attenuated convention, when once
such a one has served his purpose as a reed to pipe his strange tunes
through. He will whistle the most important personage down the
wind, lost to interest and identity, when once he has put into his
mouth his own melancholy brooding upon life--his own imaginative
reaction.

And so it happens that, in spite of all academic opinion, those who
understand Shakespeare best tease themselves least over his
dramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without further
scruple. As far as _the art of the drama_ is concerned, Shakespeare
is _shameless._ The poetic instinct--one might call it "epical" or
"lyrical," for it is both these--is far more dominant in our "greatest
dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why
those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially
"drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert again and again to
Shakespeare. Only absurd groups of Culture-Philistines can read
these "powerful modern productions" more than once! One knows
not whether their impertinent preaching, or their exasperating
technical cleverness is the more annoying.

They may well congratulate themselves on being different from
Shakespeare. They are extremely different. They are, indeed,
nothing but his old enemies, the Puritans, "translated," like poor
Bottom, and wearing the donkey's head of "art for art's sake" in
place of their own simple foreheads.

Art for art's sake! The thing has become a Decalogue of forbidding
commandments, as devastating as _those Ten._ It is the new avatar
of the "moral sense" carrying categorical insolence into the sphere of
our one Alsatian sanctuary!

I am afraid Shakespeare was a very "immoral" artist. I am afraid he
wrote as one of the profane.

But what of the Greeks? The Greeks never let themselves go! No!
And for a sufficient reason. Greek Drama was Religion. It was
Ritual. And we know how "responsible" ritual must be. The gods
must have their incense from the right kind of censer.

But you cannot evoke Religion "in vacuo." You cannot, simply by
assuming grave airs about your personal "taste," or even about the
"taste" of your age, give it _that consecration._

Beauty? God knows what beauty is. But I can tell you what it is not.
It is not the sectarian anxiety of any pompous little clique to get
"saved" in the artistic "narrow path." It is much rather what Stendhal
called it. But he spoke so frivolously that I dare not q