elucidation of religious consciousness (the only principle securely uniting men one with another). The elucidation of the religious consciousness of man is accomplished through all sides of man's spiritual activity. One side of that activity is art. One part of art, and almost the most important, is the drama.

And therefore the drama, to deserve the importance attributed to it, should serve the elucidation of religious consciousness. Such the drama always was, and such it was in the Christian world. But with the appearance of Protestantism in its broadest sense-that is to say, the appearance of a new understanding of Christianity as a teaching of life-dramatic art did not find a form corresponding to this new understanding of religion, and the men of the Renaissance period were carried away by the imitation of classical art. This was most natural, but the attraction should have passed, and art should have found, as it is now beginning to find, a new form corresponding to the altered understanding of Christianity.

But the finding of this new form was hindered by the teaching, which arose among German writers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, of the so-called objectivity of art that is to say, the indifference of art to good or evil-together with an exaggerated praise of Shakespeare's dramas, which partly corresponded to the esthetic theory of the Germans and partly served as material for it. Had there not been this exaggerated praise of Shakespeare's dramas, accepted as the most perfect models of drama, people of the 18th and 19th centuries and of our own, would have had to understand that the drama, to have a right to exist and be regarded as a serious matter, ought to serve, as always was, and cannot but be, the case, the elucidation of religious consciousness. And having understood this

they would have sought a new form of drama corresponding to their religious perception.

But when it was decided that Shakespeare's drama is the summit of perfection, and that people ought to write as he did without any religious or even any moral content-all the dramatists, imitating him, began to compose plays lacking content, like the plays of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and, among us Russians, Púshkin, and the historical plays of Ostróvski, Alexéy Tolstoy, and the innumerable other more or less well-known dramatic works which fill all the theatres and are continually produced by anyone to whom the thought and desire to write plays occur.

Only thanks to such a mean petty understanding of the importance of the drama do there appear among us that endless series of dramatic works presenting the actions, situations, characters, and moods of people, not only devoid of any spiritual content but even lacking any human sense. And let not the reader suppose that I exclude from this estimate of contemporary drama the pieces I myself have incidentally written for the theatre. I recognise them, just like all the rest, to be lacking in that religious content which should form the basis of the future drama.

So that the drama, the most important sphere of art, has become in our time merely an empty and immoral amusement for the empty and immoral crowd. What is worst of all is that to the art of the drama, which has fallen as low as it was possible to fall, people continue to attribute an elevated significance, unnatural to it.

Dramatists, actors, theatrical managers, the press-the latter most seriously publishing reports of theatres, operas, and so forth-all feel assured that they are doing something very useful and important.

The drama in our time is like a great man fallen to the

lowest stage of degradation, who yet continues to pride himself on his past, of which nothing now remains. And the public of our time is like those who pitilessly get amusement out of this once great man, now descended to the lowest depths.

Such is one harmful effect of the epidemic suggestion of the greatness of Shakespeare. Another harmful effect of that bepraisement is the setting up of a false model for men's imitation.

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 irrefragible 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.

PART XVIII

A TALK ON THE DRAMA.

Reported by I. Teneromo, ca. 1907

I RECENTLY had the opportunity of talking with Leo Tolstoy about the theatre.

"What dramas, what heartrending dramas, are being enacted before our eyes: national dramas, class dramas, caste dramas! And the individual drama! Has there ever been a time so full of terrible suffering, of mutual destruction? Only think what has passed before us during these last four years of horror! What a din of battle, what a storm of insurrection, what shrieks of massacres with their heaps of mutilated bodies in the streets, in the fields, and at the bottom of the sea! And now that the noise is past, how many secret executions, secret suicides, and how much secret madness! And in spite of such a plenitude of subjects the stage is impoverished. We have no tragedies, no moving drama, not even a healthy amusing repertoire, no humor .

"It is as though life and the drama were made of one piece of dough, and if more is allotted to the one, there remains less for the other. The well-spring of plays for the stage has dried up, and there is only the dull sticky liquid of adaptations left at the bottom.

"Oh, those adaptations! Of course, what will not hunger drive one to invent? But the idea of adaptation is a perfectly childish one. To take a novel, or a story, and rearrange it as a play is like what children do when they cut a figure out of a picture along the outline, stick it to a bit of cardboard, fix it on a stand, and are quite delighted. It stands up, there