Of other ages, not more often the language is lost to us than the peculiar meanings the listener gave to that language. We may hear the ripple of the syllables, admire the cadence, hut we do not contribute the same images of the mind that flashed to meet the meaning. Who now shivers at the inference of harm and evil when, in King Lear, the bastard son says he was conceived under the tail of the dragon?

Our Lear can no longer be the gigantic Druid King, fallen like an oak desolate on winter’s heath. He can be only an aged millionaire whose children have taken over the Trust. We must translate into the meanings of our day. Just so, the brave stories of loppings and batterings carried on by some long-dead, more whole-hearted hero are less acceptable than the fluid and hesitating persons of modem novels, narcissi of watery reflection, trembling quicksilver of characters. The chunks of solid human meat with cheerful and aboriginal appetites now do their killing and loving in the fictions of the television screen for the delectation of the more primitive and innocent of our population. The shallow tide of visual entertainment has swept over much of the region once claimed by the novel, while writers advance before it into the mists of the unexplored countries of the mind.