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.
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