Any one who so analyzes¹ the Dramatic Art as to see what its basis, contents, and uses are, will be astonished to find what a deep and wide feature it is in human nature, and how extensive and important a part it plays in human life. The study of the great spectacle of human existence as a whole, from the point of view of the Stage, in the light of dramatic usages and imagery, imparts to it a keener, more diversified², more comprehensive interest and instructiveness than it can receive in any other way. The habit of thus seeing people and things group themselves in pictures, of looking on scenes and acts in their relationship as a whole, of reading character and getting at states of mind and plucking out personal secrets by an intuitive and cultivated art of interpreting the signs consciously or unconsciously given, is spontaneous in men of the highest artistic³ genius, like Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Goethe. And it lends a marvellous charm and piquancy⁴ to their experience of the world, enchanting⁵ every object with active significance, color, and mystery.
Thus the Theatre, technically⁶ so called, is but one of the lesser⁷ spheres of the dramatic art. The tragedies and comedies coldly elaborated there are often tame and poor to those enacted⁸ with the flaming passions of life itself in parlors¹⁰ and kitchens, in palace and hut and street. Every one of us is essentially¹¹ an actor, the setting of his performance furnished independently of his will wherever he goes, all his schemes included and borne on in a divine plan deeper than he dreams. Our own organism is the primary theatre, the proscenia of brain and heart

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