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 All rights reserved
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL ❦❦ AN ESSAY BY H. BUTTERFIELD FELLOW OF PETERHOUSE
CAMBRIDGE: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS: MCMXXIV
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
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
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.