The former effort is, I have suggested, not without danger. (To what? Oh, I suppose, to truth, to sanity of mind). It would employ a strong, universally felt emotion for the purposes of a chronicle as falsely innocent as a fairy-tale. One might compare the effect of such exploitation to that of a moving-picture in colours. The colour values are all wrong, not thus do grass and a red gown look in sunlight; but there the grass actually is, waving, and through it in her false red gown actually walks the heroine. It is confusing. Even so, I do not think the danger very serious for any one with enough of a mind to be worth saving. The point of all this twaddle, plausible as the stuff may at first appear, is too naïve, too utterly unlike any conceivable expression of the reader’s own psychology.
The deliberate and persistent attempt of history to ignore legend is another and graver matter.
That the attempt should be made is perhaps natural. Legend is pure feeling, and historians distrust feeling, noting contemptuously how unfounded it usually is and how wide of the mark its conclusions more often than not appear to them, whose business it is to examine facts. Also, their minds being trained to weigh and measure, they are not interested in anything that cannot be weighed and measured.
All the same, they are wrong. Whether or not legend is something we should be better without, it exists. You cannot ignore something that is. And legend exists as solidly as the Battle of Waterloo. You cannot get through it or around it or behind it, and therefore you cannot dismiss it.
I admit that if I were an historian I should probably want to. Not only should I be disdainful (as I am, even without being an historian) of the tawdry foundationless legends spawning all about me, with their cheap slogans (‘Keep Cool with Cal!’), and apt to forget that the death-rate among legends is higher than that among Jews in Poland, but I should feel despairingly that to let oneself in for legend, to concede the necessity of considering feeling, would make the writing of history an enterprise too gigantic to be possible; and so, very likely, it is.
Nevertheless, history written, as it is, without knowledge and due consideration of emotion begins to appear to me a colossal falsehood. Men’s acts are three-fourths the product of emotions, and, no matter how false the emotions may have been, without intimate acquaintance with them you cannot rightly understand men’s behaviour. As for dismissing legend, the attempt would be insolent if it were not so hopeless. Legend has swayed more minds than has fact. Indeed, half the time it is legend that produces facts. The Napoleonic legend has had a hundred times more effect in shaping actual events than ever, for all his greatness, had Napoleon himself (who, moreover, exploited his own legend consummately). Dismiss it? ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking!’
How legends arise would be a curious and fascinating study, very far from being so simple as one may at first fancy, with his attention focussed on the standardization of thought achieved by the daily press; for legends sprang up equally, and endured, long before printing was invented. But this is a side issue that the unfortunate historian may leave to some one else. Legend itself, once it is firmly established, he has no right to disregard. It is too important—I mean, actually important in its practical results.
To get an idea of how important, observe what happens when a legend blows up. A perfect example of that phenomenon occurred not long since. With the discovery of the semi-official murder of Matteotti in Rome, and the revelations that followed, the Mussolini legend exploded and was gone, utterly. It had to go. Either Signor Mussolini was himself among the criminals or he was helpless against the machinations of a corrupt and evil clique. In either case, the legend of the ‘Duce,’ the super-man, the benevolent tyrant, wisely, righteously and firmly governing Italy for her own good, became untenable. There remained only Mussolini, the man. And, with the collapse of that legend, the whole strength, other than physical, of Fascismo evaporated. Yet it was only a silly little legend that, even left undisturbed, could not have lasted fifteen years.
In the last sentence you may discover an indication that, for my part, I distinguish between the value of ephemeral legends and that of legends which endure. So, in truth, I do. If the Mussolini legend and the Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy, of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets, above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his best, a President of the United States may and should be. There really is, incongruously and almost incredibly, a rough fundamental idealism displayed by a good many men in American public life, and, better, demanded of them by the mass of American citizens, that is largely due to the solid permanence of that legend. Not for anything would I see the legend vanish; which is fortunate, since it never will.
If I am right in this, that in the long run it is not a man but his legend that affects events and the natures of other men for good or evil, then it is of no importance that we cannot penetrate through it to the man himself and learn whether or not his legend falsifies his character. Nevertheless, the problem is a fascinating one, partly because it is insoluble, but chiefly, I fancy, because hidden in its depths lies that eternal question: ‘What is truth?’