And this pulse of personal passion is always expressing itself in Poetry. He will let the probabilities of a character vanish into air, or dwindle into a wistful note of 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._