Literary historian

“ There is art in the choice and marshaling of words. Furthermore, every department of literature—history, poetry, fiction—has a separate and definite purpose. In the successful realization of this purpose each species or form of literature must wisely choose its means. This conscious and intelligent adaptation of a means to an end is art. Apart from the careful selection and arrangement of words in sentences, the historian chooses the incidents he will relate, the order in which they will appear, the relative prominence they will have, and the symmetry and completeness of his whole work. ”

“ An historian may be an artist, too, and a novelist is an historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
I confess I dislike this contention among the various literary forms—poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama and essay—as to which of them is nearest grace. It is not the form that seizes the truth, but the imagination of the artist working200 through the form. Imagination and the sense of life are as necessary to a good historian as to a good novelist. ”

“ The high literary standard attained by the historian, writing in a language which he acquired with difficulty, and the power of vivid and dramatic description, evident in many brilliant passages, are in the circumstances very remarkable. ”

“ The historian must be more than a chronicler and an interpreter. He must be master of a lucid, virile, attractive literary style. The power of expression, indeed, must be one of his chief accomplishments. The old notion, it is true, that history is merely a branch of literature is [Pg 257] quite as erroneous as the later theory that history is a pure science and must be dissociated from all literary form. ”

“ The historian needs an imagination quite as much as he needs scholarship, and consummate literary art as much as candor and common honesty. Histories are written in order that the bulk of men may read and realize ”

“ He knew well that it obliged a writer to add largely from invention to what was actually known—to fill in with the colouring of romantic fancy the bare outline of historic fact—and thus to place the novelist's fiction in what he could not but consider most unfavourable contrast to the historian's truth. ”

“ Indefatigable in research, with an artist's eye for the picturesque, a poet's feeling for the dramatic and the human, he created the most vivid, vital histories that have yet been penned. Accurate beyond the manner of his age, gifted with genius for expression, divining the human personalities, the comic or tragic interplay of ambitions, passions, and destinies behind the mere chronicled events, he had almost ideal qualities as an historian. ”

“ The historian presents to you the outward face, the external form of history; Historical Romance would show you the heart of history, and thus bring near to your heart what, else, would stand so far off. ”

“ From such a combination of event, scene and characters our historians wrote a dramatic narrative, giving it the heroic cast without which history, the prose epic of liberty, is little better than a dull catalogue. Another very important matter was that they cultivated their style as well as their knowledge; they were literary men no less than historians, and in the conviction that the first object of literature is to give pleasure they produced works that have charmed as well as instructed a multitude of readers. ”

“ And this evidence, when subjected to judicious criticism, is trustworthy; for the ancient story-teller and poet reflects the customs and ideas and ideals of his own time, even though the combination of agencies and the preternatural proportions of the actors and their deeds belong to the imagination. The historian must know how to supplement and to give life and interest to the colorless succession of dates, names, and events of the chronicler, by means of these imaginative yet truth-bearing creations of the poet. ”

“ Your simile reminds me of a thought of my own, after my first reading of this book: that the novelist is the demagogue of letters, striving to please, and suing for public favor by catering to all its whims and weaknesses; but the historian is the aristocrat of literature, knowing the right, and proudly above taking heed of popular prejudice or moods. ”

“ HISTORY alone, of all modes of thought, places the reader above his author. While the historian more or less diligently plods along his own narrow path, perhaps the one millionth part of all history, every avenue opens wide to the imagination of those who read him. ”

“ Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the study, the history of the soul. A book which belongs to the literature of a nation, be it romance, drama, or historical work, is a gallery of character portraits, a storehouse of feelings and thoughts. ”

“ I contented myself with the humbler task to employ Romance in the aid of History,—to extract from authentic but neglected chronicles, and the unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the incidents and details that enliven the dry narrative of facts to which the general historian is confined,—construct my plot from the actual events themselves, and place the staple of such interest as I could create in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of those who had been the living actors in the real drama. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These, and perhaps other ways in which Literature may illustrate History, are tolerably obvious, and need no farther exposition. There is, however, a higher and somewhat more subtle service which Literature may perform towards illustrating History and modifying our ideas of the Past.
What the historian chiefly and finally wants to get at, through all his researches, and by all his methods of research, is the mind of the time that interests him, its mode of thinking and feeling. ”

“ In its literary productions, a nation bequeaths to posterity an ever-speaking record of its inner life.
The history of literature traces the progress of the human mind from age to age, by landmarks erected by the mind itself. ”

“ That succinctly is the naturalistic theory of the novel as a work of science—that as the history of a nation lies hidden often in social wrongs and in domestic grief as much as in the movements of parties or dynasties, the novelist must do for the former what the historian does for the latter. ”

“ Hence, biography written in a true spirit, while something quite different from history, is, nevertheless, an important supplement and aid to it, throwing light into its dark corners, and explaining its obscurity. For the historian, in the spirit of the painter or poet, must dispense with all the minutiæ of detail which would interfere with the effect of his conception. ”

“ 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 ”

“ While the historian describes events and the outward lives of men, the poet penetrates into the inner life, and portrays the spirit that moves them. The historian records facts; the poet records feelings, thoughts, hopes, and desires; the historian keeps in view the actual man; the poet, the ideal man; the historian tells us what man has been; the poet reminds us either in his dreams of the past, or in his visions of the future, what man can be; and the true poet who fulfills such a duty is as necessary to the development and education of mankind as the historian. ”

“ A rough summary of this kind is enough to show how large a question is involved in the history of Romance. All literary history is a long record of the struggle between those two rival teachers of man—books, and the experience of life. Good books describe the world, and teach whole generations to interpret the world. ”

“ In diction and style, the marks of the true historian are frankness and truth, lucidity and simplicity. The preface should be in proportion to the subject. “The body of the history ... is nothing from beginning to end but a long narrative; it must therefore be graced with the narrative virtues—smooth, level, and consistent progress, neither soaring nor crawling, and the charm of lucidity.” “Brevity is always desirable.” ”

“ With us the word 'history,' like its equivalents in all modern languages, signifies either a form of literary composition or the appropriate subject or matter of such composition—either a narrative of events, or events which may be narrated. ”

“ Literary history is, secondly, of importance, as being the index of the character and condition of a people—as holding up a mirror, which reflects the manners and customs of remote or ancient nations. The less influence, however, which literature exercises, the less valuable will be its picture of life and manners. ”

“ It is impossible for the writer of historical fiction, especially if he wishes to suggest to his readers as many subjects of interest as possible, to adapt the literary necessities of his work to fit in with the actual course of events. ”

“ Authors and even books, rather than groups and kinds, demand principal attention.
The result of this revolution is naturally most remarkable in the belles-lettres and the kindred department of history. Poetry, not dramatic, has been revived; prose romance and literary criticism have been brought to a perfection previously unknown; and history has produced works more various, if not more remarkable, than at any previous stage of the language. ”

“ The author selects some well-known event, he then adapts it to his purpose, adorns it with details of his own invention, with people who never existed, with imaginary portraits; thus he piles fiction on fiction to lend a charm to his story. I see little difference between such romances and your histories, unless it is that the novelist draws more on his own imagination, while the historian slavishly copies what another has imagined; I will also admit, if you please, that the novelist has some moral purpose good or bad, about which the historian scarcely concerns himself. ”

“ History would be a very orderly affair, could the dry-as-dust historians have their way, and doubtless it would be thrillingly romantic at every turn if the novelists were able to control its current. ”

“ He had neither time nor opportunity for original research, but his powerful imagination and picturesque style enabled him to evoke the past and make it present to his readers.
The chief characteristics of the man—psychological imagination combined with realism and a gentle irony—make his strength as a historian and his charm as a writer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In all ages, among all nations, where written records have been wanting, tradition has supplied the blank, and, generation after generation, the story of the past has been transmitted from father to son, and celebrated in the song of the wandering bard, till, at length, history has seized the shadowy phantom, and given it a place and a name on her enduring scroll. This is the fountain head of all ancient history. True, it is often so blended with the fabulous inventions of poetry, that it is not always easy to sift out the truth from the fiction. ”

“ The historian whose aim is, not to touch his readers, but to throw light upon his subject, gives these background figures a momentary prominence because the characteristics of the age are no less legibly and markedly displayed in their works than in those of its geniuses. ”

“ I pass on to deal with the subject of Historical Fiction itself. Most of us, I suppose, at one time or another have experienced a thrill of interest when some prominent personage, whom we knew well by repute, came before us in the flesh. We watched his manner, and noted all those shades of expression which in another's countenance we should have passed by unheeded. Well, it seems to me that, parallel with this experience, is that which we gain, when, reading some first-rank romance, we encounter in its pages a figure with which History has made us more or less familiar. ”

“ All primeval literary works consist of a legend, a story historical or mythical, the tale of what some man or some god has done. To the very end, novels, plays, and biography, the most human in their interest, are the favorite forms of literature. ”

“ If poetry must not theorize, much less should the historian theorize, whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's. If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws, because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also under the same conditions. ”

“ Perhaps there is as much need for Wit, an Acquaintance with Mankind, and the Knowledge of the Passions, to compose a Romance as to write a History. The only Qualification to paint Manners and Customs, is a long Experience ”