This error is also to be found in the so-called "pictures of the society of the time," by means of which another group has striven to interpret the art of Shakespeare. These are not less extrinsic and disturbing than the others, assuming that they are composed with like historical ignorance. Taine, for instance, having got it into his head that the English of the time of Elizabeth were "_des bêtes sauvages_," describes the drama of the time as a reproduction "_sans choix_" of all "_les laideurs, les bassesses, les horreurs, les détails crus, les mœurs déréglées et féroces_" of that time, and the style of Shakespeare as "_un composé d'expressions forcenées,_" in such wise that when one reads the famous _Histoire de la littérature anglaise,_ it is difficult to say whether poets or assassins are passing across the stage, whether these be artistic and harmonious contests, or dagger-thrust struggles. The opinion of Goethe is opposed to all these deformations, to the Shakespeare who moans and shrieks on the wind of the wild passions of his time, to that other Shakespeare who reveals the wounds of his own sickly soul with bitter sarcasm and disgust. In the conversations with Eckermann, he gives as his impression that the plays of Shakespeare were the work "of a man in perfect health and strength, both in body and spirit"; he must indeed have been healthy and strong and free, when he created something so free, so healthy and so strong as his poetry. In a calmer sphere of considerations, those who make the personages and the action of the plays depend upon the political and social events of the time commit a similar deterministic error--upon the victory over the Armada, the conspiracy of Essex, the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, the geographical discoveries and colonisation of the day, the contests with the Puritans, and the like. Others err in tracing the different forms of the poetry to the course of his reading, to the Chronicle of Holinshed, to Italian novels, to the Lives of Plutarch, and especially to the _Essais_ of Montaigne (where Chasles and others of more recent date have placed the origin of the new great period of his poetical work); others again have found it in the circumstances of the English stage of the time, and in the various tastes of the "reserved" and "pit" seats, as in the so-called "realistic" criticism of Rümelin. The poetry, then, should certainly be interpreted historically, but in the proper sense, disconnected, that is to say from a history that is foreign to it and with which its only connection is that prevailing between a man and what he disregards, puts away from him and rejects, because it either injures him or is of no use, or, which comes to the same thing, because he has already made sufficient use of it. CHAPTER VIII SHAKESPEAREAN SENTIMENT