It is generally believed that legends are found only at the dawn of history, in the poetic period; that is a great mistake; the legend—­the legend that deceives, that deforms, that misdirects—­is everywhere, in all ages, in the present as in the past—­in the present even more than in the past, because it is the consequence of certain universal forms of thought and of sentiment.  To-day, just as ten or twenty centuries ago, interests and passions dominate events, alter them and distort them, creating about them veritable romances, more or less probable.  The present, which appears to all to be the same reality, is instead, for most people, only a huge legend, traversed by contemporaries stirred by the most widely differing sentiments.

However the mass may content itself with this legend, throbbing with hate and love, with hope and the fear of its own self-created phantoms, those who guide and govern the masses ought to try to divine the truth, as far as they can.  A great man of state is distinguished from a mediocre by his greater ability to divine the real in his world of action beneath its superfice of confused legends; by his greater ability to discriminate in everything what is true from what is merely apparently true, in the prestige of states and institutions, in the forces of parties, in the energy attributed to certain men, in the purposes claimed by parties and men, often different from their real designs.  To do that, some natural disposition is necessary, a liveliness of intuition that must come with birth; but this faculty can be refined and trained by a practical knowledge of men, by experience in things, and by the study of history.  In the ages dead, when the interests that created their legends have disappeared, we can discover how those great popular delusions, which are one of the greatest forces of history, are made and how they work.  We may thus fortify the spirit to withstand the cheating illusions that surround us, coming from every part of the vast modern world, in which so many interests dispute dominion over thoughts and will.  In this sense alone, I believe that history may teach, not the multitude, which will never learn anything from it, but, impelled by the same passions, will always repeat the same errors and the same foolishnesses; but the chosen few, who, charged with directing the game of history, have concern in knowing as well as they can its inner law.  Taken in this way, history may be a great teacher, in its every page, every line, and the study of the legend of Antony and Cleopatra may itself even serve to prepare the spirit of a diplomat, who must treat between state and state the complicated economic and political affairs of the modern world.  And so, in conclusion, history and life interchange mutual services; life teaches history, and history, life; observing the present, we help ourselves to know the past, and from the study of the past we can return to our present the better tempered and prepared to observe and comprehend it.  In present and in past, history can form a kind of wisdom set apart, in a certain sense aristocratic, above what the masses know, at least as to the universal laws that govern the life of nations.