The historical novel

by Herbert Butterfield

This epic of national liberty is often itself inspired by the national aspirations it describes. Perhaps it would be too much to identify it with the historical novelists of Eastern Europe, especially since Hugo’s Ninety-Three, the hero of which has been described as being the Revolution, is admitted to be one of the best examples of it; but it seems fairly true to identify it chiefly with those countries in which the sense of national aspirations being thwarted has recently existed and has been an impulse to art and literature, and a good many of the historical novels of Eastern European writers are distinguished by the throb of national feeling that strikes through them. And this kind of novel is specially calculated to produce the precise feeling that it describes, to stir readers to the aspirations which are its theme, and to be a force for liberty itself. Such a result is even aimed at by writers, so that the novel becomes in danger of developing into a novel with a purpose.

Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three is a striking example of the epic of national freedom; and it illustrates much of the mind of its author and much of the character of this type of novel. It has been said that its hero is not a particular personage in the story, but rather the Revolution itself. Hugo had the powerful grasp of the character of large and complex masses of detail, the genius for synthesis, the eagle-like sweep of an imagination that can comprehend a multitude of things and combine them in one principle—the very things that were needed to make a gigantic movement of the masses the theme of an epic. In his descriptions of the Vendée there is a chapter on “the spirit of the place” which shows his way of thinking; he demonstrates in fine flights of comprehensive statement that “the configuration of the soil decides many of man’s actions and the earth is more his accomplice than people believe...,” and he describes the difference that exists between the mountain insurgent like the Swiss, and the forest insurgent like the Vendean: “The one almost always fights for an ideal, the other for a prejudice. The one soars, the other crawls. The one combats for humanity, the other for solitude. The one desires liberty, the other wishes isolation. The one defends the commune, the other the parish.... The one has to deal with precipices, the other with quagmires....” The voice of Hugo is in all this, and whether it is true or false it shows a mind that jumps to synthesis. There is much more of the same kind of generalising in this book, Ninety-Three, and often Hugo seems to be preaching when he turns aside to throw out some incidental flashes of it. He sees not only the trees but the contour of the land, the character of the forest; he grasps not merely maddening events and a confusion of men bustling with action, but divines the whole curve of the mass-movement. He can speak of “the immense profile of the French Revolution,” thrown across “the deep and distant Heavens, against a background at once serene and tragic.” It is significant enough that he can think of the Revolution as something like that.

Those chapters of the novel, however, which describe “the streets of Paris at that time,” the conversation between Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, and the Convention itself, and the Vendée, are weighed down by an accumulation of significant and often grim detail, a piling-up of incident upon incident, and example upon example. In these the Revolution is not only shown as having a character, a profile, but also is revealed as being a living thing, a vivid many-sided creature, betraying its character in a host of unexpected ways, flashing out in a thousand fresh surprises, in a multiplicity of manifestations. It is shown to be like Nature that sends out a crocus here, a daffodil there, green buds and almond blossom somewhere else, and the song of the birds everywhere, all of them saying in a number of ways that the Spring has come. It comes to us like the wind that moves the grass and the weather-vane, the smoke and the sailing-ship and the creaking door—and in a score of different voices makes itself heard to men. The mass of detail reveals the Revolution as an intricate thing, a complex tangle perhaps, but most of all as a vivid many-sided life, a unity in a hundred variations, a principle that is for ever finding a host of new ways of expressing itself.

Hugo described the Convention by heaping up a store of details, and burdening his whole chapter with a weight of concrete instances. Each of these was significant in itself and showed the Revolution in some way leaping out and leaving its mark in history; and the cumulative effect of the whole revealed the bewildering variety of the processes and the life of the Revolution. Before he closed the description, however, he wrote a few paragraphs that reveal the key-idea of the whole. He had been speaking of the men of the Convention, he had already turned aside to tell us that the Convention “had a life,” and he had piled up a host of instances of how that life had broken through into incident and action, and had mentioned the turbulent spirits that made up the life of the Assembly.

Spirits which were a prey of the wind (he continued). But this was a miracle-working wind. To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave of the ocean. This was true even of the greatest there. The force of impulsion came from on high. There was a Will in the Convention which was that of all and yet not that of any one person. This Will was an Idea, indomitable and immeasurable, which swept from the summit of Heaven into darkness below. We call this Revolution. When that idea passed it beat down one, and raised up another; it scattered this man into foam and dashed that one upon the reefs. This Idea knew whither it was going, and drove the whirlpool before it. To ascribe the Revolution to men is to ascribe the tide to the waves....

The Revolution is a form of the eternal phenomenon which presses upon us from every quarter, and which we call Necessity.

This, then, is the idea that gives a synthesis to all the mass of details, this is the wind which reveals itself in the multitude of spirits which it moves. In this kind of thinking Hugo is trying to interpret man’s experience upon earth. His story is more than a narration. He has seen the epic in history.

Above all this, however, the French Revolution comes to us as the hero of the novel because of the remarkable way in which it is personified in the man Cimourdain, who seems to have caught something of its life into himself. “He saw the Revolution loom into life,” says Hugo; “He was not a man to be afraid of that giant; far from it. This sudden growth in everything had revivified himself.... From year to year he saw events gain in grandeur and he increased with them.” The year 1793 represents above all things the time when the “something” inexorable in the very idea of the Revolution became most marked, most pressing, and Hugo has made this the prominent feature in his characterisation of the year. The book is full of cruel alternatives, and of Councils and men torn between unreserved devotion to the Ideal, the Revolution, and generous impulses towards men, humanitarian feelings. Cimourdain is the personification of this struggle between utter selfness service to a cause and a heart’s loyalty to a friend. Hugo’s whole characterisation of him hangs upon this feature of his character, this cleavage in his soul. The theme of the whole novel is the life and conduct of men like Lantenac and Gauvain as they are brought face to face with the inexorable demands of their Cause. Lantenac, however, is a Vendean; and Gauvain at the supreme trial sacrifices the Cause to his feelings of generosity. Cimourdain alone is immovable, and is devoted to his Ideal to the point of being inhuman. He personifies the Revolution, therefore. He is more than a man, he is greater than a hero of a novel, he is the central figure of an epic.

III

Molly was a handsome fool.... She lacked the historic sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of warehouses, jetties, and a church or two—an unfamiliar Wapping upon a river with a long name.