The historical novel

by Herbert Butterfield

In all these ways history can be translated into fiction and can gain something in the process; but above them all there towers a form of novel that is more sweeping in its treatment of history, more ambitious in its interpretation of life, more bold in its way of looking at the world. In it the novel reaches beyond itself, so that to call it any longer a “novel” is to give it an inadequate title. It is a prose epic; but because it is a way by which history is turned into fiction it cannot pass unnoticed.

History has been taken to mean the world looking back upon itself, and remembering things. But after memory comes experience and the reflection upon experience. In our individual lives we are not content to recall things that happened, we do not just have memories, and stop there; but we relate these to one another, and see meaning in them and work them into experiences, through which we come to see life as unity and as purpose and as a process. In a similar way there comes a time when history must be something more than reminiscence, something more than memories of this age and that age, of one happening and another happening, of a man here and a man there; it must be something more even than a chain, a succession of these; it must be a web, a unity, woven of them all. It must be the experience of Man on this earth, face to face with Nature, warring with the elements, and lonely under the sky—man at grips with Life through all the ages. It must be a symphony, each orchestral part doing something to express the great idea of the whole, and each moment, each year, each age adding a new bar to the score, and carrying the architecture of the whole a little further. History is not merely the story of men and of their deeds and adventures; it is the Epic of Man.

If the past is looked at in this way the individual ceases to be the centre of focus. Men and women and their lives become fragments in the whole trend of things, mere ripples on the surface of a great world-life. The surge of historic movement, the pulse of life underneath all lives becomes the real theme of story; though this can only manifest itself, can only become tangible in individual lives. The artist who tries to capture the wind into a picture or into words knows what this means. He may show the leaves scattered by the wind, and the trees bent before it, and the countryside devastated by a hurricane; but all this is not wind. He may paint a ship in full sail before a breeze, or an ocean whipped to fury; but these are not the wind; he may describe the delightful play of the wind in your hair, or the trail of its fingers in the grass—but that weird mysterious thing, the wind, that comes in whispers through the trees and sounds an organ-tone deep and tremendous as an ocean as it sweeps over the heather, eludes him every time. It can only be described in its results. And the same is true in history. The epic in historical fiction describes the tangible and the particular, and the concrete; but it suggests a living principle behind these, working in these, and only manifesting itself in them. The epic writer looking at the life of the past sees an accumulation of events, of details, of instances, but in them all he divines a synthesis, and sees one throb of the great heart of the world; and behind them all he feels one life-principle working itself out and carrying men with it as a tide carries the foam or as the Spring brings the buds.

The power and awfulness of the wind are not to be recognised by a glance at the weather-vane or at the thistle-down floating through the air; it is the cumulative effect of a hundred different details, a hundred different things touched and changed by the wind, that makes the wind seem beyond escape; it is the suggestion of the broad spaces and unlimited stretches through which the wind can range, that must give the impression that it is everywhere; and it is the gentleness of its touch here, and the crash of its irresistible rush there, that must give the idea of its powerful yet subtle activities. The epic that seeks to describe the heart that beats as one behind the life of a whole people must point to the pulse throbbing in a hundred places. It is the overpowering effect of accumulated detail and of all this spread over a wide canvas, that must conspire to show some surge of a deep-sounding tide in the lives of people, some breath that sweeps through the life of a race; it is only in this way that the ubiquity, the power beyond escape, the hundred varied ways of working, of some life-principle behind the affairs of individuals, can be brought out. The historical novel that is an epic, is, then, a mighty production, a great conception minutely worked out, a piece of architecture. It is the novel carried to a higher power. Its hero is not a man but a force in men. Its vision of the past is one of titanic powers working underground. It grapples with Destiny and dares to look the universe in the face; and it spells out Fate and strikes at the stars.

The love of wide canvases burdened with significant detail; the large vision of the past as one in texture with the present and as a sublime urge of humanity rising above obstacles and fighting its chains; and the poet’s power of synthesis, made Victor Hugo the great master of this epic romance, as he was its conscious exponent. Nothing could better illustrate his sense of the one-ness of history and the sublime tragedy of Man’s experience in the world than his introduction to The Toilers of the Sea:

Religion, Society and Nature; these are the three struggles of mankind. These three struggles are at the same time his three needs; it is necessary for him to have a faith, hence the temple; it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary for him to live, hence the plough and the ship. But these three solutions comprise three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life springs from all the three.

Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple fatality weighs upon us—the fatality of dogmas, the fatality of laws, the fatality of matter. In Notre Dame the author has denounced the first; in Les Misérables he has described the second; in this book he points out the third.

With these three fatalities that envelop mankind is mingled the inward fatality—the highest fatality—the human heart.

This quotation alone is sufficient to show that the conception of the Epic of Man rests, not upon the idea that the past is a new world for the novelist to range in, but on a fact that is equally true from its own point of view—the fact of the one-ness of experience and the unity of the past with the present. The historical novel that is a universal epic, therefore comes to men as an interpretation of Man’s experience in the world. It is cosmic in conception. Also it is the work of a man who is not merely novelist, but poet; for though experience is all one piece, it comes to us in fragments and we only know it in parts, and the man who wishes to understand it and to map out its meaning, must in looking at past and present find a one-ness that is not apparent in that mass of details and people and events that confront him; he must divine a synthesis. This seems to be the conscious aim of Hugo, and there is a tremendous power in his achievement that is not to be found in the interpretation of large history that Merejkowski seeks to give in his trilogy. In such works as these history as well as the novel is carried beyond itself, and raised to a higher power.

The national epic is not so broad in its sweep, not so consciously an interpretation of universal experience as what might be called the Epic of Man. Here again it is not an individual that is the hero of the story, but something that might almost be personified, a force working in the lives of men; only, in this case, the stage of the drama is the Nation at some tremendous moment in its history. The quiver through a whole people of some breath of national feeling is described like the stir of the wind upon a pool; the throb of a whole nation in some intense crisis is caught into story. And as this surge of feeling in a people becomes most apparent at the point at which it meets resistance, no theme is better for this kind of novel than that which describes in a people the bitter sense of national liberty thwarted, and of national aspirations refused, the growing consciousness of repression and an increasing desire to resist the oppressor. Where these exist love of liberty comes as a yearning and an aspiration and a vision; fine impulses become conscious because they strike against an obstacle; and they become aggressive since they feel themselves thwarted. Nothing makes a more powerful motive for a novel.