The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane by Alain René le Sage (good books to read in english .TXT) 📕

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

enamoured 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 generalising 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

N�tre. 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 Cr�billon 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.

IV

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 characterise 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 masters. 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-humoured 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.

It is one of the results of this long 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 enamoured 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 Flor�al, an xiii, 1805,” Beyle notes his

intention to cure himself of romanticism, and to learn to judge

men as they are, by re-reading 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

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 hypoth�se me parait tr�s s�duisante. Il y a sans aucun

doute quelque parent� 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

plut�t ou les int�ressent. D’ailleurs l’un et l’autre manquent

d’imagination et de po�sie. Je comprends donc tr�s bien que vous

ayez eu l’id�e d’une influence de Lesage sur Stendhal.”

Furthermore, while Lesage is all this, 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 h�ta de rire de tout, de peur d’�tre oblig�

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.

HISTORY OF GIL BLAS OF SANTILLANE.

BOOK THE FIRST.

CH. I. — The birth and education of Gil Blas.

MY father, Blas of Santillane, after having borne arms for a long

time in the Spanish service, retired to his native place. There

he married a chambermaid who was not exactly in her teens, and I

made my debut on this stage ten months after marriage. They

afterwards went to live at Oviedo, where my mother got into

service, and my father obtained a situation equally adapted to

his capacities as a squire. As their wages were their fortune, I

might have got my education as I could, had it not been for an

uncle of mine in the town, a canon, by name Gil Perez. He was my

mother’s eldest brother, and my godfather. Figure to yourself a

little fellow, three feet and a half high, as fat as you can

conceive, with a head sunk deep between his shoulders, and you

have my uncle to the life. For the rest of his qualities, he was

an ecclesiastic, and of course thought of nothing but good

living, I mean in the flesh as well as in the spirit, with the

means of which good living his stall, no lean one, provided him.

He took me home to his own house from my infancy, and ran the

risk of my bringing up. I struck him as so brisk a lad, that he

resolved to cultivate my talents. He bought me a primer, and

undertook my tuition as far as reading went: which was not amiss

for himself as well as for me; since by teaching me my letters he