In a similar way if at all—the historian wins over for himself, and comes to possess an age of the past; but whereas Stevenson in his absence could constantly shoot back in his mind to a distant, remembered Edinburgh, in the case of the historian it is in a peculiar sense an irrecoverable, and so to speak, only half-remembered world that is “referred” to, and the man cannot go direct to the original to confirm the mental picture he retains. He can never know the past just as Stevenson knew the city he had actually trodden, and there is more of himself, more of the personal element, in his appropriation of it—how much, he cannot tell, because he can never go behind his vision of the past to compare it with the reality. We who may hold some place as Stevenson did Edinburgh, and perhaps remember it as a distant thing we knew in the old days, and retread it in our imagination and refer to it in our thinking—we can return to the spot itself to verify the impression it has left in our minds and see if our picture is true; and returning we may be shocked to find how Memory has played us false, how the Edinburgh that was in our thoughts is out of touch with the real thing. Working with an equally imperfect “Memory” the historian cannot do this, cannot put back the clock to a distant age to see if the “world” he has created out of it in his mind has parted from reality. And yet, given that “world” of the past as he holds it, it is still true that he makes it peculiarly his own, in that he constantly traverses it in his imagination, it is as a magnet to his mind, he carries present things back into it and is for ever making calls upon it, till it becomes a part of his thinking. It was because Scott had worked like this upon the history that he knew so well, and because he had entered into the past in this special way and made it a country of his mind, that Hutton could write of him that “He had something like a personal experience of several centuries.”
The man who does this and can feel at home in a certain “world” of history, who saturates himself with the spirit of an age and breathes its very air, and having touched the life of a time has turned it over in his mind and has played upon it and pondered over it in his thinking—will learn to catch unawares the turns of thought that were current then, will reproduce in a spontaneous way the habits and modes of life of the past—the things he would otherwise have had to copy with servility—and will enter without effort into the very tricks of speech of some former day. Instead of transplanting facts and specific details direct from the history-book into the story-book, he will find expression for the life which he has made his own, letting it blossom out into its own appropriate “facts,” its inevitable manifestations. Atmosphere, though not merely the result of spontaneity, any more than the electricity is the result of the wire, demands this as its necessary concomitant, as electricity demands the completed circuit. Perhaps it may be said that atmosphere is the result of a conspiracy of details that come in an effortless way from a mind that has entered into the experience and made appropriation of the “world,” of some age in history. It belongs to the past age in some sense; but it cannot be separated from the personality of the novelist himself. Charles Lamb steeped his mind in old writers until some of their quaintness and charm passed into himself and came out in his prose style; and in this way he caught history somehow into his personality. Similarly the historical novelist does not merely acquire information about the past, but absorbs it into his mind. Atmosphere comes out in his books as the overflow of a personality that has made a peculiar appropriation of history. It comes as part of the man himself.
This explains why Hewlett is at home in a peculiarly romantic and coloured world like that of Renaissance Italy, and Dumas is really himself when his books are in an atmosphere of court intrigue and racy adventure, and Scott is a king in his kingdom when he is in the peasant-world of Scotland or when he is concerned with those Covenanting days of which he wrote “I am complete master of the whole history of these strange times.” These writers breathe in their novels a life that they have made their own, and that has become part of themselves. It is not a particular period of history but rather a particular phase of life, a certain type of experience, a definite sort of “world” that these writers have come to possess and can so describe with all appropriate atmosphere; and it is not necessarily when they change their period of history but when they move into a different world and concern themselves with a type of life and experience which they have not made their own by any “constant imaginative reference” that they find themselves out of their element. If they take up a fresh corner of life like this for their stories, they are unable to escape from the atmosphere that is really theirs, they cannot shake off the things that belong to the world which is their true world and which has become a part of their thinking; and either they give us no atmosphere at all, or (which is at bottom the same thing) they trail with them into this fresh world an atmosphere which is here alien and inappropriate but which has become part and parcel of themselves.
Moreover, when Hewlett in King Richard Yea-and-Nay and Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris give us the Middle Ages, although they both achieve a certain atmosphere, it is a different atmosphere in each case. Just as Hugo in Ninety-Three reconstructed the French Revolution with his eye upon the conflict between the inexorable demands of the Cause at a moment of crisis and the generous, humane impulses of men who served the cause, he has restored the Middle Ages in Notre Dame with his eye upon the Cathedral that is the centre of his story. Wherever he looks he sees a gargoyle; his mind seizes upon the grotesque; and his mediaeval world shapes itself around this central fact. Hewlett reproduces the Middle Ages as they exist rather in the mind of the poet. Whether he tells of King Richard, or depicts Renaissance times, or relates the story of Mary Queen of Scots, there is always something in his atmosphere that is Hewlett himself, there is a melody in his style, a peculiarity in the very order of his words, that breathes a sort of romance; he gives us the past seen through the coloured windows of his mind. Hugo stands alone as a man who, strikingly aware of the power of accumulated detail, produces atmosphere in a conscious way, knowing what he is doing and how he does it; but he reveals the bent of his mind in the particular appropriation which he makes of the Middle Ages, and in the type of significant fact which he fastens upon. In Hewlett in a more subjective way, there is the mysterious communication of personality. But in every case there is a certain element in atmosphere that is communicated to the past and is imputed to a bygone age by the mind of the man who resurrects the past. His own experience of the past as he has learned to live in it, his own emotions as he looks at some distant century, are transferred to that century. The novelist does not merely reproduce the past any more than an artist merely copies nature; he loads it with something of himself, he cannot describe it without betraying his way of looking at it; and all this is true also of any historian who achieves real resurrection and atmosphere. At its extreme it means a kind of “pathetic fallacy” with a scene in history instead of a scene in nature, shaping itself to the moods and the mind of a man. It is what Carlyle does when he turns to historic men and movements. It is what Turner did when he painted “Ulysses deriding Polyphemus” amid all the glow and colour of legend. It is what the grown-up writer does who gives us children’s tales and childhood scenes that seem so charmingly child-like to other grown-ups. It is what all of us do with far-off, remembered things.
And because of all this there is something in the make-up of a historical novelist’s mind, something in his temperament and outlook which finds its peculiar home in various corners of the world of the past. There is something in various ages of history, various phases of life and experience, various types of thinking, to which his mind naturally turns, and in which he finds his element. There is something in his own life which answers to its counterpart in history, and finds its own world there. A man like Jokai can catch the atmosphere of some revolutionary movement—as in The Green Book—and can thrill a novel with the feelings and the subtle workings of a secret yearning for freedom, because in real life he lived this, and finding it in history found something of himself. Carlyle’s Cromwell, Carlyle’s Mirabeau have passed through Carlyle’s mind and come out crooked; but there was in their way of thinking and in their wrestles with life a thing which Carlyle had in common with them, and which drew his thoughts to them and made their experience a thing he could enter into. That was why he could assimilate them so powerfully to himself. That also was why his interpretations of them were contributions to history, and not mere wild distortions.
And so, for the resurrection of the past and the true re-telling of the life of the past the novelist’s peculiar art has something to contribute. The virtue and power of the novelist’s depiction of men, is not that he observes perpetually and arranges data, but that he enters into the experiences of others, he runs his life into the mould of their lives, he puts himself under the conditioning circumstances of their thinking. He can feel with people unlike himself and look at the world with their eyes and grapple with the issues of life that meet them, because he can put himself in their place, that is to say, because his experience is not entirely and merely his own. It is precisely because personality is not cut off from personality, and a man is not entirely locked up within himself, with the depths of him completely hidden away from everybody else, that the novelist can so to speak transpose himself and catch life into a person other than himself. It is precisely because in the last resort a distant age of history is not its own secret, curled up in its own world, and cut off from the present day—because the men of the past had red blood in their veins and were a phase of a life that is universal and eternal—that History can recapture something of their struggles and yearnings and their particular experiences. The history of history-books gives us a glimpse of the men of the past, a chart of the facts that governed their world, an idea of the conditioning circumstances of their lives; but it withholds the closest human things, the touches of direct experience. And because life is all one, and essential experience ultimately the same, these are the very things which the novelist, better than most people, can read back into the past. These provide the peculiar place, the legitimate rôle for historical fiction. The novelist will inevitably colour his pictures of an age with something of himself, for the pictures are born of his thinking; but in so far as he does all this in tune, surprising us with facts that flash, and that light up the age in unexpected ways, and lure us into a “world,” he will have atmosphere; and in so far as he remains true to the chart which history gives him he will have the true historical atmosphere.
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The historical novel, then, is one of many ways of treating the past and of wresting from it its secret. Given the facts of Nature a scientist will make one use of them, and will do a certain kind of thinking around them; but the artist or the poet will turn a different light upon them and meet them in a different way. Given the facts of the past, the historian shapes them in one way, squeezes something out of them, hunts out a set of implications in them; the novelist uses them to a different purpose, organises them differently, and turns them over in his thinking with a different kind of logic. Given an event the historian will seek to estimate its ultimate significance and to trace out its influence, the novelist will seek merely to recapture the fleeting moment, to see the thing happening, to turn it into a picture or a “situation.” With a set of facts about the social conditions of England in the Middle Ages the historian will seek to make a generalisation, to find a formula; the novelist will seek a different sort of synthesis and will try to reconstruct a world, to particularise, to catch a glimpse of human nature. Each will notice different things and follow different clues; for to the historian the past is the whole process of development that leads up to the present; to the novelist it is a strange world to tell tales about.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS