get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing;
we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them. Life
is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand
lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them. His
methods are the same as those of the artists: between whose
office and his there was at first no difference;--_Bard_
means only, originally, an Adept Teacher. Such a one selects
experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them
through the circumstances under which they are applied; just as
the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of
treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.

So the drama-theory of Aeschylus. He took fragments of possible
experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and
interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber-
portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the
externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner
recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the
lessons life may take many incarnations to teach. This cannot be
done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than
which life itself is always better.

What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life? Personality.
Not only our own, but in all those about us. Personality dodges
and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the
adumbrations of the augustness beyond. We demand lots of
personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing. We want
to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and
hear them chattering as we do;--fellows with motives (like our
own) all springing from the personality. Human life is what