-
Introduction to Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem, by Charlotte Eliot1
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- document
- Additional Information
London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1926. Pp. xv + 99; Introduction, vii-xii. Accuracy is no justification of a work of historical fiction, though the lack of accuracy is a serious blemish. Such fiction, whether in prose or verse, must find its excuse in the same qualities as any other work of fiction, in vitality, order and grace. But historical fiction, to the degree to which it possesses these merits, has a documentary value of another kind than that possible to pure invention. Every period of history is seen differently by every other period; the past is in perpetual flux, although only the past can be known. How usefully, therefore, may we supplement our direct knowledge of a period, by contrasting its view of a third, more remote period with our own views of this third period! In this way a work of historical fiction is much more a document on its own time than on the time portrayed. Equally relative, because equally passed through the sieve of our own interpretation, but enabling us to extend and solidify this interpretation of the past which is its meaning, its sense, for us. By comparing the period described in The rôle played by interpretation has often been neglected in the theory of knowledge. Even Kant, devoting a lifetime to the pursuit of categories, fixed only those which he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be permanent, and overlooked or neglected the fact that these are only the more stable of a vast system of categories in perpetual change. Some years ago, in a paper on “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” The interpretation of history is only a very much more complex but similar activity, and historical fiction only a special case of history. Those minds which are near to our own in time seem to us to present a more accurate picture of the past than do those minds which are themselves of the past. Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer (in an admirable unappreciated novel, It has sometimes been...