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Updated: July 19, 2025
On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond, Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room, and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him greatly and did him much good.
. . . THINK of my having read the whole of Voltaire's "Henriade" last week! However, it is really better than I expected, and I read on, partly from curiosity and partly for the history. The French would have been very glad to find it an epic worthy of the name, for they have n't one.
Model Epic, HENRIADE; model History, CHARLES DOUZE; sublime Tragedies, CISAR, ALZIRE and others, which readers still know though with less enthusiasm, are blooming fresh in Friedrich's memory and heart; such Literature as man never saw before; and in the background Friedrich has inarticulately a feeling as if, in this man, there were something grander than all Literatures: a Reform of human Thought itself; a new "Gospel," good-tidings or God's-Message, by this man; which Friedrich does not suspect, as the world with horror does, to be a new BA'SPEL, or Devil's-Message of bad-tidings!
Not better, in my mind, even in the fourth of Virgil. Upon the whole, with all your classical rigor, if you will but suppose St. Louis a god, a devil, or a witch, and that he appears in person, and not in a dream, the Henriade will be an epic poem, according to the strictest statute laws of the 'epopee'; but in my court of equity it is one as it is.
As to the underlying principles of the constitution, the account which he gives of them conveys hardly more to the reader than the famous lines in the Henriade: Aux murs de Westminster on voit paraître ensemble Trois pouvoirs étonnés du noeud qui les rassemble.
Had Frederic been able to read Homer and Milton, or even Virgil and Tasso, his admiration of the Henriade would prove that he was utterly destitute of the power of discerning what is excellent in art. Had he been familiar with Sophocles or Shakespeare, we should have expected him to appreciate Zaire more justly.
Not better, in my mind, even in the fourth of Virgil. Upon the whole, with all your classical rigor, if you will but suppose St. Louis a god, a devil, or a witch, and that he appears in person, and not in a dream, the Henriade will be an epic poem, according to the strictest statute laws of the 'epopee'; but in my court of equity it is one as it is.
"I ran up and drew it out of the flames, saying that I had done more than they who did not burn the AEneid as Virgil had recommended; I had drawn out of the fire La Henriade, which Voltaire was going to burn with his own hands.
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