The highest that man can attain is the consciousness of his own thoughts and feelings, and a knowledge of himself which prepares him to fathom alien natures as well.  There are people who are by nature endowed with such a gift and by experience develop it to practical uses.  Thence springs the ability to conquer something, in a higher sense, from the world and affairs.  The poet, too, is born with such an endowment, only he does not develop it for immediate mundane ends, but for a more exalted, universal purpose.  If we rate Shakespeare as one of the greatest poets, we acknowledge at the same time that it has been vouchsafed to few to discern the world as he did:  to few, in expressing their inward feelings of the world, to give the reader a more realizing sense of it.  It becomes thoroughly transparent to us; we find ourselves suddenly the confidants of virtue and vice, of greatness and insignificance, of nobility and depravity—­all this, and more, through the simplest means.  If we seek to discover what those means are, it appears as if he wrought for our eyes; but we are deceived.  Shakespeare’s creations are not for the eyes of the body.  I shall endeavor to explain myself.

Sight may well be termed the clearest of our senses, that through which transmissions are most readily made.  But our inward sense is still clearer and its highest and quickest impressions are conveyed through the medium of the word; for that is indeed fructifying, while what we apprehend through our eyes may be alien to us and by no means as potent in its effects.  Now, Shakespeare addresses our inward sense, absolutely; through it the realm of fancy created by the imagination is quickened into life and thus a world of impressions is produced for which we can not account, since the basis of the illusion consists in the fact that everything seems to take place before our eyes.  But if we examine Shakespeare’s dramas carefully, we find that they contain far less of sensuous acts than of spiritual expressions.  He allows events to happen which may be readily imagined; nay, that it is better to imagine than to see.  Hamlet’s ghost, the witches in Macbeth, many deeds of horror, produce their effect through the imagination; and the abundant short interludes are addressed solely to that faculty.  All such things pass before us fittingly and easily in reading, whereas they are a drag in representation and appear as disturbing, even as repellent elements.

Shakespeare produces his effects by the living word, and that may be best transmitted by recitation; the listener is not distracted by either good or inadequate representation.  There is no greater or purer delight than to listen with closed eyes to a Shakespearean play recited, not declaimed, in a natural, correct voice.  One follows the simple thread which runs through events of the drama.  We form a certain conception of the characters, it is true, from their designation; but actually we have to learn from the course of the words and speeches what goes on within, and here all the characters seem to have agreed not to leave us in the dark, in doubt, in any particular.