Studies in Literature and History
power, who studied his period, would be quite as likely to make a
lucky selection of real incidents, motives, and characters, in a story
of the Roman Empire or of England under the Plantagenets, as an
erudite writer of history. Perhaps the best measure available to us of
what we may believe in regard to far-off times is afforded by
observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places;
and this test the novelist is rather more apt, on the whole, to employ
than the historian.
In the novels, as upon the stage, this demand for minute accuracy of
scenic or historical details has necessarily elicited an abundant
supply; though whether the entire picture is rendered much more
natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be
questioned. 'La recherche exageree du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It
is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a
life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its
ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter
studies archaeology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local
colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The
result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be
great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be
undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of
motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern
novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his
time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is
moulded by the environment of ideas and circumstances within which he
lives. The Myth, the Romance, the Historic Novel, each in its
successive period, did at least this service to later generations:
they preserved and handed down to us the popular impressions, the
figures or pictures of great men and striking events, as they were
reflected upon the imagination of subsequent ages. It can never be
discovered, and it does not very much matter, whether these images
have any close resemblance to the lost originals; it may be that some
artists in some periods saw far more clearly than in others. The true
criterion for estimating the true value of romantic fiction, of tales
of action and adventure, must be always its artistic and intellectual
qualities, the question whether it succeeds in filling a broad canvas,
in dealing with masculine sentiment and stirring action, in striking
the deeper chords of human emotion and energy.
But the historic novel of our day strives principally after exact
reproduction, as may be seen even in a book of such incontestable
talent as _Marius the Epicurean_, and very notably in Archdeacon
Farrar's book, _Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero_
(1891), which may stand as the type and complete specimen of Erudite
Fiction. In his preface he tells us that
'those who are familiar with the literature of the first century
will recognise that even for the minutest allusions and particulars
I have contemporary authority. Expressions and incidents which to
some might seem startlingly modern, are in reality suggested by
passages in the satirists, epigrammatists, and romancers of the
(Roman) Empire, or by anecdotes preserved in the grave pages of
Seneca and the elder Pliny.'
Here we have reached, in this conscientious explanation of method, the
extreme point of remoteness from the original spirit of historic
romance. Archdeacon Farrar's figures and descriptions are worked out
upon the pattern of a mosaic, by piecing together the loose
fragmentary bits of our knowledge regarding life and society under
Nero. A glance at these books shows that they belong to the latest
school of nineteenth-century fiction, to a period when careful
scholarly accumulation of accessories and adroit adaptation of history
have taken the place, not only of convention and clumsy invention,
but also of the free untrammelled handling of types and traditions
which gave freshness and originality to the simpler forms of early
romance.
We believe, then, that these attempts at exact reproduction, this
method of the multiplication of particulars, involve a fallacy, and
are detrimental to the more enduring forms of art. But the people is
willing to be deceived; the general reader has acquired a taste that
must be gratified; with the result that the elder romancers in prose
and verse, including Scott and Byron, are falling out of fashion with
the middle classes, though Scott holds his own in the sixpenny
edition. The rule of Realism is becoming so despotic that the story of
adventure is reverting more and more to that shape which lends itself
most completely to life-like narrative, the shape of a Memoir. And it
may be pointed out accordingly that in France the Editor of Memoirs
has lately entered into substantial rivalry with the Novelist of
Adventure.
It must have been noticed by those who attend to the course of French
literature, that of late years the publication of Memoirs relating to
the period of the Revolutionary war, and especially of the First
Empire, has rather suddenly increased. The causes are undoubtedly to a
considerable degree political, connected with the reorganisation of
the French army and navy, which has revived the military ardour of the
nation, and has given an edge to the deep-seated spirit of rivalry
with Germany on land and with England at sea. Whatever immediately
interests a nation gives a sharp turn to its literature, and the
immense success of General Marbot's book, containing the extraordinary
personal experiences of one who passed through the most famous scenes
of the heroic era, exactly hit off the public taste at a moment when
various motives combined to revive the Napoleonic legend. The
historians of that era had done their harvesting; the crop had been
reaped, raked, and gleaned; the time was too near and too thoroughly
known for fiction; and yet there never was a finer field for the
production of romance. No one can doubt that if Napoleon Bonaparte had
conquered half Europe, won his tremendous battles, and founded his
empire in an illiterate prehistoric age, he would have taken
everlasting rank with Alexander the Great and Charlemagne as the
central figure of a third world-wide cycle of heroic myths; nor is it
necessary to read Archbishop Whately's _Historic Doubts_ to perceive
how readily Napoleon's real story lends itself to extravagant
myth-making. At a later period he might have been the leading
character in some prolix and pedantic romance, and still more recently
his life and deeds would have been built up into the scaffolding
within which the historic novelist used to construct his love idylls,
his tragic situations, or even his illustrations of some social
theory. All these methods and devices have become obsolete; and though
the spirit of hero-worship that animated those who listened to the
ancient tales still possesses mankind at certain seasons, Romance must
now submit to the hard conditions of modern Realism. In this
predicament it finds a new and satisfactory embodiment in the form of
Memoirs concerning the great Emperor and his companions, which
dispense copious anecdotes of his court and camp, his sayings and
doings, his domestic habits, his private manners and peccadilloes. If
these particulars can be served up as sauce to the description of
mighty events, the contrast renders them all the more savoury. But
there is now a large class of readers who care less about Jena and
Austerlitz than for such books as _Napoleon Intime, Napoleon et les
Femmes_, which have all the attraction always possessed by the
intermixture of love and war, and by the blending of arms with amours
in the conventional style of historic fiction. The lowest depth is
reached when the reminiscences of an Emperor's valet, to whom he is
still a kind of hero, are served up with that succulent dressing of
vivid particularity which is swallowed with relish because it brings
down a great man to the level of the most trivial experience.
How far these Memoirs are genuine in the sense which makes them so
attractive--that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great
man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by
his intimates--must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True
reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose
together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent,
clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and
setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a
solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of
them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the
very latest type, such as Zola's _Debacle_, which contains a very
strong and pervading mixture of pure historical fact.
But whatever may be the exact proportion of authenticity which this
class of Memoirs can justly claim, they completely fulfil the prime
conditions of popularity prescribed for the modern novel, which must
work out minute details with the greatest possible resemblance to
actual life and circumstance. Upon this ground, indeed, the ablest
professors of fiction might despair of competing with those who
exhibit a mighty man of valour in undress, who lead us where we may
hear him talk, watch him eat or shave, and study his conjugal
relations. It is to be feared that if the multiplication of such
Reminiscences continues, they will seriously trench upon the province
of the novelist, who will be left no scope for the employment of his
craft in a field that has been thoroughly ransacked, and who must
inevitably retire before writers who have discovered the art of making
truth quite as amusing as fiction, than which it must always be more
interesting. The brilliant success of Marbot's Memoirs, which were
undoubtedly written by himself, seems to have warmed into activity and
circulation various other volumes of similar reminiscences that must
have been hibernating for one or two generations in the family
archives, or have otherwise fallen into temporary oblivion; for in
many cases one is inclined to wonder why authentic documents of such
value and interest were not sooner produced.
The latest example of this class of Memoirs, belonging to the
Revolutionary or Napoleonic cycle, is to be found in the _Adventures_
of A. Moreau de Jonnes, who died in 1870 at the age of ninety-two,
having been for fifty years a member of the Institut and a great
authority on statistics. 'We should never have supposed,' says M. Leon
Say in his preface to this book, 'that Moreau had been the hero of
warlike adventures, or that he might possibly have been placed in a
line with Marbot.' The men of M. Say's generation who knew Marbot were
quite unaware, he adds, that here was a naval and colonial Marbot,
whose fighting life was one of the strangest of stories. M. Say's
preface seems to be intended as a guarantee of this story's
authenticity, though he notices casually the remarkable fact that 'on
every occasion when Moreau is on the brink of destruction, it is his
luck to be saved by a pretty girl'; also that 'a charming
portrait-gallery might be made of the women who, between 1793 and
1805, rescued this hardy rover, who was both sailor and soldier, from
death by sword or sickness in divers parts of the world,' from the
West India Islands to the banks of the Thames. His guarantee must be
accepted; yet if this book had not been the genuine autobiography of a
known personage, there would really be nothing to distinguish it from
the historic novel, in which an imaginary person, such as Thackeray's
Esmond, describes well-known scenes of history as an eye-witness and