[34] Two specimens of the criticism of Voltaire may explain his involuntary and his voluntary blunders:—
In Hamlet, when one sentinel inquires of the other—“Have you had quiet guard?” he is answered—“Not a mouse stirring!” which Voltaire translates literally—“Pas un souris qui trotte!” How different is the same circumstance described by Racine—“Tout dort, et l’armée, et le vents, et Neptune!” A verse Kaimes had condemned as mere bombast! To every people who had not associated with the general night-stillness of a castle the movement of a mouse, this description would appear ludicrously puerile; while, with us, the familiar idiom is most happily appropriate to the speaker; but this natural language no foreigner can acquire by study or reflection; we imbibe our idioms as we did the milk of the nurse’s breast.
In Julius Cæsar, when Voltaire translates Cæsar’s reply to Metellus, who would fall at his feet to supplicate for the repeal of his brother’s banishment, the Cæesar of Shakespeare uses metaphorical expressions. He would not yield to
| “That which melteth fools; I mean sweet words, Low-crooked curt’sies, and base spaniel-fawning. If thou dost bend, and pray, and fawn for him, I’d spurn thee like a cur out of my way.” |
This natural style was doubtless “trop familier” for the polished Frenchman, and his version is malicious, and he delights to detail every motion of a spaniel, even to the licking of the feet of his master!—
| “Les airs d’un chien couchant peuvent toucher un sot; Flatte, prie à genoux, et lèche-moi les pieds— Va, je te rosserai comme un chien.” |
Rosser can only be translated by so mean a phrase as “a sound beating;” while to spurn is no ignoble action, and is used rather in a poetical than familiar style.
THE “HUMOURS” OF JONSON.