Why is this so true as to be almost intolerable—­and yet so beautiful?  The characters have art necessities.  Schiller said Art has its categorical Imperatives—­its must, and Shakespeare’s characters fulfil them.  We feel how inevitable is their fate.  They make their own tragedy.  The Poet compresses a Life Tragedy into a few pages of manuscript.  He, with the great sense and Idea of Human Life in him, has to choose what he will portray, and the greater an artist the more unerring is his selection.  Then begins his own absorption in the characters.  Conception and expression come to him and come nobly and spontaneously—­and so spontaneous is his touch—­so completely is he absorbed in, and one with his characters—­that it makes our rush of sympathy as spontaneous as his own.

We feel the Identification of Shakespeare with Othello—­with Iago—­with Desdemona He is them all. He, William Shakespeare, is “the will-less—­time-less—­subject of knowledge,” living in “pure knowing” and absorbed in the creations that represent his varied and his intuitive knowledge of the great Idea of Life.  And he excites and suggests in us the same absorption in his creations—­that is, if we have the capacity to feel it.

It is a land of marvel and of mystery when all personal interests and all consciousness of individual temperaments are lost, fall off from us, and nothing remains, nothing exists to us but the love, the betrayal, the agony, and the struggles of the noble nature, that “dies upon a kiss.”  We are so much part of it, we become so possessed by it, that we do not even know or feel that we are knowing or feeling.  Shakespeare is Othello—­and so are we, for the time being.  Shakespeare had the insight and power of genius, and so could retain and reproduce his vision into the inner life.  We alas! often cannot; when the play is over we become again, a link in the chain that binds us to the ordinary world of consciousness; the veil of illusion has fallen again between us and real vision, we are again among the shadows, with some general impressions more or less blurred, but the vivid vision of the Poet which made us feel in the manifestations he created, the very Idea of Life itself—­has faded from us, we are no longer in the Ideal world which is the real world.

We will take one other example, not of a play, but of a picture.  The Ascending Christ for instance at the Pitti Palace, Florence, by Fra Bartolomeo.

It is well enough known, with the rapt faces of the four evangelists, two on either side, gazing at their Master, with more of love for Him than of understanding even then, in their expression.  And the two lovely little angels beneath, oblivious of everything but the medallion they are holding, as is the way with old Masters.  It is the Christ alone that rivets our attention.  The majestic, noble form, and the sad, grave, beautiful eyes, revealing the Victor over Life and Death, as He leaves the earth, triumphant