Chapter LI: Act III: begins with thunder, lightning, and storm--a special kind of (3)

If people now wrote of Shakespeare that, for his time, he was a great writer, he managed verse well enough, was a clever actor and a good stage-manager, even if their valuation were inexact and somewhat exaggerated, provided it was moderate, people of the younger generations might remain free from the Shakespearean influence. But when to every young man entering on life in our time are presented as models of moral perfection, not the religious and moral teachers of mankind, but first of all Shakespeare, about whom it is decided and transmitted by learned men from generation to generation as an irrefragable truth that he is the greatest of poets and the greatest of teachers of life, a young man cannot remain free from this harmful influence.

On reading or hearing Shakespeare the question for a young man is no longer whether Shakespeare is good or bad, but only to discover wherein lies that extraordinary esthetic and ethical beauty of which he has received the suggestion from learned men whom he respects, but which he neither sees nor feels. And forcing himself, and perverting his esthetic and ethical feeling, he tries to make himself agree with the prevailing opinion. He no longer trusts himself, but trusts to what learned people, respected by him, have said (I myself have experienced all this). Reading the critical analyses of the plays, and the extracts from books with explanatory commentaries, it begins to seem to him that he feels something like an artistic impression, and the longer this continues the more is his esthetic and ethical feeling perverted. He already ceases to discriminate independently and clearly between what is truly artistic, and the artificial imitation of art.

But above all, having assimilated that immoral view of life which permeates all Shakespeare’s works he loses the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. And the error of extolling an insignificant, inartistic, and not only non-moral but plainly immoral writer, accomplishes its pernicious work.

That is why I think that the sooner people emancipate themselves from this false worship of Shakespeare the better it will be--first because people when they are freed from this falsehood will come to understand that a drama which has no religious basis is not only not an important or good thing, as is now supposed, but is a most trivial and contemptible affair. And having understood this they will have to search for and work out a new form of modern drama--a drama which will serve for the elucidation and confirmation in man of the highest degree of religious consciousness. And secondly, because people, when themselves set free from this hypnotic state, will understand that the insignificant and immoral works of Shakespeare and his imitators, aiming only at distracting and amusing the spectators, cannot possibly serve to teach the meaning of life, but that, as long as there is no real religious drama, guidance for life must be looked for from other sources.