Chapter II (2)

What Browning did in _The Ring and the Book_ for the record of a “sordid police case” historical novelists, taken all together, may be said to do for history. Browning took his ground-work of incident and related it nine different times, each time from the point of view of different people concerned, and he showed that a tale re-told from a different standpoint and around a fresh person is really a new tale. The whole world of the story shifts round when a new point of vision is adopted, the same set of events come differently and with a different bearing. To relate a narrative from the point of view of the criminal in it, and then from the point of view of the victim and then from that of the hero is not merely to tell the same story in different ways; it is something more striking than that, it is to give a new tale every time. Events that are joy to one person are grief to another, perhaps; one man’s glad story may be somebody else’s sad story, and if the centre of sympathy has been changed everything in a narrative must take a fresh shape around it. Nothing can better illustrate the richness of history and the many-sidedness of life than this fact; and the historical novelist represents it in his treatment of the past. He may make a story out of the life of Mary Queen of Scots, and out of the same set of facts he may make a totally different story, told from the point of view of Bothwell or Elizabeth. He may enrich history by bringing out its many-sided implications, and bringing to light the variety and complexity of the significance of historic happenings.

But it is a bold thing and a tremendous venture, to write of the intimate thoughts and experiences of the great, and even to guess at the motives of their actions. Carlyle said that only a great man could even recognise a great man. If this is the case, many must be tempted to ask, How can the novelist pretend to do more than this, and to understand a great man, even to re-create him in all his greatness? How can he make the statesman statesmanlike, and the queen queenly, and the prophet passionate and soul-stirring? To do this the novelist must within his own mind sweep the range of experience not merely of the ordinary man, not merely of the literary man--these things he might be expected to do--but also of the mighty forgers of history and the pioneers in experience; and he who very likely cannot understand the moods and caprices of his own landlady and who has never pierced the mystery of personality as it exists in her, must record the intimate thoughts, the slightest wave of a mood that passes over the mind like the wind over the grass, the half-conscious motives and the deep solemn experience in people like Mary Queen of Scots or Oliver Cromwell or Richard I who were in a way geniuses in living, and in particular phases of life and experience. If the novelist does not do this adequately, if his statesmen are not at least statesmanlike even though not true to facts, if his kings are not at least royal in some way, if he does not give great men the touch of greatness and the soul of grandeur, his characters are merely pompous puppets, in fine dress and on high pedestals, a piece of show, a mocking pageantry.

Perhaps the most impressive way of bringing great men into the historical novel, is not the method which makes their lives and careers the central theme of the book at all, demanding intimate treatment, and close appreciation and analysis. Many historical novels are stories of ordinary everyday issues in the lives of people, and deal with some personal concerns of fictitious characters, and with the things that make up the ordinary kind of novel; but these novels become “historical” ones by the fact that their drama is played out as it were in the shadow of great public events. Some well-known, historic character looms in the background, larger historical issues cast their shadow at times and perhaps at some point the narrow concerns of the individuals whose fate makes up the story, cross the path of these, and become interlocked for a moment with some piece of history. In _Woodstock_ for example the homely problems of a few fictitious characters, and the small vicissitudes of a locality occupy the centre of the stage. Their story grows out of a set of historical relations as it existed in the days of the Protectorate, and is a story born of the conditions of the time in the way Scott suggested in the Introductions to _Ivanhoe_ and _The Monastery_. The first chapter of the book brings out history in the form of story, it is a peep at England in the days of the Protectorate, it is a “sample,” a kind of specimen picture of the age and the story is implied in the conditions of the time. There is a suggestion of the awful omnipotence of Cromwell, and a feeling that the distant sternness of his rule is coming near and will soon be brought home to people, but the Protector himself is a solemn figure in the background. There is a kind of impressiveness in the way the story actually crosses his path. The reader is ushered into the presence of the great man, and Cromwell is not treated familiarly--we do not pry into his mind and we do not see through the man, but everything is as though in an impressive moment in real life we had once met the man and felt him greater and more distant than ever. When Charles II comes into the book a similar thing happens; we peep at a corner of his life, we catch one side of him, but the whole man is not laid bare, and we know that there is a world within him that is not revealed. In this way the feeling that to ordinary citizens of the country there is something impenetrable in these great people is maintained. Life to all of us is a chain of private aims and personal concerns and family or homely issues that seem to be all the world to us as they come one after another; but far above we can feel that larger historic issues are being worked out oblivious of our petty concerns, and ignoring our little lives. Only at times do our paths cross. A war or a popular movement at some time may touch the family and even break up homes, sweeping away the issues and affairs that were our little world, but even this only accentuates our feeling that over our heads, as it were, a great history-making is always going on; and in the days when personalities like Cromwell moved the world directly, and held an immediate sway over events, such men must have come to the minds of ordinary human beings as distant peaks come to the traveller, as objects of solitary impenetrable grandeur and of awful power. In describing the world like this, the kind of historical novel of which _Woodstock_ is only one of a whole variety of examples, depicts life in a relevant and significant fashion.

* * * * *

In all these ways history can be translated into fiction and can gain something in the process; but above them all there towers a form of novel that is more sweeping in its treatment of history, more ambitious in its interpretation of life, more bold in its way of looking at the world. In it the novel reaches beyond itself, so that to call it any longer a “novel” is to give it an inadequate title. It is a prose epic; but because it is a way by which history is turned into fiction it cannot pass unnoticed.

History has been taken to mean the world looking back upon itself, and remembering things. But after memory comes experience and the reflection upon experience. In our individual lives we are not content to recall things that happened, we do not just have memories, and stop there; but we relate these to one another, and see meaning in them and work them into experiences, through which we come to see life as unity and as purpose and as a process. In a similar way there comes a time when history must be something more than reminiscence, something more than memories of this age and that age, of one happening and another happening, of a man here and a man there; it must be something more even than a chain, a succession of these; it must be a web, a unity, woven of them all. It must be the experience of Man on this earth, face to face with Nature, warring with the elements, and lonely under the sky--man at grips with Life through all the ages. It must be a symphony, each orchestral part doing something to express the great idea of the whole, and each moment, each year, each age adding a new bar to the score, and carrying the architecture of the whole a little further. History is not merely the story of men and of their deeds and adventures; it is the Epic of Man.

If the past is looked at in this way the individual ceases to be the centre of focus. Men and women and their lives become fragments in the whole trend of things, mere ripples on the surface of a great world-life. The surge of historic movement, the pulse of life underneath all lives becomes the real theme of story; though this can only manifest itself, can only become tangible in individual lives. The artist who tries to capture the wind into a picture or into words knows what this means. He may show the leaves scattered by the wind, and the trees bent before it, and the countryside devastated by a hurricane; but all this is not wind. He may paint a ship in full sail before a breeze, or an ocean whipped to fury; but these are not the wind; he may describe the delightful play of the wind in your hair, or the trail of its fingers in the grass--but that weird mysterious thing, the wind, that comes in whispers through the trees and sounds an organ-tone deep and tremendous as an ocean as it sweeps over the heather, eludes him every time. It can only be described in its results. And the same is true in history. The epic in historical fiction describes the tangible and the particular, and the concrete; but it suggests a living principle behind these, working in these, and only manifesting itself in them. The epic writer looking at the life of the past sees an accumulation of events, of details, of instances, but in them all he divines a synthesis, and sees one throb of the great heart of the world; and behind them all he feels one life-principle working itself out and carrying men with it as a tide carries the foam or as the Spring brings the buds.

The power and awfulness of the wind are not to be recognised by a glance at the weather-vane or at the thistle-down floating through the air; it is the cumulative effect of a hundred different details, a hundred different things touched and changed by the wind, that makes the wind seem beyond escape; it is the suggestion of the broad spaces and unlimited stretches through which the wind can range, that must give the impression that it is everywhere; and it is the gentleness of its touch here, and the crash of its irresistible rush there, that must give the idea of its powerful yet subtle activities. The epic that seeks to describe the heart that beats as one behind the life of a whole people must point to the pulse throbbing in a hundred places. It is the overpowering effect of accumulated detail and of all this spread over a wide canvas, that must conspire to show some surge of a deep-sounding tide in the lives of people, some breath that sweeps through the life of a race; it is only in this way that the ubiquity, the power beyond escape, the hundred varied ways of working, of some life-principle behind the affairs of individuals, can be brought out. The historical novel that is an epic, is, then, a mighty production, a great conception minutely worked out, a piece of architecture. It is the novel carried to a higher power. Its hero is not a man but a force in men. Its vision of the past is one of titanic powers working underground. It grapples with Destiny and dares to look the universe in the face; and it spells out Fate and strikes at the stars.

The love of wide canvases burdened with significant detail; the large vision of the past as one in texture with the present and as a sublime urge of humanity rising above obstacles and fighting its chains; and the poet’s power of synthesis, made Victor Hugo the great master of this epic romance, as he was its conscious exponent. Nothing could better illustrate his sense of the one-ness of history and the sublime tragedy of Man’s experience in the world than his introduction to _The Toilers of the Sea_:

Religion, Society and Nature; these are the three struggles of
mankind. These three struggles are at the same time his three
needs; it is necessary for him to have a faith, hence the temple;
it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary
for him to live, hence the plough and the ship. But these three
solutions comprise three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of
life springs from all the three.

Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition, under
the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple
fatality weighs upon us--the fatality of dogmas, the fatality
of laws, the fatality of matter. In _Notre Dame_ the author has
denounced the first; in _Les Misérables_ he has described the
second; in this book he points out the third.

With these three fatalities that envelop mankind is mingled the
inward fatality--the highest fatality--the human heart.

This quotation alone is sufficient to show that the conception of the Epic of Man rests, not upon the idea that the past is a new world for the novelist to range in, but on a fact that is equally true from its own point of view--the fact of the one-ness of experience and the unity of the past with the present. The historical novel that is a universal epic, therefore comes to men as an interpretation of Man’s experience in the world. It is cosmic in conception. Also it is the work of a man who is not merely novelist, but poet; for though experience is all one piece, it comes to us in fragments and we only know it in parts, and the man who wishes to understand it and to map out its meaning, must in looking at past and present find a one-ness that is not apparent in that mass of details and people and events that confront him; he must divine a synthesis. This seems to be the conscious aim of Hugo, and there is a tremendous power in his achievement that is not to be found in the interpretation of large history that Merejkowski seeks to give in his trilogy. In such works as these history as well as the novel is carried beyond itself, and raised to a higher power.

The national epic is not so broad in its sweep, not so consciously an interpretation of universal experience as what might be called the Epic of Man. Here again it is not an individual that is the hero of the story, but something that might almost be personified, a force working in the lives of men; only, in this case, the stage of the drama is the Nation at some tremendous moment in its history. The quiver through a whole people of some breath of national feeling is described like the stir of the wind upon a pool; the throb of a whole nation in some intense crisis is caught into story. And as this surge of feeling in a people becomes most apparent at the point at which it meets resistance, no theme is better for this kind of novel than that which describes in a people the bitter sense of national liberty thwarted, and of national aspirations refused, the growing consciousness of repression and an increasing desire to resist the oppressor. Where these exist love of liberty comes as a yearning and an aspiration and a vision; fine impulses become conscious because they strike against an obstacle; and they become aggressive since they feel themselves thwarted. Nothing makes a more powerful motive for a novel.

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.