n than the utterances that
are friendly. It makes little difference that the latter may greatly
preponderate in number. They are read in the main only in the country in
which they are made.

Neither Germans nor Englishmen were careful before the war always to be
pleasant to each other, and the same used to be true of Frenchmen and
Englishmen. But just as we are coming to understand why and how France
and England misinterpreted each other systematically a century and a
half ago, so we may yet learn how we came to present, more than a
hundred years later, difficulties to the Germans not wholly unlike those
which they presented to us. No mere record of the dry facts will be
enough to render this intelligible in its full significance. The
historian who is to carry conviction must do more than present
photographs. He must create a picture inspired by his own study and from
the depth of his own mind, and presented in its real proportions with
its proper lights and shadows, as a true artist alone can present it.
Browning has told us something worth remembering. It is at the end of
"The Ring and the Book":

Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,--
So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

The truth in its fulness and completeness can not be compassed in any
single narrative of events. It is, of course, the case that history
depends for its value on scientific accuracy, but that is not the only
kind of truth on which it depends. No man, even the most careful and
exacting, can rely on having the whole of the materials before his eye,
and if he had them there they would not only be presented in tints
depending on his outlook, but would be too vast to admit of his using
more than isolated fragments to work into his picture of the whole.
Selection is a necessity, and when to the fact that there must be
selection there is added the other fact that every historian has his
personal equation, the notion of a history constructed by a single man
on the methods of the physicist is a delusion. The best that the great
historian can do is to present the details in the light of the spirit o