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One that is very dangerous just now is this: that for most Englishmen the Party System falsifies history, and especially the history of revolutions. It falsifies history because it simplifies history. It paints everything either Blue or Buff in the style of its own silly circus politics: while a real revolution has as many colours as the sunrise or the end of the world.
This entirely falsifies the sculptor's motive, misses the meaning of the sling, renders the broad strap behind the back superfluous, and changes into mere plastic symbolism what Michelangelo intended to be a moment caught from palpitating life. It has often been remarked that David's head is modelled upon the type of Donatello's S. George at Orsanmichele.
Every one, I hope, will admit that if the Emperor had really desired war, it is not before me he would have taken the trouble to express his desire for the conclusion of peace, as I heard him do several times; and this by no means falsifies what I have related of a reply given by his Majesty to the Prince of Neuchatel, since in this reply he attributes the necessity of war to the bad faith of his enemies.
The worst form is when a writer deliberately falsifies facts or deliberately excludes from his picture qualifying circumstances. But there are other and much more subtle ways in which party spirit continually and often quite unconsciously distorts history.
The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the "outside world."
It will be found that when our memory falsifies the date of an event, the error arises much in the same way as a visual miscalculation of distance. This threefold division of illusions of memory is plainly a rather superficial one, and not based on distinctions of psychological nature or origin.
They are all very well for young people, and for those who do not mind the nipping and eager air, with which, as I have said, the climate of England, no less than that of America, falsifies all the fine things the poets have said about May, and, I may add, even June.
Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public society.
Though this must be evident to the considerate, there is yet a disposition in man to judge others, yea, and himself too, by gifts apart from the grace which falsifies gifts, and renders them beneficial, both to the possessor, and to the world; and at the same time keeps the possessor humble, and prevents him from thinking of himself, above that which he ought to think.
A solitary rover, on such a voyage, with such nautical tactics, will meet with adventures. Nay, as we forthwith discover, a certain Calypso-Island detains him at the very outset; and as it were falsifies and oversets his whole reckoning.
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