influences of life. Grant that any of us understand a dramatist better
for seeing him acted, and it follows, first, that all of us will be
most indebted to the stage at the point where the higher and more
ethereal faculties are liable in reading to failure and exhaustion,
that is, stage-playing will be of most use to us where the mind
requires help and inspiration to grasp and revel in lofty moral or
imaginative conceptions, or where it needs aid and sharpening to
appreciate and follow the niceties of repartee, or the delicacies
of comic fancy. Secondly, it follows that if this is so with the
intellectual few, it must be infinitely more so with the unimaginative
many of all ranks. They are not inaccessible to passion and poetry and
refinement, but their minds do not go forth, as it were, to seek these
joys; and even if they read works of poetic and dramatic fancy, which
they rarely do, they would miss them on the printed page. To them,
therefore, with the exception of a few startling incidents of real
life, the theatre is the only channel through which are ever brought
the great sympathies of the world of thought beyond their immediate
ken. And thirdly, it follows from all this that the stage is,
intellectually and morally, to all who have recourse to it, the
source of some of the finest and best influences of which they are
respectively susceptible. To the thoughtful and reading man it brings
the life, the fire, the color, the vivid instinct, which are beyond
the reach of study. To the common indifferent man, immersed, as a
rule, in the business and socialities of daily life, it brings visions
of glory and adventure, of emotion and of broad human interest. It
gives glimpses of the heights and depths of character and experience,
setting him thinking and wondering even in the midst of amusement. To
the most torpid and unobservant it exhibits the humorous in life and
the sparkle and finesse of language, which in dull ordinary existence
is stupidly shut out of knowledge or omitted from particular notice.