A Recipe for the Historical Novel

The Weekly Machen

This installment of the Odd Volumes series is, well… odd. First, Machen doesn’t mentioned a reviewed book, but rather, he takes the opportunity to present a brief writing lesson. As the author of Chronicle of Clemendy, he offers the advice with some authority. Secondly, the article is divided into two distinct parts, with the later section focusing solely on the Grail Legends.

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Odd Volumes:
A Recipe for the Historical Novel
by
Arthur Machen
April 5, 1911

The period is about 1330, the novel is historical, and here is a bit of the dialogue:—

     Suppose the wagon does not come.
     I refuse to suppose anything so horrible.

Now, I have no wish to be harsh to an author who has no doubt done his—or her—best; but with all kindness it must be said that this sort of thing will not do.

Consider the purpose of the novel or romance called historical. Surely it is simply this: to give the reader the most vivid impression of the old times; to ravish him by a potent literary spell from the present into the past; to make him feel, if but for a moment, that the heavy weight of the centuries has been rolled away.

This, I conceive, is the sole reason which justifies a literary artist in going to past times for his story. Some people would say that historical novels are written in order that young people may be interested in history, but this is a plea which is utterly inadmissible in any literary—or indeed, historical—court.

We go back, then, in the ages to give ourselves and our readers the glamour of the past; we labour over romances of other days to get that impression which is afforded by the wonderful beginning of the fairy-tales—“once upon a time.” And in such a scheme as the phrase “I refuse to suppose anything so horrible” is clearly a mistake; just because it summons up before us, not the Middle Ages, but the twentieth century.

Of course the problem of style becomes a very difficult one when it is applied to the books of which we are speaking. On the one hand the English must not, it is clear, be glaringly modern. But on the other hand it must not be English of that sort which has long been called ‘‘Wardour-street.” “Grammercies” and “by’r ladies” will not save the situation. Nor, in my opinion, is the matter improved if we imitate William Morris’s prose and endeavour to write an “English” that has no words of Latin origin in its vocabulary.

The true recipe, it seems to me, is this. First of all, the mind of the writer must be saturated with the rhythms of old English prose; it must have the “shape,’’ as it were, of old English and the “colour” of old English firmly fixed on the plates of memory.

And then, for the technical work of writing a romance of the past, there are two points to be noted.

First, never use a word or a construction that is purely modern. “Horrible,” for example, in the sense of “highly inconvenient and unpleasant,’’ is modern; when our forefathers said a thing was horrible they meant that it was full of horror.

And the second caution is this: never use a word that is archaic, that has gone utterly out of modern speech. You can always get your antique effect without the use of words that have dropped from the language.

     O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that Thou didst in their days and in the old time before them.

Here there is not a single archaic word, but the whole effect is of a perfect and noble antiquity.

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The sacred stone on which the Sovereigns of England are crowned has, it seems probable, curious connections with a great literary cycle; the Legends of the Holy Graal, which most of us know through Tennyson and Malory’s ‘‘Morte d’Arthur.”

In the first place it is probable that the Graal itself was originally a stone; it is a stone in the “Parsifal” of Wolfram von Eschenbach, from which Wagner derived the plot of his opera. The idea of the Graal as a chalice is, most likely, a Norman alteration of the original Celtic legend.

But in any case, the sacred stone Coronation was, no doubt, a Celtic talisman and palladium in its early days. It was attached, we may suppose, to the fortunes of a tribe, and then to the fortunes of a nation; on its safe keeping the prosperity of its keepers was dependent.

Such was the office of the Graal in the State of Britain, according to the old legends. The sacred object was taken away, and all happiness and fortune departed from Britain. In the “Morte d’Arthur” the Graal is gone for ever; the earlier tales look forward to a time when Cadwaladr the Blessed—the conjectural prototype of Galahad—should return, bringing back with him the Holy Relic and every good thing to Britain.

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