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PARTISAN REVIEW
personages, is blurred. The historical event which we witness, or learn
from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more var–
iously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced
results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it
to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we
have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if
the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification
of the original events! Legend arranges its subject-matter in a simple
and straightforward way; it detaches it from its context in the
historical world, in order that the latter may not confuse it; it knows
only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives
and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninter–
rupted. In the legends of' martyrs, for example, a stiff-necked and
fanatical persecutor stands over against an equally stiff-necked and
fanatical victim; and a situation so complicated- that is to say, so
real and historical-as that in which the "persecutor" Pliny finds
himself in his celebrated letter to Trajan on the subject of the Chris–
tians, is unfit for legend. And that is still a comparatively easy case.
Let the reader think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing;
anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men
and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism
in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and states before
and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent his–
torical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the
historical comprises a wealth of contradictory motives in each in–
dividual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups;
only seldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situa–
tion, comparatively simple to describe, arise, and even such a sit–
uation is subject to division below the surface and is indeed almost
constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of
all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propa–
ganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification-with
the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the same
slogans. To write history is so difficult that most historians are
forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.
It
is clear that a large part of the life of David as given in the
Bible contains history and not legend. In Absalom's rebellion, for
example, or in the scenes from David's last days, the contradictions
