passions, interests, present historic personages in a thousand forms
when they are alive, transfiguring not only the persons themselves,
but events the most diverse, the character of institutions, the
conditions of nations.

It is generally believed that legends are found only at the dawn
of history, in the poetic period; that is a great mistake; the
legend--the legend that deceives, that deforms, that misdirects--is
everywhere, in all ages, in the present as in the past--in the present
even more than in the past, because it is the consequence of certain
universal forms of thought and of sentiment. To-day, just as ten or
twenty centuries ago, interests and passions dominate events, alter
them and distort them, creating about them veritable romances, more
or less probable. The present, which appears to all to be the same
reality, is instead, for most people, only a huge legend, traversed by
contemporaries stirred by the most widely differing sentiments.

However the mass may content itself with this legend, throbbing
with hate and love, with hope and the fear of its own self-created
phantoms, those who guide and govern the masses ought to try to divine
the truth, as far as they can. A great man of state is distinguished
from a mediocre by his greater ability to divine the real in his world
of action beneath its superfice of confused legends; by his greater
ability to discriminate in everything what is true from what is merely
apparently true, in the prestige of states and institutions, in the
forces of parties, in the energy attributed to certain men, in the
purposes claimed by parties and men, often different from their
real designs. To do that, some natural disposition is necessary, a
liveliness of intuition that must come with birth; but this faculty
can be refined and trained by a practical knowledge of men, by