YOU need perspective when recording the truth even more than when delineating more tangible objects; and to tell the truth about man the perspective which time alone can give is indispensable. Truth is not stranger than fiction until it becomes fiction, as it always does in the long run, and man is as unrecognisable until he becomes a myth as history is unreliable until it is legendary. Novels are truer to life than histories, which may be the reason why all histories which are readable approximate to fiction. Historic facts are of little value until they become symbolical.

T is becoming more and more necessary for us to realise these interesting and peculiar phenomena of human records at a time, such as the present, when history is being "made " before our eyes and ears. Many of us are not a little disturbed by the infinite variety of so-called authentic accounts of the origins and conclusions of the late war. One by one the supermen whose genius has turned Europe into a chaos of impoverished, morbidly self-conscious and hysterical States are telling the world how it was done and how all the mistakes were made by someone else. In a few months Mr. Lloyd George will contribute his broadside to this new battle of the books, and there are other potential combatants in the offing awaiting their opportunity to explode.

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HESE documents, and those other more ponderous records issued by the State Departments of the various nations who were drawn into the maelstrom are the raw material for the historical artists of the future. What would one not give to read what our Gibbons and Macaulays of the year A.D. 2022 evolve out of this mass of diplomatic, acrimonious, romantic material; this falsely-frank and frankly-false medley! We cannot tell-we may not know. But unless human conscious

ness undergoes surprising progress during the next hundred years towards the establishment of a more exact sense of fact, the dear old war will have become as mythical as the Arthurian legends, its incidents as picturesque and as true as Alfred and the cakes or Canute and the waves.

N the second of his letters on The Study and Use of History, Lord Bolingbroke, after pointing out that nature gave us curiosity to excite the industry of our minds, and not as an end in itself, goes on to say that the proper application of this faculty is the constant improvement of private and public virtue. “An application to any study, that tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and better citizens," he adds, "is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness, to use an expression of Tillotson: and the knowledge we acquire by it is a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more. This creditable kind of ignorance is, in my opinion, the whole benefit which the generality of men, even of the most learned, reap from the study of history and yet the study of history seems to me, of all other, the most proper to train us up to private and public virtue."

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HESE are wise words, but there is more than one obstacle

in the way of their application to that practice of private and public virtue which my Lord Viscount Bolingbroke so rightly upholds. In the first place the study of history can only be pursued on the understanding that history as it is written is indistinguishable from legend, and that no one would read it if it were not. "A mixture of lie doth ever add to pleasure. Doth any man doubt that if there were taken from men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and

unpleasing to themselves?" Thus, Lord Bacon; and the answer is, yes it would, and quite rightly so, too. If we are to make a proper study of mankind we must start with the illusions of mankind, and not with what science would call the facts. We shall never understand mankind's more recent efforts at chaosmaking unless we recognise the importance of the things men are prepared to believe. There never was such excellent raw material as the explanations of our supermen-but these will be of no permanent value until someone connotes and annotates them with the popular Press of the period. The Press is the real master of illusion; the war books are the aftermath. But any opinions we may form cannot be other than partial without the perspective of distance-and even then there will be no general agreement as to who began the war or who ended it—even if it ever ends.

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