are demanding for the drama,
religious instruction, or didactics, be called 'tendency,' a thing
incompatible with true art?" I reply that by the religious essence of
art I understand not the direct inculcation of any religious truths in
an artistic guise, and not an allegorical demonstration of these truths,
but the exhibition of a definite view of life corresponding to the
highest religious understanding of a given time, which, serving as the
motive for the composition of the drama, penetrates, to the knowledge of
the author, through all of his work. So it has always been with true
art, and so it is with every true artist in general and especially the
dramatist. Hence--as it was when the drama was a serious thing, and as
it should be according to the essence of the matter--that man alone can
write a drama who has something to say to men, and something which is of
the greatest importance for them: about man's relation to God, to the
Universe, to the All, the Eternal, the Infinite. But when, thanks to
the German theories about objective art, the idea was established that,
for the drama, this was quite unnecessary, then it is obvious how a
writer like Shakespeare--who had not got developed in his mind the
religious convictions proper to his time, who, in fact, had no
convictions at all, but heaped up in his drama all possible events,
horrors, fooleries, discussions, and effects--could appear to be a
dramatic writer of the greatest genius.

But these are all external reasons. The fundamental inner cause of
Shakespeare's fame was and is this: that his dramas were "pro captu
lectoris," _i.e._, they corresponded to the irreligious and immoral
frame of mind of the upper classes of his time.

VIII

At the beginning of the last century, when Goethe was dictator of
philosophic thought and esthetic laws, a series of casual circumstances
made him praise Shakespeare. The esthetic critics caught up this praise
and took to writing their lengthy, misty, learned articles, and the
great European public began to be enchanted with Shakespeare. The
critics, answering to the popular interest, and endeavoring to compete
with one another, wrote new and ever new essays about Shakespeare; the
readers and spectators on their side were increasingly confirmed in
their admiration, and Shakespeare's fame, like a lump of snow, kept
growing and growing, until in our time it has attained that insane
worship which obviously has no other foundat