But so deep-going an alteration in human nature, such a huge discrepancy between present and past, is disconcerting to the mind. It must needs be reduced and accounted for. Our emotional conviction of the obsolescence of pride, like every other strong and persistent feeling harboured by human beings, must needs be rationalised. And the rationalisation is now in progress. Pride has seemed to our imagination very unreal in the present; therefore our reason is demonstrating that it was also quite unreal in the past. Historical science aided by other sciences has undermined the pride of the past. It appears now that proud princes, as well as proud nations and empires, fell of old not by reason of pride but by reason of economics--or the lack of economics. Or else there were geographical, ethnological, biological, or psychological causes. The last-mentioned category is the most effective of all for eliminating moral factors from human history. For example, only an old-fashioned reader may still fancy that Henry the Second, by conquering the violence of his pride, could have refrained from causing the slaughter of Becket. That, to be sure, was the subsequent opinion of Henry himself. But, psychologically speaking, Henry and the old-fashioned reader are mistaken. Henry was subject to certain stimuli and certain complexes that completely determined, and completely explain, his extraordinary behaviour before and after the murder of the archbishop. Emerson, looking back mildly from Concord upon the greedy and murderous pride of old days, found human history very tiresome because it was so very bad. To-day many disillusioned persons are finding it still more tiresome because it seems to them neither bad nor good. It is non-moral, and therefore non-dramatic. Never does it hang dramatically in the fearful balance of the free human will between a false pride and a right humility. It merely moves back and forth like the waves and currents of the sea. History, unhappily, just happens. Perhaps, however, this ultra-modern view of history, in which pride seems so unreal, is itself the offspring of a very real pride. Modern pride is not of necessity less real than ancient pride just because, so far, its way is less conscious and dramatic. After all it takes time to dramatise ourselves to ourselves; and the modern age, so modernists say, is not yet in full swing. They say that the modern theatre has merely made a beginning and that in the future it will do great things. If so, I would claim that the greatest of those great things must be an adequate dramatisation of modern pride. But we cannot wait for that. If we did, it would never come. It cannot come until there is general recognition of the fact that pride is still the grand protagonist in the human drama; and that under its drab modern dress it has lost not a whit of its ancient sinew.