The historical novel

by Herbert Butterfield

Set the crew laughing and forgot his course.

It was so old a ship—who knows, who knows?”

In these lines is shown the lure of all ancient things that store a tale which they cannot tell.

There is a charm and mystery in unremembered things. There is something fine in the sight of a ridge of hill against the sky when one does not know what lies beyond or whether a surprise of rolling sea beneath a sudden fall of cliff, or a panorama of wooded valleys, is in store at the summit—so one can only guess and wonder. And, when, in some border-village we look at hills that have watched centuries stride by, and ask ourselves of distant scenes and old adventure that the hills must have overlooked, and when we learn that these matters were writ in water and that about them not history any more than the stern hill-crags can break her everlasting silence—then here is adventure for the imagination, and in our fancy we play around places that we know and events that we have heard of, weaving around “What-has-been” the things that might have been. We do the kind of thinking that is needed to turn a map into a picture, the kind of thinking that might translate last year’s National Budget into a drama of hearts and homes.

It is in this that there lies the first justification of the historical novel, and one way of giving that particular kind of literature a relation to experience. No infallible generalisation can give a key to all historical novels and to everything that appears in them, but here at least is a useful key that will fit many locks and will explain much that there is in all these novels, and moreover will provide a system of relations between these and the history that is a study. It cannot be too strongly stated that the explanation of historical novels is not to be found in the fact that history needs an admixture of fiction to give it spice, to make it exciting, to relieve the boredom. Truth is stranger than fiction and some of the most incredible episodes that have been found in novels have been those which an author has too foolishly taken straight from life. That there is a place for such a thing as the historical novel is due to a certain inadequacy in history itself. History is full of events and issues out of which a story could be made, and of adventures that are exciting enough; it is not wanting in incident, but these things are not stories, they have to be transmuted into story; for there are irrecoverable things in history, and these are the close, intimate personal things, the touches of direct experience that are needed in story-making, the things that we most remember in friends we used to have, what might be called “the human touches.” In order to catch these things in the life of the past, and to make a bygone age live again, history must not merely be eked out by fiction, it must not merely be extended by invented episodes; it must be turned into a novel; it must be “put to fiction” as a poem is put to music.

When history tells us that Napoleon did a certain thing, it is the work of each of us, in trying to bring history home to ourselves, to amplify in our imagination what the history-book gives us, and to see Napoleon doing the action. It is all very well to be told that a certain event took place, but the past strikes home in our minds with immeasurably greater power if we can see it happening and can catch it as a picture; and this is what we try to do for ourselves when we read a history-book. The important thing is to see the past, and not simply to hear somebody describe it. It is not enough to read of a certain event; we must be there, watching—we must fix it into a picture for ourselves, we must recapture the particular moment. History does not do this for us; just the thing that it cannot do is to catch the moment precisely; so we do this for ourselves; we complete history in our supposition. Every man who has an idea of the woman Mary Queen of Scots, or who can catch glimpses of what happened at Waterloo, has added to history something from his own imagination, and has filled in the lines for himself. The past as it exists for all of us, the world of the past in our minds, is history synthesised by the imagination, and fixed into a picture by something that mounts to fiction. For history fails when a certain situation is to be recovered, or a definite combination of circumstances is to be seized upon, or a particular moment is to be caught. And yet it is a cold and bloodless thing if these things cannot be achieved, and the life of the past is not in any way resurrected without them. The chart must be turned into a picture, if history is to be a recovery of the life of the past and not a mere post-mortem examination. The imagination of the historian does this for him; the most musty of parchments holds for him a story and speaks to a world that exists in his mind; but everybody is not a historian; so historical fiction does the work for all the world; it fuses the past into a picture, and makes it live.

Again, any attempt to recapture the past is limited and inadequate if it keeps a reader conscious of the fact that he is a modern creature, looking at a distant world and comparing it with his own. It is not enough to recover the facts of the lives that men lived long-ago and to trace out the thread of event; we must recover the adventure of their lives; and the whole fun and adventure of their lives, as of ours, hung on the fact that at any given moment they could not see ahead, and did not know what was coming. To the men of 1807 the year 1808 was a mystery and an unexplored tract; they saw a hundred possibilities in it where the modern reader only sees the one thing that actually happened; they never knew what surprise awaited them at the next turn in the road; and therefore, to study the year 1807 remembering all the time what happened in 1808 and in the succeeding trail of years, is to miss the adventure and the great uncertainties and the element of gamble in their lives. It is not enough to know that Napoleon won a certain battle; if history is to come back to us as a human thing we must see him on the eve of battle eagerly looking to see which way the dice will fall, with fears and hesitations perhaps, with a sense of all the things that may happen in spite of all his calculations, and with an uncertainty before all the range of possible things that may upset his plans. The victory that is achieved on one day must not be regarded as being inevitable the night before; and where we cannot help seeing the certainty of a desired issue, the men of the time were all suspense, and full of wonderings. History does not always give us things like these, for they are irrecoverable personal things; but we know they existed. They are the things that make life an experience. And they are the very touches that are needed to turn history into a story.

These things are what are meant, then, when it is affirmed that the history that Romanticism in all of us demands must be at once a picture and story. And it is in this way that the history-book which belongs to the “literature of knowledge” is transformed into the “literature of power.”

In the opening chapter of Ivanhoe there is a piece of writing that illustrates the difference between the historian and the historical novelist in the use that they make of the same historical material. In the introductory part of that chapter Scott recapitulates, “for the information of the general reader,” the conditions of the age with which he is dealing, describing them in general terms as a historian would.

Four generations (he writes) had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat.... At court and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleading and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victor and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe.