The historical novel

by Herbert Butterfield

Here again is a set of historical conditions which, even when described in so rough and swift a fashion, are full of implied story. To turn these into a novel necessitates no distortion of great historical events; what the writer does is to hunt out those situations and problems which are implicit in the life of the age and in the described conditions, and which are the kind of issues that make good story. In the same way the very title, The Cloister and the Hearth, suggesting as it does a collision of loyalties and a human problem, is a description of something in mediaeval life that cries out to be turned into a tale.

The conditions of the life of the present-day, the current habits of thought, the social relationships of men, the economic situation of the country, the welfare of family and Church, and the relations of those institutions and groups that make their conflicting claims upon the loyalty and cover so much of the activity of individuals, are rich with problems and anomalies, and situations and combinations of circumstance which are peculiar to the age, and are the source of most of the issues of the novel of the present-day. The entanglement of the individuals in these conditions produces problems of experience that are peculiarly modern. In the same way every set of circumstances produces its special set of human issues, every age has its own life-problems; and the novel of an age of monasticism will range through a different scheme of problems from that of an age of divorce-law activity, and the world of the Industrial Movement will show life dominated by issues different from those of the age of Chivalry. The twentieth century differs from the twelfth not merely in its language, its dress, its implements and armour, but in its whole experience of life. It is not merely in the suits and trappings that one age contrasts with another; and for this reason the historical novel is justified, as something more than picturesque scene-painting, for it treats of other ages’ experiments in living, and depicts human nature breaking in upon a different set of experiences, a different range of problems. When Scott in the Introductions to Ivanhoe and to The Monastery summarises a state of society therefore, and assumes a given set of human relationships as the basis of a novel, he is carrying with these things the whole range of experiences and issues that are involved in them and that are peculiar to them, and his purpose is to turn these into story as a present-day novelist turns the social conditions of the twentieth century into fiction.

History, then, is not merely a taskmaster to the novelist. Too often the historical novelist has been spoken of as being hampered by history and tied down by chronological tables. He has been regarded as a novelist working under limitations and with one hand tied, history restricting his imagination, and setting him a boundary. But all that has just been said implies that history is not merely the chain that ties the novelist down; rather it is the wing that helps him to soar into a new range of problems and experiences. It is his inspiration, and not simply a tie. When Scott in his Introductions gave himself a basis for his novels it is true that he was accepting certain limitations and agreeing to work within a given set of facts, just as an Arctic explorer agrees to accept the hardships of cold weather; but at the same time he was opening up to himself a different world and a life that rested on a different basis and that so provided him with a host of fresh story-issues.

If the historical novelist regards his duty as being to avoid anachronisms, history will seem to him a chain. The different condition of things existing in the period of which he writes will be a source of labour to him, and a pitfall. But to the true historical novelist they are a glory, they are the whole point of his work, and what was a weakness becomes a strength. If a writer wishes to “work up” a period in order to set a story in it, he will feel history a fetter and every unexpected fact may hamper the story he intended to tell. But if he has steeped his mind in some past age, and has lived in that age, turning it over and over in his imagination, realising the conditions of affairs and the relationships of men and pondering over the implications of these and so recasting the life of the age for himself, then that particular age and those special conditions will suggest their own story, and the historical peculiarities of that age will give point to his novel and will become a power. There is all the difference in the world between a man who has a story to tell and wishes to set it in a past age and to adjust it to the demands of history, and the man who has the past in his head and allows it to come forth in story. There is an immense gulf between the man who works up a period in history in order to tell his story without anachronisms, and a man whose stories come from a mind steeped in the past. In the one case history has to be laboriously gathered up around the story, and it is a burden; in the other case the history is there to begin with, and the story grows out of the history. In the true historical novel the writer has learned to feel at home in the age with which he is dealing. Such a novel comes out of a world of the Past that exists in the writer’s mind. The history that it embodies will be true or inaccurate according as the man has throughout his life built up that world in his mind on true foundations, but in any case that history will come spontaneously; and here the historical novelist is not a novelist working under limitations, but one who has captured new fields of experience and of circumstance and has conquered a new world for his art.

In all this, too, there can further be worked out a defence of the historical novel against one of the charges that are sometimes brought up against it. The historical novel is specially open to the temptation of mere picturesqueness. The one thing that is essentially to be kept in mind in the whole idea of history that has been described above, is not that this method of treating the past is shallow, but that it is specially liable to descend to shallowness without knowing and to be satisfied with mere externals, and pageantry, and a veneer of history. Popular literature is full of empty fiction that sets a conventional story in a picturesque background and thinks it has done justice to history when it has clothed its personages in coloured costumes and given their language a touch of the obsolete, and raised up a stage-setting of courts and camps and Gothic architecture; and the drawback to the historical novel lies in the fact that the touch of strangeness, the sense of the far-away, the hint of colour and romance in all these, too often makes the emptiness of the show more tolerable; the fine feathers disguise the worthlessness of the bird below. But if it is remembered that every state of society has its peculiar experience of life, that every age of history shows mankind breaking in upon experience and upon the problems of life at different points, and that each generation has its attitude to existence, and its peculiar synthesis, then it must be seen that the charge of shallowness is not one that can be made against the whole idea of historical novels, and that these, like any other novel, may be rich with experience and may touch human issues. A story that describes a Roman watching the decay of the Empire that he had been taught would endure for ever, and seeing a surging barbarian life flood into its borders like some awful eruption of Nature before which human effort is futile and men can only look helplessly on, may be a mere melodrama, unredeemed by its pageantry and picturesqueness; but it can be more—the story of a unique experience, and of one of the urgent moments in the life of mankind. Shallowness is not the evil of the historical novel—it is only its danger.

Lastly, it may be said that the inspiration of the historical novel is not merely history, but also geography. To a person for whom history did not exist at all a landscape would be merely a flat picture; to one who can think history into it, it has a dimension in time. To some people the ruins of Rome may be a poor heap of fragments, pieces of broken art-ware; but to Gibbon and Gregorovius who brought to the place a sense of the history behind, those ruins were the starting-point of a trail that led back to the glories of ancient Rome and were the clue to a story. If people re-tread the scenes of a distant childhood it is not merely a flat picture that comes before their eyes, but other scenes behind it, scenes that the memory has stored and that are somehow locked up in the present one; the very landscape looks different, and is richer because it breathes the past. To an architect a building is not merely a dead weight of stone, but a mass of forces striking in different directions and brought somehow to a poise; the whole structure is thrilled with life and in every line of it there is motion. To a historical mind similarly, a building must look different. It has not merely length and breadth and height, but also a certain “throughness,” an extension in time; behind the “Now” of that building there is a long trail of Moments of the same building, the place has not merely a few associations with the past but a whole context in history; and the sight of the walls at the present time is only the last picture of a cinematograph-reel which represents all the hundred Yesterdays that are folded up within the stone. Our fleeting “Now” is only the last term of an ever-lengthening series. Time is locked up within scenery and buildings; and the aim of history is to unlock it and to make it speak its secret.

What we call historic sites and buildings represent places in which this secret has in some measure been recovered. They have not existed longer than other places in geography, but they are places about which History can remember things. The cinematograph-film which represents their extension in time is not completely locked away from us; and the historical mind means among other things the power to feel the film there and to recall pictures in it at the mere sight of the place, on the mere suggestion of geography.

In Sir Walter Scott this power of reading history into places existed in real intensity.

To me (he said) the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlement of Stirling Castle. I do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling or picturesque scenery—but show me an old castle in a field of battle and I was at home at once....

If he saw a scene about which tradition or the history-book had nothing to tell, he still saw the history there, and tried to read the past into the place. Someone wrote of him: