“’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 arising in our consciousness under the actor’s genius we become ourselves the character.  The greatest actor is he who makes the spectator play the part.  So far is the drama from the scene that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves.

And what is true of the stage is true of life.  It is only through our own hearts that we look into the hearts of others.  We interpret the external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never seen any more than our own personality.  Thus our knowledge of them is not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within its limits.  It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto ourselves abides,—­the human soul, though never seen face to face.  To enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of personality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order, is the main end of ideal art.  Though in plot the outward order is brought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field, yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within.