sunbeam and helps the sunlight to show that it is there. And in this way Scott does something for history that the historian by himself cannot do, or can seldom do; he recaptures the life of an age, and resurrects a picture of the past.
The historical novelist receives his hint from history, but such examples as these from _Ivanhoe_ are enough to make it apparent that this hint need not necessarily be a story ready-made, a sequence of events to be followed. Many historical novels are stories straight from a history-book--the adventures of Guy Fawkes, the sorrows of Mary Queen of Scots--amplified and rounded off by fiction perhaps, and re-told with some variations. History may provide plot and adventure, and fiction may just fill in the lines where history is inadequate or idealise incidents and careers where history is incomplete or disappointing. It is claimed of some of Jokai’s novels that, staged as they are in lands where passion and action are intense and full of colour, and drawn as they are from a history that is crowded with romantic and thrilling episodes, they do not need an invention of incident or a perversion of history to make them complete, but are just a vivid re-telling of things that actually happened. The books of Dumas are filled with incidents and situations that are picked straight from history and are marvellously connected into an organised story. And many writers have assimilated into the body of their novels incidents that are true to fact or anecdotes from legend, and so have made history and fiction fit into each other in dovetail fashion. All this represents one way in which history can be incorporated into a novel, but it is not the only way; and the particular fact that is brought to light by the Introduction to _Ivanhoe_, as well as by other things, is the fact that history does not merely inspire fiction by providing a tale, a thread of incident, a network of action, to be re-told in story-book fashion; it may only provoke a tale, it may just provide situations and relationships and problems which give the right kind of issue that is needed in story-making. Scott saw implicit in the conditions of the age of Richard I a set of human relationships which were materials for a novel. He had the power of divining the implied story that was hidden beneath a description of Anglo-Norman relations a few generations after the Conquest.
Everything in life is full of implied story. Every piece of coal stores up history and a tale of marvel. Parish accounts that tell of a leap in the amount of money spent upon “faggots” in the sixteenth century hold a hidden story of persecution and martyrdom. There is a tragedy that can be read into many a newspaper advertisement, and there are people in the world who can see the adventure and the wandering and the panorama that are locked up in a railway-guide. The geography of Africa that might be a dull recapitulation of facts and figures might be turned into narrative, into a story of travels across an unknown continent. And if a politician wishes to bring home to people the consequences of an unwelcome measure he has only to work out a particular instance of hardship that may result from the measure, giving it preciseness and turning it into a story, and he will catch the imagination of electors far sooner than any logic could convince their intellects. It is in this way that the novelist recasts historical material into story-form, and it is in this way that history is made more effectual than the history-book.