And in spite of the great distance separating us from the moral and religious beliefs of the Greeks, we are nearer to the spirit of Sophocles than—I shall not say Lope and Calderon, whose bloody dramas, rapacious heroes and gentlemen-assassins will never be acceptable to us until the re-establishment of bull-fighting and gladiatorial combats (a possibility, indeed, but not one we particularly care to envisage)—to Shakespeare. Indeed, everything separates him from us, time as well as nationality. Nothing more surely proves our narrowness of mind, its inability without proper preparation to identify ourselves with a past epoch. The style, which in its own day was a transparent evil, exactly suited to the thought, actually obscures it nowadays, like an opaque and many-colored curtain, the strange design and color of which confuse and blind us. I once attended a popular reading of Macbeth by Maurice Bouchor. I tried to forget myself and become one of the people; but I felt ill at ease, and almost ashamed when I heard certain metaphors, the archaic grandeur of which, under the circumstances, assumed an obscure and impossibly absurd importance. Ought we then to divest Shakespeare of the charming and barbaric beauty of his style? That were a sacrilegious and perilous task, exceedingly difficult for those who love him. And it would not, besides, preserve the integrity of the rest. It would be necessary to cut, slash, and modify, both characters and plot, in order to make the plays suitable to our public. The English themselves
