n and
good-naturedly promise him indefinite prolongation of his earthly
career. According to the gospel of Dumas, the tragedy of Hamlet ends,
as soon as his and his father's wrongs have been avenged, in this
fashion:--

_Hamlet._ Et moi, vais-je rester, triste orphelin sur terre,
A respirer cet air impregne de misere?...
Est-ce que Dieu sur moi fera peser son bras,
Pere? Et quel chatiment m'attend donc?

_Le Fantome._ Tu vivras.

Such defiant transgressions of the true Shakespearean canon as those
of which Ducis and Dumas stand convicted may well rouse the suspicion
that the critical incense they burn at Shakespeare's shrine is
offered with the tongue in the cheek. But that suspicion is not
justified. Ducis and Dumas worship Shakespeare with a whole heart.
Their misapprehensions of his tragic conceptions are due,
involuntarily, to native temperament. In point of fact, Ducis and
Dumas see Shakespeare through a distorting medium. The two Frenchmen
were fully conscious of Shakespeare's towering greatness. They
perceived intuitively that Shakespeare's tragedies transcended all
other dramatic achievement. But their aesthetic sense, which, as far as
the drama was concerned, was steeped in the classical spirit, set many
of the essential features of Shakespeare's genius outside the focus of
their vision.

To a Frenchman a tragedy of classical rank connotes "correctness," an
absence of tumult, some observance of the classical law of unity of
time, place, and action. The perpetration of crime in face of the
audience outraged all classical conventions. Ducis and Dumas
recognised involuntarily that certain characteristics of the
Shakespearean drama could not live in the classical atmosphere of
their own theatre. Excision, expansion, reduction was inevitable
before Shakespeare could breathe the air of the French stage. The
grotesque perversions of Ducis and Dumas were thus not the fruit of
mere waywardness, or carelessness, or dishonesty; they admit of
philosophical explanation.

By Englishmen they may be viewed with equanimity, if not with
satisfaction. They offer strong proof of the irrepressible strength or
catholicity of the appeal that Shakespeare's genius makes to the mind
and heart of humanity. His spirit survived the French efforts at
mutilation. The Gallicised or classicised contortions of his mighty
work did not destroy its sa