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.
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