by Edward Cline
When I began work on Book Three: Caxton, I found I was losing track of my secondary characters. I began a list that now numbers over 370 names of characters that identifies who they are and where in the series they appear. The project also entailed creating a subject index for all the information amassed from my research in eight notebooks, in addition to a glossary of eighteenth-century terms.
Most of my “fans” are delighted, if not ecstatic, that the series exists not only to enjoy, but because it can also be used as a virtual history text. I can only describe the common response to it as “jaw-dropping.” Many people who come to my booksigning table will read a few paragraphs from one of the titles, then make up their minds on the spot that they must have that title or all of them. Many Americans had simply given up on American fiction, especially fiction that celebrated this country’s founding and did not attempt to dilute its significance with the poisons of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”
I am especially happy that young readers become engrossed with the novels. It is a phenomenon that apparently is occurring around the country. I suppose one could argue that I am a member of the intelligentsia, and that I am helping to point Americans in the right direction, in terms of philosophy, politics, moral values, and aesthetic values. I tell people at booksignings that the reading age range of the series, from what I’ve observed in three years of signings, is between 10 years and retired. I was certain there was a potential readership, but proof of its existence has surpassed my wildest expectations.
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THE DEDICATIONS
A word or two about the dedications. The first, which occurs in the beginning of Books One through Three, is adapted from the 79th edition of Pears Cyclopædia (1970). The full quotation, under the section “The Contemporary Theatre,” following the heading, “The Function of Dramatic Art,” is: “The especial province of drama, as was pointed out by Aristotle, is to create an image, an illusion of action, that action ‘which springs from the past, but is directed towards the future, and is always great with things to come.’ Both tragedy and comedy depict such action and the conflict which it normally entails.”6
While the quotation captures the essence of Aristotle’s philosophy of drama, the fragment within the above quotation, ostensively ascribed to Aristotle, is not to be found in the Poetics or in any other book of his works. The entire paragraph in which it occurs doubtless was written by someone who understood Aristotle.
However, a query to the Pears editors was answered with the unfortunate news that, after a passage of thirty years, not only had all the back matter and manuscripts for that edition of the Cyclopædia been discarded, but the staff and contributors to it had since passed on. Aristotelian scholars could find nothing resembling the fragmentary quotation, though they could not contest its meaning. This particular dedication was meant to underscore the moral development of Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, together with heralding the story and the sequence of events beginning with the first page of Book One.
The second dedication—“To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started”—which occurs in Books Four through Six, is taken from Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, and is almost self-explanatory. It, too, underscores the vision that moves Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, and is a suggestion to readers that they rediscover the vision that moved the Founders to create this country. The Founders and my characters take the received wisdom of the Enlightenment to its limits, but no further. It remained for Rand to pick up from Aristotle’s and the Founders’ legacies, fill in most of the blanks that they left behind, then revise the whole page.
The Founders cannot be faulted for not having gone beyond their received wisdom. They were extraordinary moral and political practitioners, not philosophers. There was no Ayn Rand to point out their errors and purge their political philosophy of its flaws. It must be noted that when the Founders were active and reaping the benefits of the Enlightenment and applying its ideas to politics, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume in that period were active in sabotaging the Enlightenment, just as their heirs today, who promulgate a repellant, destructive mix of pragmatism, nihilism, and subjectivism, are gnawing at the remnants of Western civilization. In the Founders’ time, John Locke was the high point of political philosophy, and it was on his work that they based their moral arguments and justified their actions.
One cannot gainsay the Founders, as their many contemporary detractors try to today. They never professed to be infallible. Consider what they accomplished, the freest country in history, and the first one in history founded on a set of ideas, a political entity, whatever its shortcomings and flaws, that addressed and complemented the nature of man who requires reason and the freedom to exercise it to survive and prosper.
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FACT VS. FICTION
An absence of evidentiary proof for a novelist, especially one who writes historical fiction, is a natural invitation to employ “artistic license.” In the course of researching and writing the Sparrowhawk series, I encountered numerous such opportunities. On one hand, there was an overabundance of historical data that enabled me to fashion a credible recreation of events in the eighteenth century conflict between Britain and her American colonies, events that would be the focus of the drama in the story, or events as background to the story.
On the other hand, key events, such as the debates and adoption of Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Virginia Resolves in May 1765, were not so well documented. They were enveloped in a haze of approximation, educated speculation, and scholarly guesswork. Little or nothing could be factually established. For example, only fragments of Henry’s defiant speech survive—such as, “If this be treason, then make the most of it”—and are the recollections years after the event of men who heard him that glorious day.
As a rule, colonial orators rarely recorded their own speeches, and if we have renditions of them, it is thanks to those so moved by them that they sat down and wrote them out. The journals of the House of Burgesses dryly record only votes and subjects discussed and actions taken, but no speeches by any member of that body. So, lost to us are not only Henry’s words, but those of his allies and enemies in that chamber.
A much easier task was researching the speeches made in Parliament and the actions taken by that body. Although the public reporting of the speeches of the members of Parliament was a punishable offense until 1774, auditors and spectators with shorthand skills from the gallery of the Commons could take down a speaker’s words almost verbatim. These speeches eventually found their way into private journals, diaries, and letters. The speakers themselves felt no need to record their own words. Besides, what was said in both Houses of Parliament was for a long time a jealously guarded “privilege” which outsiders violated at their own peril. Further, most members of the Commons did not think themselves accountable to their electorates for their words or voting records.
But, to illustrate the benign dilemma in which I found myself, I will focus here on the circumstances surrounding Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Speech.
First, I will emphasize here that it was necessary to write Henry’s speech, to compose it around the fragments and in a style that reflected Henry’s character and recorded manner of speaking. The chief guide in this task was his “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond some ten years later, on the eve of war with Britain.
There are contradictory accounts of Henry’s alleged “apology” to the House after he had been accused of treason by Speaker John Robinson. Lieutenant-Governor Francis Fauquier makes no mention of an apology in his subsequent report to the Board of Trade, nor does he dwell on the uproar in the House caused by the speech. If he meant to ingratiate himself with his superiors in London—he was always getting on their wrong side, especially on the matter of suspending clauses in Virginia legislation he signed—he would certainly have mentioned it, and his friends in the House, Peyton Randolph, George Wythe, and
others, would doubtless have told him about such an apology. But mention of it is conspicuously absent in Fauquier’s report.
On the other hand, the anonymous Frenchman’s account mentions an apology. Perhaps it was not an apology that the Frenchman heard, and he got it wrong. Apparently the session was a boisterous one, and the Frenchman, possibly a member of the minor French nobility in service to his government, was confused about what was happening and who was saying what. After all, the French parlement had not met in half a century.
Fauquier in his report also mentions that a copy of the Stamp Act had “crept into the house,” but there is no evidence that the House ever had a copy of the Act at the time a protest to it was being debated, nor any evidence that any copies of it had reached North America in the spring of 1765. If a copy of the Act had been in the hands of the House, he certainly would have been loaned it to see what all the uproar was about. But in his report to the Board, there is not a single mention of any of its particulars. He would receive a copy of the Act long after it went into effect, November 1 of the same year.
Some accounts, including the anonymous Frenchman’s, report that all seven Resolves were debated; others, only the first five. Fauquier implies that the sixth and seventh Resolves were in their advocates’ “pocket” but were not discussed. That the fifth was erased from the journal record is a matter of fact. I anticipate this shameful action in the chapter set in the Commons, when Dogmael Jones’s lone “nay” against the Stamp Act is nullified when a clerk is bribed to record the House vote as “unanimous.”
How were Henry’s Resolves—all seven of them, and not just the four that were passed by the House—broadcast to the other colonies, and so soon after their adoption? No one knows. Possibly Henry was responsible, but how? He was new to politics, and there is no evidence he was in correspondence with the editors and printers of colonial newspapers or in contact with other colonial representatives. Possibly one of his allies in the House undertook the task of copying out the Resolves and sending them out. There is no evidence of that having happened, either. The Resolves certainly do not appear in the Virginia Gazette of the period, for the newspaper was more or less controlled by the Lieutenant-Governor, and the printer, Joseph Royle, a Tory, would not have been inclined to print them even had he the freedom to publish them.
All these gaps required decisions on how best to fill them. So, I wrote Henry’s speech, recreated the debates, and saw to the broadcasting of the Resolves. Other gaps in the historical record were similarly exploited. The events, if they were integral to the story, were too important to neglect or gloss over.
Here I end my comments on this magnum opus. And here I shall repeat something I wrote in the acknowledgments in Books One and Two: I owe a debt of thanks to the Founders for having given me something worth writing about, and a country in which to write it.
1. Ayn Rand, “What is Romanticism?” in The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, revised edition (New York: Signet, 1975), 99.
2. Ayn Rand, Introduction (1968) to The Fountainhead, (New York: Plume, 2005), vii.
3. Ayn Rand, in Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, Robert Mayhew, ed. (New York: New American Library, 2005), 188.
4. Ayn Rand, “What is Romanticism?” 99.
5. Edward Cline, Sparrowhawk Book One: Jack Frake (San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2001), 148.
6. Pears Cyclopædia (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 13.
THE REVOLUTIONARIES
by Edward Cline
“Every idea needs a visible envelope, every principle needs a habitation,” wrote Victor Hugo in his last novel, Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three),1 set in the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, published in 1874.
Hugo was writing about the first French Revolutionary Convention in Paris in September 1792. In this chapter he describes in meticulous detail the hall in which the Convention was held as a stage for drama. The hall was the “envelope” of that Convention, while Ninety-Three, the novel, itself is the “envelope” of an idea, postmarked 1793, but containing what Ayn Rand, who wrote an introduction to an edition of Ninety-Three, deems a story about “man’s loyalty to values.”
Rand would express nearly the same idea almost a century later: in fiction, ideas must be concretized. “Abstractions do not act.”2 Men act on ideas, and in fiction men must be concretized, as well, else they will be but moving abstractions, fuzzy, nearly invisible blueprints of characters never realized or sharply drawn, never anchored to specific, personal attributes of the writer’s own creation, entities that are literarily incredible and unbelievable.
Hugo wrote in that introduction about the Convention: “Nothing loftier has ever appeared on mankind’s horizon. There are the Himalayas and there is the Convention. The Convention may be history’s highest point…It was through the Convention that the great new page was turned, and that the future of today began.”
I love Ninety-Three, and have reread it many times. That statement, however, is one of the few in the novel I have ever taken issue with. When I encounter it, a question invariably pops into my mind: And not the American Revolution? Was it not the loftiest event in human history? Was not the American Revolution a great new turn of the page of history, and the foundation of what would be the future of the world? The American Revolution was a success, the French a catastrophic failure. The American Revolution was radical, without precedent in history; the French, antiradical, and precedented in the past, when mobs and the “majority” established tyrannies in ancient Rome and Greece. The French sought to emulate the American Revolution, but ended with the Reign of Terror and an emperor. The American Revolution sought to grant men “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and largely kept that promise up until the end of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution promised “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but, obsessed with an “equality” rooted in envy and collectivism, it denied men both liberty and the fraternity possible to and among free men, and collapsed almost immediately into a new despotism.
Imagine it: If the American Revolution had failed—if Britain had suppressed the revolt of her colonies against tyranny, or if George Washington had succumbed to temptation to become George the First, the American king, as many wished him to—would not have the interminable warfare between rival powers continued well into the nineteenth century? The French Revolution, which may not have happened without the example of the American, was followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon, whose quest for empire led to a clash with Britain, a clash that did not end until 1815 and Waterloo.
But, Hugo can be forgiven his exclusionary pride in France. It would be churlish and presumptuous to belabor it. He was as much a patriot as he was a novelist. His evaluation of France’s history is not off the mark. At the beginning of that same chapter, where he comments on how men viewed the Convention, he writes: “One has a strange feeling: aversion to the great. One sees the abysses without seeing the sublimities. Thus was the Convention judged at first. It was examined by nearsighted men when it was made to be contemplated by eagles.”3
Hugo died in 1885, and as his country mourned his passing, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, a gift from a friendly and grateful France, was being erected in New York Harbor. It is almost as though France were making a present to America of the soul of her greatest patriot and novelist.
“To a Romanticist, a background is a background, not a theme. His vision is always focused on man—on the fundamentals of man’s nature, on those problems and aspects of his character which apply to any age and any country.”4 The British-American politics and culture of the eighteenth century are thus a background to the principal heroes of Sparrowhawk, but the ideas and principles that moved them are ageless, as applicable in that century as they are in this one. If the men who made the Revolution possible had not been “real,” there would have been no Revolution. It is such “reality” that I wished to make credible and “real,” as “visible” and credible as Hugo’s
heroes were to him.
Sparrowhawk is an “envelope” of ideas, of principles, of men acting on those ideas and principles. It fills a gap in American literature about why the American Revolution happened, and presents the caliber of men who made it possible. It is about their discovery, in the characters of Jack Frake, Hugh Kenrick, and in a handful of other minor heroes, of ideas that were compatible with their existence as men who thought and acted for their own sakes and own reasons, and not from duty or loyalty to the Crown.
There have been numerous novels set in the pre-Revolutionary period. Most of them are little more than costume dramas. Their characters are twentieth–century men, imposters wearing eighteenth-century apparel, transported to a century alien to them in spirit, stature, and action. They are too recognizable and so not credible. If one is searching for a clue to why the men of the Revolution did what they did and thought what they thought, it is exasperating or confusing to encounter in fiction the kinds of men one is familiar with in one’s own time, men to whom the Founders’ moral stature, intelligence, and capacity for action are impossible.
Likewise incredible are those novels in which the primary characters are unrealized abstractions that expound the ideas of the Revolution. One wants to like them, or praise them, but their unreality prohibits their concretization, and as a consequence, the ideas and events of the Revolution also remain unreal and one develops no affection for them.
