,
was gradual, and it never destroyed Shakespeare's poise and sanity. We
shall not judge Shakespeare rightly if we believe that personal feeling
rather than artistic truth shaped his work.

Two years later Collin, a critic of fine insight and appreciation, wrote
in _Samtiden_[20] an article on the sonnets of Shakespeare. He begins by
picturing Shakespeare's surprise if he could rise from his grave in the
little church at Stratford and look upon the pompous and rather naive
bust, and hear the strange tongues of the thousands of pilgrims at his
shrine. Even greater would be his surprise if he could examine the
ponderous tomes in the Shakespeare Memorial Library at Birmingham which
have been written to explain him and his work. And if any of these
volumes could interest him at all it would doubtless be those in which
ingenious critics have attempted to discover the poet in the plays and
the poems. Collin then gives a brief survey of modern Shakespearean
criticism--Furnivall, Dowden, Brandl, Boas, ten Brink, and, more
recently, Sidney, Lee, Brandes, and Bierfreund. An important object of
the study of these men has been to fix the chronology of the plays. They
seldom fully agree. Sidney Lee and the Danish critic, Bierfreund, do not
accept the usual theory that the eight tragedies from _Julius Caesar_ to
_Coriolanus_ reflect a period of gloom and pessimism. In their opinion
psychological criticism has, in this instance, proved a dismal failure.

[20. Vol. XII, pp. 61 ff.]

The battle has raged with particular violence about the sonnets.
Most scholars assume that we have in them a direct presentation
(fremstilling) of a definite period in the life of the poet. And by
placing this period directly before the creation of _Hamlet_, Brandes
has succeeded in making the relations to the "dark lady" a crisis in
Shakespeare's life. The story, which, as Brandes tells it, has a
remarkable similarity to an ultra-modern naturalistic novel, becomes
even more piquant since Brandes knows the name of the lady, nay, even of
the faithless friend. All this information Brandes has, of course, taken
from Thomas Tyler's introduction to the Irving edition of the sonnets
(1890), but his passion for the familiar anecdote has led him to
embellish it with immense enthusiasm and circumstantiality.

The hypothesis, however, is essentially weak. Collin disagrees
absolutely with Lee that the sonnets are purely conventional, without
the slightest biog