Perhaps after that period, love of Shakespeare, if not altogether extinguished, greatly declined. The colossal mass of work of every sort devoted to Shakespeare, cannot be brought up against this judgment, for this mass, in great part due to German, English and American philologists, proves rather the sedulity of modern philology, than a profound spiritual impulse. This was more lively, when Shakespeare was far less investigated, rummaged and hashed up, and was read in editions far less critically correct. How could he be truly loved and really felt in an age which buried dialectic and idealism beneath naturalism and positivism, for the former of which he stood and which he represented in his own way? In this age, the consciousness of the distinction between liberty and passion, good and evil, nobility and vileness, fineness and sensuality, between the lofty and the base in man, became obscured; everything was conceived as differing in quantity, but identical in substance, and was placed in a deterministic relation with the external world. In such an atmosphere artistic work became blind, diseased, gloomy, instinctive; struggling for expression amid the torment of sick senses, no longer amid passionate, moral struggles of the soul; confused writers, half pedantic, half neurasthenic, were taken for and believed themselves to be, the heirs of Shakespeare. Even when one reads some of the most highly praised pages of the critics of the day upon Shakespeare, so abounding in exquisite refinements, a sort of repugnance comes over one, as though a warning that this is not the genuine Shakespeare. He was less subtle, but more profound, less involved, but more complex and more great than they. This is not a lamentation directed against the age, which is perhaps now drawing to a close and perhaps has no desire to do so, and will continue to develop its own character for a greater or lesser period. It is simply an observation of fact, which belongs to that history, which is not the history of William Shakespeare. He continues to live his own history, in those spirits alone, who are perpetually making anew that history which was truly his, as they read him with an ingenuous mind and a heart that shares in his poetry. PART III PIERRE CORNEILLE CHAPTER XIII CRITICISM OF THE CRITICISM