the world, inherited, not his blindness, but his poetical gifts. Thus it comes about that all true poets and lovers of poetry are children of Thamyris, and little though they know it, have each some few drops of his inspired and rebellious blood running in their veins. If the[Pg 83] Muses had wished effectively to stamp out heresy, they would have been wiser had they followed the example of Apollo, who flayed alive that other æsthetic mutineer, Marsyas, thus robbing him not only of life, but of the hope of heretical offspring.

[Pg 82]

[Pg 83]

Now it appears to me that this tale must have been a prophetic fable, intended to symbolise certain important aspects of man’s poetic evolution. If the Muses and Apollo represent the established, conservative tradition of poetry, then in Thamyris must be embodied the perennial revolt of the creative younger generation against the prestige and authority of the past. Though the penalty of rebellion may sometimes be blindness, egoism and eccentricity, yet the sacred fire will remain alive in the heart of the rebel, and will be handed down by him to his posterity, who, themselves neither blind nor mutinous, will often become in turn the persecutors of their own[Pg 84] children. Thus the divine flame will never cease to burn, and generation after generation the youth of poetry will be renewed.

[Pg 84]

Nevertheless there are those who take a gloomier view of man’s destinies. Poetry, they tell us, like mythology, religion and metaphysics, is a primitive and puerile function of the human mind. It is already becoming superseded by less rudimentary, more rational means of self-expression. We are entering upon an era of science and prose, and may as well at once frankly put away poetry, along with other childish things. At the beginning of this essay I have tried to suggest how much and how little truth there may be in this view. I have admitted that the dissociation of poetry from music and intonation has to a great extent diminished the immediate potency of its sensuous and emotional appeal; but I have argued that the new medium of spoken verse, although it may have[Pg 85] grown more similar to prose, is yet very far from being identical with it, either formally, or in the nature of its subject-matter. Prose is the more transparent, self-effacing instrument. Its value consists not so much in itself (though it may possess a real sensuous charm and beauty of its own), but rather in its intellectual content and the knowledge it conveys. But the value of poetry resides primarily in the 

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