On this necessity is based the importance which in the examination of historians is attached to intuition, or touch, or scent, or whatever else it may be called, that is to say, to the capacity (derived in part from natural disposition and in part from practical exercise) of directly intuiting what has occurred, of passing beyond the obstacles of time and space and the alterations produced by chance or human passion. An historian without intuitive faculty, or more exactly (since no one is altogether without it), with but slender intuitive faculty, is condemned to barrenness, however learned and ingenious he may be in argument. He finds himself inferior to others, less learned and less logical than he, inferior even to the uncultured and to the illogical, when it is a question of feeling what lies beneath words and signs, or of reproducing in himself what actually happened. For the same reason, it sometimes happens that an expert in a given trade is astonished to hear the learned arm-chair historian describe certain orders of facts, of which he has no experience and of which he talks as a blind man talks of colours. A sergeant can intuite a march better than a Thiers, and laugh at the millions of men that Xerxes had led into Greece by simply enquiring how they were fed. A political schemer understands a court or ministerial intrigue far better than an honest man like Muratori. A craftsman can reconstruct the successive brush-strokes and the traces of change of mind in a picture better than the erudite and æsthetic historian of art. Historical works perhaps defective or even failures from other points of view, sometimes fascinate by the proof they give of freshness of impression: and this quality may serve to increase our knowledge of facts and to rectify the errors into which their authors have fallen in other respects. To a historian of the French Revolution we can pardon even the mistaking of one personage for another, of a river for a mountain, or the confusion of months and years, when on the whole he has lived again better than others the soul of the Jacobins, the spiritual conditions of the mob of Paris, the attitude of the peasants of Burgundy or of La Vendée. What is called an historical novel sometimes has in certain respects greater value than a history, if the novel is inspired by the spirit of the time and the history contains merely an inventory. [Sidenote: _The intuitive faculty in historical exposition. Similarity of history and art._]