178 Ideals in the Modern World
possess true faith. But, Tolstoy accurately says, no religious vision
irradiates the plays, either. Shakespeare, says Tolstoy, is a man who
“in his own soul had not formed religious convictions corresponding
to his period, and who had even no convictions at all” (263). There
is no fi gure in Shakespeare who tries in any serious way to imitate
Jesus Christ. There is no one who is truly inspired by the words of
the Gospel. From Shakespeare, Tolstoy says, arises the aesthetic
theory “according to which a defi nite religious view of life is not at all
necessary for the creation of works of art in general or for the drama
in par tic u lar; that for the inner content of a play it is quite enough to
depict passions and human characters; that not only is no religious
illumination of the matter presented required, but that art ought to
be objective, that is to say, it should depict occurrences quite in de-
pen dent of any valuation of what is good and bad” (262).
What Tolstoy sees is not only that Shakespeare’s characters
are devoid of au then tic religion. Tolstoy also understands that
Sh a ke speare himself, at least as an artist, has no interest in faith. He is
a poet of worldliness, who contributes to the comprehensive dis-
enchantment of experience that Marx and many others have
seen as central to the rise of the bourgeois world order. Though—
to repeat— Shakespeare does not endorse that world order. He does
not celebrate the life in which Self is triumphant. When he depicts the
life in, say, Merchant of Venice, it seems to repulse him. What he does
do is to contribute to a massive de mo li tion, assisting in the pro cess
whereby all the ideals that have been perceived as solid begin to melt
into air.
Was Shakespeare a Catholic? Some scholars have suggested
he was. We might like him to be, but at least in his work he is
neither Catholic nor Protestant nor Jew. Religion does not matter
all that much— and sainthood even less—to the true man of the
middle class. George Santayana corroborates Tolstoy’s sense of
Shakespeare’s feel for religion. Santayana admits that if we were