han in the past, because it is the consequence of certain
universal forms of thought and of sentiment. To-day, just as ten or
twenty centuries ago, interests and passions dominate events, alter
them and distort them, creating about them veritable romances, more
or less probable. The present, which appears to all to be the same
reality, is instead, for most people, only a huge legend, traversed by
contemporaries stirred by the most widely differing sentiments.

However the mass may content itself with this legend, throbbing
with hate and love, with hope and the fear of its own self-created
phantoms, those who guide and govern the masses ought to try to divine
the truth, as far as they can. A great man of state is distinguished
from a mediocre by his greater ability to divine the real in his world
of action beneath its superfice of confused legends; by his greater
ability to discriminate in everything what is true from what is merely
apparently true, in the prestige of states and institutions, in the
forces of parties, in the energy attributed to certain men, in the
purposes claimed by parties and men, often different from their
real designs. To do that, some natural disposition is necessary, a
liveliness of intuition that must come with birth; but this faculty
can be refined and trained by a practical knowledge of men, by
experience in things, and by the study of history. In the ages dead,
when the interests that created their legends have disappeared, we
can discover how those great popular delusions, which are one of the
greatest forces of history, are made and how they work. We may thus
fortify the spirit to withstand the cheating illusions that surround
us, coming from every part of the vast modern world, in which so
many interests dispute dominion over thoughts and will. In this sense
alone, I believe that history may teach, not the multitude, which will
never learn anything from it, but, impelled by the same passions,
will always repeat the same errors and the same foolishnesses; but
the chosen few, who, charged with directing the game of history, have
concern in knowing as well as they can its inner law. Taken in this
way, history may be a great teacher, in its every page, every line,
and the study of the legend of Antony and Cleopatra may itself even
serve to prepare the spirit of a diplomat, who must treat between
state and state the complicated economic and political affairs of
the modern world. And so, in conc