ters. What do such certainty and distinction imply? They mean that the product is the fruit of a mature intelligence; that the artist, be he sculptor, writer, or painter, has not undertaken to express until his mind is, as we say, thoroughly made up as to the nature of its content, nor until he is serenely master of the means at his disposal; that, in a word, he knows his business. In the case of Lesage it is peculiarly significant that, when he published the first part of "Gil Blas" in 1715, he was already forty-seven years of age; that the second part did not appear until 1724, nine years later; and that he was already an old gentleman with a family of boys, one of whom had entered the Church, when he ended his lifework, by the publication of the third part, in 1735. "Gil Blas," in short, is the product of the maturity of one of the keenest observers that ever looked out upon the spectacle of things. The broad good-humored gaiety of the earlier book, which vibrates with a picaresque lilt, is shaded gradually down, in the second volume, into a finer, serener, more intellectual irony. This change betrays the natural evolution in the author's interests and curiosities during the period reaching from his forty-seventh to his sixty-seventh year. The gaiety of the six books of the first part is to be contrasted with the soberer, more reflective spirit of the tale as it proceeds. We seem to be suiting our pace to the increasingly graver temper of a man whose knowledge of life has become richer, his insight keener, his heart more tolerant and generous. With the steady elimination of the picaresque element the novel becomes more and more an inclusive criticism of life. The author seems to be brooding over his pages with a tenderer care, as if he were more and more conscious of the significance, the magnificence even, of his task. gestation that "Gil Blas" has become a book of world-wide popularity. In the history of letters it has been an inexhaustible source of energy. It inspired the realistic novel. From Smollett and Marivaux to Dickens and Zola, and even to an Anatole France and to a Pio Baroja, Lesage has been the avowed or unavowed model of those writers who have been passionately enamored of life, and irrepressibly compelled to express it. The influence of Lesage on the author, for instance, of "Le Rouge et le Noir" and of "La Chartreuse de Parme"-perhaps particularly on the Stendhal of the "Chartreuse de Parme"-seems incontestable. In August 1804, Beyle, writing to his sister Pauline, recommends her to read “Gil Blas" in order to learn to know the world, and cites the famous anecdote of the Archbishop of Granada's sermons. In April 1805, he promises to bring her the book. In another undated letter to his sister, Beyle writes: "the most accurate picture of human nature as it is, in the France of the eighteenth century, is still the book of Lesage, 'Gil Blas,' Meditate well, this excellent work." And finally, in his Journal, under the date of "10 Floréal, an xiii, 1805," Beyle notes his intention to cure himself of romanticism, and to learn to judge men as they are, by rereading a certain number of books, among which he mentions Beaumarchais, the tales and "La Pucelle" of Voltaire, Chamfort, and "Gil Blas.” That is to say, at the most impressionable period of his intellectual life Beyle read and re-read "Gil Blas"; a fact which a discerning critic might easily guess, as to the truth of which, indeed, such a critic would feel an absolute conviction, and which the documents cited appear to leave beyond a doubt. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to pretend that but for “Gil Blas," Beyle would not have been It is one of the results of this long Stendhal; but I may be permitted to 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 vinaig rettes. 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 sense of values and an unimpeachable intellectual honesty. deed a certain less agreeable snobbish- refreshing ness, 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 temptations, 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 Un charmes pour un garçon d'esprit. 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 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: Sat me lusistis; ludite nunc alios! 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 |