In the last sentence you may discover an indication that, for my part, I distinguish between the value of ephemeral legends and that of legends which endure. So, in truth, I do. If the Mussolini legend and the Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy, of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets, above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his best, a President of the United States may and should be. There really is, incongruously and almost incredibly, a rough fundamental idealism displayed by a good many men in American public life, and, better, demanded of them by the mass of American citizens, that is largely due to the solid permanence of that legend. Not for anything would I see the legend vanish; which is fortunate, since it never will. If I am right in this, that in the long run it is not a man but his legend that affects events and the natures of other men for good or evil, then it is of no importance that we cannot penetrate through it to the man himself and learn whether or not his legend falsifies his character. Nevertheless, the problem is a fascinating one, partly because it is insoluble, but chiefly, I fancy, because hidden in its depths lies that eternal question: ‘What is truth?’ My own undocumented theory is that an enduring legend does not falsify the individual about whom it has formed. When a man falls in love with a woman he has an exalted perception of her as something rare and wonderful, yet perfectly definite, concrete, individual. From no one else could he receive that particular sensation. When he was in love before, he received one, equally sharp, from another woman; but it was not this sensation. If it were, I should agree with those who consider the poor creature merely deluded. Since it is not, I am inclined to believe that he has obtained a fleeting glimpse of truth. Not the average daily truth about the person worshipped, but an unrealized and unrealizable yet more significant truth--a vision of what that person might become at her best and truest. Presently the emotion fades and is gone, either utterly or to return but faintly for an instant now and then, ever so rarely; but it was surely, in its moment, too sharp and clear a fact to have been without significance. It was actually, I fancy, a sort of intensification of the personality glimpsed, together with a stripping away of everything unessential.