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.
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