What we should be grateful for. – Only artists, and especially those of the theatre, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each himself is, himself experiences, himself wants; only they have taught us to value the hero that is hidden in each of these everyday characters and taught the art of regarding oneself as a hero, from a distance and as it were simplified and transfigured – the art of ‘putting oneself on stage’ before oneself. Only thus can we get over certain lowly details in ourselves. Without this art we would be nothing but foreground, and would live entirely under the spell of that perspective which makes the nearest and most vulgar appear tremendously big and as reality itself. Maybe there is a similar sort of merit in that religion which bade one to see the sinfulness of every individual through a magnifying glass and turned the sinner into a great, immortal criminal: by describing eternal perspectives around him, it taught man to view himself from a distance and as something past and whole.