This feeling, more than any other feature of modernity, constitutes our break with the past. It has inspired the general conviction that the modern age, so far from being merely one phase, even the most important phase, of human history, has brought about a permanent alteration in the basic conditions of human history. And here again the majority of the leaders of opinion, while disavowing the popular view in its blatant extreme, have been moulded in spirit by the accumulating pressure of it. At the same time our knowledge of the _facts_ of the past has continued to increase. Popular biographies and surveys have circulated through a vast reading public. Hence has arisen what may be termed the modern historical paradox. The opening twentieth century has a wider speaking acquaintance with the past, and a fainter grip of its essential reality, than was ever the case before. The past is quite vivid to us, and quite unreal. Its main motif, its pride, is a dramatic ghost. Recently Lytton Strachey’s keen book on Queen Elizabeth and her Essex, and Francis Hackett’s glowing story of Henry Eighth and his wives, have made the pageant of the sixteenth century brilliantly alive for us. But in the end the pageant is more a pageant than ever; the past is more utterly past. The scene sparkles along before our eyes in sharp and multitudinous detail. Above all, the persons are amazingly human, as they loom toward us in vivid “close-ups.” Yet in the end they are human foreigners. They belong to a remote clime, and our attitude toward them is ironic and superior even when most sympathetic. In fact they seem to us _amazingly_ human just because we are surprised that they can be human at all. For the central motive of their lives, their pride of spirit, is or seems to us entirely out of date. Their ordinary desires were the same as ours; we see that more fully every day. But the power of their pride, which swamped or swept before it all those common desires, like the gale that ruled their little sailing-ships on the Atlantic, is obsolete. It appears almost as strange and superstitious, when we pause to reflect upon it, as the spasmodic fits of humility that made those proud ghosts grovel at the feet of their kings and gods. We think we have changed all that.