“But are there no great conceptions, no great words of consolation?
Nationality, right, liberty, humanity, art?” Yes; those words do exist,
and many people live by them and for them. But nevertheless, I have an
idea that if Shakspeare were to be born again he would find no occasion
to disclaim his “Hamlet,” his “Lear.” His penetrating glance would not
descry anything new in human existence: the same motley and, in
reality, incoherent picture would still unfold itself before him in its
disquieting monotony. The same frivolity, the same cruelty, the same
pressing demand for blood, gold, filth, the same stale pleasures, the
same senseless sufferings in the name of ... well, in the name of the
same nonsense which was ridiculed by Aristophanes three thousand years
ago, the same coarse lures to which the many-headed beast still yields
as readily as ever--in a word, the same anxious skipping of the squirrel
in the same old wheel, which has not even been renewed.... Shakspeare
would again make Lear repeat his harsh: “There are no guilty
ones”--which, in other words, signifies: “There are no just”--and he
also would say: “It is enough!” and he also would turn away.--One thing
only: perhaps, in contrast to the gloomy, tragic tyrant Richard, the
ironical genius of the great poet would like to draw another, more
up-to-date tyrant, who is almost ready to believe in his own virtue and
rests calmly at night or complains of the over-dainty dinner at the same
time that his half-stifled victims are endeavouring to comfort
themselves by at least imagining him as Richard III. surrounded by the
ghosts of the people he has murdered....
But to what purpose?
Why demonstrate--and that by picking and weighing one’s words, by
rounding and polishing one’s speech--why demonstrate to gnats that they
really are gnats?