to the devil, but not one feels himself strong enough to walk alone, strong enough to have no need to hold on by some one's skirt.

Peopled with spirits and demons nature appeared to them singularly animated; in her presence they have all the emotions which a child experiences at night before the trees on the roadside and the vague forms of the rocks.

Unfortunately, our language is a very imperfect instrument for rendering all this; it is neither musical nor flexible; since the seventeenth century it has been deemed seemly to keep one's emotions to oneself, and the old words which served to note states of the soul have fallen into neglect; the Imitation and the Fioretti have become untranslatable.

More than this, in a history like the present one, we must give a large place to the Italian spirit; it is evident that in a country where they call a chapel basilica and a tiny house palazzo, or in speaking to a seminarist say "Your Reverence," words have not the same value as on this side of the Alps.

The Italians have an imagination which enlarges and simplifies. They see the forms and outlines of men and things more than they grasp their spirit. What they most admire in Michael Angelo is gigantic forms, noble and proud attitudes, while we better understand his secret thoughts, hidden sorrows, groans, and sighs.

Place before their eyes a picture by Rembrandt, and more often than not it will appear to them ugly; its charm cannot be caught at a glance as in those of their artists; to see it you must examine it, make an effort, and with them effort is the beginning of pain.

Do not ask them, then, to understand the pathos of things, to be touched by the mysterious and almost fanciful emotion which northern hearts discover and enjoy in the works of the Amsterdam master. No, instead of a forest they want a few trees, standing out clearly against the horizon; instead of a multitude swarming in the penumbra of reality, a few personages, larger than nature, forming harmonious groups in an ideal temple.

The genius of a people9 is all of a piece: they apply to history the same processes that they apply to the arts. While the Germanic spirit considers events rather in their evolution, in their complex becoming, the Italian spirit takes them at a given moment, overlooks the shadows, the clouds, the mists, everything that makes the line indistinct, brings out the contour sharply, and thus constructs a very lucid story, which is a delight to the eyes, but which is little more than a symbol of the reality.

At other times it takes a man, separates him from the unnamed crowd, and by a labor often unconscious, makes him the ideal type of a whole epoch.10

Certainly there is in every people a tendency to give themselves a circle of divinities and heroes who are, so to say, the incarnation of its instincts; but generally that requires the long labor of centuries. The Italian character will not suffer this slow action; as soon as it recognizes a man it says so, it even shouts it aloud if that is necessary, and makes him enter upon immortality while still alive. Thus legend almost confounds itself with history, and it becomes very difficult to reduce men to their true proportions.

We must not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature, the flower and the butterfly, should be touched only by delicate hands.

The effort here made to indicate the variegated, wavering tints which form the atmosphere in which St. Francis lived is therefore of very uncertain success. It was perhaps presumptuous to undertake it.

Happily we are no longer in the time when historians thought they had done the right thing when they had reduced everything to its proper size, contenting themselves with denying or omitting everything in the life of the heroes of humanity which rises above the level of our every-day experience.

No doubt Francis did not meet on the road to Sienna three pure and gentle virgins come from heaven to greet him; the devil did not overturn rocks for the sake of terrifying him; but when we deny these visions and apparitions, we are victims of an error graver, perhaps, than that of those who affirm them.

The first time that I was at Assisi I arrived in the middle of the night. When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the old basilica11 seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it wished to speak and sing. Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to a strange life, you might have thought them painted the evening before so much alive they were; everything was moving without awkwardness or jar.

I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the day was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a reflector. Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without unity, without harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something fantastic and grotesque.

He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here a foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain from musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight.

The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they show; but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the falsehoods of the sun.

History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually changing. Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it the same charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your eyes, would never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent, but it needs only a cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs only a jet of light to bring out such or such a detail and give it a false value.

When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of the Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a shining aureola; the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere the damage which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I looked, almost thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the chatelaine ... Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish, which seem to beg for pity.

It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for historic evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be discovered; but for the present there is no purely objective truth of history.

To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it. Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the secret of objectivity, in the publication of original documents. This is a true progress which renders inestimable service, but here