ding;--and the reason it should do so
is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to our
senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough of
belief in the internal motives--all that which is unseen--to overpower
and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.[8] What we see upon a
stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading
is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements: and this I think
may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with
which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing.

[8] The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does
not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in
the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam
and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the
poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses
given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without
clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as
is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to
make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic
anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in
the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the
seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in
Shakespeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet
something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to
admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a
change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must lie
against representing another line of characters, which Shakespeare has
introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his
scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to
common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist.
When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in
_Macbeth_, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition
savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most
serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound
as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We
might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil
himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bri