oughly discontented.
She was happy enough, she says, when first she left the home of Pierus,
her father, to become a Muse. On those humble beginnings she looks
back with affection. She kept only one servant, Herodotus. The romantic
element in him appealed to her. He died, and she had about her a large
staff of able and faithful servants, whose way of doing their work
irritated and depressed her. To them, apparently, life consisted of
nothing but politics and military operations--things to which she, being
a woman, was somewhat indifferent. She was jealous of Melpomene. It
seemed to her that her own servants worked from without at a mass of dry
details which might as well be forgotten. Melpomene's worked on material
that was eternally interesting--the souls of men and women; and not
from without, either; but rather casting themselves into those souls
and showing to us the essence of them. She was particularly struck by a
remark of Aristotle's, that tragedy was "more philosophic" than history,
inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was
concerned with merely what had been. This summed up for her what she
had often felt, but could not have exactly formulated. She saw that the
department over which she presided was at best an inferior one. She saw
that just what she had liked--and rightly liked--in poor dear Herodotus
was just what prevented him from being a good historian. It was wrong to
mix up facts and fancies. But why should her present servants deal with
only one little special set of the variegated facts of life? It was not
in her power to interfere. The Nine, by the terms of the charter
that Zeus had granted to them, were bound to leave their servants an
absolutely free hand. But Clio could at least refrain from reading the
works which, by a legal fiction, she was supposed to inspire. Once or
twice in the course of a century, she would glance into this or that new
history book, only to lay it down with a shrug of her shoulders. Some
of the mediaeval chronicles she rather liked. But when, one day, Pallas
asked her what she thought of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
her only answer was "ostis toia echei en edone echei en edone toia"
(For people who like that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing they
like). This she did let slip. Generally, throughout all the centuries,
she kept up a pretence of thinking history the greatest of all the arts.
She always held her head high among her