hans
Kunst_.[18] This, however, belongs to the study of Shakespearean
criticism in Denmark.

[18. Copenhagen, 1898.]

So far as I have been able to find, Bierfreund's review was the only one
published in Norway immediately after the publication of Brandes' work,
but in 1899, S. Brettville Jensen took up the matter again in _For Kirke
og Kultur_[19] and, in 1901, Christen Collin vigorously assailed in
_Samtiden_ that elaborate and fanciful theory of the sonnets which plays
so great a part in Brandes' study of Shakespeare.

[19. Vol. VI (1899), pp. 400 ff.]

Brettville Jensen praises Brandes highly. He is always interesting, in
harmony with his age, and in rapport with his reader. "But his book is a
fantasy palace, supported by columns as lovely as they are hollow and
insecure, and hovering in rainbow mists between earth and sky." Brandes
has rare skill in presenting hypotheses as facts. He has attempted to
reconstruct the life of Shakespeare from his works. Now this is a mode
of criticism which may yield valuable results, but clearly it must be
used with great care. Shakespeare knew the whole of life, but how he
came to know it is another matter. Brandes thinks he has found the
secret. Back of every play and every character there is a personal
experience. But this is rating genius altogether too cheap. One must
concede something to the imagination and the creative ability of the
poet. To relate everything in Shakespeare's dramas to the experiences
of Shakespeare the man, is both fanciful and uncritical.

The same objection naturally holds regarding the meaning of the sonnets
which Brandes has made his own. Here we must bear in mind the fact that
much of the language in the sonnets is purely conventional. We should
have a difficult time indeed determining just how much is biographical
and how much belongs to the stock in trade of Elizabethan sonneteers.
Brettville Jensen points out that if the sonnets are the expression of
grief at the loss of his beloved, it is a queer contradiction that
Sonnet 144, which voices his most poignant sorrow, should date from
1599, the year, according to Brandes, when Shakespeare's comedy period
began!

It is doubtless true that the plays and even the sonnets mark great
periods in the life of the poet, but we may be sure that the relation
between experience and literary creation was not so literal as Brandes
would have us believe. The change from mood to mood, from play to play