The drama really took off when opposing forces entered the fray; an army of rebels with Thomas Müntzer at its head caused an insurrection and the Reformation saw Charles V, the most powerful man on earth, mercilessly defeated. On an icy winter’s night, abandoned by all his loyal lieutenants, he was forced to flee across the mountains and find sanctuary in a Spanish monastery. What artist, what poet could have dreamt up a more thrilling spectacle, where the most powerful man on earth becomes the only one in an endless line of princes who had reigned for centuries willingly and with humble abhorrence to relinquish power? Could any outcome be as logical but at the same time as surprising as this one? And what a cast of supporting players makes up this drama! I’ll mention a few names and facts: Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, the great reformers; Titian, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Leonardo and their Rome, defiled, destroyed, its artworks stolen; Machiavelli and Erasmus in Rotterdam; Holbein and the great German masters; Cervantes, whose arm was broken in a storm during the naval battle off Algeria; the discovery of new land in America, the spread of printing across the entire globe; the grotesque scenes during the absurd episode of Anabaptism, the tragedy of the peasants’ revolt and the Fiesco conspiracy: dozens, hundreds of such dramas assembled into a living space of thirty years—thirty years so dense with magnificent upsurges and calamitous downfalls, only to be compared perhaps with our own epoch since 1914. This is how History creates poetry, in her “Michelangeloesque” moments.

Or let’s view another fresco: the French Revolution, which in five years disintegrated and transformed as much historical matter as a whole century—an epoch that manages to express each phase of thought and feeling in a living person. I am thinking now of the following figures: Mirabeau, the true statesman, Danton, the agitator, Robespierre, the cold and clear-sighted politician, Marat, the demagogue, and alongside them, in all their infinite variety and nuances, a whole host of idealists and the corrupt, a wild maelstrom of wills, permanently locked in struggle with one another. And that unimaginable walk to the guillotine, with each of the condemned following the one before, each knowing that there is yet another awaiting the same fate behind him. What a dance of death worthy of Holbein; and it rampages on and on and on, until due to its own overstretch it finally expires and the heir Napoleon attempts to reach out his hand and snatch the abandoned throne.

And Napoleon in his turn, what a prodigious and unrivalled invention of History! As a young student at military school he happens to write on a sheet of paper: “St Helena, a tiny island that lies in the Atlantic”, unaware that twenty years later his path will lead him to that very place, from all the great battlefields of Europe and the most formidable power one man has possessed since Charles V, and that he will lose it all just as suddenly as his illustrious predecessor.

Here, then, it seems a moment of history is to be repeated. And yet no; nothing ever happens in the same way twice. History is so rich in material that she can always draw new situations and hypotheses from her inexhaustible arsenal. She never repeats, she only transposes, like a musician transposing a theme. Of course, sometimes we think we see analogous situations, but this is merely an illusion; and woe to the head of state who allows himself to be steered by these superficial analogies and thinks to act according to a rigid schema, who imagines he can manipulate a current situation by mimicking an event in the past. Louis XVI tried this when the Revolution broke out; he thought he could act wisely by studying books showing how his predecessor Charles I conducted himself during Cromwell’s Revolution. This is how he hoped to save his head. But precisely because he wanted to avoid the same mistakes and was too conciliatory, he committed others. History will never allow you to guess the path she will take, for she is too richly endowed for repetitions. She even surpasses the poet or writer who composes a poem, a novel or tragedy, who does not allow the reader or listener to guess the denouement until the last possible moment, who makes reality out of what seems most unlikely, and again and again History exceeds the greatest of expectations. The course of history is always unpredictable and is as random as roulette or any other game of chance, for the events that happen do so in the midst of dimensions and circumstances so unimaginable that our poor human reason cannot possibly foresee them. “There is no past,” Goethe says. “One would like to look back, but there is only the eternal new, formed from the spreading elements of the past.” History sometimes plays with resemblances, but she never remains the same, she always finds the new, the cloth she cuts is a world cloth; unfailingly she invents, and complete imaginative freedom is permitted her by God; she alone is sovereign among the artists, plays with absolute liberty in this world where all else submits to laws and boundaries. She alone is free and makes use of this freedom in the most profound and sagacious ways. We owe her a little more respect, this elusive poetess! Eternally she will remain our mistress, a paragon we can never reach!

For there is no art or technique which is foreign to this great poetess of History: in every artistic form she presents the definitive example. I showed how, in the time of Charles V or the French Revolution, she created vast frescoes containing hundreds of figures and events, each a drama in itself; how, like Michelangelo, in a great painting she places heaven and hell in the most fantastic contrasts. And even when she is concerned with a less turbulent epoch, where the drama is less condensed, she still shows herself a consummate artist. She does not always have to be stirring to be great. An example of this more gradual development: the early history of Rome, in the descriptions of Livy and Sallust. I know of nothing else in all Roman literature which can compare with its clarity of composition, measured growth and unrelieved tension, this calm yet continuous process which in three or four centuries had made of a little village in Latium, a mere molehill, the powerful city we know, centre of the Occident and the cultivated world. In this development of Rome, History eschews romantic, emotive, dramatically taut artistic forms and by contrast demonstrates in a clear account an epic exposé in the grand style, like those Tolstoy has created within the last century.

It’s not only when she is emotive that History proves herself a great artist. In those moments admittedly her technique seems more visible, but she also reveals herself to the connoisseur in more modest forms. Let us not forget that History is not overly self-admiring, and that sometimes it happens that she pens a crime or detective novel, like the history of the false Demetrius, the Gunpowder Plot or the affair of Marie Antoinette’s necklace; and sometimes she cannot resist farce, the burlesque, as in the case of a swindler duping his time, like Cagliostro or John Law—the world will be none the wiser—or today’s gold-makers, Captain von Köpenick, or the thief of the Mona Lisa. All art forms, the most elevated to the most playfully popular—History masters them all with the same ease. Likewise she can—whether in the time of the troubadours or of Werther—express with wonderfully touching delicacy the religious turmoil of the time of the Flagellants, the Crusades, the iconoclasm of Savonarola.