atter.
The course of external events, in so far as it affects one person,
whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, and
has meaning as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outward
indeed, but parallel with the states of will, intellect, and emotion
which make up the consciousness of the character; and it is interesting
humanly only as a mirror of them. It is not the murderous blow, but the
depraved will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; not the
muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse working
itself out, that hold our attention. Plot here manifests the law of
character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen
requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All
fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the
intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the
earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells
upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. Says Richard II:--

"'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And those external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells in silence in the tortured soul;
There lies the substance."

So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of Athens, excusing all
art: "The best in this kind are but shadows." So Hamlet; so Prospero.

Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far as
these are physical, their law is one of the physical world, and
interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in
the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has
human interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The external
fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is of
the unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within our
own bosoms--it is spiritually discerned. On the stage plainly this is
the case. So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they are
merely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, they
are dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as our
experience permits us so to comprehend them. We contemplate a world of
emotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a world
of character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret it
therefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion till
absorbed in what is