SOURCE: "The Germ and the Plot," in The Art & Practice of Historical Fiction, Humphrey Toulmin, 1930, 81-94.

[In the excerpt that follows, Sheppard discusses the sources and ideas that inspired such historical novels as Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Sir Walter Scott's Woodstock, and George Eliot's Romola.]

"A little Plote of my simple penning."—LORD DARNLEY (1554).

That indefatigable antiquary, folklorist, historian, ecclesiast and writer of historical (and other) fiction, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, made it a rule to read no reviews, and possibly because of that his work suffered. George Henry Lewes, treating George Eliot much as if she were a Grand Lama, was careful to keep from her knowledge any adverse criticisms of her work. Charles Dickens read very few novels. When he wrote A Tale of Two Cities he was staggered … at the cart-load of books on the Revolution sent to his door in response to his suggestion by Carlyle.

I think myself that anyone anxious to attempt the historical novel will be well advised to know nothing of an Index Expurgatorius. Victor Hugo's mother was wiser than her world thought her when she allowed her boy to roam at large among books, good, indifferent, and bad. It is useful to know what has been done in the same field, to trace origins and developments, and to study criticisms. One should, of course, be ready to criticize the critics, some of whom I propose to criticize by and by. A wide reading of the historical novel in all its stages aided by the estimates of men competent to judge is immensely useful. One can see how this writer and that have dealt with situations, problems, difficulties; one can distinguish between failure and success, and perhaps see the causes of each.

I have endeavoured to trace very roughly the development of the historical novel from the early legends, anecdotes, chansons de geste, and mediaeval romances, to the present day, because I am convinced that many writers fail through ignorance of the work that has preceded them. One need not be a sedulous ape, but example, good or bad, is better than precept where it is a case of avoiding pitfalls, or attempting to do better than the best. There have been very great historical novels. The perfect historical novel has never yet been written, and may never be. It must preserve the merits and avoid the demerits of the great writers, and even then draw something from lesser writers where the great have failed. It must preserve dignity and avoid grandiloquence, preserve atmosphere and avoid the archaic carried to extremes, preserve accuracy of background and avoid the crowding out of the human interest, preserve strength and avoid the needlessly coarse and ruthless and morbid, preserve the dramatic without being melodramatic, preserve proportion without sacrificing detail. Whether it will ever be written I do not know. There is no great historical novel without obvious and even glaring faults. Those who essay this form will, unless by a miracle, fail themselves; but at least they should at the outset attempt the miracle of throwing the rope of the wagon across a star.

An eminent historian writing of the Middle Ages has said that every country has possessed in its own primeval literature the first germ of romance. Just as in the rude epic of our forefathers, in the snatch of song in which modern rhyme was preceded by primitive means of arresting the ear, in the nursery tale or legend with its simple but often very effective plot (take, for instance, the ancient story of the spinning girl helped by, and then circumventing, the power of evil) are to be found the germs of our modern historical fiction, so each novel begins in the mind of its author with a germ from which the whole book is finally to grow. I remember having a long discussion once on this subject with an historical novelist who endeavoured to show how different books had sprung from a still-traceable germ, and held the theory that every great book could be set down in essence in a few words. A postcard (it was urged) ought to hold even The Grand Cyrus. Recently I was reminded of this by a reference in Lytton to authors who take the germs of their novels from history, and by another comment by a critic that the germ of a novel and the content of it should be reducible to a dozen or a score of words.

How does any historical novel, great or small, have its origin and take shape and bulk from that first beginning?

Lytton wrote himself, in another passage, "To my mind a writer should sit down to compose a fiction as a painter prepares to compose a picture. His first care should be the conception of a whole as lofty as intellect can grasp." Stevenson said, "A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind." One of our most popular modern novelists has said that the idea of his most famous book came to him from a train journey and the sight of someone sitting opposite him in the carriage round whom a hazy story began to weave itself. In The Young Duke Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) gave a receipt for writing a novel: "Take a pair of pistols, a pack of cards, a cookery-book, and a set of new quadrilles; mix them up with half an intrigue and a whole marriage, and divide them into three equal portions." (It was, of course, the day of the three-decker.) Alexander Pope once wrote a recipe for an epic poem, treating it as if a plum-pudding were in the making; an important ingredient was the "fable" or plot, which could be taken out of any "old poem, history book, romance, or legend."

We have in a Book of Memoranda by Charles Dickens the germ of A Tale of Two Cities, but it would be impossible to construct from it the novel as it finally appeared; his first idea, which could easily go onto a postcard, ran:

How as to a story in two periods—with a lapse of time between, like a French drama?

This first indefinite "germ-idea" was followed by "Titles for such a notion." He had always great difficulties with his titles, and took immense, though certainly not wasted, time in making a final choice. Here are the first efforts at a title for the story in two periods which became the Tale of Two Cities:

TIME! THE LEAVES OF THE FOREST. SCATTERED LEAVES. THE GREAT WHEEL. ROUND AND ROUND. OLD LEAVES. SO LONG AGO. FAR APART. FALLEN LEAVES. FIVE AND TWENTY YEARS. YEARS AND YEARS. ROLLING YEARS. DAY AFTER DAY. FELLED TREES. MEMORY CARTON, ROLLING STONES. TWO GENERATIONS.

For some time the idea was laid aside, though evidently a book was shaping gradually. "One of These Days," "Buried Alive," "The Thread of Gold," "The Doctor of Beauvais," were considered and rejected. In March, 1859, he wrote "This is to certify that I have got exactly the name for the story that is wanted; exactly what will fit the opening to a T: A Tale of Two Cities."

Alexandre Dumas attached far more importance to the idea and conception of a novel than to the actual execution: this, he thought, of quite minor importance. Before putting pen to paper he gave the closest attention to the planning of his book. When success had come to him, he would lie silent for days, it is said, on the deck of his yacht imagining, thinking, planning, until the plot had taken clear shape from the germinal idea, and everything had been carefully arranged. He wrote very rapidly when the actual penmanship began. Once he accepted a challenge to prove this; he was to write the first volume of the Chevalier de Maison Rouge (the plot having already matured) in sixty-two hours, including sufficient time for sleep and food; the book was to fill seventy-five pages, with forty-five lines to each page. He finished his task in less than the appointed time. Some of his historical novels were built up from an anecdote.

The greatest difficulty which any novelist, but especially the historical novelist, has to face is the difficulty of selection. What the Right Hon. H. A. L. Fisher said recently about the art of literature consisting in omissions seems to me not only tersely put but important and, to a large extent, true. As a matter of fact, Stevenson had said the same thing. It is not, or should not be, hard to find the germ or even the plot for novels. It is hard to find the germ or plot for a novel. When a journalist complained to Lord Northcliffe about the difficulty of finding ideas for articles, he was told that a bus-ride down Fleet Street ought to supply ideas enough to fill a newspaper; which is perfectly true, given the eye that can see what the ordinary eye misses. 0. Henry said that you had only to knock at any door and say "All is discovered!" to find a story. In every period of history, in every episode, in a fragment of stone, in an old weapon, in a name on a desolate grave, in a scrap of verse, is the germ of an historical novel. The difficulty is, or should be, selection. The selection of title is a difficulty. The selection of character and incident is a difficulty. And it is as important to know what to reject as what to select.

Perhaps I may be forgiven here if, by way of illustration, I give some scraps from my own experience. The germ of my first novel, The Red Cravat, lay in a paragraph in Carlyle's Frederick the Great, where Frederick William of Prussia gives a letter to a girl which is really an order for her instant marriage to one of his giant grenadiers; she discovers or suspects this, and hands it to an old woman who is promptly married when it is delivered. In my book the grenadier became English, the letter or order after vicissitudes secured his marriage to an English girl with whom he was in love. (But almost always one wanders much farther than this from the germinal idea, which sometimes, when the book is finished, seems altogether lost. The Red King cried out, when Alice, coming through the Looking Glass, took hold of the end of his pencil, "It writes all manner of things that I don't intend.") Running Horse Inn began with the idea of writing a novel round a little wooden inn I knew at Herne Bay, calling it by another name, and part of the germinal idea included a certain episode in a trial for murder, early in the nineteenth century, when a scrap of torn newspaper used as the wad of a gun proved guilt. The Rise of Ledgar Dunstan and The Quest ofLedgar Dunstan were based on the hypothesis that the world war might have been the secret and unintentional work of one obscure individual. A Son of the Manse might have been summed up in a few words as a study of the results in certain cases of harsh, procincial Nonconformity on sensitive natures. Consciously or unconsciously it undoubtedly owed something to George Douglas Brown's powerful but gloomy The House with the Green Shutters. The Autobiography of Judas Iscariot was inspired by a scrap of legend and a little story by Anatole France. Brave Earth was the result of a paragraph read in an old copy of Baker's Chronicle picked up on a Cambridge bookstall. This paragraph described the unexpected fate of a Bodmin man during the Western Insurrection under Humphry Arundell in 1549, but the novel drifted far beyond this one episode, which had, in the end, no essential connection with the plot or book. Here Comes an Old Sailor was based on an old legend; the scenes were placed chiefly at Fordwich, because that tiny forgotten port of Canterbury had caught my imagination during a visit long before the book came to be written. Queen Dick first began to take shape after reading some verses about Queen Dick—Richard Cromwell—among some contemporary tracts and broadsheets.

In every case, the book itself was, in the end, very different from my first intention—in more ways, unfortunately, than one. In my short stories germinal ideas have come, I find on reflection, from the suggestions of friends (one was based on a description of the game of Pool) on a chance remark made by a chambermaid in a French hotel about a neighbouring circus, on newspaper paragraphs, on a journey in the tube when the lights went out suddenly and unexpectedly, on memories attached to a certain old wooden seat at a watering-place long ago, on scraps in old chronicles and histories, on an incident in school life which I transferred to Napoleonic days, with grown men instead of boys for the actors. There is no reason to reject anything because one finds it first in a modern setting. What happens in a modern liner may (unless one is attempting another story like "The Ship that Found Herself"—and perhaps even then) be made to happen in a Spanish galleon, a Cinque-Port ship, a Viking-ship, a coracle. A train may become a stage coach. A tank of today's warfare may be the wooden horse of Troy.

I do not know whether it is the experience of most authors that books drift very far from the first intention, but probably in the majority of cases the final result is far indeed from the preliminary nutshell form, or even from a carefully elaborated plot. With Scott this was certainly the case, though he was careful to warn young writers that he did not advise them to imitate his own methods. He said often that he could never adhere to a written-out careful plot; ideas rose as he wrote. When he was at work on Woodstock—a novel which I have heard one distinguished critic describe as the best of Scott's novels, though I am far from agreeing with him—he reports in his Journal, "This morning I had some good ideas respecting Woodstock which will make the story better. The devil of a difficulty is that one puzzles the skein in order to excite curiosity, and then cannot disentangle it for the satisfaction of the prying fiend they have raised." On the 12th of February, 1826, he wrote again: "Having ended the second volume of Woodstock last night I have to begin the third this morning. Now I have not the slightest idea how the story is to be wound up to a catastrophe. I am just in the same case as I used to be when I lost myself in former days in some country to which I was a stranger. I always pushed for the pleasantest road, and either found or made it the nearest.… I only tried to make that which I was actually writing diverting and interesting, leaving the rest to fate. A perilous style, but I cannot help it. I would not have young writers imitate my carelessness, however."

In spite of his faults and foibles, Scott was too essentially modest to be unaware of his own faults; or of many of them. While engaged on one of his novels he broke off to have a nap, first urging his readers to do the same—at all events, in his Journal, to which he confided his difficulties and dissatisfactions. Publication in parts, or in threevolume form, itself led to a certain looseness in the work of most of our earlier novelists. J. R. Lowell once said that he himself could not write a novel, nor conceive how any-one else was able to, and he would sooner be hanged than begin to print anything before he had wholly finished it. "Moreover," he added, "what can a man do when he is a treadmill?" Scott, when ill-health and his noble effort to redeem his fortunes made his work largely a treadmill business, certainly wrote many a careless and dreary page, but I think there is still some truth in what a once popular Scottish writer, Mrs. Grant of Laggan, who knew him well, wrote. Quoting an old proverb of the North, "King's caff is better than ither folks' corn," she said: "Though the 'caff' (chaff) may abound, it is still King's caff."

The first thing, then, in writing an historical novel is the germ from which it is to grow into something which may—or may not—bear some final resemblance to its origin; a "germ" which may be reducible to writing in a few words, or may be almost formless, like Stevenson's cloudy conception in the mind. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at once more and less an historical novelist because, as someone has written of him, he saw everything double, and never saw the surface of things without seeing beneath the surface, wrote down carefully in brief abstract his stories before he set seriously to work; here, for instance, are a few of the ideas he jotted down in his notes for tales and essays:

"The History of an Almshouse in a country village from the eve ofits foundation downwards." (He elaborates this postcard "germ" by suggesting the vicissitudes of fortune such a history might show; the rich of one generation becoming the poor of the next; perhaps the son and heir of the founder being glad to enter as an inmate; a gleam of occasional sunshine being given to the tale by the good fortune of some inmate, for instance a nameless infant being discovered the child of wealthy parents.)

"A young woman in England poisoned by an East Indian barbed dart which her brother had brought home as a curiosity."

"A story, the principal characters of which shall always seem on the point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear."

"For a child's story—imagine all sorts of wonderful playthings."

The world is so full of a number of things that every way one turns there are novels and short stories for those with eyes to see, and all the world's history offers backgrounds. Scott, Dumas, Stevenson, Hardy, all the great historical novelists had note-books constantly at hand. (Hardy even scribbled notes on leaves and chips of wood.) Reade devoted a large part of his working day to note-books and cuttings. An idea or the broad outlines of a plot may come at any moment and in any place; even from a dream, as Stevenson and Walpole found—though dreamland is perhaps the most unsatisfactory country from which the novelist can draw his inspiration. Too often there is disillusion on full awakening, as Jebb (not famous as a novelist) found once when suffering from typhoid fever; he dreamed a dream which seemed to make the plan of a most amazing and admirable novel, only to find it resolve itself into sheer nonsense in daylight. Lytton dreamed, or said that he dreamed, verse—but it was nonsense verse. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though the best dream-story ever written, suffers from its origin; there is at least a grain of truth in Watts-Dunton's criticism, that had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all writers except Chaucer—Sir Walter Scott—Stevenson might have been in the ranks of the pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage, who do their best to make life hideous.

He and we were spared that, and Stevenson escaped another peril; he tells us he wrote Kidnapped partly for a lark, partly as a pot-boiler, but suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out of the canvas, and he found himself in another world. It is a little disconcerting to find that one very great historical novel, Kingsley's Westward Hol (there was an earlier Westward Hol by the way, by James Kirke Paulding, the American novelist, published in 1832) was written partly as a pot-boiler; fine story as it is, it might have been better still if no other influence had been at work than love of his story for his story's sake. As he admitted frankly, he had one eye upon his public; but for all that Westward Ho! stands in my opinion high above Hypatia (written after prolonged study of Egypt in literature) or Hereward the Wake (splendid in parts, but not to be taken too seriously as history). In Westward Ho! the prejudice and bigotries of the days he described, and the sturdy patriotism made truculent by the pretensions of Spain, exactly suited Kingsley's own temperament. Early and later days in Clovelly, Bideford, and that countryside, and memories of his grandfather's stirring yarns of adventure and the sea, first inspired him and then gave him zest to write this epic of the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth. The storm was drawn from his own knowledge and experience on the wild North Devon coast. It is interesting, by the way, to compare John Masefield's fine and too little appreciated book Captain Margaret with Kingsley's great story.

I first read Westward Hol years back on Bideford Quay, and Lorna Doone is another Devon book as good, to me, "as clotted cream, almost"; even if nowadays one is more critical, and some of the verdicts of history are being revised.

Kingsley's book, written as he said for immediate popularity, and to make men (and boys, he might have added) fight, might possibly be a hundred times better, and quite certainly he was right when he said that with more care and time he himself might have made it twice as good. Yet it is a fine book, steeped in the spirit of the strong and stalwart Elizabethan gallants. And here perhaps one may make an aside about the number of great historical novelists who have been essentially poets; Kingsley was one, Blackmore one (some magnificent lines of his, at the time of their rediscovery anonymous, were retrieved for the end of the Oxford Book of English Verse by that fine critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch), Scott of course first became famous as a poet, Lytton wrote verse, Victor Hugo was more notably poet than novelist, and more recent instances are Stevenson, M. E. Coleridge, Eden Phillpotts, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Maurice Hewlett. "The truth is I write everything and approach everything as a poet," said Hewlett—"history, psychology, romance, novels, everything. I use the poetic method entirely—stuff myself with the subject, drench myself, and then let it pour out as it will. I trust to inspiration or what is called inspiration absolutely. I never put anxious or deliberate brainwork into a book; such as there may be of that is done in sleep." If any distinction is to be made between an historical novel and a romance, Blackmore has made it in his one great book, Lorna Doone; but even in the structure of its sentences and paragraphs it may be as properly called a poem; the words over and again, without any alteration or addition, shape themselves into blank verse.

There has been considerable discussion as to the foundations of actual fact on which this book stands. I remember hearing years back from a relative of Blackmore's that the novelist explored the Devon countryside to gather material, with his brother-in-law, but it was evidently no very strenuous expedition, as most of the excursions seem to have been made easily, by carriage. Eighteen years before Lorna Doone was published, Cooper's Guide to Lynton referred to a certain ruined village of eleven deserted cottages in a North Devon valley; the Doones, once a family of distinction impoverished during the Stuart troubles, were said to have occupied them. The leader or founder of the Doone family at this time had fought as a private soldier at Sedgemoor on Monmouth's side, and had escaped from the brutalities of Jeffreys. They made themselves a terror for miles around, escaping, when pressed, with their booty to Bagworthy, few daring to follow them across the wild fastnesses of Exmoor. The last of the Doones were an old man and his granddaughter who perished in the snow while singing Christmas carols for pence in 1800. In 1863 the legend of the Doones was a current tale among boys in Devon. Three or four years before Lorna Doone appeared a tale entitled The Doones of Exmoor was published in The Leisure Hour, and Blackmore, who saw it, probably was incited by it to write his own greater story.

Environment—the fascination of some district known and loved—has been the first inspiration of many an historical novel. James Payn wrote once, "To the story-teller the germ is everything," and said that it might be put into half a dozen lines. If he had put in half a dozen words the germ of his Lost Sir Massingberd he might have written "Man Lost in a Hollow Tree." It was the sight of a hollow tree, and the possibilities it suggested, that led to his most popular book. But there is a curious foot-note to this story. In the Diaries of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff I came across an account told by Jean Ingelow—the poet, and a finer poet than the modern world has yet quite discovered—of a visit she paid in girlhood to an uncle; he had been guardian to a young Mr. Massingberd, heir to a great estate, who had mysteriously disappeared and was never found. This may quite probably have made James Payn search for an explanation of the mystery.

George Eliot might have stated the germ of Romola in two words: "Florence—Savonarola." She found the City of Flowers more stimulating to the imagination than even Rome—and I think this is not an uncommon experience. Unfortunately a few weeks sojourn is not sufficient, even aided by prodigious reading of Florentine historians, to enable one to catch the spirit of the city, or of the age she describes. Leslie Stephen, so often wrong, was largely right when he described Romola as "a magnificent piece of cram." A few famous scenes in fiction which gripped the imagination in youth leave one colder in more mature years. I cannot quite recapture the thrill of the first reading of the assassination of the Marquis, or even the death of Carton, in A Tale of Two Cities, though I am still convinced that it is a greater book than many modern critics would have us believe. Hypatia's murder is less blood-curdling than of old; and in the same way, the banquet scene in Romola, which held one breathless in boyhood, has lost much of its fascination. Her characters are indeed, in Romola, fifteenth-century figures in Victorian dress; her Florence is the Florence of the student-tourist. Merezhkowski in The Forerunner paints a Florence at once more vivid and more true. During her brief stay George Eliot made it part of her work to capture the essence of the Florentine character. In a month or two, even perhaps in a year or two, it cannot be captured. Towards the end of a year's stay I myself still made daily and surprising discoveries. The Florentine, who must be today very much in some ways as he was in the Renaissance—and yet in some ways very different—is unlike the Sienese, the Pisans, the Genoese, the Romans, the Neapolitans. He does not wear all his heart on his sleeve, and no doubt found some sly amusement in the English woman-novelist taking her diligent notes in his shops and markets, and poked sly fun at her (as the Florentine loves to do) when she had passed … No; though Lewes preferred its serial publication because it was a book to be read solemnly and slowly—though the payment for it was so enormous—though in writing it George Eliot passed from youth to age—I would sacrifice Romola for a few more chapters of the Aunts in The Mill on the Floss, or a few more chapters like the opening chapters of Adam Bede.