ABSTRACT

Everyone possesses at the bottom of his heart, as it were, a synthetic or compendious image of a poet like William Shakespeare, who belongs to the common patrimony of culture, and in his memory the definitions of him that have been given and have become formulae. Nor is he a poet of ideals, as they are called, whether they be religious, ethical, political, or social. This explains the antipathy frequently manifested towards him by apostles of various sorts, of whom the last was Tolstoi, and the unsatisfied desires that take fire in the minds of the right thinking, urging them always to ask of any very great man for something more, for a supplement. This sense of life is also extolled in his work, which for that reason is held to be eminently dramatic, that is to say, animated with a sense of life considered in itself, in its eternal discord, its eternal harshness, its bitter-sweet, in all its complexity.