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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:

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.

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.

The first section of this book is a love-story very largely conventional. It is not a piece from a historical novel at all; the slight references to history and the picturesqueness of background and costume are not in themselves sufficient to give this story of homely private life the character of historical fiction. Nothing that happens is calculated to make a particular age of the past betray itself; there is no chord that awakens a response from History. Nothing but the slight element of colour and picturesqueness exists to prevent this from being a story of any century; and at the most there is only the suggestion of an indefinable Past such as is so attractive to the shallow romantic novelist.

In the middle of the book, however, as if by an afterthought the reader is introduced to that uprising of the people which is known as the Gordon Riots. In the fervour of describing the riotous mass-movement Dickens seems to forget his original plot and to lose sight of his principal characters. The story loses itself in a vivid sketch of the Gordon Riots, and the original problems of the book are only solved in a perfunctory way at the close. The reader who has made himself interested in the homely affairs of the Willets and Vardons is irritated to find that these are pushed on one side, and that the whole novel takes a swerve in a different direction.

In these instances the set of conditions in which the individual is involved are not static, but dynamic; and the character of them, and the sweep of them, come out at their points of contact with individual lives, and are revealed in the way they touch the concerns of men and break in upon the personal fortunes of a few people. In these instances, therefore, the wind is described by its effect on the feather that drifts helplessly in it, and we follow the flood by keeping our eyes on some particular object floating in it and swept forward by it. All this would be sufficient to make a historical novel and to justify it; for such a novel would in a way outstrip the history-book in the telling of history, since it would not merely describe a distant past to us, but would take us into it; it would not be a telescope as history is, enabling us to see something far away, but would be a bridge leading us over the gulf that divides past and present, and so annihilating time. In such a novel we should see the past from the point of view of the past, and recapture an age as it comes to individuals in it; we should be not merely twentieth-century spectators watching a distant scene, but would become contemporary with the past, and having an inside knowledge of it. In all this the historical novel would challenge the history-book in its own fields.

But this does not span the full range of this kind of novel; it omits something that historical novelists almost always go out of their way to achieve. Here the incidents and adventure of the novel may be purely fictitious, and the characters may be inventions; and only the world in which they are placed, the currents that sweep over their lives, and the movements that overwhelm them need to be real; the novel is true to the life of the past, and is faithful to the age with which it is concerned, regarding the age as a set of conditions to be conformed with. It is true to the spirit of the age; and may describe the past as a far-country; but it may have nothing to do with the actual events of the past, and with history regarded as a chain of story. Every happening that it relates may be an invention; and it can do all that has just been claimed for it without containing any specific incident that ever took place. It may tell its history by revealing history in its workings in an imaginary life set in it; in the same way as a teacher may illustrate the force of gravity to children by talking about its workings on an imaginary apple. It may be in a way true to history without being true to fact.

If a story is told us about some spot with which we are acquainted, then, although the story may not be true, it touches us somewhere, it has a root in actuality and so makes us listen, in a way which would be impossible if the story were told, so to speak, in the air. If we hear some anecdote that is narrated about a friend of ours it holds us even if we know it is a legend, in a way which it could not do if it had not fastened itself upon something real. If a story can plant one foot in actuality then it belongs no more to the clouds, and it gains an added power from having established a connection with reality. It is this kind of additional effectiveness that historical novelists seek to obtain. They are not satisfied that the world of their story shall be true to the world of the past, and that situations and incident shall grow out of that world. Their novel is not merely background, but story, and to them history is not merely the world as it once was, but also a quarry of incident. And once a novel is regarded as a story, and incidents or episodes are looked upon as the important thing, the units in it, the things into which the chapters arrange themselves--then a historical novel is still "in the air," and is only historical in a vague and unconvincing way, and lacks one of the strongest roots in actuality, if its events are fictitious and its characters imaginary, so that nothing in the story ever really "happened." There is a great difference between the novel that simply lights up the history of an age, and illustrates the conditions of the time, and one which is itself a piece of historical narrative. It is when the reader can feel that the things that are being related actually took place, and that the man about whom the stories are being told really lived although the stories about him may not all be true; it is when the thread of incident in the novel, as well as what might be called the texture of the book, can in some way be called "historical," that the work is most effective in its grip on actuality. And if this is true, an author looking at the life of the past and at the things that happened in history is like the artist looking upon a scene in nature and "longing to do something with it," longing to turn it into something and to recreate it, in such a way as to express himself as well as to reproduce actuality.

History often gives the novelist the hint for story, since the conditions and circumstances of an age are full of implied story, and are enough to set anybody tale-telling. In a larger and more direct way, as will be shown, it may further provide a theme for a novelist; in the lives of people like Mary Queen of Scots, or Richard I, and in affairs like the Gunpowder Plot or the Jacobite risings, it may give not exactly a story to the novelist, but a fit subject for novel-study, something to work upon, a problem to develop and solve; for not only on their public side, but still more on their personal side these things invite story; and history itself supplies a number of incidents about them and a general outline of broad events which set the key for a novel and fix the lines within which the novelist will work. But beyond all these there is a mass of human experience, and a wide circle of life, a whole World of People--and all these, just the things that the novelist must most trouble himself about--concerning which history, as has been shown, can tell only an inadequate story. The novelist who deals with kings perhaps, but more often with ordinary fighters and citizens--with courts and parliaments sometimes, but more often with hearts and homes, looks to history for "things that really happened," regarding history as a storehouse of narrative, and finds there only episodes. Things only come out of the darkness on brief occasions, and many things are only hinted at, and many threads of story are carried a short way and then broken and dropped; History bursts out here and there in a few fine flashes of story; but very rarely is there a consecutive flow of narrative such as would make a true, but coherent and continuous story for a novel--a long connected strand of story-issues only waiting to be re-told in fiction. This history that is narrative comes in fragments, in mere snatches, to be incorporated in fiction. The novelist who seeks to tell "things that really happened" must clutch at episodes. It remains to be seen what use he can make of them.

All novelists seem at times to introduce into their works situations and happenings straight from life, or founded upon fact; sometimes things that have been accounted incredible or unnatural in novels, have been defended by authors as having been copied straight from nature. No critic, however, would seriously admit that the appreciation of any novel is at all influenced by a fact like this. The literal truth of an incident is not sufficient justification for its inclusion in a novel, and does not even make its presence in the work more valuable; still less does it affect the worth of the whole novel as a faithful representation of truth. It is clear that the same reasoning must apply to historical episodes incorporated into fiction. The mere inclusion of some actual happening in a story, the attempt to drag in a piece of history and to patch it into a novel, is not justified by the addition of a footnote informing the reader that "This incident actually took place." The fact may interest a reader, but it is a separate kind of interest that it gives, and it does not affect the total appreciation of the novel as a complete unity. The occasional and arbitrary use of happenings from history, the sending of a few pistol-shots of actual episode into a piece of work, does not alter the character of the whole, and does not give the novel one foot in reality, a root in actual life, any more than Dickens's use of events from real life brought his novels into closer touch with reality and with truth.

Yet there is an important use that can be made of historical incident in fiction, and a more effective way of transferring anecdotes and events from history into the novel. This time the author does not exactly put his finger upon some particular period in history, and work upon that, using the conditions of the time as the hint for story; and does not apply himself specially to a certain wave of popular movement or fix his attention upon particular historical characters; these things he can never ignore, but here they are not his first thought, and it is not around these that his work takes shape; his unit is rather "the thing that actually happened"; his eye is upon the incident, and he works upon that; and the result appears in the existence of a peculiar type of episodical novel, which consists of pieces of story, isolated episodes, loosely strung together upon a thread of fiction, not worked into one another and fused together by fiction; and succeeding one another in such a detached way that sometimes the unity of the whole is very far to seek. The entire novel tends to split up into particular knots of story, one cluster of narrative having perhaps only the most accidental of connections with another, and each being in a way complete in itself.

The achievement of Dumas is sufficient to show what can be done in a novel that is above all things a narrative. Dumas did not merely set his novels in history and weave his stories around men who actually lived; he took actual situations and events, incident and action from history; and his greatness lies in the fact that he did not reproduce these in a broken episodic fashion, putting each in its own frame, and on a separate canvas, he did not merely patch them into fictions of his own and sprinkle them in his works, but he worked them in with his imagined episodes into a thread of running story.

He was lucky in the field of his labours. The history of the France that he described flashes out in brilliant episodes, and is rich in characters and situations that give the hint for more. It is the history of the great--of kings and statesmen and of the first in the land--but it is at the same time an extraordinarily personal kind of history, not a tale of dry public events. It was set in scenes of gallantry and colour, and was just distant enough to come to readers with a glamour. And Dumas by the multiplicity of the characters whose fortunes he intertwined in his novels laid a wide field of its incident and adventure open to himself, and brought a large range of actual recorded facts into the scope of his novels.

But it was his way of twining history and fiction into one another, instead of tacking the one on to the other, and of making one story out of them, that gave him his power. He ran the whole into one flowing narrative. A list could be made of the incidents in his novels that are taken from history but only a close student, and a man as learned in the history of those times as Dumas himself, can detect the joint, the place where the actual and the invented episodes fit into one another. History and fiction cannot be disentangled in these novels, and a separate r?le, a particular function in the combined work, be assigned to each; they grow into each other, and reinforce one another; each somehow gives its character to the other; so much in the novels is actual history that this lends its character to the whole, and gives it a root in actuality, so that the works come as a narrative of France, a stream of national story, a kind of history themselves.

The works of Dumas, therefore, do not come as a series of shifting episodes that displace one another. There is no stopping to set the scene for an episode or an event. The story will run into the Massacre of St Bartholomew and straight out of it, and there will be no drawing of the curtain, no break in the action, while a stage is being arranged. Exploits and adventures and intrigues come in quick succession, and keep the reader on tip-toe. The result is an effect of sheer movement. Everything seems in motion. The novels are pure story, and Dumas is pre-eminently a teller of stories.

History may be regarded as a chain of ages that overlap, and run into each other and then fold under--as an ocean of human life, generations of peoples, coming in waves through the centuries. It may also be regarded as a thread of narrative, a stream of story, winding through time. Dumas more than anybody else has succeeded in turning history into narrative like this. His works are a thread of story running through centuries of the history of France.

They are not pictures of France. Dumas's eye does not sweep the broad landscape of France, does not see the whole of it. The deep sound of the ocean of peoples does not reverberate through his books. The great life of France is not in them, like a sounding-board against the noisy events of court and camp. The ebb and flow of popular movements does not surge through them; and only occasionally is the swelling tide of some big heave of human effort let in, to hint at the mass-life of France outside the pages of the story. Dumas does not stop to paint a horizontal scene of France as a whole; and because of this his thread of story keeps moving, but there are no broad landscapes of history. There are courts and state-rooms, hunting-fields and street-scenes; but these do not echo the sounds from mountains and plains and the larger France. Dumas gives a trickle of narrative running through history; not a surging flood. He deals with the men who in their day were the men who mattered, the life which, while it was being lived, was considered to be the life that counted in France; and he deals with the region which stood out in high light above the dark masses in the past, and about which, therefore, history could remember things.

The limit of the things that history can remember must determine the range of most historical novels, and fix their choice of subject. It is useful to see the bearings upon this of that slight differentiation in meaning between the words "historic" and "historical." A "historical" event is anything that really happened in history, but a "historic" one is a celebrated one--one that would not be forgotten and that made a noise in the world. A "historic" character is a famous character, very often a public man. And so history comes to mean, not the world living out its centuries, but the stage upon which the big things happened and were noticed, and upon which far-reaching issues were worked out. In all the ages of the past there have been a few people who have moved the world, and have cut a great figure in their day, and behind these there has been the mass of people who did not lead, but followed, who did not act, but watched, who were the material upon which the great men worked, the instrument upon which the men in high station played. They were spectators of the historic event, as much as we; but only the actors in it belong to remembered history. History then becomes, as it were, the limelight directed upon the arena of loud-sounding events and brilliant action, leaving the whole theatre of spectators in darkness. It is the platform for Cromwell and Caesar and Napoleon and Milton; captains and kings and discoverers and heroes feel at home upon it; but behind it are the people who watch and suffer and serve these Cromwells and Caesars; they leave no memorial; and only occasionally at moments of intense history-making, do they break through on to the platform, and sweep across the stage, and show that they are there.

This arena of great "historic" event provides a more spacious theme for the novelist than mere episodes abstracted from universal history can do. Instead of wandering in the interesting by-ways of the past, and finding surprises of thrilling episode in out-of-the-way corners, the novelist may boldly face the full course of important events, and plunge into the fate and fortunes of the great. The historical novel then becomes an embodiment of historic things in the sense of far-reaching, loud-sounding issues, and it has a wider canvas, an ampler scope. Here it is not incidents merely that are taken from history, but a whole block of action and happening, a whole act from the mighty drama of the ages. History provides not merely snatches of tune that have to be worked into some sort of connection with one another, but a whole orchestral theme, which the novelist re-organises and works out afresh. It gives a set of issues that are capable of novel-study, and are full of human-meaning, and embody a problem in experience. Only, it must be said, all this is limited, or at least its character is determined, by the fact that this theme must concern men who have been in the public eye, and events that have been enacted in the sight of the world and so have been registered on the memory of the world. And a novel that deals with public events and national affairs and treats of people who are remembered in history because of their part in the political movements of their time, presents a problem that is peculiar in one respect.

The theme of a novel is human experience and the fate of human beings in the world. It covers all the things that the heart has ever touched, all the varied harmonies that it has happened to strike as it has brushed against life. It may concern itself with the big events that send their echo through the ages, it may feel the great heart that pulses in the life of a whole continent, it may tell of movements that have broken upon the world and changed the fate of peoples; but its supreme interest is in a mere man. In a sense it is true that every man is alone in the world, and feels himself stranded amongst "everything else." He is, and he cannot help being, the centre of the circle of his own horizon; he must see his fellow-creatures as part of the "everything else," part of the world against which he stands out; and that outer world must come to him as an experience and an adventure. The one thing that exists for him is this experience of the world.

And that is the one thing that exists in him for the novelist. It is the aim of the novelist to stand by the individual and feel life with him. The waves of some political or historic movement may touch the man and so come within the range of the novel, but they will not affect the man any more than his own special, homely concerns--probably they will only affect him through those little concerns. It is his own hopes and ambitions and fears as he finds himself set up against the world of men and things, his conflict with circumstances, his moods and his glad moments, his risks, his falling in love, his bewilderments, his relations with men, that make up a novel. Some writers, like Jokai and Dumas and Stevenson, will be specially concerned with the adventure of his life; the things that happened, the things he undertook, the surprises and the thrills; these are the story-tellers whose novels are narrations; but others, and especially the modern novelists, look more to the experience, and regard it as a theme to be studied as well as a story to be related. Perhaps these are the true historians, for they record experience, and it is they who in the most intimate and personal way capture life into the pages of a book.

The scope of the novel, however, is not limited to the life and affairs of ordinary people, average humanity. There are people who have felt life more intensely than others, and have reached loftier heights of experience than most. Things may have come to them with greater power than to the mass of people. Perhaps life is for ever a bigger thing because they have lived and have swept new ranges of experience, and have happened upon new chords, fresh harmonies of feeling, and have in some way communicated these to the world. Then again, there are men who, not because of any intrinsic greatness of mind or heart, but by reason of what we mortals can only regard as the incalculable thing, and can only call "chance," have been placed in exceptional circumstances and situations of novelty, and so have struck upon new elements of experience, or fresh life-problems. In the careers of such men life seems to come out in new forms, and in unexpected ways. If they can be captured for the novel, then the novel can range over the finest regions of life, and can communicate their experience to the world, and so enlarge life for everybody else.

It might seem that these, the men of exceptional powers, and the men who find themselves in unusual situations, are the very people whom history does not forget; but this is only true with one great limitation. They must be people whom exceptional powers or the apparent accident of circumstances once brought into the public eye. They must be "historic" people, as well as "historical," if our knowledge of them is to be more than fragmentary. If a man is memorable in his public life, then the world will see to it that his private life does not go unrecorded and unremembered; the personal things, the experience of the man even, will become known in so far as they are not specially concealed and in so far as such things in the life of an individual are communicable to others. The novelist who can do justice to these is widening the range of the novel, and bringing new and intenser experience into the kingdom of the novel, and is exploring life in its most intractable regions. He reaches life as it has been lived, at some of its finest points, and at some of its most splendid or most pressing moments. History, it has been seen, may give wing to the novel, and may expand its range. What is true for the life of an age or a people is here true also of the life of individuals. Biography also may place new fields of experience within the scope of a novel.

Statesmen and kings and scientists, then, are not shut out of the novel, but the novelist's interest in them is not an interest in the statesmanship, or in the rule, or in the science but in the whole personality of the man behind these, and his theme is still a human heart caught into the world and entangled in time and circumstance. The politician, the economist, the philosopher and the psychologist are all students of mankind in a way, and can claim that their studies are human studies; but they only start with human nature, and they soon run into theorems and formulas and lose themselves in their own categories, and so are swept away from contact with flesh and blood. But the novelist does not begin with men and then leap into abstractions. He keeps his hand on a human pulse all the time. Political issues coming into his work are put into their whole context in life and experience, and instead of being abstracted into a realm of political science they are fastened to men and women who are "political animals," but are something more as well. The novelist sees the whole of life, and he goes one further, and one better than the scientific historian in that men are to him ends in themselves, not merely servants of a process which consumes them, not merely means to an end and links in the chain of history. A man may lose himself in politics or mathematics but to the novelist it is still the man that matters.

The things that are far-reaching and historic are not to him more important than the things that are momentary yet external. He would give more to catch a real glimpse of Mary Queen of Scots tapping her foot in a moment of impatience than to possess a logical statement of her political position at any time. He will not ignore the politics of some Prime Minister of a former century, but he would love still more to surprise him at play. A great political speech might come within the scope of his work, but where a historian might be tempted to sum up the whole event in terms of politics, he would notice too the headache that made the statesman depressed and the heat of the building that made him irritable, the private worries that he could not throw off and that tormented his mind and perverted his judgment, and the sight of a man sitting opposite whom he detested in private life and who wore an annoying tie. The novelist would attempt to recapture the moment, rather than to estimate its historic significance, and the things which he would notice would be those which influenced the man at the moment, though they did not always concern the politics.

There was once a day when kingdoms were a piece of family property that could be sold, and the whole politics of a land depended on marriages, and wars raged for years over some intricate point in a genealogical table; in those days public events were part of the private concern of a king, and as surely as the succession to a throne depended upon family inheritance, the affairs of the kingdom depended upon personal whims and private ambitions. There was a time when the religious system of England had to be changed because a king wished to marry a lady about his court. In the world that Dumas described so well, personal prowess and individual exploits determined events, and private concerns and the prejudices and feuds of families cut across the larger history of a nation. There have been times when a slight offered to a king's mistress has been more tragic in its results than a lost battle or a lost election; and who knows how much the history of a reign has been affected by an influence like that which Buckingham had upon Charles I, or the Duchess of Marlborough upon Queen Anne? In all these things private life complicates even where it does not determine public events, and all history is full of imaginable situations like these that invite novel-treatment. When personality counts in public affairs, and many things, other than purely political motives--even things which seem trivial and accidental--determine the conduct of a man at any time, then the mood of a moment, the personal discomfort or family irritation that might have caused it, the perversities of whim and arbitrary desire, and a hundred other things in a man may affect history. The historical novel, not consciously perhaps, but still demonstrably stands for this fact. It emphasises the influence of personal things in history, it regards man's life as a whole and runs his private action and his public conduct into each other, as it ought to do; and it turns the whole into a study of human nature. Even when dealing with an action that seems purely political it will root the action in personality, not merely in politics. Because every public action that was ever taken can be regarded as the private act, the personal decision of somebody, historic events can become materials for the novel, in spite of the fact that public affairs and political matters are not in themselves issues for a novel.

The novelist looking at a historic figure sees personality where the scientific historian is tempted to see only the incarnation of a policy. He feels flesh and blood where the ordinary history-reader complains that he is given only abstractions. Every historic decision that comes under his review has for him a context in the mind of the man who made it and not simply in the politics of the day. Behind every great name he sees a human being, with a peculiar experience of life; even if history does not tell of the experience he knows it is there, he thinks it into history and endows the man with it, and he completes the personality in his imagination, bringing in fiction to supply what history fails to give. That is true resurrection, that is the reason why historical novels are full of life and of people, where history is often bloodless and dead.

It is evident from all this that there are particular periods and particular problems in history that are specially adapted to this kind of novel-treatment. An age of riotous individualism and of aggressive personalities is more suited to it than one in which corporate action determines events. An age in which war is a game, an orgy of fun and fine fighting, is better than one in which war is an intricate and organised science. A king who governs by whim is more fitting than a politician who is merely the mouthpiece of a party, the servant of organised action. More and more as life increases in complexity and the world becomes organised on impersonal lines, the historical novel that treats of the action of personalities in history and the interaction of private life and public events, must find its course intricate and hard. Ultimately personality counts to-day as much as ever it did in history; it is still the real power, but its influence is not direct, and immediate, and palpable; things perhaps can be traced back to the influence of individuals, but it is an ultimate influence, an influence in the last resort, and it does not show itself on the surface of life. It is fairly true to say that the historical novel, where it deals with politics and public events, must seize upon those periods of history and those phases of life in which personality not only matters in the last resort, but makes an immediate impression and stamps itself directly upon the world. The mental struggle of Charles I before he consented to sacrifice Strafford to his enemies, and the personal influence which immediately contributed to his decision are a theme for the novel; but it would need a large admixture of fiction and a wilful exaggeration of the interaction of private concerns with political issues, and a perversion of history to treat a modern change of ministry in the same fashion.

Nothing could be more suited to this idea of the historical novel than a reign like that of Mary Queen of Scots, in which the whims of a woman are a national concern, a direct and immediate influence upon historic events, and history for a time hangs upon her moods and prejudices, and her very love-stories have a kind of political significance.

Such is the sort of theme that a novelist can take from history--one in which public affairs appear as somebody's private concern, and so can be treated in a personal way. A set of historic events or the career of some historic figure is placed in its context in personal experience, and is worked into a novel that may be a study as well as a story. Somebody has said that every individual carries within him at least one novel, the story of his own wrestle with life. It may be added that every historic theme, every chapter taken out of the past contains within itself not merely a story, but several stories, all of them equally true, all of them representing the same set of events as they came to the various people concerned and struck home in different ways--all of them facets of the same truth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Vend?e, 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 . 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.

Molly was a handsome fool.... She lacked the historic sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of warehouses, jetties, and a church or two--an unfamiliar Wapping upon a river with a long name.

Maurice Hewlett's heroine had known only Wapping and Wapping was her world. She could not think of Rome as being, so to speak, the blossom of another sort of tree--a place where the very sky looked different; but she must take Wapping as the pattern of things. Her untravelled mind could not see that Life as it strikes through the Earth, crystallising into towns and cities and breaking out in buildings and fashions and thoughts, is one thing here and another thing there, and ever finds fresh forms for its expression like an artist in his moods. Molly could not dream that all history--and, behind history, geography--had conspired to make Rome a different picture, a different mood, from the Wapping she had known. She "lacked the historic sense." It was not that the warehouses of Rome might be different from those of Wapping, or its churches bigger, or all these set out in an unfamiliar way; it would have been wrong if it had been possible to think of Rome as an unfamiliar Wapping, without warehouses, jetties and churches, all. The truth was that Rome was one poem, and Wapping was another poem; and each was the clothing of a Life. Each was a personality; in a way, a world in itself. Each had that sort of one-ness and identity which gave it an "atmosphere" of its own.

For a mind that is moulded to a locality the historical novel can come as travel and as an opening of the windows of the world. It is not a history-lesson, a book that sits to facts, a record of things as they actually happened; or rather, it may be all this and it has an added power if it is, but its appeal and purpose are not here. When a reader comes to the historical novel he is not, or ought not to be, ignorant of the fact that it is a form of fiction that he is reading, and that history in it is mixed with inventions in a proportion which he cannot be expected to estimate with any precision. The novel does not replace the history-book; it is a splendid thing if it drives us to the history-book, if it provides us with something--some sort of texture--in which the facts of the history-book, when we come to them, can find a context and a lively significance and a field that gives them play. The real justification of the novel as a way of dealing with the past, is that it brings home to readers the fact that there is such a thing as a world of the past to tell tales about--an arena of vivid and momentous life, in which, men and women were flesh and blood, their sorrows and hopes and adventures real as ours, and their moment as precious as our moment. The power of the novel is that it can give to people the feeling for history, the consciousness that this world is an old world that can tell many stories of lost years, the sense that the present age is the last of a trail of centuries. It makes history a kind of extension of our personal experience, and not merely an addition to the sum of our knowledge.

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