Certainly, Lear and Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet, Cordelia and Desdemona are part of our souls, and so they will be in the future, more or less active, like every part of our souls, of our experiences, of our memories. Sometimes they seem inert and almost obliterated, yet they live and affect us; at others they revive and reawaken, linking themselves to our greatest and nearest spiritual interests. This latter was notably the case in the epoch that extends from the "period of genius" at the end of romanticism, from the criticism of Kant to the exhaustion of the Hegelian school. At that time, poets created Werther and Faust, as though they were the brothers of Hamlet, Charlotte and Margaret and Hermengarde, as though sisters of the Shakespearean heroines, and philosophers constructed systems, which seemed to frame the scattered thoughts of Shakespeare, reducing his differences to logical terms, and crowning them with the conclusion that he either did not seek or did not find. At that time persisted even the illusion that the spirit of Shakespeare had transferred itself from the Elizabethan world to the new world of Europe, was poetising and philosophising with the mouths of the new men and directing their sentiments and actions.
Perhaps after that period, love of Shakespeare, if not altogether extinguished, greatly declined. The colossal mass of work of every sort devoted to Shakespeare, cannot be brought up against this judgment, for this mass, in great part due to German, English and American philologists, proves rather the sedulity of modern philology, than a profound spiritual impulse. This was more lively, when Shakespeare was far less investigated, rummaged and hashed up, and was read in editions far less critically correct. How could he be truly loved and really felt in an age which buried dialectic and idealism beneath naturalism and positivism, for the former of which he stood and which he represented in his own way? In this age, the consciousness of the distinction between liberty and passion, good and evil, nobility and vileness, fineness and sensuality, between the lofty and the base in man, became obscured; everything was conceived as differing in quantity, but identical in substance, and was placed in a deterministic relation with the external world. In such an atmosphere artistic work became blind, diseased, gloomy, instinctive; struggling for expression amid the torment of sick senses, no longer amid passionate, moral struggles of the soul; confused writers, half pedantic, half neurasthenic, were taken for and believed themselves to be, the heirs of Shakespeare. Even when one reads some of the most highly praised pages of the critics of the day upon Shakespeare, so abounding in exquisite refinements, a sort of repugnance comes over one, as though a warning that this is not the genuine Shakespeare. He was less subtle, but more profound, less involved, but more complex and more great than they.
This is not a lamentation directed against the age, which is perhaps now drawing to a close and perhaps has no desire to do so, and will continue to develop its own character for a greater or lesser period. It is simply an observation of fact, which belongs to that history, which is not the history of William Shakespeare. He continues to live his own history, in those spirits alone, who are perpetually making anew that history which was truly his, as they read him with an ingenuous mind and a heart that shares in his poetry.