in the ford of an English river to find a casket holding "the mystery" of this authorship, doubtless very completely in solution. And it was a British barrister who discovered that the man who wrote these plays likewise penned the bulk of Elizabethan literature. Our heart goes out to this last poor devil, chained to his desk eternally to write from early morn to dewy eve, at a low estimate as to mere penmanship for at least fifty arduous years. Hail immortal Tom, Francis or Billy the Penman!

Now which of us knows an unadulterated fact when face to face with it? And will the huddling of any number of facts in one brain inform, educate or imin any prove wise its unhappy possessor? Facts are nothing until ordered and correlated into that substance of a higher order which we call truth. And facts are as helpful - if that be the word- to the building of a fabric of falsehood. It is, according to some who profess to know, a fact that Washington was a fox-hunting squire, that he owned and occasionally whipped slaves and that his personal morality was much that of his time. More of such facts, not a hundred like them, could account for this particular foxhunting squire, who was likewise a patriot, a general of indomitable spirit, a statesman controlling the trend of history and guiding the destiny of a great nation. The favorite myth of the hatchet and the cherry tree may be rationally demolished with ease. Was it a cherry tree? Or a pear? Was there a tree? Perhaps the hatchet was actually that handier implement, an Was there even an ax? But what of all these

ax.

facts? The truth lies in the parable; the integrity of the boy" who could not tell a lie " was the integrity of the man who founded an empire.

Once more, I understand that the researches of historians disprove the fine old story that Jefferson, upon his inauguration to the presidency, rode up alone to the capitol on a white horse, tied him to a post, took the oath of office, and rode as simply and unattended home again. The horse, it is said, was really not white, there were actually two of him, harnessed to a livery stable carriage and attended as usual by other horses similarly hired and harnessed to other equipages. But what, again, of all these proofs? The myth remains an admirably true designation of Jeffersonian simplicity; and no accumulation of mere proofs and disproofs could so create the atmosphere of truth.

The Psalmist was possibly more discourteous than untruthful in his outburst: "I said in my heart all men are liars," as even the least accomplished among us find it less difficult to draw a long bow than a nice line of distinction between what we are sure of and what we are not so certain about. Myth-making is an equal strain on human ingenuity and human honesty; but to neither is it wholly discreditable. And it is ultimately referable to the artist, innate in us all. If we are able to tell stories and pray, sir, who among us does not tell stories - why not tell them well? And what true artist has ever been hampered by life studies in the poses of a naked fact?

Greatness is inherent: but fame is recognition of greatness or the report of greatness. The greater the

fame, therefore, the richer the myth. Babes, in further Asia on their mother's knees, are stilled, even now, with folk-tales of Alexander of Macedon, and the horrors of the Attila of a heightened fiction have only been equalled by the realities made in Germany in our own times. There is no saint, canonized or potential, who does not attract to himself the nimbus of a glory not his own. And there is no merely human creature whose fellows do not contrive, humanly or inhumanly, to gossip about him, to magnify or minimize him. Whenever popular esteem has gathered repute about a man so that he becomes a Marcus Aurelius, let us say, or a King Arthur, there are always the diggers in the dust-bins of time to disprove his virtues or perhaps his existence. And whenever the popular imagination has found in some portentous figure, such as Richard Crookback or Benedict Arnold, an object of abhorrence and revolt, there is always some casuist at hand to show that he was, after all, a very reputable citizen. The whitewashing of great scoundrels is one of the most approved and elegant pursuits of the modern historian. And the contemporary art of maligning and blackening great names is by no means wholly lost among us. Thus are we always raveling and unraveling our myths, tearing the fabrics of the past to weave them anew into novel designs and in striking and bizarre colors.

The greater the repute, then, the richer the myth; for a larger corps of myth-makers are at work; and unfortunate is he about whom no one of his fellow men has anything to fabricate. Few of us escape being

thought something other than we are; and this, for the most part, is fortunate; for, when all is said, myth balances myth and such an airy habitation as has been made for many a man is often quite as good as a name. An honest myth is the noblest work of man; and man and nation is inevitably to be appraised by the myth he makes. When a reportorial person finds out to his own satisfaction, as one such did a few years ago, that Shakespeare was the Oscar Wilde of his time, a man of an utterly base and debauched life, and that the price which the world had to pay for the greatest of plays was the wreck of the greatest of personalities, we may not know what to make of such a Shakespeare, but we know exactly what to make of the reportorial person aforesaid. When another writer, posing as a detective, scents fraud and deception in every unsuspected act of an author's life, and a malign and covert allusiveness in every other harmless passage of his poetry, we know just what to think of a nature so petty and prying. Depend upon it by their myths ye shall know them, for there is nothing so infallibly a man's own as the myth that he fashions.

None the less, if we view the thing aright there are few things more creditable to human nature than this tendency to turn everything into myth; for the process is essentially a quest after truth. It is the great popular figures of history, literature and art about which myth most readily gathers Alexander, Cleopatra, Barbarossa, Shakespeare, Beethoven - for there are thousands building up, each for himself, his contribution to the conception of truth. Facts, as such, are

things thought of theoretically. Truth gives us the world in its interrelations, things seen in atmosphere. Nothing exists in a vacuum- not even the man of fact although one would fain wish sometimes that he did. Wherefore atmosphere is essential if we are to get at reality. There is no scientific fact which can pass from mind to mind without some generalization into truth, some play of the imagination in the process. The making of myths is the breaking loose of the creative impulses and creation, according to the true idea, is the basis of all the arts. Let us keep our myths in the interests of truth as in the interests of beauty.