MY DEAR FRIEND: I consider you now as at the court of Augustus, where, if
ever the desire of pleasing animated you, it must make you exert all the
means of doing it. You will see there, full as well, I dare say, as
Horace did at Rome, how states are defended by arms, adorned by manners,
and improved by laws. Nay, you have an Horace there as well as an
Augustus; I need not name Voltaire, ‘qui nil molitur inept?’ as Horace
himself said of another poet. I have lately read over all his works that
are published, though I had read them more than once before. I was
induced to this by his ‘Siecle de Louis XIV’, which I have yet read but
four times. In reading over all his works, with more attention I suppose
than before, my former admiration of him is, I own, turned into
astonishment. There is no one kind of writing in which he has not
excelled. You are so severe a classic that I question whether you will
allow me to call his ‘Henriade’ an epic poem, for want of the proper
number of gods, devils, witches and other absurdities, requisite for the
machinery; which machinery is, it seems, necessary to constitute the
‘epopee’. But whether you do or not, I will declare (though possibly to
my own shame) that I never read any epic poem with near so much pleasure.
I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire which
formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended
with smoke; but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of
five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.
In this disposition of mind, judge whether I can read all Homer through
‘tout de suite’. I admire its beauties; but, to tell you the truth, when
he slumbers, I sleep. Virgil, I confess, is all sense, and therefore I
like him better than his model; but he is often languid, especially in
his five or six last books, during which I am obliged to take a good deal
of snuff. Besides, I profess myself an ally of Turnus against the pious
AEneas, who, like many ‘soi-disant’ pious people, does the most flagrant
injustice and violence in order to execute what they impudently call the
will of Heaven. But what will you say, when I tell you truly, that I
cannot possibly read our countryman Milton through? I acknowledge him to
have some most sublime passages, some prodigious flashes of light; but
then you must acknowledge that light is often followed by darkness
visible, to use his own expression. Besides, not having the honor to be
acquainted with any of the parties in this poem, except the Man and the
Woman, the characters and speeches of a dozen or two of angels and of as
many devils, are as much above my reach as my entertainment. Keep this
secret for me: for if it should be known, I should be abused by every
tasteless pedant, and every solid divine in England.
‘Whatever I have said to the disadvantage of these three poems, holds
much stronger against Tasso’s ‘Gierusalemme’: it is true he has very fine
and glaring rays of poetry; but then they are only meteors, they dazzle,
then disappear, and are succeeded by false thoughts, poor ‘concetti’, and
absurd impossibilities; witness the Fish and the Parrot; extravagancies
unworthy of an heroic poem, and would much better have become Ariosto,
who professes ‘le coglionerie’.
I have never read the “Lusiade of Camoens,” except in prose translation,
consequently I have never read it at all, so shall say nothing of it; but
the Henriade is all sense from the beginning to the end, often adorned by
the justest and liveliest reflections, the most beautiful descriptions,
the noblest images, and the sublimest sentiments; not to mention the
harmony of the verse, in which Voltaire undoubtedly exceeds all the
French poets: should you insist upon an exception in favor of Racine, I
must insist, on my part, that he at least equals him. What hero ever
interested more than Henry the Fourth; who, according to the rules of
epic poetry, carries on one great and long action, and succeeds in it at
last? What descriptions ever excited more horror than those, first of the
Massacre, and then of the Famine at Paris? Was love ever painted with
more truth and ‘morbidezza’ than in the ninth book? 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 could expatiate as much upon all his different works, but that I should
exceed the bounds of a letter and run into a dissertation. How delightful
is his history of that northern brute, the King of Sweden, for I cannot
call him a man; and I should be sorry to have him pass for a hero, out of
regard to those true heroes, such as Julius Caesar, Titus, Trajan, and
the present King of Prussia, who cultivated and encouraged arts and
sciences; whose animal courage was accompanied by the tender and social
sentiments of humanity; and who had more pleasure in improving, than in
destroying their fellow-creatures. What can be more touching, or more
interesting--what more nobly thought, or more happily expressed, than all
his dramatic pieces? What can be more clear and rational than all his
philosophical letters? and whatever was so graceful, and gentle, as all
his little poetical trifles? You are fortunately ‘a porte’ of verifying,
by your knowledge of the man, all that I have said of his works.
Monsieur de Maupertius (whom I hope you will get acquainted with) is,
what one rarely meets with, deep in philosophy and, mathematics, and yet
‘honnete et aimable homme’: Algarotti is young Fontenelle. Such men must
necessarily give you the desire of pleasing them; and if you can frequent
them, their acquaintance will furnish you the means of pleasing everybody
else.
‘A propos’ of pleasing, your pleasing Mrs. F-----d is expected here in
two or three days; I will do all that I can for you with her: I think you
carried on the romance to the third or fourth volume; I will continue it
to the eleventh; but as for the twelfth and last, you must come and
conclude it yourself. ‘Non sum qualis eram’.
Good-night to you, child; for I am going to bed, just at the hour at
which I suppose you are going to live, at Berlin.