The historical novel

by Herbert Butterfield

He was but half-satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some local legend, and when I was forced sometimes to confess with the knife-grinder “Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir,” he would laugh and say “then let us make one—nothing so easy as to make a tradition.”

Such a story invented around a place, such an attempt to call up history out of a scene, is really an act of homage, an offering made to the place, a work of dedication.

History is rooted in geography, and the historical novel, which is a novel that seeks to be rooted in some ways in actuality, finds one of its roots in geography. The quotation made above from Scott’s Introduction to The Monastery is part of an explanation which the author gives of the reason why he chose the celebrated ruins of Melrose as the scene of his story, although he described the place as “possessing less of romantic beauty than some other scenes in Scotland.” Of Jokai it has been said “The world around him—Hungary, Russia, and Turkey—breathed more romance and imagination than did the Highlands to Scott or France to Dumas”; and here was the inspiration of the writer.

Historical novels are born of romanticism of a kind; but they are a romancing around objects and places; they have a basis in reality, and their roots in the soil. In this way there is something more firm about them than is found in the more vague and dreamy products of romanticism—those dim romances of some undefined no-time, no-place, which have a “stained-glass window” vision of a mediaeval past and lack the link with earth, and can only be connected with the historical novel in the way a fairy-story can, that is by the remote suggestion of the past that is contained in the airy words “Once upon a time.”

And if in the historical novel there is devotion to locality and a feeling for the history that breathes through the soil, all this comes out large and most complete where geography and tradition, love of place and pride in its heritage of story, combine in patriotism. Patriotism that so often rings false is in this true, in that it becomes the consciousness of belonging to a place and a tradition. Even where it seems most local and confined, even where it contains no sounding of the trumpets of nationalism, and where its author holds no patriotic motive, the historical novel cannot help reminding men of their heritage in the soil. It is often born of a kind of patriotism; it can scarcely avoid always being the inspiration of it. In this way it becomes itself a power in history, an impulse to fine feeling, and a source of more of the action and heroism which it describes. The historical novel itself becomes a maker of history.

II

It has been noticed that the ostensible theme of The Cloister and the Hearth is an instance of a human problem that came out in a particular form in mediaeval life, but exists in some form in every society. The problem is one of loyalties that cut across each other and pull different ways. A modern novelist would be likely to treat this as a study in human experience and would analyse the disruption it would cause in the individual soul. Reade, however, is a Victorian, who lived before the psychological novel had become the fashion, and he does the Victorian thing; instead of treating this problem as the real theme of his novel, he pushes it on one side, and makes it simply the excuse for sending his hero on a journey, so that his story becomes very largely a story of travel.

The simplest kind of novel is the novel of this kind, which gives a string of happenings that befell the hero in his wandering through the world. It is not the working-out of a plot, or the following-up of a situation. It does not turn upon a definite set of relations which provide a problem for the novelist to solve, a knot for him to untie; it does not hunt down a given set of circumstances to some logical issue. It is simply a chain of happenings, an accumulation of incident; one episode does not grow out of another, each leading to something deeper; but events merely succeed one another at various turns in the road which the hero has to travel, and the only connection between them is that they all happen to the same person. Dickens is an example of this kind of novelist, who takes any excuse for sending his hero on his travels, and narrates the various things that turn up on the journey. The Pickwick Papers belong to this class, for they do not represent a scheme of action working to a certain issue, but are a chain of episodes that never lead to anything and might continue for ever. In the adventures of Pickwick, therefore, Dickens is really describing a world in which his hero is wandering; just as in David Copperfield he is not so much revealing a character as painting the world that his hero passed through in his life’s journey. Such novels are really tales of travel; the world of the story is not merely the background for the hero, the setting for the story; rather the hero is the excuse for describing the world. Sometimes that world is a topsy-turvy place, like the one that bewildered Pickwick, or the fantastic “Wonderland” that Alice found herself in; sometimes it is a Lilliput, or some imagined future state of things, or it may even be modern society. In a historical novel it will be some past age, described as a far-country.

The simplest form of treatment that can be given to history in the novel is that of the story in which the hero travels a bygone age, and the reader follows him as into a new world and peeps over his shoulder to see what he sees. The age, the whole scheme of things as it then existed, is described in the adventures of the wanderer and at its point of contact with an individual life. This happens to some extent in every historical novel. Apart from any conscious description of the background of his story the novelist must always be betraying the peculiar conditions of a particular century, since the fate and fortunes of the actors in his drama are the result of their entanglement in the affairs of the time and in the system of things of the particular moment. But in a work like The Cloister and the Hearth all this is raised into a method and is the way adopted for making history betray itself; the wanderings of the hero make the book pre-eminently a descriptive one, and the fact that the novel is rather a chain of incident than the working out of a particular process of action, makes the world of the story more important than the plot. The hardships of Gerard at strange inns, his illnesses, the brawls in the countryside, the companions whom he meets, and the steps in his career are simply the means by which the age manifests its character, and in them history is speaking. There can be no simpler example than this of the translation of history into story.

In so far as this method of treating the past is followed in The Cloister and the Hearth or in any novel, it means that an age is regarded as a set of conditions, a system of things, that is looked upon as static and is described at its points of contact with an individual life set in it and, so to speak, entangled in its network. That individual may be the creation of the novelist and his chain of adventures may be pure invention. His life is a candle that lights up corners of his age as it is brought into them, and the places at which he touches his age and runs up against the characteristic circumstances of his time, his points of contact with the machinery of society, may be ideally chosen to show up the character of his time. His life may then sum up his age in a way in which no actual individual life that is ever lived can in itself sum up the peculiar conditions of the age in which it is set. In The Cloister and the Hearth, at any rate, a century is fixed for us as a picture, as a static thing. The cinematograph-film of history is stopped there, and one particular photograph on the reel is projected into the book.