The
spirit of a period is like the selfhood of a human being--something
that cannot be handed on; try as we may, it is impossible for us to
breathe the atmosphere of a bygone time, since all those thousand-
and-one details which went to the building up of both individual
and general experience, can never be reproduced. We consider (say)
the Eighteenth Century from the purely Historical standpoint, and,
while we do so, are under no delusion as to our limitations; we
know that a few of the leading personages and events have been
brought before us in a more or less disjointed fashion, and are
perfectly aware that there is room for much discrepancy between the
pictures so presented to us (be it with immense skill) and the
actual facts as they took place in such and such a year. But, goes
on the objector, in the case of a Historical Romance we allow
ourselves to be hoodwinked, for, under the influence of a pseudo-
historic security, we seem to watch the real sequence of events in
so far as these affect the characters in whom we are interested.
How we seem to live in those early years of the Eighteenth Century,
as we follow Henry Esmond from point to point, and yet, in truth,
we are breathing not the atmosphere of Addison and Steele, but the
atmosphere created by the brilliant Nineteenth Century Novelist,
partly out of his erudite conception of a former period, and partly
out of the emotions and thoughts engendered by that very
environment which was his own, and from which he could not escape!
Well, to all such criticisms it seems to me there are ample
rejoinders.
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