We know that it is necessary to make an effort of abstraction, to forget biographical details concerning the poets, in those cases where they abound, if we wish to enjoy their art, in what it possesses of ideality, which is truth. We know, too, that poets and artists have always experienced dislike and contempt for those gossip-mongers, who investigate and record the private occurrences of their lives, in order to extract from them the elements of artistic judgment. This is the reason why a poet's contemporaries and his fellow-countrymen and fellow-townsmen are said not to be good judges and that no one is a poet or prophet among his familiars and in the place of his birth. The advantage of the lack of a bar to artistic contemplation, one of the good consequences of this lack of biographical detail relating to Shakespeare, is thrown away by these conjecturers, who, like the mule of Galeazzo Florimonte, bring stones to birth that they may stumble upon them. We can observe the re-immersion of Shakespearean poetry in psychological materiality in the already mentioned book of Brandes (and also to some extent in the more subtle and ingenious work of Frank Harris) and in the case of Brandes, the readjustment of values that is its consequence, as with _King Lear_ and _Timon,_ both documents of misanthropy induced by ingratitude; and even the sinking of values into non-values, when he fails to effect his psychological reduction, even by means of those extravagant methods, as in the case of _Macbeth,_ where he declares that this play, which is one of the dramatic masterpieces, appears to him to possess but "slight interest," because he does not feel "the heart of Shakespeare beating there," that is to say, of the Shakespeare endowed with certain practical objects and interests by his imagination.