324 Mr. Laurence Binyon [May 31, 



shape and form. And, in truth, one might ask whether it is reallj 

 as relative to its age as Shelley's " Prometheus," which under a 

 mythic disguise embodies the hopes of that rarefied yet passionate 

 ideahsm which was so characteristic of the time. With all its 

 splendour and its incomparable lyrics, Shelley's " Prometheus " does 

 not rank as a solid richly structural achievement with the great 

 poems it attempts to rival. Yet I do not think it fails because its 

 nominal theme is an old Greek legend. I think snch a theme is 

 likelier of success than such a theme as Wordsworth took in his 

 " Excursion," which, again, though sown with beauties and often 

 exquisite in its felicity of language, makes as a whole a flat impres- 

 sion ; the characters are so stationary, and their reflective talk so 

 much a monotone. Of all modern English poets Keats had the gifts 

 most adequate for the task. He had grandeur and simplicity of 

 conception ; his imagination was sensuous and concrete. But he 

 broke off his " Hyperion " because the subject dissatisfied him ; he 

 tried, in recasting it, to give the subject a more real relation both to 

 himself and to his age — to make it significant, and in a deep, though 

 not superficial sense, modern. It is certainly a misfortune for us in 

 England that we have so little in the way of national myth and 

 legend to draw upon ; for in the far-descended stories that come 

 down from a nation's childhood there is usually embodied something 

 innate and permanent which belongs to the character of the race ; 

 and, being fluid rather than fixed, they are material which every 

 generation of poets can take up and fashion anew and adapt to its 

 own uses. They are removed from actual history, so that the 

 impertinent antiquarian cannot intrude his idle stickling for the 

 facts of time and place. We have the Arthurian legends, it is true, 

 but these have come to us in a version already modernized and 

 mediaevalized, so that the truth of their pristine features is overlaid 

 with the colouring of an artificial age, with courtly codes and 

 romantic decorations, from which it is hard now to extricate the 

 vital elements. But if anyone doubt the power of mythic stories 

 to stir the blood of the race in whose imagination they were born, let 

 him consider what AVagner's treatment of the cycle of Northern 

 legends has meant to the Germany of our day, or what the Irish 

 legends, resuscitated in recent years and handled in poetry by Mr. 

 Yeats and his followers, have meant to the youth of Ireland. 



It is to such materia] as this that a creative poet turns by instinct. 

 He wants to be at a certain distance in time from his theme, because 

 he wants to grasp it clearly as a whole, because he does not want to 

 be distracted by externals and irrelevant, but none the less insistent, 

 associations ; because he wants to concentrate on human spirits in 

 action ; because he wants figures of a strong outline and a pregnant 

 type ; because he wants to get away from the Avorld of fact to the 

 world of imaginative reality. He does not go to the past for the sake 

 of what is past, but for the sake of what is permanently Hving. He 



