THE FOLKLORE OF HISTORY

THE world (it is a proud reflection) is governed by homo sapiens: perhaps malicious quadrupeds, aware of our present situation, would add that it looks it. But it is not always easy to distinguish the master of the world from the remainder of the brute creation. His physical equipment is scandalously simian; and his mental qualities vary between the bovine and the bird-like. The proud attempt is often made to found a claim to superiority upon his manufactures; but his case, even here, is sometimes less than thin. He makes tunnels; but so does the mole. He makes bridges; but so does the beaver. He makes laws; but so (without professional assistance) does the ant. He makes filigree; but the spider makes it too. He makes songs; but the birds make better ones.

Yet there is one handicraft which is his peculiar secret. Perhaps it may serve as the mystery of the human guild. What other animal makes gods? One puts the question a little haughtily and pauses, with easy confidence, for a reply. The brute creation is shamed into a respectful silence. It hangs its head; its tail is (where possible) between its legs. There is no answer to the human challenge, because man alone makes gods. He makes them on the oddest occasions and from the most unpromising material. From rainstorms, from sunsets, from trees, from thunder, from running water and stones with peculiar shapes, the strange little creature fashions divinities. His capacity for adoration is inexhaustible; and it is lavished upon the most remarkable objects.

But of all the gods which man has ever made the most singular are those which he makes out of other men. Sometimes the venerated person has a religious turn; in such cases he is added, quite simply, to the bright company of the skies and becomes a god pur sang-like the gaunt Mahomet and the mild Gautama Buddha. But more frequently his career has a merely national significance; and the deification of these political figures has produced queer series of patriotic sub-religions which, fascinating as folk-lore, strangely complicate the task of the historian. Patriotism and centenaries are the two greatest enemies of

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Truth. The shy lady seems to retire into the cool depths of her well when she hears a brass band coming or detects the deeper note of memorial orators tuning up. But she is nowhere harder to discern than in those careers which have been overlaid by this odd craving for mythology. A persevering monarch of Teutonic origin, named Karl, reappears in French fable as a semi-divine old man of colossal stature, with miraculous accomplishments, and in direct communication with heaven through the Archangel Gabriel. The French imagination seems peculiarly friendly to these transfigurations. For a still more questionable character, whom a series of happy accidents elevated to the throne of France in the early years of the Nineteenth Century, emerges in a blaze of theological glory, which can hardly be stated except in the decorous terms of classical mythology. The fortunate artillerist

Assumes the god,
Affects to nod,

And seems to shake the spheres.

A far-shining figure is seen to sit above the thunder on the Napoleonic Olympus; on his right hand is the eagle (how fortunate that his heraldic advisers did not adopt, as they nearly did, the elephant); beside him sit one or other of the ladies who were cast to play the part of Juno; and to right and left gleams the bright circle of the lesser gods, with a distinct preponderance of Mars and a brisk competition between his sisters for the agreeable rôle of Venus. Can it be wondered that historians have failed to render the lineaments of the deified Emperor? Folk-lore defies the search for truth; and any age, which has once glowed under its magic touch, is lost to history.

No period, perhaps, is richer in such mythology than the decade which produced the American Revolution. A century of patriotism has transfigured the facts; and there is a fine profusion of semi-divine personages. Infernal deities abound in Dantesque abundance. The mild features of King George III. acquire, as they preside over the Brocken of British policy, a Tartaric magnificence. Lord North,

One next himself in power and next in crime,

shambles a little inadequately through the part of Beelzebub. And the assembled 'Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,' which lived upon the British taxpayer between the years 1760 and 1782 loom in the sinister glare of their infernal characters. One had almost forgotten that they were human beings who played at loo and lived in a pleasant world—when fine ladies said Pho' and sent little notes to gentlemen by their abigails.

Almost equally baffling is the blinding white radiance which

envelops, to the American eye, the fathers of his country. Yet Dr. Franklin was a man; General Washington was almost human; and the fatal bullet which struck down Mr. Hamilton was not averted, as it sped from Mr. Burr's pistol, by some divine mother, invisible in a cloud. One even doubts how far these laborious apotheoses perform any real service to the reputations which they are designed to glorify. One may conceivably worship, but one can never admire, a god. The adored object is removed into a sphere beyond the reach of mere affection; and his appetites are starved upon a perpetually unsatisfying diet of rather perfunctory incense. Yet these men were once alive. Those chilly figures, in their marble attitudes, had wives and doubts and failings. Each of them, after his fashion, was strong, weak, admirable, reprehensible, before a sacerdotal view of history froze him into perfection, set him in his niche, and erected him as the immobile totem of some national virtue.

And there is another side to it all. Every religion breeds its sceptics. Canonisation creates the agnostic; and great names, which might have earned respect on the human plane, become the targets of young unbelievers. Nothing is more distressing than to observe the disproportionate fall which follows overvaluation. One has seen it in innumerable poets. The popular painter waits for posterity, as for a hangman. And the same monotonous pendulum which swings national heroes to the skies. will one day drop them almost out of sight. Did not a minor poet in New York say of a highly questionable prince, so early as the year 1837, that he was a rather dull man of the order of Washington'? There is a stupid alternation of praise and blame ; little men run about among the national images looking for feet of clay, or laboriously bleach historical black sheep. It is a singularly aimless process; and there is no corrective, except the substitution of a clear-eyed estimate for the ecstasies of patriotic religion.

Not, be it said, that all the fixed ideas are upon one side of the Atlantic. There is an equally distorted body of doctrine through which the American Revolution is reflected in the English mind. The stern figures, before which awed worshippers swing republican censers, recur in British legend under a strange disguise. There they are oddly shrunken; they dwindle into a provincial pettiness; and their voices monotonously intone the dreary formulæ of sedition. The British misconception relates principally to the American leaders: Englishmen have few illusions about their own. Their national modesty is rarely recognised abroad; but, by an admirable tradition, they hardly ever make extravagant claims on behalf of their public men. Profoundly respectful of themselves, they are generally economical

of respect for their masters. So one is not confronted with a national cult for King George III.; reference to Mr. Grenville is rare in public speeches; and Lord North is one of the few Tory statesmen after whom no club in Oxford has yet been named. But in place of the men who opposed them they have erected a disfiguring mythology, which renders almost as little of the facts as the loftiest flights of republican eloquence. General Washington, that profoundly British country gentleman, has become a dangerous revolutionary; the benevolent Dr. Franklin flits across the stage as a sinister conspirator; and Mr. Hamilton reappears in the uncongenial character of a dreary prig. It is all as remote from the truth as that glorious charade which has delighted American minds for a century with the elevating spectacle of Lord North in the sombre trappings of Alva and the Neronic despotism of King George.

The two myths form a pleasing contrast and may well engage the attention of folk-lorists. Some unborn Frazer should pursue a Golden Bough through the dark forest of Thanksgiving Day oratory and Anglo-American school text-books. But the figures of that age have surely receded far enough into the long perspective of history for a more detached view. Whilst they still remained relevant to public controversies, politics demanded a lively distortion. The long story was simplified into a party cry; and the actors in the piece were merely divided into villains and heroes with a precision which brought them within the comprehension of the humblest politician. That has been the fate of almost every great event in history. A century ago the British schoolboy approached the execution of Charles I. with grave partisanship; half a century later professors exchanged challenges about the Reformation. But as Prerogative and Protestantism passed out of active politics into history, it became possible to discern the outline of the facts through that clearer (though frostier) atmosphere. So, one may hope, the American Revolution emerges slowly into the daylight. The Sons of Liberty follow the Roundheads into historic reality. Stiff figures step off their pedestals and become human once more; and men whom one had seen fitfully under the shifting glare of patriotic limelight sit to historians for their portraits by the still light of studios. The political controversy has almost fallen silent. The Stamp Act is no longer debated in the remoter villages of either country; and the competing eloquence of Mr. Burke and Mr. Henry compels few cheers beyond the silent applause of students in libraries. The dispute has become an old problem in administration, almost in geography; and there are no longer any sides to it, except the two sides of the Atlantic. The debate is ended; and historians hover over that quiet battlefield.

In this still air one may set up an easel to paint a few portraits. It would be safer, perhaps, to make the usual genuflexions before the stiff effigies erected by tradition on patriotic totems. National tabus are awkward things to disregard. But it seems more respectful to a man, even if he was a great man, to depict him as a man. And since they lived in the hard, bright light of the Eighteenth Century, by which Mr. Walpole saw everything and M. de Voltaire saw through everything, when anxious ladies were closeted with their mantua-makers and young gentlemen of fashion eloped with pretty nymphs, how clearly one can see them, those men who (some of them without intending it) made two nations grow where one nation grew before.

PHILIP GUEDALLA.