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.
In thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a single
soul is externalized, one important element has been excluded from
consideration.
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