ver this baggage. The automatic and pious
minstrel carries it with him to the end.

[Sidenote: No history without documents.]

For these reasons there can be no serious history until there are
archives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privileged
position may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of his
own time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archives
and records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian from
paying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the same
concessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence of
documents, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle that
elicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out of
remembered events. In both cases the facts are automatically
foreshortened and made to cluster, as it were providentially, about a
chosen interest. The historian's politics, philosophy, or romantic
imagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that falls
within that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, the
rest is passed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possible
to say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest which
guides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on the
events he relates and especially on their grouping and significance.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
The conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts and
put a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is brought
forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of
events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are
endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their
actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual
achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain
buried in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and an
honest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish,
as he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits of
his book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a very
great mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent and
such a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative of
all reality.

[Sidenote: The aim is truth.]

Some historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical th