“The
myths told by the [ancients] are as important as history for our understanding
of what those peoples, ancestors of [modern] civilization, believed and thought
and felt, and expressed in writing and in visual art.
The intelligible form of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths: all these have vanished.
They lived no longer in the faith of reason!
But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back old names…
And
so even communities professing that quite different code of beliefs which is
Christianity have, after various struggles, found it impracticable to dispense
with the classical stories. Today new political systems have fabricated their
own myths which Coleridge, writing those lines under the Graeco-Roman spell,
had never imagined. Yet twentieth-century writers, from tragic theatre to comic
strip, have continued to employ the archetypes with renewed vigour. These
dramatic, concrete, individual, insistently probing ancient myths still
supplement the decisions of science as clues to much in the world that does not
alter.
