Part 8

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 scientist will 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

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Page 93: “selfness” may be a typographical error for “selfless.”