Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/106

 unfailingly pass through the same phases of birth, growth, decay and oblivion. According to Spengler, our own civilisation, that of the west, is at the end of its long development and we are about to become the spectators of its final death agonies. A certain number of past civilisations are presented in a convincing and impressive manner, with undeniable literary skill, in proof of this. For all this Spengler is no historian, being the mere champion of information drawn from secondary sources, choosing only those facts which favour his theories and his bias. The uninformed public can see no danger and can therefore not avoid it.

In the success of this clamorous craft of self-advertisement to which belong, in another field of literature, the historical romances from Paris and the semi-literary improvisations of Emil Ludwig, many recent books have their origin. With a sovereign contempt for the facts, presented recently in a long series of volumes, such as the English ones from Cambridge and the collection of « syntheses » directed by Mr. Berr, they destroy all that was hitherto definite and secure. A bolshevism in historiography as childish and impertinent as the other doctrine, which corresponds to the new portraiture and sculpture of human beings the like of which is yet to be born, to the architecture without profile and proportion, to the poetry whose first requirement is to be deprived of all rhyme and rhythm. The psychosis of the new generation should be manifested in history too.

It is natural that a witness of these important changes in his own speciality should try, after forty years of experience, and after having studied the histories of most countries on this globe, minutely as well as along the broad lines of material and moral currents, to prepare a synthesis of his own. It appeared at Paris, in the four volumes