The historical novel

by Herbert Butterfield

All novelists seem at times to introduce into their works situations and happenings straight from life, or founded upon fact; sometimes things that have been accounted incredible or unnatural in novels, have been defended by authors as having been copied straight from nature. No critic, however, would seriously admit that the appreciation of any novel is at all influenced by a fact like this. The literal truth of an incident is not sufficient justification for its inclusion in a novel, and does not even make its presence in the work more valuable; still less does it affect the worth of the whole novel as a faithful representation of truth. It is clear that the same reasoning must apply to historical episodes incorporated into fiction. The mere inclusion of some actual happening in a story, the attempt to drag in a piece of history and to patch it into a novel, is not justified by the addition of a footnote informing the reader that “This incident actually took place.” The fact may interest a reader, but it is a separate kind of interest that it gives, and it does not affect the total appreciation of the novel as a complete unity. The occasional and arbitrary use of happenings from history, the sending of a few pistol-shots of actual episode into a piece of work, does not alter the character of the whole, and does not give the novel one foot in reality, a root in actual life, any more than Dickens’s use of events from real life brought his novels into closer touch with reality and with truth.

Yet there is an important use that can be made of historical incident in fiction, and a more effective way of transferring anecdotes and events from history into the novel. This time the author does not exactly put his finger upon some particular period in history, and work upon that, using the conditions of the time as the hint for story; and does not apply himself specially to a certain wave of popular movement or fix his attention upon particular historical characters; these things he can never ignore, but here they are not his first thought, and it is not around these that his work takes shape; his unit is rather “the thing that actually happened”; his eye is upon the incident, and he works upon that; and the result appears in the existence of a peculiar type of episodical novel, which consists of pieces of story, isolated episodes, loosely strung together upon a thread of fiction, not worked into one another and fused together by fiction; and succeeding one another in such a detached way that sometimes the unity of the whole is very far to seek. The entire novel tends to split up into particular knots of story, one cluster of narrative having perhaps only the most accidental of connections with another, and each being in a way complete in itself.

This kind of novel can only come from a history rich with the right kind of episodes. It would seem that there are certain periods in the world’s story, and in this case the Renaissance would be assuredly one, and there are certain countries and localities like the Hungary that Jokai depicted and the Highlands of Scotland, which are peculiarly favourable to this method of treating history in fiction, since they appear to throw out their history in the form of episodes that ask to be turned into story. When life is adventurous and full of colour and crowded with striking incident, when, against a romantic background, there is the assertion of vigorous personality, resulting in novel turns of action, and exciting combinations of circumstance; and, above all, when these are the kind of things that are remembered in story and tradition and song, so that history is a store of incidents, and a tale of exploits and intrigues and adventures rather than a mere narrative of social development and public events, then the raconteur must find this history a treasure-store of materials for a historical novel that shall be a succession of brilliant episodes rather than the working-out of some great theme, some large process. The by-ways of history, too, the dusty corners of the past, away from the main course of broad political movement and public event, are lit up by out-of-the-way incidents and stories that the history of history-books misses in its wide sweep; and these, although rooted in fact, are things that a story-teller would love to have invented, and they ask to be re-told in fiction. This, then, is the field of the novel of historical episodes. In faults as well as in virtues many of the books of Jokai are striking illustrations of the form; but many novelists have adopted it with some variations; and even a book like Merejkowski’s Forerunner, in spite of its unity in the character of Leonardo and in the spirit of Renaissance, is only an example of this way of treating episodes; it may work them into a finer whole, and centralise the interest of the reader, and send one great idea throbbing through each; but it can scarcely avoid taking shape before the eyes of the reader as a series of fine flashes of incident, each in a way self-contained, and finding their connection more in the fabrications of the novelist than in the fabric of real history.

The first book of The Forerunner is a key to this whole method of abstracting episodes from history and setting them into a novel; especially as it is one of the places where an author not only tells his story, but at the head of his chapter reveals his authority for it in contemporary writings, and so allows us to see just what was his “hint from history” and what use he made of it. This incident of the “White She-Devil” is a self-contained episode, one of the stray stories that history can tell. The novelist fills in the lines of the brief historical narrative. He does for it what an illustrator does for any author—he adds detail and colour and gives preciseness and a certain elaboration to the general outline, the vaguer description, that is given him to work upon. More than this, fiction somehow amplifies the whole bearings of the event, and enlarges its significance, making it almost symbolic; and further provides links, that a reader can identify and put his finger upon, slight links, just the necessary connections that bring the affair into its place in the whole book, and so form the excuse for its presence in the novel at all. But the most noticeable thing of all is not merely the episodic nature of the material that is taken from history to be incorporated in fiction but the episodic treatment that is given to it. The stage is set for this particular incident, and when it is completed the curtain falls and we are carried away to a totally different scene. A wealth of historical detail is grouped around this one episode; the episode is the thing that the whole section of the book clusters around. When this anecdote has been worked into a picture the author takes up an entirely new canvas, and starts over again for the next, raising up a fresh historic background for it. In this way one thing succeeds another like slides displacing one another in a lantern, a shutter separating each; things do not run into one another with the connectedness of a film. If the episodic novel reaches a unity at all, its episodes are generally related to one another as facets of a diamond, rather than as links in a chain; the spectator changes his ground, his point of vision in passing from one to another; he does not slide unconsciously from one episode to the next.

In a complete and organised type of novel, episodes usher in one another and grow out of one another, luring the reader to a prepared climax, each carrying the architecture of the whole a step further, and all conspiring to produce an event to which the whole novel is tending. Such a novel comes to the reader as a process unfolding itself, a theme being worked out. In the looser type of fiction that The Cloister and the Hearth represents, things follow one another in a chain, and find their unity in the fact that they all happen to the same person; so that the novel shapes itself round the hero, rather than into a theme. But in the episodical novel it is not any unifying theme that is the nucleus of the story, nor is it any particular character, but it is the “episode.” Each chapter is in a way a fresh inspiration and has its source in an isolated historical fact. History supplies not so much a run of narrative for the whole novel, as unrelated episodes which fiction may fasten together, but which stand alone in their original historical setting. The whole method of taking narrative itself straight from the history-book, in spite of its pointedness in reproducing definite incidents that actually happened, has its limitations in the fragmentary nature of history itself, or, at least, of the history that deals with the personal human things of story-interest. That history can only reach to episodes as a general rule, so it is in danger of producing something that is not a novel at all but a series of imaginative excursions into the past, a collection of historical “sketches.” The conflict of loyalties in historical fiction is seen here. A historical novel can not be made up of history that is picked out in snatches, and of this alone. A collection of episodes is disjointed narrative. It may be fused into running story by the imagination and the inventions of an author; or it may still remain in broken narrative, yet find a different unity in a novel that is something more than a narration. But in either event fiction must help out history.

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The achievement of Dumas is sufficient to show what can be done in a novel that is above all things a narrative. Dumas did not merely set his novels in history and weave his stories around men who actually lived; he took actual situations and events, incident and action from history; and his greatness lies in the fact that he did not reproduce these in a broken episodic fashion, putting each in its own frame, and on a separate canvas, he did not merely patch them into fictions of his own and sprinkle them in his works, but he worked them in with his imagined episodes into a thread of running story.

He was lucky in the field of his labours. The history of the France that he described flashes out in brilliant episodes, and is rich in characters and situations that give the hint for more. It is the history of the great—of kings and statesmen and of the first in the land—but it is at the same time an extraordinarily personal kind of history, not a tale of dry public events. It was set in scenes of gallantry and colour, and was just distant enough to come to readers with a glamour. And Dumas by the multiplicity of the characters whose fortunes he intertwined in his novels laid a wide field of its incident and adventure open to himself, and brought a large range of actual recorded facts into the scope of his novels.

But it was his way of twining history and fiction into one another, instead of tacking the one on to the other, and of making one story out of them, that gave him his power. He ran the whole into one flowing narrative. A list could be made of the incidents in his novels that are taken from history but only a close student, and a man as learned in the history of those times as Dumas himself, can detect the joint, the place where the actual and the invented episodes fit into one another. History and fiction cannot be disentangled in these novels, and a separate rôle, a particular function in the combined work, be assigned to each; they grow into each other, and reinforce one another; each somehow gives its character to the other; so much in the novels is actual history that this lends its character to the whole, and gives it a root in actuality, so that the works come as a narrative of France, a stream of national story, a kind of history themselves.

The works of Dumas, therefore, do not come as a series of shifting episodes that displace one another. There is no stopping to set the scene for an episode or an event. The story will run into the Massacre of St Bartholomew and straight out of it, and there will be no drawing of the curtain, no break in the action, while a stage is being arranged. Exploits and adventures and intrigues come in quick succession, and keep the reader on tip-toe. The result is an effect of sheer movement. Everything seems in motion. The novels are pure story, and Dumas is pre-eminently a teller of stories.