On Some Ancient Battle-Fields in Lancashire. Charles Hardwick
two might be cited in opposition: "Either the novel becomes pure cram, a dictionary of antiquities dissolved in a thin solution of romance, or, which is generally more refreshing, it takes leave of accuracy altogether and simply takes the plot and the costumes from history, but allows us to feel that genuine moderns are masquerading in the dress of a bygone century." Dean Milman, in his review of Ranke's work on the Papacy, referring to the scene in the conclave on the elevation of Sixtus V. to the Papal chair, which, he says, Gregoria Leti "has drawn with such unscrupulous boldness," adds, "All the minute circumstances of his (the Pope's) manner, speech, and gesture is like one of Scott's happiest historical descriptions, but, we fear, of no better historical authority than the picture of our great novelist."
The false impressions often formed of actual fact from implicit reliance on artistic fiction, as authority in such matters, is admirably illustrated in a passage in "Travels in Central Asia," by Arminius Vámbéry. After journeying from Tabris to Teheran, he says—"It is a distance of only fifteen, or perhaps we may rather say of only thirteen caravan stations; still, it is fearfully fatiguing, when circumstances compel one to toil slowly from station to station under a scorching sun, mounted upon a laden mule, and condemned to see nothing but such drought and barrenness as characterise almost the whole of Persia. How bitter the disappointment to him who has studied Persia only in Saadi, Khakani, and Hafiz; or still worse, who has received his dreamy impressions of the East from the beautiful imaginings of Goethe's 'Ost-Westlicher Divan,' or Victor Hugo's 'Orientales,' or the magnificent picturings of Tom Moore."
If, under circumstances so favourable as those attendant upon such a "Dryasdust" historical student as Sir Walter Scott, historical truth is violated or perverted as often as it is illustrated, it is painful to reflect what must have resulted when solar and other myths, miraculous legends and traditions of pagan times, have become interwoven with the faith and morals of Christianity, and the pomp and pageantry of mediæval chivalry! Leslie Stephens asserts that "'Ivanhoe,' and 'Kenilworth,' and 'Quentin Durward,' and the rest are, of course, bare, blank impossibilities." "No such people," he declares, "ever lived or talked on this planet." He is willing to allow that some fragments of genuine character may be embedded in what he terms "the plaster of Paris;" but he insists that "there is no solidity or permanence in the workmanship." If this be true, how has history fared at the hands of such craftsmen as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Archdeacon Walter Map, Sir Thos. Malory, and a whole host of mediæval romance writers, with their King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, their magicians, sorcerers, giants, dragons, and other monsters? History, in its highest, indeed its only legitimate, sense, most unquestionably has suffered to a much greater extent than can be conceived, except by those who have patiently plodded amongst the details of a portion at least of its dim and dusty, and oft-times doubtful, raw material. But, on the other hand, to the novelist or the poet historical truthfulness in the incidents of which his plot is composed, or biographical truthfulness in the characters delineated, is simply surplusage, if it be nothing worse, æsthetic or artistic verities having no necessary foundation thereupon. It is this æsthetic ideal, evolved from general rather than individual truths, this poetic element, which lies at the root, and, indeed, furnishes the raison d'être, the very life-giving blood, of such art products as those under consideration. Hamlet, Lear, Imogen, Ophelia, Cordelia, Oberon, Elaine, Sir Galahad, Achilleus, Arthur, et hoc genus omne, possess an inherent subjective vitality and truthfulness of their own, drawn from the universal and everlasting fountains of human emotion, passion, and psychical aspiration, however little realistic, individual, or strictly historic value the learned may place on the legends of Saxo Grammaticus and Geoffrey of Monmouth, or the myths of our common Aryan ancestors. Thos. Carlyle, in "Sartor Resartus," aptly asks—"Was Luther's picture of the devil less a reality, whether it were formed within the bodily eye, or without it?" Dean Milman, in his essay on "Pagan and Christian Sepulchres," referring to the "two large mounds popularly known as the tombs of the Horatii and the Curiatii," on the Appian way, near Rome, says—"Let us leave the legend undisturbed, and take no more notice of those wicked disenchanters of our old belief." Yet he feelingly and truthfully adds—"They will leave us at least the poetry, if they scatter our history into a mist." Truly the æsthetic element, if in itself worthy, will ever survive the destruction of the presumed historical verity with which it may have been for ages allied. Who now believes in the historic truthfulness of the reputed deeds of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome? And yet the æsthetic beauties of Homer, Æschylus, Virgil, and Ovid are none the less admired and enjoyed. Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, in his Life of J. M. W. Turner, when commenting on the lack of "topographical," and other realistic truthfulness, both in colour and details, in many of the great landscape painter's finest productions, thus aptly deals with the difference between æsthetic and literal truthfulness—"It is with these drawings as with the romances of Sir Walter Scott: a time comes in the life of every intelligent reader when he perceives that Scott was not, and could not be, really true to the times he represented, except when they approached very near his own; but a student of literature would be much to be pitied who was unable to enjoy 'Ivanhoe' after this discovery. So when we have found out the excessive freedom which Turner allowed himself; when we have discovered that he is not to be trusted for the representation of any object, however important—that his chiaroscuro, though effective is arbitrary, and his colour though brilliant is false; when we have quite satisfied ourselves, in a word, that he is a poet, and not an architectural draughtsman, or an imitator of nature, is that a reason why we should not enjoy the poems? There is a wide difference, I grant, between the pleasure of real belief and the pleasure of confessed imagination: the first belongs to imaginative ignorance, and is only possible for the uncritical; the second belongs to a state of knowledge, and is only possible for those in whom the acquisition of knowledge has not deadened the imaginative faculties. Show the 'Rivers of France' to a boy who has the natural faculties which perceive beauty, but who is still innocent of criticism, he will believe the drawings to be true, and think as he dreams over them that a day may come when he will visit these enchanting scenes. Show them to a real critic, and he will not accept for fact a single statement made by the draughtsman from beginning to end, but he will say—'The poetic power is here,' and then he will yield to its influence, and dream also in his own way—not like the boy, in simple faith, but in the pleasant make-belief faith which is all that the poet asks of us."
This æsthetic truthfulness, in contradistinction to literal historic fact, is admirably expressed by Macaulay in an entry in his journal, in August, 1851. He says—"I walked far into Herefordshire," (from Malvern) "and read, while walking, the last five books of the 'Iliad,' with deep interest and many tears. I was afraid to be seen crying by the parties of walkers that met me as I came back; crying for Achilles cutting off his hair; crying for Priam rolling on the ground in the court-yard of his house; mere imaginary beings, creatures of an old ballad maker who died near three thousand years ago."
Lord Byron wrote under the influence of the traditions of his youth or of his classical college education, and not as the true poet, when he said—"I stood upon the plain of Troy daily for more than a month, in 1810; and if anything diminished my pleasure it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity." On the contrary, I felt no such lack of pleasurable emotion when I first gazed on the Thames at Datchet, or on the withered trunk of "Herne's Oak," or on the Trossachs and Loch Katrine, or on the Rialto or the Ducal palace at Venice, or on the Colisseum or the adjacent ruins of the "lone mother of dead empires," because the mere historical verity of Jack Falstaff's unwieldly carcase, or of Shakspere, Otway, Byron or Scott's ideal and semi-historical personages, never once entered into my mind. It was sufficient for me that the scenes before me were those which were contemplated and portrayed by the great dramatists and the great novelist and the great poet. For the time being, thanks to the law of mental association, to my imagination their characters were as real personages as was necessary for the fullest appreciation and enjoyment of the ideal of their artistic creators, and anything more, being unnecessary, might have been intrusive, or even impertinent, in the original and non-metaphorical meaning of that somewhat abused word. Byron spoke more to the purpose in the opening stanzas of the fourth canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," when, after lamenting the fate of Venice, and recalling the glories of her past history, he exclaims:—
But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her name in story and her long array