This transformation of biography does not imply failure to recognize individuality, but is, on the contrary, its elevation, for it finds its true meaning in its relation with the universal, as the universal its concreteness in the individual. And indeed individualizing power, perception of physiognomies, of states of the soul, of the various forms of the ideas, sense of the differences of times and places, may be said to show themselves for the first time in romantic historiography. That is to say, they do not show themselves rarely or as by accident, nor any longer in the negative and summary form of opposition between new and old, civil and barbarous, patriotic and extraneous. It does not mean anything that some of those historians lost themselves (though this happened rarely) in an abstract dialectic of ideas, and that others more frequently allowed ideas to be submerged in the external picturesqueness of customs and anecdotes, because we find exaggerations, one-sidedness, lack of balance, at all periods and in all progress of thought. Nor is the accusation of great importance that the colouring of times and places preferred by the romantics was false, because the important thing was precisely this attempt to colour, whether the result were happy or the reverse (if the latter, the picture had to be coloured again, but always coloured). A further reason for this is that, as has been already admitted, there were fancies and tendencies at work in romanticism beyond true and proper historiography, which bestowed upon the times and places illustrated that imaginary and exaggerated colouring suggested by the various sentiments and interests. History, which is thought, was sometimes idealized at this period as an imaginary living again in the past, and people asked of history to be carried back into the old castles and market-places of the Middle Ages; for their enjoyment they asked to see the personages of the time in their own proper clothes and as they moved about, to hear them speak the language, with the accent of the time, to be made contemporary with the facts and to acquire them with the ingenuous spirit of a contemporary. But to do this is not only impossible for thought, but also for art, because art too surpasses life, and it would be something useless, because it is not desired, for what man really desires is to reproduce in imagination and to rethink the past _from the present,_ not to tear himself away from the present and fall back into the dead past. Certainly this last was an illusion, proper to several romantics (who for that matter have their successors in our own day), and in so far as it was an illusion either remained a sterile effort or diffused itself in a lyrical sigh; but an illusion of that kind was one of many aspects and did not form an essential part of romantic historiography.