. . .
--
* The `Midsummer Night's Dream', `Hamlet', and `The Tempest'.
--
"In short, the young eye already sees the twist and cross of life,
but sees it as in a dream: and those of you who are old enough
to look back upon your own young dream of life will recognize instantly
that the dream is the only term which represents that unspeakable
SEEING of things, without in the least REALIZING them,
which brings about that the youth admits all we tell
-- we older ones -- about life and the future, and, admitting it fully,
nevertheless goes on right in the face of it to ACT just as if
he knew nothing of it. In short, he sees as in a dream.
It is the Dream Period. But here suddenly the dream is done,
the real pinches the young dreamer and he awakes. This, too, is typical.
Every man remembers the time in his own life, somewhere from near thirty
to forty, when the actual oppositions of life came out before him
and refused to be danced over and stared him grimly in the face:
God or no God, faith or no faith, death or no death, honesty or policy,
men good or men evil, the Church holy or the Church a fraud,
life worth living or life not worth living, -- this, I say,
is the shock of the real, this is the Hamlet period in every man's life.
"And finally, -- to finish this outline, -- just as the man settles
all these questions shocked upon him by the real, will be his Ideal Period.
If he finds that the proper management of these grim oppositions of life
is by goodness, by humility, by love, by the fatherly care of a Prospero
for his daughter Miranda, by the human tenderness of a Prospero
finding all his enemies in his power and forgiving their bitter injuries
and practicing his art to right the wrongs of men and to bring
all evil beginnings to happy issues, then his Ideal Period
is fitly represented by this heavenly play, in which, as you recall its plot,
you recognize all these elements.
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