Historical fiction

“ The history of history-books gives us a glimpse of the men of the past, a chart of the facts that governed their world, an idea of the conditioning circumstances of their lives; but it withholds the closest human things, the touches of direct experience. And because life is all one, and essential experience ultimately the same, these are the very things which the novelist, better than most people, can read back into the past. These provide the peculiar place, the legitimate rôle for historical fiction. ”

“ The conflict of loyalties in historical fiction is seen here. A historical novel can not be made up of history that is picked out in snatches, and of this alone. A collection of episodes is disjointed narrative. It may be fused into running story by the imagination and the inventions of an author; or it may still remain in broken narrative, yet find a different unity in a novel that is something more than a narration. But in either event fiction must help out history. ”

“ An impulse from in front may lead one to write historical novels when "they" want historical fiction; and sometimes rather good ones; still oftener it brings great material returns, but it will never bring literature. ”

“ 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 manifesting84 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. ”

“ It is not exactly that history and fiction should dovetail into one another to produce a coherent whole; it is not simply that the story of the Popish Plot can be rounded off by a piece of invention, or the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots depicted more fully and with more connectedness by the interspersion of imaginary episodes; but it is rather that in the historical novel history and fiction can enrich and amplify one another, and interpenetrate. They can grow into one another, each making the other more powerful. ”

“ Many historical novels are stories straight from a history-book—the adventures of Guy Fawkes, the sorrows of Mary Queen of Scots—amplified and rounded off by fiction perhaps, and re-told with some variations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He has not once yielded to the temptation to display his eruditions at the expense of the story, a temptation to which so many learned men succumb when they try to write historical fiction. They succumb because they lack the instinct of the story teller, and do not realize that a novel must be a human drama first, whatever else it may be, whether a study of manners or of morals or a picture of the world in a historical epoch.... ”

“ This being so, I would ask—Is not the writer of Fiction justified in emphasising those elements of History which have a bearing on life and character in general? There is, doubtless, a wise and an unwise method of procedure. One novelist, in the very effort to be accurate, produces a work which—being neither History nor Fiction—is simply dull; while another, who has gauged the true relation between fact and imagination, knows better than to bring into prominence that which should remain only as a background. ”

“ These walls, these faces, what are they in comparison with the countless images, the innumerable population which every one of us can summon up to the tiny show-box of the brain, in material breadth scarce a span, yet infinite as space and time? And in what, I pray, are those we gravely call historical characters, of which each new historian strains his neck to get a new and different view, in any sense more real than the personages of fiction? Do not serious and earnest men discuss Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln? ”

“ It cannot be too strongly stated that the explanation of historical novels is not to be found in the fact that history needs an admixture of fiction to give it spice, to make it exciting, to relieve the boredom. ”

“ Moreover the aim of the best historical novels is not to escape the present and carry the reader back to the past, but to bring the present and the past face to face,—in short, to portray life as it exists, and always has existed. ”

“ Though a work of fiction, it aims at painting the historical features, and such works if faithfully executed throw more light than many so-called histories on the true roots and causes of the Revolution, which are so widely and so gravely misunderstood. ”

“ It is not a piece from a historical novel at all; the slight references to history and the picturesqueness of background47 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 ”

“ The historical novel, which more commonly is looked upon as having been the principal agent in the change, gave, in sooth, only what modern fiction of every kind could no longer do without, namely, local colour. ”

“ They are not bare records of fact, like the Chronicles; imagination enters into their scope; non-human, miraculous incidents are allowable; their content is not a matter for faith or factual record; they may be called historical fiction, which, broadly taken, corresponded to actual events, and typified the national strivings and ideals. ”

“ Historical fiction can be kept apart and arranged under the countries and periods, or the idea can be carried further and the books sub-divided under such headings as Human Careers, Adventures Abroad, America, English Life, Irish Life, Scottish Life, Short Stories and Sketches, Detectives and Crime. ”

“ We should count such a work an illegitimate use of historical material, unless the author gave some clear indication of its real nature. We draw a sharp distinction between history and fiction, and in the serious historian we demand fidelity to the truth as he sees it. ”

“ I know well that such a book as Green's "Short History of the English People" may prove to some more fascinating than any novel. There are, however, cases in which recourse may be had to a high-class work of fiction for the attainment of a truer historic sense; while, taken only as supplement to more strictly Academic reading, such a work may prove to have its uses. ”

“ History supplies not so much a run of narrative for the whole novel, as unrelated episodes which fiction may fasten together, but which stand alone in their original historical setting. The whole method of taking narrative itself straight from the history-book, in spite of its pointedness in reproducing definite incidents that actually happened, has its limitations in the fragmentary nature of history itself, or, at least, of the history that deals with the personal human things of story-interest. ”

“ Truth is stranger than fiction and some of the most incredible episodes that have been found in novels have been those which an author has too foolishly taken straight from life. That there is a place for such a thing as the historical novel is due to a certain inadequacy in history itself. History is full of events and issues out of which a story could be made, and of adventures that are exciting enough ”

“ Others, no less able and conscientious, and no less learned, have re-admitted tradition to investigation, and have made it their special care to pick out the historical grain from the chaff of fiction. ”

“ When the nature of an historical work admits of its being invested with a dramatic interest—and all history is capable, more or less, of having that attraction—where minute details can fill up the whole outline of characters, events, and scenes, all bearing the impress of truth and certainty, real history, being often stranger than fiction, may be, and ought to be, so written as to bring to bear upon the reader, the charm, and work the spell, of what is called romance. ”

“ For the purposes of fiction, you have to grant the possibility of the character which is analysed or displayed in action. For the purposes of history, you have to understand the correspondency of the character with the conditions and circumstances of national life. It requires a skilful delineation of those conditions to give a character historical reality. He cannot be detached from his background. His whole interest lies in the fact that he really existed, and he must above all things be made possible. ”

“ I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give, and fictitious characters and conversations might illustrate them; but none the less the actual drama of history and not the drama of invention should claim the attention of the reader. ”

“ Popular literature is full of empty fiction that sets a conventional story in a picturesque background and thinks it has done justice to history when it38 has clothed its personages in coloured costumes and given their language a touch of the obsolete, and raised up a stage-setting of courts and camps and Gothic architecture; and the drawback to the historical novel lies in the fact that the touch of strangeness, the sense of the far-away, the hint of colour and romance in all these, too often makes the emptiness of the show more tolerable ”

“ It is one of the arts that are born of the marriage of different arts. A historical event is “put to fiction” as a poem is put to music; it is turned into story as words are turned into song; it is put into a context of narrative which is like the result that is obtained when words are printed between the staves of a vocal score. And just as a composer in choosing a poem to set to music, accepts certain limitations, volunteers a certain allegiance, and must in some way be loyal to the poetry he has selected, so the historical novelist owes a certain loyalty to the history of which he treats. ”

“ The historical novel is obviously a subdivision of the novel of life and manners. But, dealing as it does with remote ages, with forgotten opinions and long-disused customs, it has to reconstruct where the novel of contemporary life has only to illustrate. Strict historical accuracy can hardly be expected in fiction concerned with the past. The details of life, always difficult to seize, are almost beyond the reach of the novelist who deals with a subject with which he has had no personal experience. ”

“ It is a truism to say that the genuine creations in fiction take their places in general apprehension with historical characters, and sometimes they live more vividly on the printed page and on canvas than the others in their pale, contradictory, and incomplete lives. ”

“ Whatever else picturesqueness may attempt to do, it must not seek to abolish the pathos of humble industry.
I have been speaking generally about picturesque ways of writing history, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Let me attempt to go a little farther, and try to discover in what the picturesqueness of history consists. It is obvious that, if it lies in a series of vivid pictures of events and striking presentations of character, the historian cannot rival the writer of fiction, and historical novels are the proper mode of expressing picturesque presentation. ”

“ An historical novel is great,—when it is great,—because, in its study of the life of the past, it displays the same qualities that give value to the life of today. The true test of greatness in an historical novel may be defined at once, as the test of its success in portraying the past with realistic effect.
With this test in mind, I have reviewed all novels of Roman life which a most thorough search has brought to light, asking the question: What degree of success do they attain in portraying the life of Rome with realistic effect? ”

“ All this represents one way in which history can be incorporated into a novel, but it is not the only way; and the particular fact that is brought to light by the Introduction to Ivanhoe, as well as by other things, is the fact that history does not merely inspire fiction by providing a tale, a thread of incident, a network of action, to be re-told in story-book fashion; it may only provoke a tale, it may just provide situations and relationships and problems which give the right kind of issue that is needed in story-making. ”

“ 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; History55 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. ”