History may be regarded as a chain of ages that overlap, and run into each other and then fold under—as an ocean of human life, generations of peoples, coming in waves through the centuries. It may also be regarded as a thread of narrative, a stream of story, winding through time. Dumas more than anybody else has succeeded in turning history into narrative like this. His works are a thread of story running through centuries of the history of France.
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.