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: Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont, J'accoutume mon âme à souffrir ce qu'ils font Oui, je vois ces défauts dont votre âme murmure Comme vices unis à l'humaine nature, Et mon esprit enfin n'est pas plus offensé De voir un homme fourbe, injuste, intéressé, Que de voir des vautours affamés de carnage, Des singes malfaisants et des loups pleins de rage, Beyle did not confine himself to "accustoming his soul to suffer" the enormities that men commit, but positively 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 life yet 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. Of course, Thackeray was in the tradition of a literature which counts among its chief masterpieces the "Pilgrim's Prog 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 arbitrary 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-centuryfor, 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 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 quote the following passage from a private letter of M. Paul Arbelet, the editor of Stendhal's "Journal d'Italie": Votre hypothèse me paraît très séduisante. Il y a sans aucume doute quelque parenté intellectuelle entre Lesage et Stendhal, tous deux curieux d'observation morale, tous deux juges sans illusions des faiblesses humaines, mais point misanthropes, car ils s'indignent peu des vices ou des ridicules, qui les amusent plutôt ou les intéressent. D'ailleurs l'un et l'autre manquent d'imagination et de poésie. Je comprends donc très bien que vous ayez eu l'idée d'une influence de Lesage sur Stendhal. Furthermore, while Lesage is all this, The Quarterly Review. the fountain-head of a great literary current, he is at the same time, as a moralist, in the sanest Latin and French tradition, that which is marked, in successive epochs, by the serene temper of a Horace, by the gay science, the pantagruelism of a Rabelais, by the irony of a Beaumarchais, who “se hâtade rire de tout, de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer,' and finally by the tranquil mansuetude of a Renan: observers, one and all, who, after having told the towers of all the citadels of science, became amusedly aware that the only really absolute truth in the world is that all things are relative. Wm. Morton Fullerton. EAST AND WEST: A STUDY OF DIFFERENCES. Those who have spent an April-as one April at least should be spentwhere the olive-clad hills of Corfu rise in silver-green foliage from a sea of silver-blue, have close at hand a striking illustration of the differences that divide the East from the West. Across the narrow straits that lie between them and the mainland towers the mountain chain of Albania, rising into snow-fields above the sparkling sealine a brilliant drop-scene, as it were, through which one passes from the manners of Europe to those of Asia. In an hour or two one may cross into Turkish territory and wonder at the causes which hold fast-bound in poverty and squalor places which in reason should be comfortable and progressive. The contrast is all the more striking since modern Greece stands by no means in the van of European progress. The Corfiotes can pass their time easily in idleness: they are exceedingly poor: they are very superstitious, and they take little thought for the drainage of their streets. Yet amongst them one is in Europe. There are roads, schools, and hospitals. Trade is fostered by an efficient harbor service. Western standards of comfort and display are accepted as desirable. The meanest householder endeavors to present himself, his children, and his house in decency to the world; and of evenings, emerging from poor little houses, and stepping delicately over the abominations of the street drains, you may see fashionably dressed young women set out for their stroll along the esplanade. Across the straits one is in a different atmosphere. Valona, possessing the finest harbor on the southern Adriatic, Durazzo (Dyrrhachium), with its distinguished memories of classical days, are but mean little Oriental bazaars, their shops untidy, open-fronted, tin-roofed shanties, their streets impossible for wheeled traffic, their wharves grass-grown, and well-nigh deserted. They are as Athens was before she was set free from Oriental fetters. Everywhere there is apparent the disregard of comfort and |