s between all portions of every work
of art, whether it be an epic or a song, and the more perfect it is, and
the more various and numerous the elements that have flowed into its
perfection, the more powerful will be the emotion, the power, the god it
calls among us. Because an emotion does not exist, or does not become
perceptible and active among us, till it has found its expression, in
colour or in sound or in form, or in all of these, and because no two
modulations or arrangements of these evoke the same emotion, poets and
painters and musicians, and in a less degree because their effects are
momentary, day and night and cloud and shadow, are continually making and
unmaking mankind. It is indeed only those things which seem useless or
very feeble that have any power, and all those things that seem useful or
strong, armies, moving wheels, modes of architecture, modes of government,
speculations of the reason, would have been a little different if some
mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion, as a woman gives
herself to her lover, and shaped sounds or colours or forms, or all of
these, into a musical relation, that their emotion might live in other
minds. A little lyric evokes an emotion, and this emotion gathers others
about it and melts into their being in the making of some great epic; and
at last, needing an always less delicate body, or symbol, as it grows more
powerful, it flows out, with all it has gathered, among the blind
instincts of daily life, where it moves a power within powers, as one sees
ring within ring in the stem of an old tree. This is maybe what Arthur
O'Shaughnessy meant when he made his poets say they had built Nineveh with
their sighing; and I am certainly never certain, when I hear of some war,
or of some religious excitement, or of some new manufacture, or of
anything else that fills the ear of the world, that it has not all
happened because of something that a boy piped in Thessaly. I remember
once asking a seer to ask one among the gods who, as she believed, were
standing about her in their symbolic bodies, what would come of a charming
but seeming trivial labour of a friend, and the form answering, 'the
devastation of peoples and the overwhelming of cities.' I doubt indeed if
the crude circumstance of the world, which seems to create all our
emotions, does more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions
that have come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation