deed a certain less agreeable snobbishness, are after all to his credit. He is the first to laugh at his own mistakes, as he is the first to learn the lesson of his blunders. Here is a characteristic utterance of his:

I let myself go with the current for three weeks. I gave myself up to every form of voluptuous pleasure. But I will say at the same time that in the midst of it all a sense of remorse often mingled bitterness with my delight. Debauch did not stifle this remorse; my remorse increased, on the contrary, in proportion as I became more and more of a debauchee; and, as a result of my fortunately honest nature, the disorder of the theatrical life began to strike me with horror. Ah, wretch that you are, I said to myself, is it thus that you are fulfilling the expectations of your family? Is it impossible, merely because you are a servant, to be an honest man? Do you really find it worth while to live with such a vicious crew? Envy, anger and avarice dominate some of them; modesty is unknown to others.

Some have given themselves up to intemperance and idleness, while in others pride has become insolence. Enough of this! I will dwell no longer with the seven deadly sins.

From all that we know of Lesage himself, as well as from a comparison of "Gil Blas" with the author's other works, it seems legitimate to conclude that the good humor of his most famous hero is merely the expression of his own philosophic gaiety, at all events of his own disabused placidity, his bourgeois moderation and practical sense, his bias toward taking things easily. Life, when viewed at the angle adopted by Lesage, is an endless series of comic situations of a highly diverting and edifying character. Many of its conventions, which are nurtured on hypocrisy and snobbery, form a constant object of his good-humored raillery, just as they form the subject-matter of the comic verve of his great master, Molière. Both have the most

The most comic incidents of the tale are the series of rebuffs experienced by Lesage's naive hero before he finally reaches the point where discretion becomes a second nature. With what touching and respectful candor does Gil Blas fall a prey to the pretensions and foibles of the great! Note the art with which Lesage, by juxtaposing his hero with, for instance, an Archbishop of Granada, shows the vain prelate so enamored of his own productions as to suffer no honest criticism from even the most disinterested of his acolytes. First cajoled by flattery, then infuriated by the naive frankness of Gil Blas, whose opinion he had solicited, he shows the rash youth the door; and Gil Blas returns once again to his life of adventure. It is his rich fund of good sense that saves him here as throughout his career, and that keeps his judgment sane and his heart true amid all the eccentricities and affectations and

passing passions, and even the tempta

tions, which surround and beset him during his checkered years. This jolly easy-going boon companion is a long time learning to be canny, but he is never really a fool. He comes out ultimately the poorer for the loss of a good many illusions, but profoundly convinced that straightforwardness in human relations is as desirable a good as simplicity in art.

Watch him with his friend Fabrice, turned writer à la mode, after having been the astute lackey who early in life defined with such cold-blooded cynicism the ideals of a servant:

le métier de laquais est impossible, je l'avoue, pour un imbécile; mais il a des charmes pour un garçon d'esprit. Un génie supérieur qui se met en condition ne fait pas son service matériellement comme un nigaud. Il entre dans une maison pour commander plutôt que

pour servir. Il commence par étudier son maître, il se prête à ses défauts, gagne sa confiance et le mène ensuite par le nez.

Fabrice, seized by "la rage d'écrire," as Gil Blas calls it, and convinced that he has in him the stuff of a great writer, ignores the sage advice of his employer who has warned him that poetry is not all beer and skittles, and comes up to Madrid, the centre of "les beaux esprits," "in order to form his taste." He falls under the influence of one of the leaders in a log-rolling literary set, and so adroitly imitates the fashion of the hour that he is regarded as one of the cleverest writers of the younger generation. He and Gil Blas meet, after many years, over a bottle of wine; and Fabrice reads to his friend a sonnet which Gil Blas finds absurdly obscure. "A poet capable of producing such rubbish as that," he says, "can deceive only his time;" and he adds, "your sonnet is merely pompous nonsense." The tortured, involved, affected style disgusts Gil Blas as such a style always disgusted Lesage, whose one ambition was to be an "écrivain naturel qui parle comme le commun des hommes," and who detested "le langage précieux" which the great ladies and certain wits of his time took to be the mark of genius and a password for immortality. Fabrice becomes angry. "Tu n'es qu'une bête avec ton style naturel," he exclaims; and he maliciously reminds Gil Blas of what befell him with the Archbishop of Granada. The allusion makes the two old friends laugh, and they finish the evening over a third bottle.

Yes, Gil Blas, who is a kind of joyous jack-of-all-trades, capable, as Fabrice on another occasion puts it, of fulfilling all kinds of employment, since he possesses "l'outil universel," is interesting and sympathetic quite as much because of his sound sense and ready wit as because of his amusing adven

tures. But this good sense and this wit, it should be remembered, are the fruits of his experience. Gil Blas's character is slowly formed by life under the reader's eye. Successively the dupe of the habits and the manners, the prejudices and the ideals of each social condition which he traverses in his advance towards the stable equilibrium of middle age, he is too intelligent ever to remain dazzled by his surroundings for more than a brief period. You constantly hear him, after each fresh round with Fate, saying in his natural French way: "Ca n'est pas ça; there must be something better than that in store for me!" Even the seduction of life at Court ceases eventually to charm him; and one of his most poignant regrets is the fact that he had forgotten under that corrupting influence his father and mother and the old canon, his uncle. He does his best later on to make amends for this neglect. On his way to his country place at Lirais he is suddenly filled with remorse, and he turns aside towards Oviedo, where his parents live. His own dream now is to watch over their last years; and he looks forward, on arriving home, to inscribing in gold letters on the door of his father's house the Latin verses:

Alas! it is almost too late, for he arrives just in time to bury his father. He had previously entered the country inn, where he had been recognized by the inn-keeper with lively joy. "By Saint Anthony of Padua," his host had exclaimed, "here is the son of the good Blas de Santillane"; and his wife had chimed in with, "Why, yes, so it is. Oh, I recognize him. He is hardly changed. It's that wide-awake little Gil Blas who had more intelligence than inches. I can still see him drop

ping in here for a bottle of wine for his uncle's supper." Gil Blas has changed, nevertheless. Fabrice is too keen not to perceive it some time afterwards when Gil Blas visits him at the hospital. Fabrice remarks upon his modest bearing and observes: "You haven't the vain and insolent air that prosperity is wont to give." Gil Blas explains the reason why: "Les disgraces ont purifié ma vertu; et j'ai appris à l'école de l'adversité à jouir des richesses sans m'en laisser posséder." He is now and then to be a backslider still, but we know that he has learned the essential lesson of life. Really, as the Italians say, "Il tempo è galantuomo."

The rapidity of the narrative enhances the effect of optimism which is so inspiriting throughout the whole book. The transitions from the episodes of bad luck to those of good fortune take place, as Smollett has already pointed out, so suddenly that the reader positively has no time to pity Gil Blas. He is speedily inspired with a firm confidence in Lesage's ingenuity, which somehow manages to extricate his hero from every possible embarrassment. Lesage's point of view, as an observer of life, is thus quickly revealed to be a lively sense of life's chronic succession of ups and downs, and of the merely relative importance of its plights. When Gil Blas loses his place with Count Galiano, he remarks:

I began to lose courage when I found myself back again in so miserable a case. I had grown accustomed to the conveniences of existence, and I could no longer, as before, regard indigence with cynicism. Yet I will confess I was wrong to indulge in sadness after having so many times discovered that no sooner had Fortune upset me than it put me on my feet again.

Lesage accepts the stoical ideal of patience in adversity, but he does not

accept it in the stoical way. His philosophy is the Christian belief in a Providence upon whom sane mortals may serenely rely. Providence, he knows, can be counted upon to hold the balance true on that Day of Judgment, when all human things will be set right, and when there will be a startling reversal of human verdicts. Convinced, like Bishop Butler, that things will be as they will be, his experience of life has taught him that the best philosophy is to bide one's time, all one's antennæ out. For Lesage the logical result of having been frequently a fool is to cease being a dupe.

It would be possible and amusing to draw a parallel in this connection between the philosophy of Lesage and that of an even more successful French playwright of the present day, M. Alfred Capus-who has not yet, however, written a "Gil Blas"-and to contrast the manner of the two with that of Beyle in his characterization of Julien Sorel. Gil Blas is too often, if you like, a genial rascal, as are so many of M. Capus's heroes, but he is never an odiously cynical one like his servant Scipion, and like Julien. While Lesage could say with Philinte, discreetly blaming the vices of mankind:

created in Julien Sorel an unscrupulous professor of energy whom he would appear to have regarded as an excellent model. Lesage, on the other hand, must be looked upon as a moralist; a moralist indulgent, no doubt -such indulgence was the finest flower of his inexhaustible knowledge of lifeyet a moralist in the same sense in which Shakespeare and Molière are moralists. Moreover, Lesage has no cynical bias forcing him to confine the subject-matter of his novel to such naturalistic notations as were the stockin-trade of the Goncourts and, to a large extent, of Zola.

He had notably no such bias, either "cynical" or "moral," as has wittingly altered the reports of so many British observers of life, who have regarded the pursuit of literature as a mission, to be accepted with a high and strennous purpose, for the improvement of their fellows. Thus, even a Thackeray wrote first and foremost for edification. In a recently published letter to his friend Robert Hall, Thackeray refers as follows to "Vanity Fair":

I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the storywe ought all to be with our own and all other stories. Good God! don't I see (in that maybe cracked and warped looking-glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses, wickednesses, lusts, follies, shortcomings? in company, let us hope, with better qualities about which we will pretermit discourse. We must lift up our voices about these and howl to a congregation of fools: so much, at least, has been my endeavor. (The Times, July 17, 1911).

The idea of "howling to a congregation of fools" would have struck Lesage as a counsel of impertinent ill-breeding, or, at all events, as a grotesque attitude for a self-respecting novelist. course, Thackeray was in the tradition of a literature which counts among its chief masterpieces the "Pilgrim's Prog

Of

ress"; but if the Puritan point of view is good sociology and good Tolstoism, it is not necessarily for that reason good art; and it would even seem to make "good art" a more difficult achievement. In the great book just mentioned there is no laugh of Tom Jones to clear the air. Thackeray would have seemed, indeed, in "Vanity Fair" to have been more of an artist than his pamphleteering preoccupations appeared likely to allow him to become. He himself states his object in that book to have been to indicate in cheerful terms that we are for the most part an abominably foolish and selfish people. Incorrigible misanthropist, he sets out to draw up a savage indictment of the society of his time. He is cheerful, as cheerful as he knows how to be; but, as he has resolved to give no one in his book a chance, his cheerfulness fails to produce all its intended effect. Finally, one and all, even Amelia, are branded because foredoomed. But what is the result? Gibbeted for an example, they inspire more pity than horror; and not only does all our sympathy go out to them against the despotic heartlessness of the author, who so unfairly nailed them to the cross, but we fail even to draw the whole of the useful general moral which Thackeray holds to be essential. Thus Thackeray upsets even his own ends; anxious, by the confessed clarion-toned morality of his appeal, to produce the effect aimed at by a prophet in Israel, he nevertheless inspires in his reader a quick and sane recoil before the arbi

trary injustice, or, at all events, the incredibility of the author's misanthropy. In literary art, in fact, the only way to convey the illusion of reality is to tell the average truth about the average man.

Lesage, like the Tolstoi of the good period, had the tact and good sense to perceive this. He does not make the unscientific and inartistic blunder of

humiliating his heroes. Like a Balzac or a Tolstoi or a Henry James, he gives them their full value, takes them for all they are worth. The pretension that naturalism, because superficially true to a certain aspect of life, is realism in the complete sense of the word, is a view which Lesage in "Gil Blas" triumphantly repudiates; and he differs from many playwrights of contemporary France, who appear to be so enamored of caddishness as to regard its manifestations as pre-eminently worthy of presentation in the novel or on the stage. One of the ablest of Lesage's commentators has called him the Homer of naturalism; no neater phrase could be found to define his importance and his manner.

Nor is it the fault of Lesage if his immediate influence upon the literature of his time was perhaps not wholly what he would himself have wished it to be. It is a commonplace to note that Lesage helped to prepare in France that eighteenth century with which he was in so many respects out of sympathy. There was a whole side of Lesage that was out of touch with the modern world surrounding him. M. Faguet seems to me absolutely right as to this point. The spirit, the attitude of Lesage are seventeenth-century— for, after all, the seventeenth century was realist while so eminently moralist; he believes in the superiority of the clear old form of expression; he abominates an affected style; he prefers natural utterance that everybody can understand to individual experiments in ingenious phraseology. Moreover, while not at all the conscious moralist, he is a moralist all the same; he has a certain generalizing habit, the liking for large vistas, harmonious inclusive ranges of thought; his thought-scapes have the perfection and the proportions of a garden by Le Nôtre. But it is nevertheless certain that the immense success of Lesage as a realist, the fact

that he made realism look so easy, constituted a terrible incentive to imitation; and that, as a matter of fact, his example was just one of those which no writer could afford to follow who had not his marvellous good sense and his mental and moral poise. Without such moral balance and such good sense the would-be realist is almost certain to become addicted to the grosser forms of naturalism, to exercise, that is, his faculty of clear vision on special salient and picturesque, even salacious and perverse cases, rather than upon the types of the average world with which average men are familiar. Thus there can be no doubt that Lesage's unconcern for positive edification, his indifference to matters of conscience, was a trait of the eighteenth century, and a trait for which he may to a certain extent be held responsible. It was inevitable that he should find imitators, and that, in this sense, he may be said to open the way to a Crébillon fils and a Laclos, even to a Louvet, for whom he would have refused to be responsible, and to prepare an eighteenth century with which there is every reason to suppose he would have become utterly out of sympathy, not merely as a man, but as an artist in letters.

It remains to consider "Gil Blas" as a work of literary art. In style it is one of the most perfect examples of narrative prose in the world, comparable for limpidity, ease, and precision, with that of Cervantes in "Don Quixote." With regard to its composition, it is noticeable that the novel begins at the same pitch of calm lucidity which is to characterize it to the end. The reader feels that the promise of the author in his "Declaration," "I have merely undertaken to represent life as it is," is likely to be kept. Lesage speaks with authority. The artists who inspire confidence with their very first stroke are not numerous. They belong to the aristocracy of the mas