He wore a fool's cap crowned with tiny bells, and he strummed, of all things, a lyre--probably brass, but it looked gold. And he said:

I am the myth-maker, the symbolist, the seer of truths. I have wandered down the pedestrian centuries, beneath the bright flags, toting a bag of legends and singing the old songs. I have been Homer's eyes. I suggested Mephistopheles. They say--with some salt to be sure--that I pinched Beatrice and Dante merely followed her flight to comfort. I am the Muse, the Artist, or if you will, the Human Venture. You may think my costume outlandish and my demeanor strange; but that is your fault, not mine. I have endured.

In each age I have found a home: I was swaddled in immortality and time was my play-pen. Men burned candles at my altar--in religion, poetry, the sciences. All the professions engendered their terms, and the terms became symbols, and the symbols grew into myths, and the myths became legends. And the legends were allegories, teaching the racial wisdom.

I was at home in Thebes; I whispered in Cassandra's ear; I felt secure in the shadow of the cross; I rode phantom horses through the Nordic lands and danced on the Northern twilight--among the apparitions of the imagination.

In this time only am I alone.

I counseled the children as they spoke, one heart to another. I understand the idiot's smile. I sing of the simple savage.

Know me, and you know why man aspired from the cave to Westchester County, from the sling to the mushroom cloud. Know me, and you know that primitive man conceived in images, that his images were ideas; that he ascribed words to these ideas. And now, in this technological century, the word has grown further from the idea, until they have separated, and the word is all. The shattered images lie in a pile, along with utopia and dreams.

The dream needs neither time nor mathematics.

Ask me why you have no poets and no epics. Ask me to talk to you of greatness and Art. I will tell you that you are lost. That the Indian with the name of a bird and the hieroglyphic picture-writing and the stone monuments of island cultures have a wisdom which you lack. They have not divided the estate of God into man and nature, into past and present. They have not abandoned the essence of image and the picture-idea.

Civilization, and the apotheosis of abstraction. When words become their own meaning, when Angry Young Men and hipsters plunge into the night and the academicians experiment with style--ask me why there is no literature.

Did not Eliot return to dead cultures, ancient languages, and the Legend of the Fisher King? Did not Yeats sustain himself on the Irish folklore? Did not Lawrence traipse across continents to Mexico, seeking the meaning of the Aztecs, the wisdom of primitive man?

What obsessed scowling Melville to create a new symbolism of the sea? Whence Faulkner's new mythology? Why all the shouting and none of the beauty of literature?

I will tell you, for I know. There are no men who think symbolically. There are no artists who understand the myth. These are no times to sing of the Abstract and the investigating subcommittee.

You come nearest to the ancient rhythms in jazz and rock 'n' roll. Your modern art has lost its meaning. The myth, tongue of the unconscious and language of the race, was sanctioned solely by children, savages, and fools--before Freud. And now only by psychiatrists.

The modern poet comes to symbolism with a consciousness: This is a symbol, meaning such and such. But a symbol means itself, and must be understood for itself, and must be conceived.