For these great myths have, over and above that quality of which I spoke just now as wizardry, some common and not readily definable power which resistlessly makes captive the dreams of men of all conditions and faiths and degrees of intelligence. I can remember puzzling a long while over what conceivable feature these so divergent stories could be said to have in common; since some shared trait must be, I reasoned, the explanation of their virtually uniform allure. And these myths baffled me. Their might seemed, as their origin, not wholly explicable. I say "their origin" because no great romantic myth seemed the product of any especial brain. Never could we detect any writer seated at his desk about the diligent invention of any one of these stories, told now for the first time. Rather did legends gather slowly and contradictorily, arising none knew whence, about the tale's protagonist, who was by ordinary an actual personage some while since dead. By and by somebody had perhaps written down a part of this rumor, always with plain inability to narrate the whole; and the result might be, to the one side an _Odyssey_, to the other a _Juif Errant_.... Sometimes one of these inexplicably macrobiotic myths had found no formal chronicler, and for centuries existed in detachment from literature. There was, for example, I reflected, the fine figure of Punch, which imaginative artists had prodigally left unexploited. In fact, nobody except Mr. Conrad Aiken[3] seemed ever to have written with seriousness about Punch; and this superb theme as yet awaited merely the attention of some gifted writer, to enrich the world with a masterpiece. Then there was Mélusine. There was, for that matter, Blue Beard.... All these stayed uncommemorated with any adequacy as yet, and were, despite that fact, no whit the less recognizable as magnificent and immortal. I could not see that these old stories had anything whatever in common; and even if in these ageless fables some shared feature were discovered, that would hardly explain the unvarying strange sequel. It would not, I thought, explain the emergence from the "story" of a figure which, the story done with, and all its incidents put behind, continued to live on in other stories, and continued through generation after generation to have quite fresh adventures. Nothing seemed able ever to explain that. Yet it was a fact. One was tempted to imagine these immortal figures had guiles of their own, and exerted strange potencies less to afford the artist a fruitful theme than to demand his service. Man here again, it might be, enacted his not infrequent rôle of Frankenstein.... At any rate, the secret was not in the stories: artists did not repeat these stories, but instead arranged new imbroglios for the old tales' protagonists.