630 FRENCH EPIC POETRY. 



of subscribers, had it printed. Its success was instantaneous and 

 immense. Three hundred thousand copies were sold in France, 

 translations of it appeared in all languages, and the Crown Prince 

 of Prussia pronounced it worthy of being made into another 

 codex argenteus, and printed in silver characters. Voltaire soon 

 believed himself the equal of Virgil. As early as 1725, he confi- 

 dentially said to Thieriot: " L'epique est mon fait ou je me suis 

 bien trompe," and to R. P. Poree he wrote : 



Je n'ose encore me flatter d'avoir lave le reproche qu'on fait a !a 

 France de n'avoir jamais pu produire un poeme epique, mais si la 

 Henriade voar plait, j'atteindrai aux astres: sublimi feriam sidera vortice. 



The Henriade is incontestably a most interesting production, 

 far superior to the Franciade, the Semaines, the Tragiqnes, Alaric, 

 Clovis, and the Pncelle, in short, to all the post-medireval epics 

 I have alluded to above, but it is not yet the kind of epic that 

 stirs the soul of the people, and forces itself upon the whole 

 nation as a favourite. In the meantime it is a fact that in this 

 poem Voltaire foreshadowed some of the brilliant qualities he 

 was soon to display in more scientific work ; and his contempora- 

 ries must have foreseen in it the great historian he was to become. 

 The Henriade had a few decidedly weak spots. By selecting so 

 modern a hero as Henri IV, Voltaire had been obliged to break 

 the time-honoured rules and theories of the epic. He was a 

 fervent classicist and, in all his poetry, tied himself down to a 

 far too scrupulous application of the principles laid down by 

 Boileau and Le 'Bossu.* I once more take the liberty of quoting 

 Dr. Clark, who far more aptly than I could ever do it, illustrates 

 ihe reasons of Voltaire's failure in producing a great national 

 epic: 



Instead of suiting his epic to its surroundings and writing a historico- 

 heroic poem, which might have approximated to an epic, Voltaire tried 

 to be epic to his finger-tips. He imported all the epical machinery, 

 travestied the epic manner, stole epic machines, and produced merely a tour 

 de force in verse. He did not succeed in the task he imposed on himself, 

 nor would he have succeeded, had he been less anxious to have the 

 externals of epic poetry. Apart from the difficulties of the subject he 

 chose, and the bad instrument he had in the conventional metre of the 

 Alexandrine, there were other obstacles to success. Voltaire was essen- 

 tially an unpoetical spirit, and his enthusiasm over his poem was volitional 

 and not of the temperament. He had some intuition of the heroic in 

 action, but not of the heroic in sentiment. His subject, moreover, had 

 more than its share of the drawbacks of historical subjects. Henry's 

 surroundings were not the surroundings to produce an epic hero; and 

 we can hardly say, that Henry is brilliantly superior to his surroundings. 

 These were too unheroic to permit of the growth of a heroism deserving 

 commemoration in a national epic. Indeed Voltaire was born to write 

 words like the S\icle dc Louis XIV, not to compose epics like the 

 Henriade. His Henriade proves, that not even a superlatively clever man 

 can write an epic poem. 



That Voltaire was " essentially an unpractical sj^irit " is 

 characteristically corroborated by the following critical passage, 

 which has become famous. It flows from the vitriolic pen of 



* ■' Traitt du Poeme Epique par le Pere Bossu" (1675). 



