No: that is not by any means all. For the romantic enters into frank competition with nature by attempting not merely to create more interesting persons than nature creates, but also to outvie nature by making his creations durable. And, as a sort of supreme affront, creative art now and then plucks from the graveyard one of nature's put-by failures, and, with a triumphant, "See now what I can do with the very material this bungler has flung away!" converts the dead man or woman into an ever-living romantic myth. So are begotten those favored persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of mankind renews.... I refer, of course, to such persons as Prometheus and Pan and Judas and the Sphinx,--and to Andromeda and Helen of Troy and Satan. I refer to the Wandering Jew and Faust and Odysseus, who stay always irresistible to the romanticist: and I refer to King Solomon and Queen Cleopatra and the knight Tannhäuser, and to Lilith and Don Juan also, for whom are yet reserved, we know, the most spirit-stirring adventures in the manuscripts of writers still unborn. I refer to Blue Beard, and to Dame Mélusine, and to Punch, and to a great many others who were so lucky as to originate in a satisfyingly romantic myth, and who in consequence stay always real and always free of finding life monotonous. Now, it is an ever-present reminder of our own impermanence to note that no human being stays real. In private annals a species of familiary canonization sets in with each fresh advent of the undertaker; no sooner, indeed, do our moribund lie abed than we begin even in our thoughts to lie like their epitaphs; and all of us by ordinary endure the pangs of burying ineffably more admirable kin than we ever possessed.... Nor does much more of honesty go to the making of those national chronicles which Mr. Henry Ford, with a candor that at one time really seemed incurable by anything short of four years in the White House, has described as "bunk." In history one finds everywhere an impatient desire to simplify the tortuous and complex human being into a sort of forthright shorthand. Alexander was ambitious, Machiavelli cunning, Henry the Eighth bloodthirsty, and George Washington congenitally incapable of prevarication. That is all there was to them, so far as they concern the average man: and thus does history imply its shapers with the most curt of symbols, somewhat as an astronomer jots down a four's first cousin to indicate the huge planet Jupiter and compresses the sun that nourishes him, into a proof-reader's period. Always in this fashion does history work over its best rôles into allegories about the Lord Desire of Vain-glory and Mr. By-ends, about Giant Bloody-man and Mr. Truthful; and rubs away the humanness of each dead personage resistlessly, as if resolute to get rid in any event of most of him; and pares him of all traits except the one which men, whether through national pride or the moralist's large