our most thoughtful writers, our first
cosmopolitan, thinks that "these ancient legends refuse to be taken out
of their old environment." But I believe that the tales which have been
preserved for a hundred generations in the heart of the people must have
had their power, because they had in them a core of eternal truth. Truth
is not a thing of today or tomorrow. Beauty, heroism, and spirituality
do not change like fashion, being the reflection of an unchanging
spirit. The face of faces which looks at us through so many shifting
shadows has never altered the form of its perfection since the face of
man, made after its image, first looked back on its original:

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.

These dreams, antiquities, traditions, once actual, living, and
historical, have passed from the world of sense into the world of memory
and thought: and time, it seems to me, has not taken away from their
power, nor made them more remote from sympathy, but has rather purified
them by removing them from earth to heaven: from things which the eye
can see and the ear can hear they have become what the heart ponders
over, and are so much nearer, more familiar, more suitable for literary
use than the day they were begotten. They have now the character of
symbol, and, as symbol, are more potent than history. They have crept
through veil after veil of the manifold nature of man; and now each
dream, heroism, or beauty has laid itself nigh the divine power it
represents, the suggestion of which made it first beloved: and they
are ready for the use of the spirit, a speech of which every word has
a significance beyond itself, and Deirdre is, like Helen, a symbol of
eternal beauty; and Cuculain represents as much as Prometheus the heroic
spirit, the redeemer in man.

In so far as these ancient traditions live in the memory of man, they
are contemporary to us as much as electrical science: for the images
which time brings now to our senses, before they can be used in
literature, have to enter into exactly the same world of human
imagination as the Celtic traditions live in. And their fitness for
literary use is not there determined by their freshness but by their
power of suggestion. Modern literature, where it is really literature
and not book-making, grows more subjective year after year, and the mind
has a wider range over time t