st without exception the resultants of many motives. We have
come to recognize that men have always misapprehended themselves,
contradicted themselves, obeyed primal impulses, and then deluded
themselves with sophistications upon the springs of action. In a word,
unaware of what they are doing, men allow their aesthetic and dramatic
senses to shape their conceptions of their own lives.

That "great impersonal artist," of whom Matthew Arnold has so much to
say, is at work in us all, subtly making us into illusions, first to
ourselves and later to the historian. It is the business of history, as
of analytic fiction, both to feel the power of these illusions and to
work through them in imagination to the dim but potent motives on which
they rest. We are prone to forget that we act from subconscious quite as
often as from conscious influences, from motives that arise out of the
dim parts of our being, from the midst of shadows that psychology has
only recently begun to lift, where senses subtler than the obvious make
use of fear, intuition, prejudice, habit, and illusion, and too often
play with us as the wind with blown leaves.

True as this is of man individually, it is even more fundamentally true
of man collectively, of parties, of peoples. It is a strikingly accurate
description of the relation of the two American nations that now found
themselves opposed within the Republic. Neither fully understood the
other. Each had a social ideal that was deeper laid than any theory of
government or than any commercial or humanitarian interest. Both knew
vaguely but with sure instinct that their interests and ideals
were irreconcilable. Each felt in its heart the deadly passion of
self-preservation. It was because, in both North and South, men were
subtly conscious that a whole social system was the issue at stake, and
because on each side they believed in their own ideals with their whole
souls, that, when the time came for their trial by fire, they went to
their deaths singing.

In the South there still obtained the ancient ideal of territorial
aristocracy. Those long traditions of the Western European peoples
which had made of the great landholder a petty prince lay beneath the
plantation life of the Southern States. The feudal spirit, revived in a
softer world and under brighter skies, gave to those who participated in
it the same graces and somewhat the same capacities which it gave to the
knightly class in the days of Rola