But the majority convert the less probable conjectures into certainties, and proceed from conjecture to conjecture and from assertion to assertion, finally producing, under the title, _Life of Shakespeare,_ nothing but a romance, which, however, always turns out to be too colourless to be called artistic. A rapacious hand is stretched out to seize the poetical works themselves, with the view of writing this sort of fiction since (to quote the author of one of these unamusing fictions, Brandes) it cannot be admitted that it is impossible to know by deducing them from his writings, the life, the adventures, and the person of a man who has left about forty plays and poems. And it is certainly possible to deduce all these things from the poetical writings, but the life, and the poetical adventures and personages, not the practical and biographical; save in the case (which is not that of Shakespeare,) where definitely informative, autobiographical statements and excursions are to be found among the poems, that is to say, passages that are not poetical, but prosaic. In every other instance, the poetical emotion does not lead to the practical, because the relation between the two is not _deterministic,_ from effect to cause, but _creative,_ from material to form, and therefore incommensurable. The moment it is raised to the sphere of poetry, a sentiment that has really been experienced is plucked from its practical and realistic soil, and made the motive of composition for a world of dreams, one of the infinite possible worlds, in which it is as useless to seek any longer the reality of that sentiment, as it is vain to seek a drop of water poured into the ocean, and transformed from what it was previously by ocean's vast embrace. One feels almost inclined to repeat as warning that strophe from the _Sonnets,_ where the poet said of his mistress to his friend:
"Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe."
For this reason, when we read in Brandes's book (which we select for quotation here, because it has been widely circulated), such statements as that Richard III, the deformed dwarf, whom we feel to be superior in intellect, adumbrates Shakespeare himself, obliged to adopt the despised profession of the actor, but full of the pride of genius, it is not a case of rejecting or accepting his statements, but of simply looking upon them as so many conjectures founded upon air and as such, devoid of interest. This criterion can also be applied in the following cases: that the pitiful death of the youthful Prince Arthur, in _King John,_ shows traces of the loss of one of his sons, sustained by the author at the moment when he was composing that drama; that the riotous youth of Henry V is a symbol of the youth of Shakespeare during his first years in London; that Brutus, in _Julius Caesar,_ has reference to the persons of Essex and Southampton, protectors of the poet and unsuccessful conspirators against the queen; that Coriolanus, disdainful of praise, is Shakespeare in the attitude that it suited him to take up towards the public and the critics; that the feeling of King Lear, appalled with ingratitude, is that of the poet, appalled at the ingratitude he experienced at the hands of his colleagues, of the impresarii and of his pupils; and finally that Shakespeare must have written those terrible dramas in the nocturnal hours, although he most probably worked as a rule in the early morning; together with many other fancies of a similar sort; it is not a case of accepting or of confuting them, but of just taking them for what they are, conjectures based upon air, and as such of no interest.