For this is the strength of legend: that it is not thought, but feeling. When I know a man well I do not think of him as having dark hair, a straight nose, rather small eyes, and a stoop. His presence or the mention of his name produces in me a certain sensation that, so far as I am concerned, _is_ the man. My like or dislike for him, my opinion of his character, may be affected by what others tell me about him; but that sensation nothing can alter. It is of precisely the same kind as the sensation given me by a certain odour or a certain melody. It is unmistakable. Something like this, legend gives. One says Lincoln, and a feeling, a sensation, springs up in the mind. This emotion, this legend, the patriotic Sunday-Schoolish brand of literature attempts to exploit, and history attempts to ignore. The former effort is, I have suggested, not without danger. (To what? Oh, I suppose, to truth, to sanity of mind). It would employ a strong, universally felt emotion for the purposes of a chronicle as falsely innocent as a fairy-tale. One might compare the effect of such exploitation to that of a moving-picture in colours. The colour values are all wrong, not thus do grass and a red gown look in sunlight; but there the grass actually is, waving, and through it in her false red gown actually walks the heroine. It is confusing. Even so, I do not think the danger very serious for any one with enough of a mind to be worth saving. The point of all this twaddle, plausible as the stuff may at first appear, is too naïve, too utterly unlike any conceivable expression of the reader’s own psychology. The deliberate and persistent attempt of history to ignore legend is another and graver matter. That the attempt should be made is perhaps natural. Legend is pure feeling, and historians distrust feeling, noting contemptuously how unfounded it usually is and how wide of the mark its conclusions more often than not appear to them, whose business it is to examine facts. Also, their minds being trained to weigh and measure, they are not interested in anything that cannot be weighed and measured. All the same, they are wrong. Whether or not legend is something we should be better without, it exists. You cannot ignore something that is. And legend exists as solidly as the Battle of Waterloo. You cannot get through it or around it or behind it, and therefore you cannot dismiss it. I admit that if I were an historian I should probably want to. Not only should I be disdainful (as I am, even without being an historian) of the tawdry foundationless legends spawning all about me, with their cheap slogans (‘Keep Cool with Cal!’), and apt to forget that the death-rate among legends is higher than that among Jews in Poland, but I should feel despairingly that to let oneself in for legend, to concede the necessity of considering feeling, would make the writing of history an enterprise too gigantic to be possible; and so, very likely, it is.