PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

The art of biography зіхаххах pretends to recover the personality of great men as women in the past, refusing to see that that personality is forever lost, lost through the disappearance of the facts, lost through the disappearance of the psychological atmosphere -- the tacit assumptions -- of the time, lost through the temporary distortions of the recorders, lost through the temporary distortion which we, the onlookers, impose upon the material.

What is left then?

The great man's personality and example, regarded not as fact, but as force, as energy, working upon the minds of those who surrounded, descending through the impress of imagination upon imagination, suffering change suffering distortion (yet directing change and effecting distortion),--the legend, the myth. That is a fact in history, and this time not a fact in the absurd schoolmasterish sense of the word, but a fact as facts only are: energy. This fact, the Myth, has its own laws and even when it is wrong is still xxxxx significant, even when it is unlikely, it is still vital and contains with it, pendulum-like, its own power for self-correction.

The only thing that is left to us from the past is the Myth. The biography of a great man can never be anything more than the history of the myth as it descends through the perspective of human watchers, changing its colors and its shape with each successive age, now loved, now hated, creating children in its own image, creating anti-selves through xxxxxx repudiation, -- what is that but the life of Christ, the life of Julius Caesar, the life of Socrates?

(1)

The failure of history and biography xxxxxxxx to restore the past to us does not lie so much in the discovery (as the historians raefully acknowledge) that there are such glaring and capricious lacunae in the documents, regrettable though that is. It lies in the fact that the psychological atmosphere which surrounded that fact has disappeared. A fact in history, -- a crusade, a migration, a change of government, -- is unworth of

does such alteration occur when applied to the Greeks.

But we are told that with the aid of the "historical imagination" we may overcome this difficulty.

When the historian begins to feel complacency stealing over him and when he is convinced that he is developing this sympathetic historical imagination that permits him to "enter in" to other ages, let him lay before himself three phenomena of the past: the Greek custom of the exposure of infants; the Roman deification of emperors; and the Mediaeval sense of the life after death, represented for example in the sale of indulgences. You and I and the historian can give intelligent lip-explanation of these things; we can say "primitive" and "superstition" and "ignorance", --conceive them we cannot let them stand for a perpetual warning, shibboleths, barriers showing that every age is a hermetically sealed room, its air forever unbreathable by a later age. These barriers stand in all directions: explain to an Egyptian under Akhnaton that some people cremate their dead: under the wildest flights of fancy he could not imagine a human being who so looked upon life as to permit of such a practice. Our daily life is similarly full of Monsters for other ages. An intelligent man of the Age of Louis the Fourteenth could digest the telegraph and the radio after twenty minutes, but never could he understand

To a poet-philosopher (you and I) the very idea of a dictionary is an indefensible, and inconceivable thing. What are xx basilos, rex, re, konig and rol, are these all king? And is Shakespeares's king, in the same world of ideas as Swifts, as Mr T.S. Eliot's in his recent pronouncement?

(2)

But not only are the facts in any document of history and biography full of capricious omissions, and not only is the psychological background irrecoverable, but the very recorder who gives them to us was unable to transmit them to our editorial readjustment without stamping them first with his own temperamental stamp. At best a xxxiii may set down the dates of birth and death, the dates of a battle and the facts of asieze; let him depart ever so little from this crude notation(and only with such a departure does his dignity as a witness enter) but the margin of personal distortion enter; and when the record takes the shape of Suetonius' life of Caesar, of the Fourth Gospel, of the Anabsis, and we are in full Subjectivism.

(3)

Historians are aware of this, xxxiv but they "The more we know," they cry, "the more we realize that we have hold of but a grain of a grain of the truth".

And in their confusion and despair they retire into increasingly restricted specializations.

History is a study of the greatest fascination, but it must not be mistaken for an account of how and why human beings felt and acted in the past.

It is an exercise for drones. It is to adults what collecting stamps to children. The accumulation and juxtaposition of facts

Lion-heart reading Professor Monroe upon the Crusades; imagine Metternich reading one of the authors of the economic school who find in the Congress of Vienna the weaving of trading routes and wheat markets) is as absorbing and as lacking in livable residue as a game of chess. I shall read history all my life and persuade my friends to read it, but I shall never cease to regard it as a debased form of creative imaginative literature. Only when the historians frankly propose their work as a meditation about life taking its point xxxxx of departure from some given data in the past does it enter the field of human record worthy of our regard. Bossuet's History of the World considered as a theological demonstration of God's concern for the French monarchy may appear as so much nonsense to Mommsen, but at least it is informed throughout with one truth and one consistency, namely Bossuet's view of life. In that there are no capricious lacunae, in that there are no margins of partisanship: its xxxxx xxxxx good and its ill at least proceed from the same hand.

(4)

Since the records of history are as we have described them it follows that from history there can be derived no rules whereby through example, analogy and warning we may conduct ourselves more prudently in the present. History cannot serve as a series of examples for the profitable instruction of later ages.

Hereaclitus said: One can never put one's foot twice in the same stream.

(5)