as blind
men would act who endeavored to find diamonds by touch among a heap of
stones they were fingering. As the blind man would for a long time
strenuously handle the stones and in the end would come to no other
conclusion than that all stones are precious and especially so the
smoothest, so also these esthetic critics, without artistic feeling,
could not but come to similar results in relation to Shakespeare. To
give the greater force to their praise of the whole of Shakespeare, they
invented esthetic theories according to which it appeared that no
definite religious view of life was necessary for works of art in
general, and especially for the drama; that for the purpose of the drama
the representation of human passions and characters was quite
sufficient; that not only was an internal religious illumination of what
was represented unnecessary, but art should be objective, _i.e._, should
represent events quite independently of any judgment of good and evil.
As these theories were founded on Shakespeare's own views of life, it
naturally turned out that the works of Shakespeare satisfied these
theories and therefore were the height of perfection.

It is these people who are chiefly responsible for Shakespeare's fame.
It was principally owing to their writings that the interaction took
place between writers and public which expressed itself, and is still
expressing itself, in an insane worship of Shakespeare which has no
rational foundation. These esthetic critics have written profound
treatises about Shakespeare. Eleven thousand volumes have been written
about him, and a whole science of Shakespearology composed; while the
public, on the one hand, took more and more interest, and the learned
critics, on the other hand, gave further and further explanations,
adding to the confusion.

So that the first cause of Shakespeare's fame was that the Germans
wished to oppose to the cold French drama, of which they had grown
weary, and which, no doubt, was tedious enough, a livelier and freer
one. The second cause was that the young German writers required a model
for writing their own dramas. The third and principal cause was the
activity of the learned and zealous esthetic German critics without
esthetic feeling, who invented the theory of objective art,
deliberately rejecting the religious essence of the drama.

"But," I shall be asked, "what do you understand by the word's religious
essence of the drama? May not what you