Page:Shakspeare and His Times (1852).djvu/10

iv discerns, and brings admirably into view, the instincts, passions, ideas—indeed, all the inner life of man; he is the most profound and most dramatic of moralists; but he makes his personages speak a language which is often fastidious, strange, excessive, and destitute of moderation and naturalness. And the English language is singularly propitious to the defects, as well as to the beauties, of Shakspeare; it is rich, energetic, passionate, abundant, striking; it readily admits the lofty flights, and even the wild excesses, of the poetic imagination; but it does not possess that elegant sobriety, that severe and delicate precision, that moderation in expression and harmony in imagery, which constitute the peculiar merit of the French language; so that, when Shakspeare passes from England into France, if he is translated with scrupulous fidelity, his defects become more apparent, and more offensive, beneath his new dress, than they were in his native form; and if, on the other hand, it is attempted to adapt his language, even in the slightest degree, to the genius of our tongue, he is inevitably robbed of a great part of his wealth, force, and originality. A literal translation and a free rendering do wrong to Shakspeare in a different manner, but in an equal degree. When he is translated, or when he is read in a translation, it must never be forgotten that he labors under one or other of these disadvantages.

In continuation of the Essay on the Life and Works of Shakspeare, I have published, in this volume, a series of Notices of his principal dramas, and an Essay on Othello and Dramatic Art in France in 1830, which the Duke De Broglie inserted, at that period, in the “Revue Francaise,” and which he has kindly allowed me to include in this volume. These Essays constitute, in some sort, proofs in support of the ideas which, in 1821, I endeavored to de-