but of all other great art whatsoever; for all pieces of such art are
didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first, you
shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work in
bettering yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly
with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtile
that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion
of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only
find by slow mining for it,--which is withheld on purpose, and
close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it
in a furnace of your own heating. And this withholding of their meaning
is continual, and confessed, in the great poets. Thus Pindar says of
himself: "There is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the
wise, but, for the many, they need interpreters." And neither Pindar,
nor Æschylus, nor Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or
teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional
reservation; nay, beyond this, there is often a meaning which they
themselves cannot interpert [sic],--which it may be for ages long after
them to intrepert [sic],--in what they said, so far as it recorded true
imaginative vision. For all the greatest myths have been seen by the men
who tell them, involuntarily and passively,--seen by them with as great
distinctness (and in some respects, though not in all, under conditions
as far beyond the control of their will) as a dream sent to any of us by
night when we dream clearest; and it is this veracity of vision that
could not be refused, and of moral that could not be foreseen, which in
modern historical inquiry has been left wholly out of account; being
indeed the thing which no merely historical investigator can understand,
or even believe; for it belongs exclusively to the creative or artistic
group of men, and can only be interpreted by those of their race, who
themselves in some measure also see visions and dream dreams.