the author remarks:
"He rendered to immutable nature his Hamletic soul." William enters
and, discovering his Kate, gives her a sound beating; not the first or
the last, as she apprises us. The poem ends with this motto: Un Hamlet
de moins; la race n'en est pas perdue, qu'on se le dise! Which is
chilly truth.

The artistic beauty of the prose, its haunting assonance, its supple
rhythms make this Hamlet impossible save in French. Nor can the fine
edge of its wit, its multiple though masked ironies, its astounding
transposition of Shakespearian humour and philosophy be aught else
than loosely paraphrased. Laforgue's Hamlet is of to-morrow, for every
epoch orchestrates anew its own vision of Hamlet. The eighteenth
century had one; the nineteenth had another; and our generation a
fresher. But we know of none so vital as this fantastic thinker of
Laforgue's. He must have had his ear close to the Time Spirit, so
aptly has he caught the vibrations of his whirring loom, so closely to
these vibrations has he attuned the key-note of his twentieth-century
Hamlet.

IV

DOSTOIEVSKY AND TOLSTOY
AND THE YOUNGER CHOIR OF RUSSIAN WRITERS

I

"It is terrible to watch a man who has the Incomprehensible
in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits
playing with a toy called God."
--_Letter to his brother Michael._

In his Criticism and Fiction, Mr. Howells wrote: "It used to be one of
the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which
Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were few
shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is
one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky's novel, The Crime and
the Punishment, that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in
American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing--as false and as
mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain
nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying."

Who cares nowadays for the hard-and-fast classifications of idealist,
realist, romanticist, psychologist, symbolist, and the rest of the
phrases, which are only so much superfluous baggage for literary
camp-followers. All great romancers are realists, and the converse may
be true. You note it in Dumas and his gorgeous, clattering
tales--improbable, but told in terms of the