oing better, the greatest historian that the earth
has ever known. Thucydides is in fact the supreme historian, at the
same time swift and detailed, scrupulously sifting his evidence but
giving free play to intuition, setting forth none but incontestable
facts, yet divining the most secret intentions and embracing at a
glance all the present and future political consequences of the events
which he relates. He is withal one of the most perfect writers, one of
the most admirable artists in the literature of mankind; and from this
point of view, in an entirely different and almost antagonistic world,
he has not an equal save Tacitus. But Tacitus is before everything a
wonderful tragic poet, a painter of foul abysses, of fire and blood,
who can lay bare the souls of monsters and their crimes, whereas
Thucydides is above all a great political moralist, a statesman
endowed with extraordinary perspicacity, a painter of the open air and
of a free state, who portrays the minds of those sane, ingenious,
subtle, generous and marvellously intelligent men who peopled ancient
Greece. The one piles on the gloom with a lavish hand, gathers dark
shadows which he pierces at each sentence with lightning flashes, but
remains sombre and oppressed on the very summits, whereas the other
condenses nothing but light, groups together judgments that are so
many radiant sheaves and remains luminous and breathes freely in the
very depths. The first is passionate, violent, fierce, indignant,
bitter, sincerely but pitilessly unjust and all made up of magnificent
animosities; the second is always even, always at the same high level,
which is that which the noblest endeavour of human reason can attain.
He has no passion but a passion for the public weal, for justice,
glory and intelligence. It is as though all his work were spread out
in the blue sky; and even his famous picture of the plague of Athens
seems covered with sunshine.

2

But there is no need to follow up this parallel, which is not my
object. I will not dwell any longer--though perhaps I may return to
them one day--upon the lessons which we might derive from that
Peloponnesian War, in which the position of Athens towards Lacedaemon
provides more than one point of comparison with that of France towards
Germany. True, we do not there see, as in our own case, civilized
nations fighting a morally barbarian people: it was a contest between
Greeks and Greeks, displaying however in the same