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THE HISTORICAL NOVEL.

THE historical novel is no longer in fashion. There is without doubt one very good reason for this. We have no longer amongst us writers like Sir Walter Scott or the elder Dumas. But something more than this would seem to be implied by the current critical opinion. Readers of the literary journals must have noticed the sort of contemptuous forbearance shown to the new writers who still in these days attempt the historical novel. The critics seem to feel towards them much as the mathematician feels towards the man who is to square the circle or to discover perpetual motion -to feel, that is, that the poor fellows are foredoomed to failure, and that they really ought to know better than to attempt impossibilities. The implication is, that, in itself, and quite apart from the particular merits of the writers, the historical novel is an impossible form of art. Now, if these critics condemn the historical romances of Scott and Dumas, that is a judgment of importance which, in deference to the position of the condemned, should be delivered at length, with its grounds explicitly stated. If on the other hand they shrink from condemning Scott and Dumas, it becomes interesting to examine the causes which have rendered that impossible to-day which was so brilliantly possible earlier in the century.

The opinion of the critics does not at first sound unreasonable. It is a matter of common observation how sadly writers err the moment they leave the sphere of their personal experience. The male novelist, who is wise, shuns the details of his heroine's dress, and, like Mr. Black, contents himself with such safe generalities as "all in cream white with a bunch of scarlet geraniums in her bosom." The light brigade of lady

novelists, less easily daunted, makes its heroic charge into university slang and the secrets of the smoking-room; and we exclaim, "C'est magnifique," but we do not look for success. If the pitfalls lie so close at our door, to plunge into the dim distances of history must surely be to court disaster. And when, instead of considering probabilities, we turn to actual examples of novels historical and unhistorical by the same authors, it may seem to many that a comparison of, say, Romola with Adam Bede, or of Esmond with The Newcomes, goes to support the view of the critics. In spite of the subtle truth of the picture of moral dissolution presented in Tito, most people in reading Romola experience a chilling sense of general unreality, and withal a fatiguing consciousness of the author's effort to be accurately Florentine, which prevents it from taking in their hearts an equal place with the earlier stories of middle-class English life. Esmond is a favourable example for the author: the age of Queen Anne is not very far removed from to-day, and the pages of The Spectator make its characters and manners familiar. Thackeray had an intimate literary knowledge of it- indeed Professor Seeley has had to combat the heresy that the novelist would have been its

best historian. Yet Esmond too, charming as it is, suffers, some have thought, from its slight constraint of pose it does not throb, they say, with life-blood, like The Newcomes and Vanity Fair. Nay, take Scott himself. The late Professor Green of Oxford once said outright that the permanent value of the Waverley Novels lay in their pictures of the Scottish peasantry. Certainly Scott's strongest work in some respects is to be found in his peasants and lairds and bailies. It is the Dandie Dinmonts and Nicol

Jarvies whom we know as real people, and who recur to our minds in thinking over Scott's characters. Set Jeanie Deans side by side with Rebecca, or Davie Deans by Isaac of York, and if the latter lose none of their picturesque charm, they surely at least lose some of their living reality.

Nor has this view of the intrinsic impossibility of the historical romance been left to be implied by the tone of anonymous critics. It has often been openly expressed. The hostility of the professed historians was no doubt to be expected. But there is Mr. Leslie Stephen, a professed literary critic, who has spoken in his time much good sense about fiction, frankly giving up the historical novel. Hypatia and Westward Ho! he speaks of as brilliant but almost solitary exceptions to the general dreariness of their class.

He

is sure they are full of hopeless inaccuracies: he does not believe that men like the Goths ever existed in this world; and he is prepared to give up the whole tribe of monks, pagans, Jews and Fathers of the Church. Even in his "dear Ivanhoe" he thinks that the buff-jerkin business, which aroused Carlyle's easily aroused contempt, is an element of decay, and that consequently the book is on the high road to ruin like one of Reynold's most carelessly painted pictures. He quotes with approval Sir Francis Palgrave's opinion, that historical novels are the mortal enemies of history; and adds for himself that they are mortal enemies of fiction. "There may be an exception or two, but as a rule the task is simply impracticable. The novelist is bound to come so near to the facts that we feel the unreality of his portraits." This is plain speaking, but the interesting and important point is that in spite of all this Mr. Stephen confesses that he rejoices in the Amal and Raphael ben Ezra, and that he loves Ivanhoe and Front de Boeuf and Wamba the Witless.

If the lover thus chastises them with whips it were not to be wondered if Mr. Freeman and the Bishop of

Chester should chastise them with scorpions. The former, indeed, in a lecture recently republished, concluded a list of essential preliminaries to understanding the age of the Crusades with this admonition: "and if you can so steel yourselves, forbear from reading Ivanhoe." Alas, it must be admitted that when we were undergraduates at Oxford our tutor never had to warn us to forbear, if we could so steel ourselves, from reading our Freeman and our Stubbs. But in truth (and this is the first thing to make ourselves clear about) objections from the point of view of the tutor of history are not necessarily valid objections in the sphere of artistic criticism. There are no doubt occasions when the tutor, like the British matron, may have a word to say on artistic questions. But our present inquiry is not whether these romances are good science, but whether they are good art; and historical inaccuracy will only concern us if it spoil the novel as a novel, if it weaken, that is, the interest of the story or the force of the dramatic passion. It is no part of the proper function of art to impart information; and the true novel-reader, recalling childish experiences of powder and jam, will rather rejoice that his "dear Ivanhoe," is of no use for the schools. If it is to be read at all, let it be read, not for the sake of some illegitimately acquired information, but for its own sake, that the reader, like Mr. Stephen, may love Wilfred, and Front de Bœuf, and Wamba the Witless; that he may shudder when Rebecca stands on the dizzy edge that sunders death from dishonour; and breathe a sigh of relief, when the Templar, "unscathed by the lance of the enemy falls a victim to the violence of his own contending passions."

In considering Mr. Stephens's strictures on historical novels, the first thing that strikes one is, that similar objections might be made as well to most poetical treatments of historical subjects. An undergraduate who

should boast,like the great Duke of Marlborough, that he had learnt all his history from Shakespeare, would, there can be no doubt, fare as badly at the hands of Mr. Freeman as he who had pinned his simple faith to Ivanhoe

or

The Talisman. Wonderfully as Julius Cæsar has caught the spirit of an epoch so different from Elizabethan England, it would scarcely bear the microscope of modern research. And what then shall be said of Victor Hugo's incursions into these sacred realms? Yet poetry is freely allowed the license which is, it seems, to be denied to the novel. There are indeed not wanting signs that science may ere long dispute this license in the case of poetry, and the point was expressly raised by a reviewer of Mr. Browning's last volume.

But

hitherto there has been a clear distinction between the attitude of criticism to the historical novel, and its attitude to historical plays or poems in respect of this matter of accuracy. The attack on Ivanhoe and Hypatia is not extended to Le Roi s'Amuse

or Henry the Fourth. Poetry has been freely allowed to use all history as her storehouse of raw material, and to re-create after her fashion its heroes and heroines in her own image. Indeed, a great part of our finest literature is thus derived. This distinction of attitude cannot be accidental. It must be due to an instinctive feeling in the minds of some readers at all events that the novels are spoiled by the inaccuracy, while the poetry is not. And this would imply some essential difference between the method of the two arts, the recognition of which may throw light on the special point under consideration. The distinction that immediately occurs to one is that, while poetry comes to us offering itself frankly as ideal re-creation, novels present themselves professedly as narratives of fact. The novel is bound to be natural, that is, to present its facts in their every-day guise. The reality looked for in the poem is truth and consistency of conception; but an

illusion of literal conformity to fact is instinctively demanded of the novel. This distinction is worth a little consideration because a misunderstanding of its nature has given rise to two complementary errors; on the one side the theory of the realists, on the other a refusal to the novel of a place among the arts.

"Your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inward, never getting near the hearts of them," wrote Carlyle (himself an unrivalled observer and painter of men from the skin outwards) in his essay on the creator of Dandie Dinmont. And the contrast here suggested between Shakespeare and Scott is extended in Green's essay above mentioned into a general contrast between the methods of poetry and the novel. "Tragedy," wrote Green, and the scope of his essay includes epic poetry as well,

"has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit made for its own sake to re-create human life according to spiritual laws to transport itself from a world where chance and appetite seem hourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may work unimpeded by anything but the antagonisms inherent in itself, and the presence of an overruling law. The common facts of life as it is, and always must have been, the influence of custom, the transition of passion into mechanical habit, the impossibility of continuous effort, the necessary arrangements of society, the wants of our animal nature and all that results from them-these are excluded from view, and so much only of the material of humanity is retained, as can take its form from the action of the spirit, and become a vehicle of pure passion. The false distinctions of dress, of manner, of physiognomy are obliterated, that the true individuality which results from the internal modifications of passion may be seen in clearer outline. The tragedian idealises because he starts from within. He reaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which every separate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident is melted down and lost. The novel, on the contrary, starts from the outside. Its main texture is a web of incidents through which the motions of the spirit must be discerned, if discerned at all. . . . These incidents must be probable, must be such as are consistent with the observed sequences of the world."

On this distinction Green based a critical judgment which banished the novel from the high company of the arts. This, we have been told, was not Green's own maturer view; and it was surely a harsh and narrow judg

ment.

No doubt in too many novels the details remain merely external, dead matter unfused by the central heat. But an art must be judged by its successes and not by its failures; and in the great novels the details are penetrated and made luminous. As against the naturalistic school of criticism, then, it must be insisted that all art, the art of M. Zola, or of Mr. Howells, so far as it is art, is necessarily ideal so against this view of Green's it is to be urged that, being ideal, art need not shrink from the dullest or ugliest facts of common life. Like religion, art must call nothing common nor unclean. In every age common life looks dull till it is touched by the spirit; but it is a Cinderella that only waits the fairy wand. As Green himself says in the same essay: "The spirit descends that it may rise again, it penetrates more and more widely into matter, that it may make the world more completely its own." Surely Shakespeare won this battle once for all. It was the very triumph of his genius to transfigure the clowns and Calibans, nay, to spiritualise this very matter which Green finds so clogging to the spirit, dress, manner, and physiognomy. Let it not be forgotten that the French critic of the old classical school felt towards Bardolph's nose-luminous with the spirit of Mrs. Quickly's excellent sack-very much what Green felt towards the apparently circumstantial vulgarity of the novel.

Yet there can be no doubt that these observations of Green and Carlyle touch a true distinction between the methods of the two arts; and it is a distinction which affords a clue to the difficulty of the historical novel.

The

novel, in contrast to poetry, is bound to present its subject in its every-day dress to the every-day mind, even when

through these means it throws a light which is by no means of every day upon the tragic significance of some quite ordinary destiny. That we may the better realise this let us look for a moment at cases where a similar motive has been treated by masters in each art. Adam Bede, like the episode of Gretchen in Faust, is a tragedy of seduction and child-murder. Le Père Goriot has been well called a French Lear, a tragedy of filial ingratitude and cruelty. Gretchen's hand was coarse and hard, just as Hetty's arms towards the wrists were coarsened with butter-making, and "other work that ladies never did." What Green might call the accident of social position is an element in both tragedies. But the setting of poor Gretchen's story is immediately significant to every educated intelligence in Christendom: the circumstances are, so to speak, incarnate ideas the temptation of the jewels, the mocking maidens, the soldierbrother, the Dies Ira in the dim cathedral. In Adam Bede, on the other hand, the full force of the tragedy depends upon its complete detailed presentation of life and sentiment in Hayslope details only immediately and thoroughly significant to people familiar with such life. We must know and feel the relation of the young squire to the tenants and villagers, and be at home at the rectory and the Hall Farm: we must enter into the spirit of the carpentering and butter-making, the birthday-feast and the Methodist preaching, and have sympathy with the pride of the selfrespecting Poysers. The pathos of the trial and sentence, and of the perhaps even more moving scene in the prison, is the focus of the tragedy, but it is not the whole tragedy. The trouble at the Hall Farm is real and deep, though it sounds querulous and selfish beside those terrible scenes. "She's made our hearts bitter to us for all our lives to come, and we shall ne'er hold up our heads i' this parish, nor i' any other." We are made to feel even the oddly expressed but intensely char

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acteristic grief of the old grandfather: "I mun begin to be looked down on now, an' me turned seventy-two last St. Thomas', an' all th' under-bearers and pall-bearers as I'n picked for my funeral are i' this parish and the next to't. It's o' no use now-I mun be ta'en to the grave by strangers."

Or again, compare Le Père Goriot with King Lear. Lear is the spiritual tragedy of filial ingratitude for all time: the details supply a picturesque background or are swallowed up in the passion of the piece. Le Père Goriot is a tragedy of filial ingratitude accurately and elaborately set in the circumstances of Parisian life of a special and, it may be hoped, transitory epoch. We feel with searching force Lear's spirit riven and all jangled out of tune by the cruelty of Goneril and Regan; but we do not get up with him in the morning and live with him day by day, witnessing the partings from the dismissed body-guards and watching the growing shabbiness of the once kingly raiment. Whereas we see with our every-day eyes every aspect of that Parisian life, and the form and circumstance of each downward step in the long martyrdom of old Goriot. And yet, see how every detail is an element in the central tragedy: the old retired tradesman's unfashionable style which banished the doating father from his daughter's table: the sordid features of the pension to which the extravagances of those daughters drove him the very stains and torn paper on the walls of the dining-room, the heavy atmosphere which Balzac christens odeur de pension, nay, the vapid slang of the pensionnaires. There is perhaps no more striking instance than this last point of the transfusing by art of matter intrinsically base, till it becomes luminous. There is nothing in this dull, transitory world so transitory and dull as stupid slang, and perhaps the stupidest piece of slang, recorded to man's shame, is the slang of the Maison Vauquer. A panorama had been set up in Paris, and it became the mode amongst the pensionnaires to

add "orama" to every other word in their witless sentences: salt without much savour, one would have thought, to season tasteless talk. At the end of the book, when Goriot had drained drop by drop the cup of humiliation and anguish, when by the grim deathbed in the desolate and fetid garret to which their extravagances had at last reduced him, the two sisters, seeking money still, by their mutual recriminations forced the poor old man to face the fact he had tried to hide from himself, that they had no affection for him, that their cruelty had been wilful, then there was wrung from him the pitiful cry: "Je sais cela depuis dix

ans.

Je me le disais quelquefois, mais je n'osais pas y croire;" and at last the tortured heart broke. Young Rastignac, fresh from the chamber of death, where he had witnessed the long agony with its harrowing alternations of delirious invective and maudlin self-reproach, comes down into the dining-room of the pension. He is greeted with: "Eh bien, il parait que nous allons avoir un petit mortorama là haut."

We dwell on these details partly to show, in disproof of Green's contention, that even such sordid matters are not beyond the transfusing power of art, but mainly to bring home to the mind the mass of intimate detail habitually employed by the novelist of this type. For to realise how abundant and convincing are such details in books like Adam Bede or Le Père Goriot, to realise how not only the spirit but the body of the tragedy is reproduced for us, is at the same time to realise the hopelessness of the task of a writer who. should set about to do the same thing for the age of the Crusades, or any age but the one with which he himself is familiar. It is just because George Eliot conscientiously endeavoured to do for Florence, for Savonarola and Tessa, what she did for Hayslope, for Mr. Irwine and Mrs. Poyser and Hetty, that the book is the comparative failure that it is. It is not merely that such details are beyond the reach of an

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