Part 5

They are not pictures of France. Dumas’s eye does not sweep the broad landscape of France, does not see the whole of it. The deep sound of the ocean of peoples does not reverberate through his books. The great life of France is not in them, like a sounding-board against the noisy events of court and camp. The ebb and flow of popular movements does not surge through them; and only occasionally is the swelling tide of some big heave of human effort let in, to hint at the mass-life of France outside the pages of the story. Dumas does not stop to paint a horizontal scene of France as a whole; and because of this his thread of story keeps moving, but there are no broad landscapes of history. There are courts and state-rooms, hunting-fields and street-scenes; but these do not echo the sounds from mountains and plains and the larger France. Dumas gives a trickle of narrative running through history; not a surging flood. He deals with the men who in their day were the men who mattered, the life which, while it was being lived, was considered to be the life that counted in France; and he deals with the region which stood out in high light above the dark masses in the past, and about which, therefore, history could remember things.

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The limit of the things that history can remember must determine the range of most historical novels, and fix their choice of subject. It is useful to see the bearings upon this of that slight differentiation in meaning between the words “historic” and “historical.” A “historical” event is anything that really happened in history, but a “historic” one is a celebrated one--one that would not be forgotten and that made a noise in the world. A “historic” character is a famous character, very often a public man. And so history comes to mean, not the world living out its centuries, but the stage upon which the big things happened and were noticed, and upon which far-reaching issues were worked out. In all the ages of the past there have been a few people who have moved the world, and have cut a great figure in their day, and behind these there has been the mass of people who did not lead, but followed, who did not act, but watched, who were the material upon which the great men worked, the instrument upon which the men in high station played. They were spectators of the historic event, as much as we; but only the actors in it belong to remembered history. History then becomes, as it were, the limelight directed upon the arena of loud-sounding events and brilliant action, leaving the whole theatre of spectators in darkness. It is the platform for Cromwell and Caesar and Napoleon and Milton; captains and kings and discoverers and heroes feel at home upon it; but behind it are the people who watch and suffer and serve these Cromwells and Caesars; they leave no memorial; and only occasionally at moments of intense history-making, do they break through on to the platform, and sweep across the stage, and show that they are there.

This arena of great “historic” event provides a more spacious theme for the novelist than mere episodes abstracted from universal history can do. Instead of wandering in the interesting by-ways of the past, and finding surprises of thrilling episode in out-of-the-way corners, the novelist may boldly face the full course of important events, and plunge into the fate and fortunes of the great. The historical novel then becomes an embodiment of historic things in the sense of far-reaching, loud-sounding issues, and it has a wider canvas, an ampler scope. Here it is not incidents merely that are taken from history, but a whole block of action and happening, a whole act from the mighty drama of the ages. History provides not merely snatches of tune that have to be worked into some sort of connection with one another, but a whole orchestral theme, which the novelist re-organises and works out afresh. It gives a set of issues that are capable of novel-study, and are full of human-meaning, and embody a problem in experience. Only, it must be said, all this is limited, or at least its character is determined, by the fact that this theme must concern men who have been in the public eye, and events that have been enacted in the sight of the world and so have been registered on the memory of the world. And a novel that deals with public events and national affairs and treats of people who are remembered in history because of their part in the political movements of their time, presents a problem that is peculiar in one respect.

The theme of a novel is human experience and the fate of human beings in the world. It covers all the things that the heart has ever touched, all the varied harmonies that it has happened to strike as it has brushed against life. It may concern itself with the big events that send their echo through the ages, it may feel the great heart that pulses in the life of a whole continent, it may tell of movements that have broken upon the world and changed the fate of peoples; but its supreme interest is in a mere man. In a sense it is true that every man is alone in the world, and feels himself stranded amongst “everything else.” He is, and he cannot help being, the centre of the circle of his own horizon; he must see his fellow-creatures as part of the “everything else,” part of the world against which he stands out; and that outer world must come to him as an experience and an adventure. The one thing that exists for him is this experience of the world.

And that is the one thing that exists in him for the novelist. It is the aim of the novelist to stand by the individual and feel life with him. The waves of some political or historic movement may touch the man and so come within the range of the novel, but they will not affect the man any more than his own special, homely concerns--probably they will only affect him through those little concerns. It is his own hopes and ambitions and fears as he finds himself set up against the world of men and things, his conflict with circumstances, his moods and his glad moments, his risks, his falling in love, his bewilderments, his relations with men, that make up a novel. Some writers, like Jokai and Dumas and Stevenson, will be specially concerned with the adventure of his life; the things that happened, the things he undertook, the surprises and the thrills; these are the story-tellers whose novels are narrations; but others, and especially the modern novelists, look more to the experience, and regard it as a theme to be studied as well as a story to be related. Perhaps these are the true historians, for they record experience, and it is they who in the most intimate and personal way capture life into the pages of a book.

The scope of the novel, however, is not limited to the life and affairs of ordinary people, average humanity. There are people who have felt life more intensely than others, and have reached loftier heights of experience than most. Things may have come to them with greater power than to the mass of people. Perhaps life is for ever a bigger thing because they have lived and have swept new ranges of experience, and have happened upon new chords, fresh harmonies of feeling, and have in some way communicated these to the world. Then again, there are men who, not because of any intrinsic greatness of mind or heart, but by reason of what we mortals can only regard as the incalculable thing, and can only call “chance,” have been placed in exceptional circumstances and situations of novelty, and so have struck upon new elements of experience, or fresh life-problems. In the careers of such men life seems to come out in new forms, and in unexpected ways. If they can be captured for the novel, then the novel can range over the finest regions of life, and can communicate their experience to the world, and so enlarge life for everybody else.

It might seem that these, the men of exceptional powers, and the men who find themselves in unusual situations, are the very people whom history does not forget; but this is only true with one great limitation. They must be people whom exceptional powers or the apparent accident of circumstances once brought into the public eye. They must be “historic” people, as well as “historical,” if our knowledge of them is to be more than fragmentary. If a man is memorable in his public life, then the world will see to it that his private life does not go unrecorded and unremembered; the personal things, the experience of the man even, will become known in so far as they are not specially concealed and in so far as such things in the life of an individual are communicable to others. The novelist who can do justice to these is widening the range of the novel, and bringing new and intenser experience into the kingdom of the novel, and is exploring life in its most intractable regions. He reaches life as it has been lived, at some of its finest points, and at some of its most splendid or most pressing moments. History, it has been seen, may give wing to the novel, and may expand its range. What is true for the life of an age or a people is here true also of the life of individuals. Biography also may place new fields of experience within the scope of a novel.

Statesmen and kings and scientists, then, are not shut out of the novel, but the novelist’s interest in them is not an interest in the statesmanship, or in the rule, or in the science but in the whole personality of the man behind these, and his theme is still a human heart caught into the world and entangled in time and circumstance. The politician, the economist, the philosopher and the psychologist are all students of mankind in a way, and can claim that their studies are human studies; but they only start with human nature, and they soon run into theorems and formulas and lose themselves in their own categories, and so are swept away from contact with flesh and blood. But the novelist does not begin with men and then leap into abstractions. He keeps his hand on a human pulse all the time. Political issues coming into his work are put into their whole context in life and experience, and instead of being abstracted into a realm of political science they are fastened to men and women who are “political animals,” but are something more as well. The novelist sees the whole of life, and he goes one further, and one better than the scientific historian in that men are to him (as they are to themselves) ends in themselves, not merely servants of a process which consumes them, not merely means to an end and links in the chain of history. A man may lose himself in politics or mathematics but to the novelist it is still the man that matters.

The things that are far-reaching and historic are not to him more important than the things that are momentary yet external. He would give more to catch a real glimpse of Mary Queen of Scots tapping her foot in a moment of impatience than to possess a logical statement of her political position at any time. He will not ignore the politics of some Prime Minister of a former century, but he would love still more to surprise him at play. A great political speech might come within the scope of his work, but where a historian might be tempted to sum up the whole event in terms of politics, he would notice too the headache that made the statesman depressed and the heat of the building that made him irritable, the private worries that he could not throw off and that tormented his mind and perverted his judgment, and the sight of a man sitting opposite whom he detested in private life and who wore an annoying tie. The novelist would attempt to recapture the moment, rather than to estimate its historic significance, and the things which he would notice would be those which influenced the man at the moment, though they did not always concern the politics.

There was once a day when kingdoms were a piece of family property that could be sold, and the whole politics of a land depended on marriages, and wars raged for years over some intricate point in a genealogical table; in those days public events were part of the private concern of a king, and as surely as the succession to a throne depended upon family inheritance, the affairs of the kingdom depended upon personal whims and private ambitions. There was a time when the religious system of England had to be changed because a king wished to marry a lady about his court. In the world that Dumas described so well, personal prowess and individual exploits determined events, and private concerns and the prejudices and feuds of families cut across the larger history of a nation. There have been times when a slight offered to a king’s mistress has been more tragic in its results than a lost battle or a lost election; and who knows how much the history of a reign has been affected by an influence like that which Buckingham had upon Charles I, or the Duchess of Marlborough upon Queen Anne? In all these things private life complicates even where it does not determine public events, and all history is full of imaginable situations like these that invite novel-treatment. When personality counts in public affairs, and many things, other than purely political motives--even things which seem trivial and accidental--determine the conduct of a man at any time, then the mood of a moment, the personal discomfort or family irritation that might have caused it, the perversities of whim and arbitrary desire, and a hundred other things in a man may affect history. The historical novel, not consciously perhaps, but still demonstrably stands for this fact. It emphasises the influence of personal things in history, it regards man’s life as a whole and runs his private action and his public conduct into each other, as it ought to do; and it turns the whole into a study of human nature. Even when dealing with an action that seems purely political it will root the action in personality, not merely in politics. Because every public action that was ever taken can be regarded as the private act, the personal decision of somebody, historic events can become materials for the novel, in spite of the fact that public affairs and political matters are not in themselves issues for a novel.

The novelist looking at a historic figure sees personality where the scientific historian is tempted to see only the incarnation of a policy. He feels flesh and blood where the ordinary history-reader complains that he is given only abstractions. Every historic decision that comes under his review has for him a context in the mind of the man who made it and not simply in the politics of the day. Behind every great name he sees a human being, with a peculiar experience of life; even if history does not tell of the experience he knows it is there, he thinks it into history and endows the man with it, and he completes the personality in his imagination, bringing in fiction to supply what history fails to give. That is true resurrection, that is the reason why historical novels are full of life and of people, where history is often bloodless and dead.

It is evident from all this that there are particular periods and particular problems in history that are specially adapted to this kind of novel-treatment. An age of riotous individualism and of aggressive personalities is more suited to it than one in which corporate action determines events. An age in which war is a game, an orgy of fun and fine fighting, is better than one in which war is an intricate and organised science. A king who governs by whim is more fitting than a politician who is merely the mouthpiece of a party, the servant of organised action. More and more as life increases in complexity and the world becomes organised on impersonal lines, the historical novel that treats of the action of personalities in history and the interaction of private life and public events, must find its course intricate and hard. Ultimately personality counts to-day as much as ever it did in history; it is still the real power, but its influence is not direct, and immediate, and palpable; things perhaps can be traced back to the influence of individuals, but it is an ultimate influence, an influence in the last resort, and it does not show itself on the surface of life. It is fairly true to say that the historical novel, where it deals with politics and public events, must seize upon those periods of history and those phases of life in which personality not only matters in the last resort, but makes an immediate impression and stamps itself directly upon the world. The mental struggle of Charles I before he consented to sacrifice Strafford to his enemies, and the personal influence which immediately contributed to his decision are a theme for the novel; but it would need a large admixture of fiction and a wilful exaggeration of the interaction of private concerns with political issues, and a perversion of history to treat a modern change of ministry in the same fashion.

Nothing could be more suited to this idea of the historical novel than a reign like that of Mary Queen of Scots, in which the whims of a woman are a national concern, a direct and immediate influence upon historic events, and history for a time hangs upon her moods and prejudices, and her very love-stories have a kind of political significance.

Such is the sort of theme that a novelist can take from history--one in which public affairs appear as somebody’s private concern, and so can be treated in a personal way. A set of historic events or the career of some historic figure is placed in its context in personal experience, and is worked into a novel that may be a study as well as a story. Somebody has said that every individual carries within him at least one novel, the story of his own wrestle with life. It may be added that every historic theme, every chapter taken out of the past contains within itself not merely a story, but several stories, all of them equally true, all of them representing the same set of events as they came to the various people concerned and struck home in different ways--all of them facets of the same truth.

What Browning did in _The Ring and the Book_ for the record of a “sordid police case” historical novelists, taken all together, may be said to do for history. Browning took his ground-work of incident and related it nine different times, each time from the point of view of different people concerned, and he showed that a tale re-told from a different standpoint and around a fresh person is really a new tale. The whole world of the story shifts round when a new point of vision is adopted, the same set of events come differently and with a different bearing. To relate a narrative from the point of view of the criminal in it, and then from the point of view of the victim and then from that of the hero is not merely to tell the same story in different ways; it is something more striking than that, it is to give a new tale every time. Events that are joy to one person are grief to another, perhaps; one man’s glad story may be somebody else’s sad story, and if the centre of sympathy has been changed everything in a narrative must take a fresh shape around it. Nothing can better illustrate the richness of history and the many-sidedness of life than this fact; and the historical novelist represents it in his treatment of the past. He may make a story out of the life of Mary Queen of Scots, and out of the same set of facts he may make a totally different story, told from the point of view of Bothwell or Elizabeth. He may enrich history by bringing out its many-sided implications, and bringing to light the variety and complexity of the significance of historic happenings.

But it is a bold thing and a tremendous venture, to write of the intimate thoughts and experiences of the great, and even to guess at the motives of their actions. Carlyle said that only a great man could even recognise a great man. If this is the case, many must be tempted to ask, How can the novelist pretend to do more than this, and to understand a great man, even to re-create him in all his greatness? How can he make the statesman statesmanlike, and the queen queenly, and the prophet passionate and soul-stirring? To do this the novelist must within his own mind sweep the range of experience not merely of the ordinary man, not merely of the literary man--these things he might be expected to do--but also of the mighty forgers of history and the pioneers in experience; and he who very likely cannot understand the moods and caprices of his own landlady and who has never pierced the mystery of personality as it exists in her, must record the intimate thoughts, the slightest wave of a mood that passes over the mind like the wind over the grass, the half-conscious motives and the deep solemn experience in people like Mary Queen of Scots or Oliver Cromwell or Richard I who were in a way geniuses in living, and in particular phases of life and experience. If the novelist does not do this adequately, if his statesmen are not at least statesmanlike even though not true to facts, if his kings are not at least royal in some way, if he does not give great men the touch of greatness and the soul of grandeur, his characters are merely pompous puppets, in fine dress and on high pedestals, a piece of show, a mocking pageantry.