If now, after these preliminary reflections, I turn to Shakespeare, I can not forbear wishing that my readers should themselves make the comparison and the application.  Here Shakespeare stands out unique, combining the old and the new in incomparable fashion. Wollen and Sollen seek by every means, in his plays, to reach an equilibrium; they struggle violently with each other, but always in a way that leaves the Wollen at a disadvantage.

No one, perhaps, has represented more splendidly the great primal connection between Wollen and Sollen in the character of the individual.  A person, from the point of view of his character, should:  he is restricted, destined to some definite course; but as a man, he wills.  He is unlimited and demands freedom of choice.  At once there arises an inner conflict, and Shakespeare puts it in the forefront.  But then an outer conflict supervenes, which often becomes acute through the pressure of circumstances, in the face of which a deficiency of will may rise to the rank of an inexorable fate.  This idea I have pointed out before in the case of Hamlet; but it occurs repeatedly in Shakespeare; for as Hamlet is driven by the ghost into straits which he cannot pass through, so is Macbeth by witches, by Hecate, and by the arch-witch, his wife; Brutus by his friends; nay, even in Coriolanus, we find a similar thing—­in short, the conception of a will transcending the capacity of the individual is modern.  But as Shakespeare represents this trouble of the will as arising not from within but through outside circumstances, it becomes a sort of Fate and approaches the antique.  For all the heroes of poetic antiquity strive only for what lies within man’s power, and thence arises that fine balance between will, Fate, and performance; yet their Fate appears always as too forbidding, even where we admire it, to possess the power of attraction.  A necessity which, more or less, or completely, precludes all freedom, does not comport with the ideas of our time; but Shakespeare approaches these in his own way; for, in making necessity ethical, he links, to our gratified astonishment, the ancient with the modern.  If anything can be learned from him, it is this point that we should study in his school.  Instead of exalting our romanticism—­which may not deserve censure or contempt—­unduly and exclusively, and clinging to it in a partisan spirit, whereby its strong, solid, efficient side is misjudged and impaired, we should strive to unite within ourselves those great and apparently irreconcilable opposites—­all the more that this has already been achieved by the unique master whom we prize so highly, and, often without knowing why, extol above every one.  He had, to be sure, the advantage of living at the proper harvest-time, of expending his activity in a Protestant country teeming with life, where the madness of bigotry was silent for a time, so that a man like Shakespeare, imbued with a natural piety, was left free to develop his real self religiously without regard to any definite creed.