Legend
Under the influence of that gentle optimism which once upon a time suffused the world with a warm twilight glow, I used to believe that in the very long run truth would out, and that accordingly history was an exact science. Conceding cheerfully that a veracious history of our own period or of other periods close behind it was impossible, I yet took it for granted that, given time enough, falsehoods and misconceptions would be weeded out and documented objective truth established. This condition, I assumed, had already been perfectly achieved in the history of the various western nations up to about the period of the French Revolution, which still lay in a sort of gradually clearing penumbra.
Now that the attractive twilight glow has given place to a bleak grey light (whether or not of dawn I have no idea, but, if so, of a singularly unpleasant November dawn), I have begun to question, among other things, that comfortable belief. And, questioned, it seems to me to reveal at once certain lacunae and incongruities that make it appear extremely dubious and lead me to wonder that I ever accepted it so unthinkingly.
For example, while, judging from the past, anything like a definitive history of the late war will probably not be written for two hundred years or so, from tendencies apparent even to-day it is already possible to predict that such a history will deal with the struggle coolly as the result of clear-cut national rivalries, largely economic. Thus history has explained earlier wars, and thus it is, as yet gropingly, preparing to explain this one.
Now any man who at maturity lived through the period from 1914 to 1918 must be aware that such an explanation, however fully documented, will not be a complete and truthful explanation of the war. In retrospect the war will seem, from its results, to have been an inevitable, coldly logical affair; but the fact remains that it was not that, as we who witnessed it know. To begin with, many hundreds of thousands of young men went willingly into the war, though aware that they were going to almost certain death. That is simply not done in behalf of an economic conflict. A considerable proportion of those young men went to war because they believed with all their heart that they were to fight for an ideal. That final history will doubtless ignore their emotional attitude. To-day, when it is not yet possible to ignore the attitude, the tendency among interpreters of the war is to discount it as of no importance, to brush all these dead thousands aside as deluded—mere tools of the real forces that brought on the war. But unless one is to adopt the absurd belief that economic laws, nationalistic rivalries and so forth, are objective things with a life of their own, instead of what they obviously are—expressions of the minds of men assembled in groups, it is clear that if these thousands of young men were deluded they must have been deluded by some person or group of persons.
But if one thing should be apparent by now to any one who lived through those four trying years, it is that the war had no villain or villains responsible for it. There were, indeed, fierce economic and other rivalries between the groups of men called nations, but no one, literally no one, intended or devised that catastrophe. The peoples blundered into war. It was a vast, senseless, chaotic mêlée. History may, and doubtless will, write it down as something clear and logical; in truth it was neither one nor the other. People rather fortuitously but none the less rigidly assembled in groups were at odds with people assembled in other similar groups, about trade, world markets, the congestion of population, and the like; but they were far less clearly so than history is going to give them credit for being, and their being so was only half the story. The other half was emotion. Neither, given the bewilderment over the war, when it came, of positively every one save the regular army officer (whose mind, if you can call it that, is not subject to bewilderment), can I believe that within each comprehensive national group smaller groups of people pulled strings and, callously exploiting the majority, deliberately brought on the war for their own advantage. The result may prove to be the same as though they had done that, but they simply did not. They were as bewildered and upset and emotional as the others. History, I begin to perceive, cares really only for results—with, perhaps, neat, post-factum causes; and that is why I grow sceptical of it, since a result without its causes—all of them—is not truth and lacks significance.
Presumably, then (still judging by the past), what we are going to have a couple of centuries hence is a cold, neat, logical, definitive history of the World War, with, running along beside it, a body of literature patriotically chronicling, exalting and deforming its episodes of heroism. And never the twain shall meet, any more than East and West, Highbrow and Lowbrow, mind and matter. And which of the two will be the falser it is hard to say. The former will not explain truly why people made the war, and the latter will not tell what they truly felt. Each will fail even in its own chosen province. A novel like War and Peace may be written that will come amazingly close to the real truth, but the historians will sniff at it because some of its facts are inaccurate and because it is a novel, and the addicts of the patriotic literature will detest and condemn it because it does not picture their ancestors as heroes, but as bewildered mediocre individuals like themselves.
It is only of late that I have begun to distrust history, but this patriotic literature I have, ever since I was old enough to think, disliked and found depressing. Depressing because it is so sweet, wide-eyed and simple, giving always somehow the effect of being written in words of one syllable; because it attributes to the men whose deeds it recounts the minds of children—not real children, at that; and because it would reduce the obscurely motivated happenings of this rich, confused, infinitely interesting world to the insipid level of a Sunday-School story or a play by Schiller. However, it is not very important. Despite its use of real names, people can hardly accept it as real—that is, as in any way related to their own lives. And I should not have devoted even a paragraph to it but for one thing that it does, from which comes its only strength and in which lies its only danger. This is: to attempt to exploit legend.
A legend, like a gigantic shadow with blurred edges, forms about every man who has been of great importance in his day. For that matter, a legend forms about every significant period in history, too. There is a Greek legend and an Italian Renaissance legend, just as there is a Socrates legend and a Leonardo legend. But the personal legend is the less vague and the more important. When a man’s influence on his fellows is impressive, and often when it is not, a legend grows up about him, even during his lifetime. There was certainly a Roosevelt legend long before Roosevelt’s death, and there is already a Coolidge legend to-day. For the most part these legends eventually fade, flicker and go out (there was even a Blaine legend once upon a time), but when a man’s existence has modified that of millions and left an impress on events, his legend grows and solidifies, rather than diminishes, as the years pass. Until finally it becomes so strong that it alone has life; you cannot possibly get at the vanished individual for the impenetrable legend surrounding his memory.
‘Surrounding his memory’ is perfectly accurate; for the legend is not equivalent to the memory. It is, indeed, something quite different, as some of those who knew the dead hero intimately often struggle in vain to show us. Yet in their struggle there is a kind of perplexity; even these intimates become submerged by the legend, and get it all mixed up with their personal memories, so strong it is. The best example of which is to be found in the reminiscences of old men who actually knew Lincoln, since rarely about any one so recently dead has a permanent legend formed so compactly. It is as impossible to know what Lincoln truly was as to know what Washington or Napoleon was. No amount of newly unearthed documents can alter the legend or shake it.
For this is the strength of legend: that it is not thought, but feeling. When I know a man well I do not think of him as having dark hair, a straight nose, rather small eyes, and a stoop. His presence or the mention of his name produces in me a certain sensation that, so far as I am concerned, is the man. My like or dislike for him, my opinion of his character, may be affected by what others tell me about him; but that sensation nothing can alter. It is of precisely the same kind as the sensation given me by a certain odour or a certain melody. It is unmistakable.
Something like this, legend gives. One says Lincoln, and a feeling, a sensation, springs up in the mind.
This emotion, this legend, the patriotic Sunday-Schoolish brand of literature attempts to exploit, and history attempts to ignore.
The former effort is, I have suggested, not without danger. (To what? Oh, I suppose, to truth, to sanity of mind). It would employ a strong, universally felt emotion for the purposes of a chronicle as falsely innocent as a fairy-tale. One might compare the effect of such exploitation to that of a moving-picture in colours. The colour values are all wrong, not thus do grass and a red gown look in sunlight; but there the grass actually is, waving, and through it in her false red gown actually walks the heroine. It is confusing. Even so, I do not think the danger very serious for any one with enough of a mind to be worth saving. The point of all this twaddle, plausible as the stuff may at first appear, is too naïve, too utterly unlike any conceivable expression of the reader’s own psychology.
The deliberate and persistent attempt of history to ignore legend is another and graver matter.
That the attempt should be made is perhaps natural. Legend is pure feeling, and historians distrust feeling, noting contemptuously how unfounded it usually is and how wide of the mark its conclusions more often than not appear to them, whose business it is to examine facts. Also, their minds being trained to weigh and measure, they are not interested in anything that cannot be weighed and measured.
All the same, they are wrong. Whether or not legend is something we should be better without, it exists. You cannot ignore something that is. And legend exists as solidly as the Battle of Waterloo. You cannot get through it or around it or behind it, and therefore you cannot dismiss it.
I admit that if I were an historian I should probably want to. Not only should I be disdainful (as I am, even without being an historian) of the tawdry foundationless legends spawning all about me, with their cheap slogans (‘Keep Cool with Cal!’), and apt to forget that the death-rate among legends is higher than that among Jews in Poland, but I should feel despairingly that to let oneself in for legend, to concede the necessity of considering feeling, would make the writing of history an enterprise too gigantic to be possible; and so, very likely, it is.
Nevertheless, history written, as it is, without knowledge and due consideration of emotion begins to appear to me a colossal falsehood. Men’s acts are three-fourths the product of emotions, and, no matter how false the emotions may have been, without intimate acquaintance with them you cannot rightly understand men’s behaviour. As for dismissing legend, the attempt would be insolent if it were not so hopeless. Legend has swayed more minds than has fact. Indeed, half the time it is legend that produces facts. The Napoleonic legend has had a hundred times more effect in shaping actual events than ever, for all his greatness, had Napoleon himself (who, moreover, exploited his own legend consummately). Dismiss it? ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking!’
How legends arise would be a curious and fascinating study, very far from being so simple as one may at first fancy, with his attention focussed on the standardization of thought achieved by the daily press; for legends sprang up equally, and endured, long before printing was invented. But this is a side issue that the unfortunate historian may leave to some one else. Legend itself, once it is firmly established, he has no right to disregard. It is too important—I mean, actually important in its practical results.
To get an idea of how important, observe what happens when a legend blows up. A perfect example of that phenomenon occurred not long since. With the discovery of the semi-official murder of Matteotti in Rome, and the revelations that followed, the Mussolini legend exploded and was gone, utterly. It had to go. Either Signor Mussolini was himself among the criminals or he was helpless against the machinations of a corrupt and evil clique. In either case, the legend of the ‘Duce,’ the super-man, the benevolent tyrant, wisely, righteously and firmly governing Italy for her own good, became untenable. There remained only Mussolini, the man. And, with the collapse of that legend, the whole strength, other than physical, of Fascismo evaporated. Yet it was only a silly little legend that, even left undisturbed, could not have lasted fifteen years.
In the last sentence you may discover an indication that, for my part, I distinguish between the value of ephemeral legends and that of legends which endure. So, in truth, I do. If the Mussolini legend and the Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy, of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets, above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his best, a President of the United States may and should be. There really is, incongruously and almost incredibly, a rough fundamental idealism displayed by a good many men in American public life, and, better, demanded of them by the mass of American citizens, that is largely due to the solid permanence of that legend. Not for anything would I see the legend vanish; which is fortunate, since it never will.
If I am right in this, that in the long run it is not a man but his legend that affects events and the natures of other men for good or evil, then it is of no importance that we cannot penetrate through it to the man himself and learn whether or not his legend falsifies his character. Nevertheless, the problem is a fascinating one, partly because it is insoluble, but chiefly, I fancy, because hidden in its depths lies that eternal question: ‘What is truth?’
My own undocumented theory is that an enduring legend does not falsify the individual about whom it has formed. When a man falls in love with a woman he has an exalted perception of her as something rare and wonderful, yet perfectly definite, concrete, individual. From no one else could he receive that particular sensation. When he was in love before, he received one, equally sharp, from another woman; but it was not this sensation. If it were, I should agree with those who consider the poor creature merely deluded. Since it is not, I am inclined to believe that he has obtained a fleeting glimpse of truth. Not the average daily truth about the person worshipped, but an unrealized and unrealizable yet more significant truth—a vision of what that person might become at her best and truest. Presently the emotion fades and is gone, either utterly or to return but faintly for an instant now and then, ever so rarely; but it was surely, in its moment, too sharp and clear a fact to have been without significance. It was actually, I fancy, a sort of intensification of the personality glimpsed, together with a stripping away of everything unessential.
A somewhat similar intensification and stripping away it is at least possible that legend, an enduring legend, gives. Seizing on the individual’s essentially personal dreams, evil or good, divined beneath a few of his inadequate acts, and exaggerating, or perhaps only intensifying, them, legend gives us these as the man. Probably that was not the way the individual appeared to himself. Probably no other individual ever saw him like that, unless, for a moment, his passionate lover or his passionate enemy. Yet that, says legend confidently, is what he was.