The historical novel

by Herbert Butterfield

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.

And yet the bareness of the historical setting of the first section of the book, and the lack of all suggestion of a political background or of any complication of individual issues by larger political events, sets out in more effective contrast the later theme of the novel, that irresistible sweep of a great mob-action rushing like a blight over any corner of life that lies in its path. If the Gordon Riots come like a flood into Barnaby Rudge, playing havoc with the fortunes of the story and swallowing up everything they meet, it is what they do in real life. If the reader loses sight of the men and women in whose fate he has become interested, and if all that he can catch is an occasional glimpse of them, lost or helpless in a crowded surging stream of life, it is what would have happened to them if the flood had carried them away in actual existence. The very faults of Barnaby Rudge as a piece of construction, its irritating weaknesses as a story, are calculated to intensify the effect that a historian of some popular upheaval must always try to obtain—the effect of a sweeping, ravaging flood that surges over the peaceful lives of individuals and swallows up men and their homes and their little aims and concerns, and leaves a devastated track behind.

A similar treatment of a historic movement occurs in A Tale of Two Cities; but in this case, precisely because Dickens kept a closer hold upon his story and fixed his eyes more steadily upon his principal characters and his main issues—precisely because he did not lose himself in the setting of his novel, in the “world” of his story—the same cataclysmic result is not so apparent, the tremendous sweep of the destroying storm is not so graphically reproduced. The story is less irritating because we do not lose sight of the characters whose fate is the theme of the novel, but the Revolution does not come so powerfully as a devastating wave and at the same time it does not come with the awful precipitancy of the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge, but it is anticipated and prepared for in advance. Still, even here, the historical idea that stands out is the spectacle of a movement of the people that is overwhelming in the havoc that it plays with the individual lives and concerns caught within its orbit.

In these instances the set of conditions in which the individual is involved are not static, but dynamic; and the character of them, and the sweep of them, come out at their points of contact with individual lives, and are revealed in the way they touch the concerns of men and break in upon the personal fortunes of a few people. In these instances, therefore, the wind is described by its effect on the feather that drifts helplessly in it, and we follow the flood by keeping our eyes on some particular object floating in it and swept forward by it. All this would be sufficient to make a historical novel and to justify it; for such a novel would in a way outstrip the history-book in the telling of history, since it would not merely describe a distant past to us, but would take us into it; it would not be a telescope as history is, enabling us to see something far away, but would be a bridge leading us over the gulf that divides past and present, and so annihilating time. In such a novel we should see the past from the point of view of the past, and recapture an age as it comes to individuals in it; we should be not merely twentieth-century spectators watching a distant scene, but would become contemporary with the past, and having an inside knowledge of it. In all this the historical novel would challenge the history-book in its own fields.

But this does not span the full range of this kind of novel; it omits something that historical novelists almost always go out of their way to achieve. Here the incidents and adventure of the novel may be purely fictitious, and the characters may be inventions; and only the world in which they are placed, the currents that sweep over their lives, and the movements that overwhelm them need to be real; the novel is true to the life of the past, and is faithful to the age with which it is concerned, regarding the age as a set of conditions to be conformed with. It is true to the spirit of the age; and may describe the past as a far-country; but it may have nothing to do with the actual events of the past, and with history regarded as a chain of story. Every happening that it relates may be an invention; and it can do all that has just been claimed for it without containing any specific incident that ever took place. It may tell its history by revealing history in its workings in an imaginary life set in it; in the same way as a teacher may illustrate the force of gravity to children by talking about its workings on an imaginary apple. It may be in a way true to history without being true to fact.

If a story is told us about some spot with which we are acquainted, then, although the story may not be true, it touches us somewhere, it has a root in actuality and so makes us listen, in a way which would be impossible if the story were told, so to speak, in the air. If we hear some anecdote that is narrated about a friend of ours it holds us even if we know it is a legend, in a way which it could not do if it had not fastened itself upon something real. If a story can plant one foot in actuality then it belongs no more to the clouds, and it gains an added power from having established a connection with reality. It is this kind of additional effectiveness that historical novelists seek to obtain. They are not satisfied that the world of their story shall be true to the world of the past, and that situations and incident shall grow out of that world. Their novel is not merely background, but story, and to them history is not merely the world as it once was, but also a quarry of incident. And once a novel is regarded as a story, and incidents or episodes are looked upon as the important thing, the units in it, the things into which the chapters arrange themselves—then a historical novel is still “in the air,” and is only historical in a vague and unconvincing way, and lacks one of the strongest roots in actuality, if its events are fictitious and its characters imaginary, so that nothing in the story ever really “happened.” There is a great difference between the novel that simply lights up the history of an age, and illustrates the conditions of the time, and one which is itself a piece of historical narrative. It is when the reader can feel that the things that are being related actually took place, and that the man about whom the stories are being told really lived although the stories about him may not all be true; it is when the thread of incident in the novel, as well as what might be called the texture of the book, can in some way be called “historical,” that the work is most effective in its grip on actuality. And if this is true, an author looking at the life of the past and at the things that happened in history is like the artist looking upon a scene in nature and “longing to do something with it,” longing to turn it into something and to recreate it, in such a way as to express himself as well as to reproduce actuality.

In A Tale of Two Cities, then, Dickens was content to describe the grim fires of the French Revolution not directly, but in the reflection that they threw upon a few imaginary individuals; the events that were “historical” in the sense of being memorable, the public events that held the stage at the time, he was content to portray in their effects upon the homely lives of one or two fictitious characters. But there is a more direct and pointed way of transferring things from history into the novel, and this method, when superimposed upon the other, gives a story an added link with actuality. In any novel adventures and incidents, exploits, intrigues, and fine action rich with character may not merely be good fiction, but coming direct from history may be like the cords which bound Gulliver in Lilliput, each of them a tie holding the novel to earth, and fixing it in reality. To people for whom incident is an important thing in the novel the historical value of The Cloister and the Hearth lies not so much in the picture that it gives of an age of the past, as in the foundation that its story can claim to possess in the life of the Father of Erasmus. In Barnaby Rudge it is the description of Lord George Gordon and his circle that gives the novel a tangible connection with history; the story becomes a story about somebody we know, a person we have met before; history provides the writer not merely with the world of his story, but with actual story itself. It is regarded not merely as a picture of things as they once were, but as a store of narrative and of anecdote too.

History often gives the novelist the hint for story, since the conditions and circumstances of an age are full of implied story, and are enough to set anybody tale-telling. In a larger and more direct way, as will be shown, it may further provide a theme for a novelist; in the lives of people like Mary Queen of Scots, or Richard I, and in affairs like the Gunpowder Plot or the Jacobite risings, it may give not exactly a story to the novelist, but a fit subject for novel-study, something to work upon, a problem to develop and solve; for not only on their public side, but still more on their personal side these things invite story; and history itself supplies a number of incidents about them and a general outline of broad events which set the key for a novel and fix the lines within which the novelist will work. But beyond all these there is a mass of human experience, and a wide circle of life, a whole World of People—and all these, just the things that the novelist must most trouble himself about—concerning which history, as has been shown, can tell only an inadequate story. The novelist who deals with kings perhaps, but more often with ordinary fighters and citizens—with courts and parliaments sometimes, but more often with hearts and homes, looks to history for “things that really happened,” regarding history as a storehouse of narrative, and finds there only episodes. Things only come out of the darkness on brief occasions, and many things are only hinted at, and many threads of story are carried a short way and then broken and dropped; History bursts out here and there in a few fine flashes of story; but very rarely is there a consecutive flow of narrative such as would make a true, but coherent and continuous story for a novel—a long connected strand of story-issues only waiting to be re-told in fiction. This history that is narrative comes in fragments, in mere snatches, to be incorporated in fiction. The novelist who seeks to tell “things that really happened” must clutch at episodes. It remains to be seen what use he can make of them.