theater the
actor thinks for us; in a study we think for ourselves. For
contemporaries of "The Letters of Junius" to attempt guessing who
Junius was, was plainly exhilarating as a walk at morning along a
country lane. To attempt the interpretation of a Shakespeare's tragedy
for yourself is no less so. Believe in your own capabilities, and test
your own powers. Conceive of Shakespeare's folk, not as dead and past,
but as living. These men and women, among whom we move, are those
among whom Shakespeare moved. Ages change customs and costumes, but
not characters. Bring Shakespeare down to now, and see how rational
his men and women become; and we, as central to his movement, may begin
to reckon on the periodicity of souls as of comets. I would have
people inherit Shakespeare as they inherit Newton's discoveries or
Columbus's new world.

And as we know, we shall learn to trust, Shakespeare. He is uniformly
truthful. He may sin against geographical veracity, as when he names
Bohemia a maritime province; or he may give Christian reasonings to
ancient heathen; but these are _errata_, not falsehoods; and besides,
these are mistakes of a colorist, or in background of figure-painting,
and do not touch the real province of the dramatist, whose office is
not to paint landscapes, but figures--and figures not of physique, but
of soul--the delineation of character being the dramatist's business.
Here is Shakespeare always accurate. To argue with him savors of
petulancy or childish ignorance or egotism. Some people ourselves have
met had no sense of character, as some have no sense of color. They do
not perceive logical continuity here, as in reasoning, but approach
each person as an isolated fact, whereas souls are a series--men
repeating men, women repeating women, in large measure, as a child
steps in his father's tracks across a field of snow in winter. Other
people seem intuitively to read character, being able to shut their
eyes and see more than others with eyes open, having a faculty for
practical psychology, which is little less than miracle, as in
Tennyson, who was not a man among men--being shy as a whip-poor-will,
seclusive as flowers which haunt the woodland shadows--yet those
reading him must know how accurately he reads the human heart; and his
characterization of Guinevere, Pelleas, Bedivere, Enid, the lover in
Maud, a Becket, the Princess, Philip, Enoch Arden, and Dora, are, in
accuracy, as

"Perfe