was

tainly have admitted that its picaresqueness was very good of its kind; that it was, in fact, as picaresque as could be expected of a Frenchman who conspicuously an "honnête homme" and who signed himself "bourgeois de Paris." But in all likelihood he would have instantly added that it was not the "picaresqueness" of "Gil Blas" which has given that production its fame; and that, if Lesage's masterpiece has lived so long, and if it lives to-day with such a fresh and abundant life, this constant appeal has been made in spite of its resemblance to the Spanish picaresque prototype.

The application of the scientific method to literary criticism during the last generation has steadily tended to define works of art as "documents" of their epoch, and at the same time to classify them according to their structural variations rather than to accept them wholly as sources of human pleasure. The novel of Lesage, for the purposes of classification, may be viewed as a picaresque novel, and it is interesting and legitimate to note that it is no doubt the best of its kind; yet there is equally little doubt that thousands of readers who do not know what the word "picaresque" means have for several generations regarded "Gil Blas" as simply the best of all novels, and that their reasons have been based on qualities quite independent of the mould into which it happened to be run. This is, in fact, the truth which these brief remarks are meant to set forth. In order to become a classic, and in order to hold its own among the books of the world, "Gil Blas" has had to live down its picaresqueness. The book has survived, and become one of the great books, notwithstanding the characteristics which seemed destined to confine it to the museum of antique literary forms.

Walter Scott's recognition of the supreme delightfulness of "Gil Blas"

has not been general among the critics; indeed, the sense of its intrinsic value as a definition of life must rather be placed to the credit of the uncritical public. Voltaire, referring to Lesage in his "Siècle de Louis XIV," limits his praise to the remark: "His novel 'Gil Blas' has survived because of the naturalness of the style." The curtness and inadequacy of this remark are probably due rather to the fact that Voltaire did not see beyond the superficial traits of this novel, its general picaresque atmosphere, than, as has so often been asserted, to any malicious intent to decry a book in which he supposed himself to have been held up to ridicule.1 Joubert, whose delicacy was a hothouse fruit grown in the thin subsoil and the devitalized air in which he was compelled to live, corroborates Voltaire, while revealing his own prejudices after all, is not the main interest of criticism the light it throws upon the critic?-in a characteristic utterance: "Lesage's novels would appear to have been written in a café by a domino-player, after spending the evening at the play." Evidently this is a long way from the "beatitude" of Walter Scott, but it is nearer the point of view of Mr. Warner Allen, who, while he notes that "Gil Blas" "has a conscience," is ingeniously effective in arguing that the spirit of "Gil Blas" is essentially picaresque-by which he means that realism and materialism are so predominantly its note that it must be classed well below "Don Quixote," where the heterogeneous picaresque material is beautifully fused by the imagination of an idealist. "It is just because Lesage ignores the idealistic side

1 The traditional view is, however, plausible enough, as Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly has shown in his introduction to the edition of "Gil Blas" published in the "World's Classics." There can be no doubt as to Lesage having ridiculed Voltaire in two of his plays.

In his remarkable general introduction to the Picaresque section of the "Library of Early Novelists," published by George Routledge and Sons.

of man," Mr. Allen says, "that 'Gil Blas' misses being a great creation." On the other hand, La Harpe, who had read many books, but was no doubt the very opposite of a scientific critic of literature, praises "Gil Blas" not merely, as did Scott, for its entertainment, its agrément, but also for its moral inspiration; utile dulci, he insists, ought to be the device of this excellent book, forgetting that Lesage has himself written the precept of Horace on its title-page. "C'est l'école du monde que 'Gil Blas,'" La Harpe continues; and he remarks with singular felicity that Lesage in "Gil Blas" "has not fallen into that gratuitous profusion of minute detail which is now-a-days taken to be truth." This comment suggests the probability that the reproach addressed to Lesage as to his lack of idealism is one that La Harpe would be disinclined to accept; and that they who make it have other standards for judging a work of art than those of the public to whom it is addressed, or indeed than those of the artist himself, especially such an artist as Lesage, who in his "Déclaration" to the reader says expressly: "My sole aim has been to represent life as it is"; "Je ne me suis proposé que de représenter la vie des hommes telle qu'elle est."

Certain of Lesage's predecessors had already declared it to be their aim to write books which should be a wholesome reaction against the romanticism of the tales of chivalry that had so long delighted the taste of Europe. The sub-title of Alemán's famous novel, "Guzmán de Alfarache," was "Atalaya de la Vida," which Chapelain translated by "Image" or "Miroir de la Vie Humaine." And long before Lesage, the author of "l'Histoire Comique de Francion" used almost the identical terms of Alemán and Lesage in announcing his tale: "Nous avons dessein de voir une image de la vie humaine, de sorte qu'il nous en faut montrer ici diverses

pièces." Francion, less picaresque than the hero of Alemán, was undoubtedly what he has been called by one of Lesage's biographers, M. Lintilhac, a direct precursor of Gil Blas; and there can be no question as to the importance of the influence exercised upon Lesage by Charles Sorel's admirable performance. But, however easily even a little erudition can discover possible prototypes of "Gil Blas" in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century literature of both France and Spain-however picaresque, in a word, “Gil Blas" may be, and whatever else it may be its picaresqueness was obviously, for Lesage, not an end in itself, but merely a device for carrying out his main project, which was "the representation of life"; and the meaning he put into those words was incomparably richer than was their connotation on the lips of an Alemán or even a Sorel. Lesage found ready to his hand one of the most convenient literary forms that the novel ever assumed for the achievement of the end he had in view. That end was to hold a mirror up to Nature, and to the whole of Nature.

This ambitious project has haunted most observers who have essayed the novel form. It was obviously the end and aim of the author of "Anna Karenina." But such is the complexity of human relations, such the variety of the kinds of human plights, such the swift passage of events, such are the endless differences and the fleeting character of the situations presented to the artistic consciousness at any moment of time, that only the most self-confident craftsman would be tempted, in his sane mind, to undertake their complete representation. mirror in which a writer would seek to converge and to foreshorten the vast spectacle of things must needs be an all-but unmanageable revolving mirror of gigantic dimensions, unless some way be found of dispensing with suc

The

machinery altogether. Tolstoi made no attempt to achieve an artistic synthesis of life as a whole. He was content to map life out on a sort of Mercator's projection. Balzac despaired altogether of success, and confined himself to "doing" the multitudinous phases of human activity piecemeal. Lesage, on the other hand, hit on the happy idea of using the picaro type, the picaresque tradition in the novel, to facilitate his project. And what device, in fact, could be neater and more rapid? Certainly not the invention of Zola. The author of the series of the Rougon-Macquart set himself the task of describing the whole of French society at the end of the last century. He believed himself to have improved on Balzac's method by conceiving of a family-tree, with branches sufficiently wide-spreading to illustrate every kind of activity of which French men or French women were capable in his time. The unity of his result was to be secured by postulating a family, the sum of the several lives of whose members should be coterminous with the conscious existence of all their essential French fellow-types at a certain historical period. The plan was ingenious but artificially ingenuous.

Lesage, writing at the opening of the eighteenth century, had, it is true, the luck to be free to employ--or, in fact, to have thrust upon him by the literary taste of his time-a simpler trick for the representation of life. The literary air was full of picaresque odors. But, while Lesage came after Sorel and Alemán, and a score of other sane story-tellers eager to temper the bombast of the hour by the saving salt of realism, the living models that surrounded him were quite as suggestive as any he might have been led to imitate in the books of his predecessors. Lintilhac, Cherbuliez, Brunetière, have dwelt in detail on this fact. What need had Lesage of a Guzmán or a

Francion, when before his very eyes were such conspicuous models for the study of the valet parvenu as the Cardinals Dubois and Alberoni? And why go farther afield than the memoirs of the famous Gourville, which appeared in 1673, if one really feels impelled at all costs to account for the origin of "Gil Blas," and to answer the futile question, "Where did Lesage get his idea?" That kind of inquiry explains everything except the essential. Homer and Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Corneille, have been put to the same torture as Lesage; and in the folds of their royal robes whole colonies of industrious parasitic moths are still furiously and often enviously at work. There is a "Lesage question" as there is an "Homeric question." But of this the public recks little. It sanely holds the view of M. de Maurepas, who wittily defined an author as "un homme qui prend aux livres tout ce qui lui passe par la tête." The public rightly judges the work of art by the criterion of pleasure which it is capable of giving. By that standard "Gil Blas" was long ago classed among the delightful books of the world. How many of its beauties are plagiarisms, or whether any of them are, are inquiries which the wise are content to leave to the mandarins of literature."

The representation of life, then, is the avowed object of Lesage. "Gil Blas" is a microcosm. One might apply to Lesage the words of Balzac in allusion to the Comédie Humaine: "J'aurai porté une société toute entière dans ma tête." "Gil Blas" is a picture, singularly vivid and comprehensive, of the society of

3 While the oft-reported story of the pillage by Lesage of a lost Spanish manuscript is a myth, it is incontestable that in the last books of "Gil Blas" he embodied long passages from a French translation of two Italian pamphlets on "The Disgrace of Count Olivares," and from a book published in 1683 at Cologne entitled, "Le Ministre Parfait ou le Comte-Duc." It is easy to prove also that Lesage had read Lazarilla de Tormes and a great many Spanish tales and plays; but, as M. Lintilhac says, so nad Corneille, yet the "Cid" remains the "Cid."

France at the close of the reign of Louis XIV and at the beginning of the Regency. Lesage, like St. Simon, sought to reflect the life of his time; but he is greater than St. Simon because of the larger general interest and significance of his literary form. Lesage was a gentleman, serenely, gaily taking notes on the world that surrounded him; but, as it pleased him to publish all his notes in his own lifetime, he adopted the novel form and the device of a Spanish atmosphere. Happily the society that surrounded Lesage in the Paris of the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries was sufficiently complex and representative for an exhaustive picture of that world to assume a typical value.

"Gil Blas" is an encyclopædia of human types. No other single book contains so rich a collection of specimens of the genus homo. The success with which Lesage has introduced into "Gil Blas" virtually every form of human character, all sorts and conditions of men, is one of the miracles of literary art. The purely traditional picaro types, the vagabond and the beggar, the unscrupulous highwayman and the cut-throat, have, after all, comparatively small importance in the great comedy of life which Lesage depicts. These picaro types move in and out of the vast throng peopling his pages much as their counterparts in the flesh, the Apaches of the Marais quarter, jostled on the Pont Neuf the honest workman, the country bumpkin, the banker Turcaret, the bourgeois merchant, the strutting soldier, the barefoot monk, the daintily stepping petits maîtres, the authors and the actors, the ministers and the high officials, the servants and the adventurers, the priests, and the précieuses peering from their vinaigrettes. From the brigand cave that sheltered the jail-bird to the drawingroom of the Marquise de Chaves, from

the boudoir of the enticing Laure to the cabinet of the Duke of Olivares, we visit every haunt of human activity and every social condition, conversing on the way with comedians, doctors, poets, lawyers, statesmen, valets, judges of the Inquisition, shopkeepers, courtesans, archbishops, and countless other actors of the Human Comedy. The final impression is that we have been in contact with the whole of life and with life as a whole.

We have witnessed the amusing spectacle arm-in-arm with Gil Blas de Santillane, a puppet of circumstance, but the most good-natured of companions. No youth of sprightlier wit, of keener observation, or of more unfailing good humor was ever born of mortal man or immortal writer. Gil Blas is too agreeable a fellow for us to dream of parting company with him merely because of his escapades. Moreover, no one was ever long in his company without discovering that the firstfruit of his innate gift of observation is a habit of reflection gradually conducting him to the point of view of the great American pragmatist. For Gil Blas, as for Franklin, whatever else honesty may be, it is at all events the best policy. His ambition "to get on," to succeed, is not the ambition of a Julien Sorel. He is not ready and willing to succeed at any price. He would not say cynically with MarieCaroline of Naples: "je vois trop que la force seule compte et que la bonne foi ne sert qu'à être dupe." (Letter to the Marquis de Gallo, July 2, 1800.) In the case of Gil Blas, the habit of reflection has engendered a conscience, As he grows older in experience, the practical promptings of that conscience tend to arrest many an impulse to indulge his petty vices and to reinforce the virtues which he is prudent enough to regard as useful. His efforts to better his lot, while they bring to the fore his harmless vanity, and often in