It is a very common thing, especially in modern history, to
lay such things to the power of one or two wealthy or one or two bloody
leaders, but you have only to think for a few moments of what a mob is
to see the falsity of that. Craft can harness this sort of explosive
force, it can control it, or persuade it, or canalize it to certain
issues, but it cannot create it.
Again, this sort of sense easily recognizes in historic types the
parallels of modern experience. It avoids the error of thinking history
a mistake and making of the men and women who appear there something
remote from humanity, extreme, and either stilted or grandiose.
In aid of this last feature in historical judgment there is nothing of
such permanent value as a portrait. Obtain your conception (as, indeed,
most boys do) of the English early sixteenth century from a text, then
go and live with the Holbeins for a week and see what an enormously
greater thing you will possess at the end of it. It is indeed one of the
misfortunes of European history that from the fifth century to at least
the eleventh we are, so far as Western European history is concerned,
deprived of portraits. And by an interesting parallel the writers of the
dark time seemed to have had neither the desire nor the gift of vivid
description. Consider the dreariness of the hagiographers, every one of
them boasting the noble rank and the conventional status of his hero,
and you may say not one giving the least conception of the man's
personality.
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