The things that are far-reaching and historic are not to him more important than the things that are momentary yet external. He would give more to catch a real glimpse of Mary Queen of Scots tapping her foot in a moment of impatience than to possess a logical statement of her political position at any time. He will not ignore the politics of some Prime Minister of a former century, but he would love still more to surprise him at play. A great political speech might come within the scope of his work, but where a historian might be tempted to sum up the whole event in terms of politics, he would notice too the headache that made the statesman depressed and the heat of the building that made him irritable, the private worries that he could not throw off and that tormented his mind and perverted his judgment, and the sight of a man sitting opposite whom he detested in private life and who wore an annoying tie. The novelist would attempt to recapture the moment, rather than to estimate its historic significance, and the things which he would notice would be those which influenced the man at the moment, though they did not always concern the politics.
There was once a day when kingdoms were a piece of family property that could be sold, and the whole politics of a land depended on marriages, and wars raged for years over some intricate point in a genealogical table; in those days public events were part of the private concern of a king, and as surely as the succession to a throne depended upon family inheritance, the affairs of the kingdom depended upon personal whims and private ambitions. There was a time when the religious system of England had to be changed because a king wished to marry a lady about his court. In the world that Dumas described so well, personal prowess and individual exploits determined events, and private concerns and the prejudices and feuds of families cut across the larger history of a nation. There have been times when a slight offered to a king’s mistress has been more tragic in its results than a lost battle or a lost election; and who knows how much the history of a reign has been affected by an influence like that which Buckingham had upon Charles I, or the Duchess of Marlborough upon Queen Anne? In all these things private life complicates even where it does not determine public events, and all history is full of imaginable situations like these that invite novel-treatment. When personality counts in public affairs, and many things, other than purely political motives—even things which seem trivial and accidental—determine the conduct of a man at any time, then the mood of a moment, the personal discomfort or family irritation that might have caused it, the perversities of whim and arbitrary desire, and a hundred other things in a man may affect history. The historical novel, not consciously perhaps, but still demonstrably stands for this fact. It emphasises the influence of personal things in history, it regards man’s life as a whole and runs his private action and his public conduct into each other, as it ought to do; and it turns the whole into a study of human nature. Even when dealing with an action that seems purely political it will root the action in personality, not merely in politics. Because every public action that was ever taken can be regarded as the private act, the personal decision of somebody, historic events can become materials for the novel, in spite of the fact that public affairs and political matters are not in themselves issues for a novel.
The novelist looking at a historic figure sees personality where the scientific historian is tempted to see only the incarnation of a policy. He feels flesh and blood where the ordinary history-reader complains that he is given only abstractions. Every historic decision that comes under his review has for him a context in the mind of the man who made it and not simply in the politics of the day. Behind every great name he sees a human being, with a peculiar experience of life; even if history does not tell of the experience he knows it is there, he thinks it into history and endows the man with it, and he completes the personality in his imagination, bringing in fiction to supply what history fails to give. That is true resurrection, that is the reason why historical novels are full of life and of people, where history is often bloodless and dead.
It is evident from all this that there are particular periods and particular problems in history that are specially adapted to this kind of novel-treatment. An age of riotous individualism and of aggressive personalities is more suited to it than one in which corporate action determines events. An age in which war is a game, an orgy of fun and fine fighting, is better than one in which war is an intricate and organised science. A king who governs by whim is more fitting than a politician who is merely the mouthpiece of a party, the servant of organised action. More and more as life increases in complexity and the world becomes organised on impersonal lines, the historical novel that treats of the action of personalities in history and the interaction of private life and public events, must find its course intricate and hard. Ultimately personality counts to-day as much as ever it did in history; it is still the real power, but its influence is not direct, and immediate, and palpable; things perhaps can be traced back to the influence of individuals, but it is an ultimate influence, an influence in the last resort, and it does not show itself on the surface of life. It is fairly true to say that the historical novel, where it deals with politics and public events, must seize upon those periods of history and those phases of life in which personality not only matters in the last resort, but makes an immediate impression and stamps itself directly upon the world. The mental struggle of Charles I before he consented to sacrifice Strafford to his enemies, and the personal influence which immediately contributed to his decision are a theme for the novel; but it would need a large admixture of fiction and a wilful exaggeration of the interaction of private concerns with political issues, and a perversion of history to treat a modern change of ministry in the same fashion.
Nothing could be more suited to this idea of the historical novel than a reign like that of Mary Queen of Scots, in which the whims of a woman are a national concern, a direct and immediate influence upon historic events, and history for a time hangs upon her moods and prejudices, and her very love-stories have a kind of political significance.
Such is the sort of theme that a novelist can take from history—one in which public affairs appear as somebody’s private concern, and so can be treated in a personal way. A set of historic events or the career of some historic figure is placed in its context in personal experience, and is worked into a novel that may be a study as well as a story. Somebody has said that every individual carries within him at least one novel, the story of his own wrestle with life. It may be added that every historic theme, every chapter taken out of the past contains within itself not merely a story, but several stories, all of them equally true, all of them representing the same set of events as they came to the various people concerned and struck home in different ways—all of them facets of the same truth.
What Browning did in The Ring and the Book for the record of a “sordid police case” historical novelists, taken all together, may be said to do for history. Browning took his ground-work of incident and related it nine different times, each time from the point of view of different people concerned, and he showed that a tale re-told from a different standpoint and around a fresh person is really a new tale. The whole world of the story shifts round when a new point of vision is adopted, the same set of events come differently and with a different bearing. To relate a narrative from the point of view of the criminal in it, and then from the point of view of the victim and then from that of the hero is not merely to tell the same story in different ways; it is something more striking than that, it is to give a new tale every time. Events that are joy to one person are grief to another, perhaps; one man’s glad story may be somebody else’s sad story, and if the centre of sympathy has been changed everything in a narrative must take a fresh shape around it. Nothing can better illustrate the richness of history and the many-sidedness of life than this fact; and the historical novelist represents it in his treatment of the past. He may make a story out of the life of Mary Queen of Scots, and out of the same set of facts he may make a totally different story, told from the point of view of Bothwell or Elizabeth. He may enrich history by bringing out its many-sided implications, and bringing to light the variety and complexity of the significance of historic happenings.
But it is a bold thing and a tremendous venture, to write of the intimate thoughts and experiences of the great, and even to guess at the motives of their actions. Carlyle said that only a great man could even recognise a great man. If this is the case, many must be tempted to ask, How can the novelist pretend to do more than this, and to understand a great man, even to re-create him in all his greatness? How can he make the statesman statesmanlike, and the queen queenly, and the prophet passionate and soul-stirring? To do this the novelist must within his own mind sweep the range of experience not merely of the ordinary man, not merely of the literary man—these things he might be expected to do—but also of the mighty forgers of history and the pioneers in experience; and he who very likely cannot understand the moods and caprices of his own landlady and who has never pierced the mystery of personality as it exists in her, must record the intimate thoughts, the slightest wave of a mood that passes over the mind like the wind over the grass, the half-conscious motives and the deep solemn experience in people like Mary Queen of Scots or Oliver Cromwell or Richard I who were in a way geniuses in living, and in particular phases of life and experience. If the novelist does not do this adequately, if his statesmen are not at least statesmanlike even though not true to facts, if his kings are not at least royal in some way, if he does not give great men the touch of greatness and the soul of grandeur, his characters are merely pompous puppets, in fine dress and on high pedestals, a piece of show, a mocking pageantry.
Perhaps the most impressive way of bringing great men into the historical novel, is not the method which makes their lives and careers the central theme of the book at all, demanding intimate treatment, and close appreciation and analysis. Many historical novels are stories of ordinary everyday issues in the lives of people, and deal with some personal concerns of fictitious characters, and with the things that make up the ordinary kind of novel; but these novels become “historical” ones by the fact that their drama is played out as it were in the shadow of great public events. Some well-known, historic character looms in the background, larger historical issues cast their shadow at times and perhaps at some point the narrow concerns of the individuals whose fate makes up the story, cross the path of these, and become interlocked for a moment with some piece of history. In Woodstock for example the homely problems of a few fictitious characters, and the small vicissitudes of a locality occupy the centre of the stage. Their story grows out of a set of historical relations as it existed in the days of the Protectorate, and is a story born of the conditions of the time in the way Scott suggested in the Introductions to Ivanhoe and The Monastery. The first chapter of the book brings out history in the form of story, it is a peep at England in the days of the Protectorate, it is a “sample,” a kind of specimen picture of the age and the story is implied in the conditions of the time. There is a suggestion of the awful omnipotence of Cromwell, and a feeling that the distant sternness of his rule is coming near and will soon be brought home to people, but the Protector himself is a solemn figure in the background. There is a kind of impressiveness in the way the story actually crosses his path. The reader is ushered into the presence of the great man, and Cromwell is not treated familiarly—we do not pry into his mind and we do not see through the man, but everything is as though in an impressive moment in real life we had once met the man and felt him greater and more distant than ever. When Charles II comes into the book a similar thing happens; we peep at a corner of his life, we catch one side of him, but the whole man is not laid bare, and we know that there is a world within him that is not revealed. In this way the feeling that to ordinary citizens of the country there is something impenetrable in these great people is maintained. Life to all of us is a chain of private aims and personal concerns and family or homely issues that seem to be all the world to us as they come one after another; but far above we can feel that larger historic issues are being worked out oblivious of our petty concerns, and ignoring our little lives. Only at times do our paths cross. A war or a popular movement at some time may touch the family and even break up homes, sweeping away the issues and affairs that were our little world, but even this only accentuates our feeling that over our heads, as it were, a great history-making is always going on; and in the days when personalities like Cromwell moved the world directly, and held an immediate sway over events, such men must have come to the minds of ordinary human beings as distant peaks come to the traveller, as objects of solitary impenetrable grandeur and of awful power. In describing the world like this, the kind of historical novel of which Woodstock is only one of a whole variety of examples, depicts life in a relevant and significant fashion.
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