The Torch

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE TITAN MYTH I I propose to-night to illustrate by the specific example of the Titan Myth how it is that Greek mythology is a tongue of the imagination ? a living tongue of the universal imagination of men. The Titan Myth ? I wonder what it means to you ? The Titans were the earliest children of the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE TITAN MYTH I I propose to-night to illustrate by the specific example of the Titan Myth how it is that Greek mythology is a tongue of the imagination ? a living tongue of the universal imagination of men. The Titan Myth ? I wonder what it means to you ? The Titans were the earliest children of the earth, elder than the Greek gods even, and were the sons of the the Earth, their mother. You perhaps think of them as mere giants, such as Jack killed ? mediaeval monsters of the kin of Beauty and the Beast. Think of them rather as majestic forms, with something of the sweep and mystery of those figures you may remember out of Ossian and his misty mountains, with the largeness and darkness of the earth in them, a massive dim-featured race, but with an earthly rather than celestial grandeur, embodiments of mighty force dull to beauty, intelligence, light. When Zeus, the then young Olympian, was born, and with him the other deities of the then new divine world and when he dethroned his father, and put the new gods in possession of the universe, these children of the old regime, misliking change, took the father's part, and warred on the usurper of ancient power, and were overthrown by his lightnings, and mountains were piled on them; and now you may read in Longfellow of Encela- dus, the type and image of their fate, buried under Etna whose earthquakes are the struggling of the great Titan beneath. This was the war of the Titans and the gods. One of the Titans, however, stood apart from the rest, being wiser than they. Prometheus made friends with Zeus, but his fortune was not less grievous to him; for when he saw that Zeus took no account of men ? of miserable men, but yearned to destroy them from the face of the earth, he took pity on mankind, and stole for them the celestia...