EPIC POETRY IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 



By Prof. Renicus Dowe Nauta. 



{Read July 9, 19 18.) 



One Mr. Malezieux, a French mathematician of the early 

 part of the i8th century, who in his spare hours wrote poetry, 

 once said, in the course of a conversation on poets and poems, to 

 the Duchesse du Maine, at whose salon at Sceaux he seems to 

 have been a sedulous visitor: " Les Frangais n'ont pas la tete 

 epique." 



\\'hen Voltaire had published his Henriade, he wrote a little 

 later on : 



We never yet had any epic in French, and I am not even cocksure 

 v.'heth^T we have one now. It is true, that my " Henriade '' has been 

 reprinted several times, but it would smack too much of presumption on 

 my part, if I considered my poem to be valuable enough to pass to pos- 

 terity and obliterate the blemish, with which France has been tainted so 

 long, of not being able to produce an epic. 



A little further on he mentioned this same Mr. Malezieux, 

 whom he app»ears to have consulted with regard to his Henriade. 



The late Mr. Malezieux, a man of vast imagination and huge literary 

 attainments, said to me: " Vous entreprenez un ouvrage qui n'est pas 

 fait pour notre nation, les Frangais, n'ont pas la tete epique. Ce furent 

 ses propres paroles et il ajouta: Quand vous ecririez aussi bien que MM. 

 Racine et Despreaux, ce sera beaucoup si on vous lit." 



In the present paper, I shall venture to attempt at showing 

 the fallacy of Malezieux's statement, endorsed as it stands by 

 \''oltaire, who apparently has not sufficiently discounted the " vast 

 imagination " of the poetical medico. The fact that France is 

 conspicuous by its absence from the traditional list of the eight 

 great world epics, on which we find Greece with the Iliad and 

 the Odyssey, Rome with the ALneid, Germany with the Nibelun- 

 gefi', Portugal with the Lusiad, Italy with Gierusalemme liberata 

 and the Divlna Commedia, and England with Paradise Lost, will 

 surely have carried weight with both Voltaire and Malezieux, 

 as it is bound to do with everyone. It would be utterly wrong, 

 however, to conclude from the doctor's obiter dictum and Vol- 

 taire's sweeping statement that nothing or next to nothing of the 

 epic species has been produced in France. Even if we rest satis- 

 fied that, down from the Chanson de Roland up to the Legende 

 des Siecles, no French production could be hall-marked and put 

 on a par with the transcendant eight mentioned above, it would 

 be positively incorrect to assert that, in the brilliant galaxy of 

 French poems, produced between the nth and the 19th 

 centuries, the epic element is lacking. Three French epics are, as 

 a rule, accepted as such. La Chanson de Roland, Voltaire's 

 Henriade, and Victor Hugo's Legende des Siecles. . Of these, the 

 first two are admitted, even by critics, whose strictly classical 

 minds make them very exacting with regard to the requirements 

 of the genuine epics. With kind permission of my learned col- 



