'The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!'
and these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness of
the moon and of the wave, whose relation to the setting of Time is too
subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But, when
all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the
melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other
arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. We may call this metaphorical
writing, but it is better to call it symbolical writing, because metaphors
are not profound enough to be moving, when they are not symbols, and when
they are symbols they are the most perfect, because the most subtle,
outside of pure sound, and through them one can the best find out what
symbols are. If one begins the reverie with any beautiful lines that one
can remember, one finds they are all like those by Burns. Begin with this
line by Blake--
'The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew;'
or these lines by Nash--
'Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye;'
or these lines by Shakespeare--
'Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover;'
or take some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its
place in a story, and see how it flickers with the light of the many
symbols that have given the story its beauty, as a sword-blade may flicker
with the light of burning towers.
All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained
energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise
emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied
powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound,
and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to
one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and
evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is
one emotion. The same relation exists 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; or
that love itself would be more than an animal hunger but for the poet and
his shadow the priest, for unless we believe that outer things are the
reality, we must believe that the gross is the shadow of the subtle, that
things are wise before they become foolish, and secret before they cry out
in the market-place. Solitary men in moments of contemplation receive, as
I think, the creative impulse from the lowest of the Nine Hierarchies, and
so make and unmake mankind, and even the world itself, for does not 'the
eye altering alter all'?
'Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.'