Part 3

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

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

The general plan of the story was, to conjoin two characters in that bustling and contentious age, who, thrown into situations which gave them different views on the subject of the reformation, should, with the same sincerity and purity of intention, dedicate themselves, the one to the support of the sinking fabric of the Catholic Church, the other to the establishment of the reformed doctrines. It was supposed that some interesting subjects for narrative might be derived from opposing two such enthusiasts to each other in the path of life, and contrasting the real worth of both with their passions and prejudices.

Here again is a set of historical conditions which, even when described in so rough and swift a fashion, are full of implied story. To turn these into a novel necessitates no distortion of great historical events; what the writer does is to hunt out those situations and problems which are implicit in the life of the age and in the described conditions, and which are the kind of issues that make good story. In the same way the very title, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, suggesting as it does a collision of loyalties and a human problem, is a description of something in mediaeval life that cries out to be turned into a tale.

The conditions of the life of the present-day, the current habits of thought, the social relationships of men, the economic situation of the country, the welfare of family and Church, and the relations of those institutions and groups that make their conflicting claims upon the loyalty and cover so much of the activity of individuals, are rich with problems and anomalies, and situations and combinations of circumstance which are peculiar to the age, and are the source of most of the issues of the novel of the present-day. The entanglement of the individuals in these conditions produces problems of experience that are peculiarly modern. In the same way every set of circumstances produces its special set of human issues, every age has its own life-problems; and the novel of an age of monasticism will range through a different scheme of problems from that of an age of divorce-law activity, and the world of the Industrial Movement will show life dominated by issues different from those of the age of Chivalry. The twentieth century differs from the twelfth not merely in its language, its dress, its implements and armour, but in its whole experience of life. It is not merely in the suits and trappings that one age contrasts with another; and for this reason the historical novel is justified, as something more than picturesque scene-painting, for it treats of other ages’ experiments in living, and depicts human nature breaking in upon a different set of experiences, a different range of problems. When Scott in the Introductions to _Ivanhoe_ and to _The Monastery_ summarises a state of society therefore, and assumes a given set of human relationships as the basis of a novel, he is carrying with these things the whole range of experiences and issues that are involved in them and that are peculiar to them, and his purpose is to turn these into story as a present-day novelist turns the social conditions of the twentieth century into fiction.

History, then, is not merely a taskmaster to the novelist. Too often the historical novelist has been spoken of as being hampered by history and tied down by chronological tables. He has been regarded as a novelist working under limitations and with one hand tied, history restricting his imagination, and setting him a boundary. But all that has just been said implies that history is not merely the chain that ties the novelist down; rather it is the wing that helps him to soar into a new range of problems and experiences. It is his inspiration, and not simply a tie. When Scott in his Introductions gave himself a basis for his novels it is true that he was accepting certain limitations and agreeing to work within a given set of facts, just as an Arctic explorer agrees to accept the hardships of cold weather; but at the same time he was opening up to himself a different world and a life that rested on a different basis and that so provided him with a host of fresh story-issues.

If the historical novelist regards his duty as being to avoid anachronisms, history will seem to him a chain. The different condition of things existing in the period of which he writes will be a source of labour to him, and a pitfall. But to the true historical novelist they are a glory, they are the whole point of his work, and what was a weakness becomes a strength. If a writer wishes to “work up” a period in order to set a story in it, he will feel history a fetter and every unexpected fact may hamper the story he intended to tell. But if he has steeped his mind in some past age, and has lived in that age, turning it over and over in his imagination, realising the conditions of affairs and the relationships of men and pondering over the implications of these and so recasting the life of the age for himself, then that particular age and those special conditions will suggest their own story, and the historical peculiarities of that age will give point to his novel and will become a power. There is all the difference in the world between a man who has a story to tell and wishes to set it in a past age and to adjust it to the demands of history, and the man who has the past in his head and allows it to come forth in story. There is an immense gulf between the man who works up a period in history in order to tell his story without anachronisms, and a man whose stories come from a mind steeped in the past. In the one case history has to be laboriously gathered up around the story, and it is a burden; in the other case the history is there to begin with, and the story grows out of the history. In the true historical novel the writer has learned to feel at home in the age with which he is dealing. Such a novel comes out of a world of the Past that exists in the writer’s mind. The history that it embodies will be true or inaccurate according as the man has throughout his life built up that world in his mind on true foundations, but in any case that history will come spontaneously; and here the historical novelist is not a novelist working under limitations, but one who has captured new fields of experience and of circumstance and has conquered a new world for his art.

In all this, too, there can further be worked out a defence of the historical novel against one of the charges that are sometimes brought up against it. The historical novel is specially open to the temptation of mere picturesqueness. The one thing that is essentially to be kept in mind in the whole idea of history that has been described above, is not that this method of treating the past is shallow, but that it is specially liable to descend to shallowness without knowing and to be satisfied with mere externals, and pageantry, and a veneer of history. Popular literature is full of empty fiction that sets a conventional story in a picturesque background and thinks it has done justice to history when it has clothed its personages in coloured costumes and given their language a touch of the obsolete, and raised up a stage-setting of courts and camps and Gothic architecture; and the drawback to the historical novel lies in the fact that the touch of strangeness, the sense of the far-away, the hint of colour and romance in all these, too often makes the emptiness of the show more tolerable; the fine feathers disguise the worthlessness of the bird below. But if it is remembered that every state of society has its peculiar experience of life, that every age of history shows mankind breaking in upon experience and upon the problems of life at different points, and that each generation has its attitude to existence, and its peculiar synthesis, then it must be seen that the charge of shallowness is not one that can be made against the whole idea of historical novels, and that these, like any other novel, may be rich with experience and may touch human issues. A story that describes a Roman watching the decay of the Empire that he had been taught would endure for ever, and seeing a surging barbarian life flood into its borders like some awful eruption of Nature before which human effort is futile and men can only look helplessly on, may be a mere melodrama, unredeemed by its pageantry and picturesqueness; but it can be more--the story of a unique experience, and of one of the urgent moments in the life of mankind. Shallowness is not the evil of the historical novel--it is only its danger.

Lastly, it may be said that the inspiration of the historical novel is not merely history, but also geography. To a person for whom history did not exist at all a landscape would be merely a flat picture; to one who can think history into it, it has a dimension in time. To some people the ruins of Rome may be a poor heap of fragments, pieces of broken art-ware; but to Gibbon and Gregorovius who brought to the place a sense of the history behind, those ruins were the starting-point of a trail that led back to the glories of ancient Rome and were the clue to a story. If people re-tread the scenes of a distant childhood it is not merely a flat picture that comes before their eyes, but other scenes behind it, scenes that the memory has stored and that are somehow locked up in the present one; the very landscape looks different, and is richer because it breathes the past. To an architect a building is not merely a dead weight of stone, but a mass of forces striking in different directions and brought somehow to a poise; the whole structure is thrilled with life and in every line of it there is motion. To a historical mind similarly, a building must _look_ different. It has not merely length and breadth and height, but also a certain “throughness,” an extension in time; behind the “Now” of that building there is a long trail of Moments of the same building, the place has not merely a few associations with the past but a whole context in history; and the sight of the walls at the present time is only the last picture of a cinematograph-reel which represents all the hundred Yesterdays that are folded up within the stone. Our fleeting “Now” is only the last term of an ever-lengthening series. Time is locked up within scenery and buildings; and the aim of history is to unlock it and to make it speak its secret.

What we call historic sites and buildings represent places in which this secret has in some measure been recovered. They have not existed longer than other places in geography, but they are places about which History can remember things. The cinematograph-film which represents their extension in time is not completely locked away from us; and the historical mind means among other things the power to feel the film there and to recall pictures in it at the mere sight of the place, on the mere suggestion of geography.

In Sir Walter Scott this power of reading history into places existed in real intensity.

To me (he said) the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlement of Stirling Castle. I do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling or picturesque scenery--but show me an old castle in a field of battle and I was at home at once....

If he saw a scene about which tradition or the history-book had nothing to tell, he still saw the history there, and tried to read the past into the place. Someone wrote of him:

He was but half-satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some local legend, and when I was forced sometimes to confess with the knife-grinder “Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir,” he would laugh and say “then let us make one--nothing so easy as to make a tradition.”

Such a story invented around a place, such an attempt to call up history out of a scene, is really an act of homage, an offering made to the place, a work of dedication.

History is rooted in geography, and the historical novel, which is a novel that seeks to be rooted in some ways in actuality, finds one of its roots in geography. The quotation made above from Scott’s Introduction to _The Monastery_ is part of an explanation which the author gives of the reason why he chose the celebrated ruins of Melrose as the scene of his story, although he described the place as “possessing less of romantic beauty than some other scenes in Scotland.” Of Jokai it has been said “The world around him--Hungary, Russia, and Turkey--breathed more romance and imagination than did the Highlands to Scott or France to Dumas”; and here was the inspiration of the writer.

Historical novels are born of romanticism of a kind; but they are a romancing around objects and places; they have a basis in reality, and their roots in the soil. In this way there is something more firm about them than is found in the more vague and dreamy products of romanticism--those dim romances of some undefined no-time, no-place, which have a “stained-glass window” vision of a mediaeval past and lack the link with earth, and can only be connected with the historical novel in the way a fairy-story can, that is by the remote suggestion of the past that is contained in the airy words “Once upon a time.”

And if in the historical novel there is devotion to locality and a feeling for the history that breathes through the soil, all this comes out large and most complete where geography and tradition, love of place and pride in its heritage of story, combine in patriotism. Patriotism that so often rings false is in this true, in that it becomes the consciousness of belonging to a place and a tradition. Even where it seems most local and confined, even where it contains no sounding of the trumpets of nationalism, and where its author holds no patriotic motive, the historical novel cannot help reminding men of their heritage in the soil. It is often born of a kind of patriotism; it can scarcely avoid always being the inspiration of it. In this way it becomes itself a power in history, an impulse to fine feeling, and a source of more of the action and heroism which it describes. The historical novel itself becomes a maker of history.

II

It has been noticed that the ostensible theme of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ is 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 of another, 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. The _Pickwick Papers_ belong 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 in _David Copperfield_ he 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 the reader 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 like _The Cloister and the Hearth_ all 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 in _The Cloister and the Hearth_ or in any novel, it means that an age is regarded as a 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. In _The 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 background and 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.