8 Hartley Burr Alexander 



Dodona and Delphi; the rude ballad of Robin Hood's Alan a Dale 

 is only remotely akin to the courtly romaunt of Coeur de Lion's 

 Blondel ; and ever there has been one song echoed from moun- 

 tain and mist, quite another from green dale and blossoming 

 hedgerow. 



The clear-seeing eyes of the poet find the fundamental tone of 

 poetic composition everywhere but atmosphere and perspective 

 follow environment and age-old heredities. All true poetry is 

 luminous, but the scenes that are shot with light vary indefinitely. 

 Some are almost trans-sensibly perspicuous, — and this is the 

 classical, the Mediterranean mode ; some are revealed through 

 intermittent and blinding flashes, scenes of cosmic indefiniteness 

 and awe, — and this is the Teutonic, the Northern mode; some 

 are perpetually ashimer with the mystic " light that never was on 

 land or sea," — and this is the mode of the Celts of the ultimate 

 West. 



Yet each of these — Greek, Saxon, Celtic, — develops from the 

 same Aryan heredity. The studies of the past quarter-century 

 have penetrated far into the depths of that old racial mind — 

 pre-Hellenic, pre-Teutonic, pre-Celtic, — the mind of primitive 

 Europe whence the European civilizations have been unfolded. 

 In this old mind we meet that common fond of ideas and ways of 

 seeing what we call our world which is the basis of the unity of 

 European thought as we know it today. The picture we have of 

 this mind, reconstructed from the debris of folklore and from 

 slow-dissolving custom and speech, is lurid rather than attractive ; 

 for it is mainly a murk of ghost-ridden superstition, with its 

 grim attendance of human sacrifice and half-remembered canni- 

 balism, this and the hardly less gruesome and fierce ritual of a 

 spirit of the corn to whom man's blood must be yearly rendered 

 up in return for the yearly dole of food. Placation of the hover- 

 ing and vengeful souls of the human dead and compensation, 

 life for life, to the great Earth Mother of us all, who must devour 

 that she may feed, — these are the primal dogmas of old Europe, 

 living-dead in us yet; and it is out of these that is sprung that 

 curious melange of ideas of shape-shifting men and talking beasts, 



350 



