ero of the
highest type--the instinct of helpfulness; the instinct that, if he were
a kinsman of the gods, he must fight on their side, through toil and
danger, against all that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them.
Who loves not the old legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literature
of any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer
of evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the
yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur;
Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast;
Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; and
all the rest--

"Who dared, in the god-given might of their manhood
Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests
Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated, brood of the giants;
Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired
rulers"--

These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the hearts, not
merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women who suffered and who
feared; the memory of them, fables though they may have been, ennobled
the old Greek heart; they ennobled the heart of Europe in the fifteenth
century, at the rediscovery of Greek literature. So far from
contradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with--I had almost
said they supplemented--that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism
which had sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, and
actually gave a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which had
grown up in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and
manly virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister. They
inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature, both in
England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the
chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable,
because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which
developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the
Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes
questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's
'Fairy Queen'--perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned
by mortal man.

And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be,
and fables, and fair dreams? What, though they have no body, and,
perhap