She knows how to show heroism in all its excesses, where the heroes are desperadoes, as in the conquest of Mexico or that of Siberia by a handful of men who could fit into a single railway carriage. Then History can take on a darker tone, composing sombre war ballads, like poems, so rounded, so enclosed, about the return of Charles XII from Sweden to the Ukraine, or the expeditions of the Vikings, or the fall of the Goths in Italy. But as much as History creates the highest lyrical and dramatic forms, she can, when the mood takes her, resort to simple jokes, to anecdote, and even in this form the situations she presents are incomparable. Everywhere, in all artistic manifestations, in the fresco of characters, she leaves far behind in her wake the fully achieved works of the individual artist or poet.

But how, even though History has made perfect poetry of herself, is there always this seemingly endless procession of writers and artists who seize on historical matter and transform it through their own imagination, thereby creating from raw history dramas and historical novels, and desire to be greater poetical interpreters than reality itself? How do these audacious creators dare to surpass History through invention, she who is the unrivalled mistress of invention, and the supreme poetess? Nothing is more justified than this question, than this objection. Well, we should remember what was noted earlier—that History is not always a poetess; there are fallow periods, developments which are too sprawling and ponderous in their evolution, untilled areas amidst this vast field, and—this is decisive—it must be remembered that what History transmits to us is never the whole event, the complete image of man, but merely a shadow of his nature, always fragmentary. Even the individual, each and every one of us, knows particular important things and events and carries them with him to the grave. What it is to have such an abundance of things and events at such a distance from us in time! History, I repeat, is never a finished printed book which we can read from one end to the other, but a vast palimpsest, a compilation, a manuscript of which nine-tenths is amended, where hundreds of pages are indecipherable, and thousands of others are missing and can only ever be replaced in their context through synthesis and the imagination. These countless enigmatic passages must inevitably encourage the poet’s addendum, his fabrication. He will attempt to intervene and, following the sense of History, will try as far as he is able to add what is missing, thereby achieving what Michelangelo did with a Greek statue when he tried to replace the arms and head with his own sculptural vision of being. Of course, it is only in the more obscure passages that the poet will seek to apply his imagination to proceedings, not to those that are perfectly clear. In these brilliant passages he does not seek to outdo History. Even the greatest of all poetic dramatists, Shakespeare, inclines to this rule. At the climax of the tragedy of Julius Caesar, in Mark Antony’s speech when he calls to the people for vengeance, almost word for word the historical text comes straight from Plutarch. If a master such as Shakespeare requires of himself to show such veneration, should it not be required of all? Happily, this respect for the facts, for the original historical material is reborn and the era of the “historical novel”, the blatant falsification of our ancestors’ lives, is now over. The time is over where a Walter Scott could rearrange history to suit his own needs and form characters who resemble gaily painted marionettes; today it would be unthinkable to do as Schiller, who depicted the young Maid of Orléans falling on the field of battle instead of perishing at the stake. Things have become purer, clearer, more objective and precise, ultimately more honest through our modern way of thinking; we no longer feel obliged to “romanticize” and satisfy the “heroic”, to recognize the beauty in a particular historical figure, and we venerate the truth in history too much to modify it casually for our own ends. Who after all has the right to invent a life of genius? One must be a genuinely great poet even to dare, in a work of theatre or a novel, to place fictional words in the mouth of a Caesar or a Napoleon, a Luther or a Goethe. Such sacrilege is perhaps admissible when Shakespeare has Julius Caesar speak, or Strindberg Luther. In this case the sensibility of the author is so profound that he really can speak with a kind of fraternal genius. But essentially there are very few who have this right and that is why the vast majority of all that is offered us by way of historical novel or story is nothing more than caricature, a valueless hybrid form, and in the end a literary failure. For if our intellectual power is limited, then the logic of History rests with the spirit of the world. Our dimensions originate from a rigid corporeality, while those of History draw on the armoury of the eternal; and therefore these novelistic inventions mostly treat their heroes on their own level: they dilute elements of the story to make it more digestible to their audience while disregarding History and their own contemporaries.

It is this ignorance of the poetic superiority of History that we witness so clearly in the current trend for the “biographie romancée”, that is to say, the biography decked with the romantic garnishing of a novel, where the real is intermingled with the false, the documentary with the imaginary, where great figures and events are illuminated by a private form of psychology instead of by the pitiless logic of History. In these romantically infused biographies artifice retouches the canvas, exaggerating the “tiny” traits, reinforcing the heroic and more interesting. But by doing this they produce more posters than psychological portraits in the manner of the great masters. I always prefer the historically accurate biography which does not spin tales but renounces all manner of invention, one which humbly serves the superior spirit of History and does not stand brash and headstrong in her way. The true biography is that which is content to explain what is happening, respectfully to follow the half worn-away runic traces and, instead of presumption, prefers to state sincerely: “Nescio, here I do not know the truth, I cannot be decisive.” But through this renunciation the strictly objective historical biography does not become a sterile collection of documents, a cold and passionless after-account. For, naturally, anyone who wishes to get a handle on history must in some sense be psychological: they must possess the faculty of deep perception, of listening closely to the event with the inner ear to have the capability of knowing how to distinguish historical truths. This is not a slip of the tongue when I speak of historical truths. In history there is virtually never a single and unique truth, but each vital fact is gathered, related to others and transmitted in a hundred different ways. I should recall that famous episode of Walter Raleigh, the great English naval hero and pirate, who, incarcerated in the Tower of London, began to write his memoirs.