f humanity, and Shakespeare was one of the
three; Moses and Homer were the other two. Alfred de Musset became a
dramatist under Shakespeare's spell. To George Sand everything in
literature seemed tame by the side of Shakespeare's poetry. The prince
of romancers, the elder Dumas, set the English dramatist next to God
in the cosmic system; "after God," wrote Dumas, "Shakespeare has
created most."

III

It would be easy to multiply eulogies of Shakespeare from French lips
in the vein of Victor Hugo and Dumas--eulogies besides which the
enthusiasm of many English critics appears cold and constrained. So
unfaltering a note of admiration sounds gratefully in the ears of
Shakespeare's countrymen. Yet on closer investigation there seems a
rift within the lute. When one turns to the French versions of
Shakespeare, for which the chief of Shakespeare's French encomiasts
have made themselves responsible, an Englishman is inclined to
moderate his exultation in the French panegyrics.

No one did more as an admiring critic and translator of Shakespeare
than Jean Francois Ducis, who prepared six of Shakespeare's greatest
plays for the French stage at the end of the eighteenth century. Not
only did Ducis introduce Shakespeare's masterpieces to thousands of
his countrymen who might otherwise never have heard of them, but his
renderings of Shakespeare were turned into Italian and many languages
of Eastern Europe. They spread the knowledge of Shakespeare's
achievement to the extreme boundaries of the European Continent.
Apparently Ducis did his work under favourable auspices. He
corresponded regularly with Garrick, and he was never happier than
when studying Shakespeare's text with a portrait of Shakespeare at his
side. Yet, in spite of Ducis's unquestioned reverence and his
honourable intentions, all his translations of Shakespeare are gross
perversions of their originals. It is not merely that he is verbally
unfaithful. He revises the development of the plots; he gives the
_dramatis personae_ new names.

Ducis's _Othello_ was accounted his greatest triumph. The play shows
Shakespeare's mastery of the art of tragedy at its highest stage of
development, and rewards the closest study. But the French translator
ignored the great tragic conception which gives the drama its pith and
moment. He converted the piece into a romance. Towards the end of his
rendering Iago's villanies are discovered by Othello; Othello and
Desdemona are recon