Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 810
Look through the pages of Parkman’s books and you will find an unending series of magic phrases of scene and sky. Or take a sustained passage and observe the cumulative effect, the intensity of the reality. Here, in the volume La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, are Joliet and Marquette (1675) at the Winsconsin river. They have passed 9 from Lake Michigan up the river and over the marshes and have now reached waters moving the other way to bear them to the Mississippi:
Carrying their canoes a mile and a half over the prairie and through the marsh, they launched them upon the Wisconsin, bade farewell to the waters that flowed to the St. Lawrence, and committed themselves to the current that was to bear them they knew not whither — perhaps the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the South Sea or the Gulf of California. They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape-vines; by forests, groves, and prairies, the parks and pleasure grounds of a prodigal nature, by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars under the shadowing trees between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some wooded bluff. At night, the bivouac — the canoes inverted on the bank, the flickering fire, the meal of bison-flesh or venison, the evening pipes and slumber beneath the stars; and when in the morning they embarked again, the mist hung on the river like a bridal veil, then melted before the sun, till the glassy water and the languid woods basked breathless in the sultry glare.
It may be objected of course that this beautiful imagery, this completed picture, demands time and space. There is not room for it within an ordinary history book. This is quite true. But it means that the writer of any history book, short or long, should contrive to get as much of this effect as the space will allow, should feel that there is a certain indispensable minimum of it that must be there or the book is not history. There is no hardship in telling a writer to sacrifice a certain amount of detail of fact for a greater intensity of presentation. After all, details are infinite. When you have given all you have there are plenty more behind.
On the other hand historians determined to insert every last detail of fact, every first and last cause, so crowd and condense their material as to defeat their own end. What they write becomes unintelligible without a special effort and unrememberable even with one.
The extreme type of this kind of writing is found in what are sometimes called in their titles ‘political’ histories of this or that country. This means that they not only leave out the weather, but every other human or natural aspect of everything except meetings, votes, motions, committees, resolutions and sentences of execution. The effect is dreary beyond words. One such history of modern Europe, written in French but translated into English words, was inflicted so long and so cruelly on so many of our American universities that it is better not to name it. But we may throw against the glass houses of our neighbours the bricks that we wouldn’t throw into our own, and refer to another modern French work, Aulard’s Histoire Politique de la dévolution Française. In this the Assembly meets, calls itself to the order of the day, calls’ itself out of the order of the day, goes into a committee and comes right out of it, expels itself, meets outside, votes death, abrogates the votes, declares the constitution open, then closed — the whole thing punctuated by public executions without wind or weather or scenery or spectators — and that is called the French Revolution.
One admits of course the need for tabulated fact. But such a thing is only like a guide book or a street directory. Let it be granted of course that there is a certain necessary apparatus of dates and names indispensable to history as a frame to hold itself in. But dates are not history, only a necessary adjunct, no more history than a pair of braces is a pair of trousers. The dates hold the history up. But a man with a list of dates only makes as sorry a showing as a man with braces but no trousers.
Speaking still of the French Revolution we may realize that the great moments of the world history can only be properly appreciated when properly presented. Here are two contrasted pictures from the history of the French Revolution. The first is Sir Archibald Alison’s account (History of Europe) of the execution of Robespierre. The next is the execution of Louis XIV as carried out in a college history.
Here is Alison:
‘At four in the afternoon all Paris was in motion to witness the death of the tyrant. He was placed on the chariot, between Henriot and Couthon, whose persons were as mutilated as his own, the last in the vehicle, in order that, with the usual barbarity of the period, which he himself had been instrumental in introducing, he should see all his friends perish before him. They were bound by ropes to the benches of the car in which they were seated; and the rolling of the vehicle during the long passage, which was through the most populous quarters of Paris, produced such pain in their wounds, that they at times screamed aloud. The gendarmes rode with their sabres presented to the people who clapped their hands, as they had done when Danton was led to execution. Robespierre’s forehead, one eye, and part of the cheek, were alone seen above the bandage which bound up the broken jaw. St. Just evinced throughout the most unconquerable fortitude. Robespierre cast his eyes on the crowd, turned them aside, and shrugged his shoulders. The multitude, which for long had ceased to attend the executions, manifested the utmost joy at their fate. They were conducted to the Place de la Revolution; the scaffold was placed on the spot where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had suffered. The Statue of Liberty still surmounted the scene. Never had such a crowd been witnessed on any former occasion; the streets, despite the earliness of the hour, were thronged to excess; every window was filled; even the roofs of the houses, like the manned yards of a ship, were crowded with spectators. The joy was universal; it almost approached to delirium. The blood from Robespierre’s jaw burst through the bandage, and overflowed his dress; his face was ghastly pale. He kept his eyes shut, when he saw the general feeling, during the time the procession lasted, but could not close his ears against the imprecations of the multitude. A woman, breaking from the crowd, exclaimed: “Murderer of all my kindred! Your agony fills me with joy; descend to hell covered with the curses of every mother in France!” He ascended the scaffold with a firm step, and was laid down near the axe. Twenty of his comrades were executed before him; during the time they were suffering, he lay on the scaffold with his eyes shut, never uttering a word. When lifted up to be tied to the fatal plank, the executioner tore the bandage from his face; the lower jaw fell upon his breast, and he uttered a yell which filled every heart with horror. For some minutes the frightful figure was held up, fixed to the board, to the multitude; he was then placed under the axe, and the last sounds which reached his ears were the exulting shouts, which were prolonged for some minutes after his death.’
Here, on the other hand, is the way in which King Louis XVI is executed in a modern compendium history, which many will recognize without my naming it:
‘On the morning of the list he was driven in the company of Santerre and Garat to the Place de la devolution....’
This sounds like a civic reception.
‘Although the attitude of the crowd was on the whole sympathetic, the Jacobins managed everything so well that no incident occurred.’
None, that is, except cutting off the King’s head.
‘Louis’ behaviour on the scaffold was marked by perfect composure and piety. His attempt to address the crowd was cut short by the roll of drums’
It is not mentioned that the King’s head was cut off. But the account adds that at 10.20 a in on January 21,1793, his head was held up to the crowd by Sanson the executioner. Somebody must have cut it off a little before that.
No doubt the writer of this account would say that everything essential is there. Yet to some people it seems — it may be said without ill-nature — a little too comfortable. It suggests an odd mixture of a civic function and a scene of horror — perhaps it was. One might, still without ill- nature, offer a comparison with a similar mixed scene in that good old book of Max Adder’s called Out of the Hurly- Burly. Here the mixture arises from a country newspaper getting the type of two articles mixed — one an account of a presentation gift to the Rev. Dr. Hopkins and the other a description of a new hog-killing machine.
‘Several of the Rev. Dr. Hopkins’s friends called upon him yesterday, and after a brief conversation the unsuspecting hog was seized by the hind legs and slid along a beam until he reached the hot-water tank. His friends explained the object of their visit and presented to him a very handsome butcher who grabbed him by his tail, swung him around, slit his throat from ear to ear, and in less than a minute the carcass was in the water.’
The unhappy Louis XIV. had nothing on the Rev. Dr. Hopkins. But perhaps the analogy is far fetched, or fetched for the sake of fetching it. It may be pardoned; history is dull stuff anyway and needs brightening up with Dr. Hopkins.
Let it be agreed of course that in this writing of history the picturesque aspect must be kept within its proper limits. It must never run to picturesqueness for picturesqueness’s sake. Making pictures is one thing, writing history is another. There was a famous French romanticist who saw and described Niagara Falls while still the country was wilderness. He puts in all the foam, mist, noise, roar, trees, wind — even the wild monkeys dangling from the trees — he says so. Parkman would have given the Falls two lines, and yet caught the sound of them, and assigned the monkeys to a foot-note. Similarly William Cullen Bryant describes the prairies and covers a thousand lines. Parkman spreads them noiselessly out underfoot for the explorer Verendrye and those who followed. In the one treatment the picturesque is a picture and the history a background to muse upon; in the other the picturesque element is introduced only to obtain the full comprehension of the narrative, impossible without it. Here, for instance, is the English historian John Richard Green (Short History of the English People), a master of condensed and vivid imagery, describing the effect of the preaching of the first Methodists to the working people of England. Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the dens of London, or in the galleries where in the pauses of his labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea. When I read that as a boy at school I thought it wonderful and I think so still. Nor can you get the same effect of reality by writing, after the compendium fashion:
Whitefield then went to the West of England where he preached at Taunton (Sept, j), at Exmouth (Sept. 4), at Wrexmouth (Sept. 5), and at Pargelly, Clovelly and Pingelly on three following days. On some of these occasions Mr. Whitefield preached underground, once at a mean barometric altitude (or lack of it) 100 feet below sea-level.
This will never convey what is needed.
On the other hand the attempt to make history vivid, if overdone and underdone by those who can’t do it, produces mere bombast, a potful of words and epithets, stock phrases and forced comparisons. With such writers the Mississippi is always the Father of Waters, the Saskatchewan the mighty Saskatchewan. The rivers always roll, the mountains frown, the precipices yawn — certainly one can’t blame the precipices. The colour is so thick, so continuous, that the reader longs for a plain statement such as: Washington remained with his army at Valley Forge from the first of the month till the fifteenth — and not:
Here remained the intrepid, unbudging, unbudgable Washington, his back against the frozen snow-drifts in which were firmly set his hard-bitten, close-nipped, underfed, overtaxed Americans, still waving the Stars and Stripes.
This type of writing is often called journalese, but there is a distinction. The journalist writes it only to give the people what the people want, as you give sugar candy to children; he really knows better. But the bombast historian is trying his best to show the people what they ought to want.
One further word needs to be said to distinguish between the problem of how to write history and the problem of how to interpret it. It is with the first of these, the art of narration, that this present book is properly concerned. The other problem, commonly called the philosophy of history, belongs elsewhere. It deals with such matters as to whether history repeats itself, in other words whether, in some degree, the study of history has a prophetic character and helps us to foretell the future. The idea of general historical laws has found great favour in the past especially as it could go hand in hand with a divine or theological interpretation. But in our complicated and changing events it is impossible to trace the effect of such general laws and nothing can be prophesied till it is over. General laws are thus out of date. But particular sequences of history are still capable of discussion, and indeed call for it. Did the French Revolution make Europe or ruin it? Such questions are to most of us more engrossing than the lesser problem of how to narrate what happened in the French Revolution. But writing the Revolution must come first and interpreting it after.
There is also the question of ‘selecting’ history — which is a part of its interpretation. Is history to be a record of monarchs and dynasties, or ‘good kings’ and ‘bad kings,’ as it used to be in the English school-book, Little Arthur’s England? Is it mainly a record of wars, battles, conquests and cessions of territory, the drum-and-fife history which was the prevailing type of a century ago? On the other hand history can be thought of as the story of the life of a people — the plain people, all the people — and of the rise of industry and the progress of agricultural settlement — a sort of Farmers’ Almanac in place of a Court Circular.
Now some people, as notably Thomas Carlyle, have thought that the plain people are always led, moulded and made or marred in their destiny by the people of exception, good and bad — for England, let us say, the Oliver Cromwells and Charles Wesleys and the Cecil Rhodeses. Hence even if you pin your history down to the plain people it won’t stay there. This theory, along with the regal theory, fell flatter and flatter in Victorian times, during the Great Peace of 1815-1854, that was to last for ever, and even in the Victorian half-century that followed when war seemed for ever ended for the home people of Great Britain and henceforth only an intermittent thing of exception, for savages, foreign revolutionaries and such. Hence the British historians more and more laid stress on the history of the people. They no longer wanted the children to read of the conflict of the Wars of the Roses, of the battles over in the snows of Towton and King Richard shouting for a horse at Bosworth Field. They wanted them to learn all about the life of the people, how the Britons painted themselves blue and the Normans made tapestry and the minstrels sang in the land. How much of these pictures really got home it is hard to say. The battles were simpler for children to understand and to imitate. The life in the castle beat them. I recall a school-paper answer in a juvenile class in my teaching days, given to an examination question about life in the castle. ‘In the evening in the Great Hall,’ wrote the pupil, ‘the men used to get drunk and play chess.’ It was a high compliment to British character, but looks poor as an encouragement to historical method.
John Richard Green of the Short History was the most ardent advocate of this school. ‘War plays a small part,’ he writes, ‘in the real story of European nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any,’ Yet Sir Charles Oman, the veteran historian of the art of war, looking back from 1941 in a retrospect of the half a century since Green wrote, remarked: ‘What a pity Green did not live to see 1914 or 1939!’ Green, as Oman points out, and plenty of others of his day, had a comfortable sort of democratic, evolutionary idea of history, in which ‘freedom had broadened down from precedent to precedent.’ Great men counted for relatively little. The worst was over. There were just a few little things, such as the slums, poverty and unemployment left to attend to. Meantime, history could be made of druids and mistletoe, tapestry; Elizabethan sheep-runs instead of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots; spinning machines instead of the American Revolution; and gas light and steam print instead of Waterloo.
Yet, after all, if war is to be the chief history, all the greater curse on it.
It is a fascinating and interesting inquiry, greatly commended to all who write, or read.
CHAPTER EIGHT. HOW TO WRITE HISTORICAL NOVELS
THE CHARM OF the past — Saxon oak trees and Norman courtyards — Difficulty to make it live — Difference (if any) between Tennyson’s King Arthur and a stuffed shirt — Antiquarian affectation — Don’t say the knight wore a salade — How to make historic people talk — Include me out, laughed Mary, Queen of Scots — Tady Rowena at the bat — The beam in our own eye — Dirt enough to attract clean minds — Private life of Peter the Hermit.
BUT now we come to the real thing, the orte most connected for our purpose with history — the writing of historical fiction. There is a never-ending attraction in the past. For the past contains the good old times, and also the bad old times. Our phrases cluster round it as the ‘days of old,’ and the ‘men of old,’ and beyond these again ‘the days of yore.’ Here as everywhere the individual repeats the experience of the race. He looks back to the prehistoric twilight of the nursery, the cave-men days of the boyhood farm, the heroes of high school; he carries the same viewpoint of his own life as a nation does of its centuries, with all the colours at the early morning, when the woods were green and the sky always blue and love beautiful and sweet.
Well may a child or boy of imaginative mind slip out of the pages of a school book into dreams of Saxon England, of men riding under the great oak trees... of Norman knights clattering on the pavement of the courtyard...
and most of all, of the long ships with beaks like dragons driving on to the beaches of England under a huge square sail and with that for ever the mystery and magic of the sea.
So the interest comes to him — the urge people often call it now — but the word sounds too much like itch — so shall we say the impulse to write it all down, reproduce the scenes and people that pass like a bannered procession before his inner vision.... He tries to do so — with a pitiable result... all that comes from his pen is... ‘How now,’ said Sir Boris, leaping in full armour from his horse and drawing his double-handed sword as he came down, foul catiff, would’st insult a lady! Have at you! Here’s you on you!’ The pen hesitates, stops. Would Sir Boris really talk like that? Would he, or anyone, really say, Have at you! Could he really leap with all that iron stuff? It would give his heels an awful jolt.... The pen drops... but another boy picks it up and the eternal struggle goes on to reproduce the past. Has it ever succeeded.... Some people think it never can. We can make something else, or something better, or something just as good — but not the past. There is, as it were, a contradiction in terms; because it is past we cannot make it present.
