The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, Alain René le Sage [most read books .txt] 📗
- Author: Alain René le Sage
- Performer: -
Book online «The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, Alain René le Sage [most read books .txt] 📗». Author Alain René le Sage
THE ADVENTURES OF GIL BLAS OF SANTILLANE
BY ALAIN-RENE LESAGE
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY TOBIAS SMOLLETT
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE AND ACKNOWLEGDEMENTS
The text of this version is taken from
The Adventures of Gil Blas by A.R. LeSage. Translated from the
French by Tobias Smollett with an introduction by William Morton
Fullerton. George Routledge & Sons. 1913
We wish to acknowledge the courtesy and helpfulness of Ms. Sally
Sweet of ITPS in clearing copyright for this publication.
THE AUTHOR’S DECLARATION.
THERE are some people in the world so mischievous as not to read
a work without applying the vicious or ridiculous characters it
may happen to contain to eminent or popular individuals. I
protest publicly against the pretended discovery of any such
likenesses. My purpose was to represent human life historically
as it exists: God forbid I should holdmyself out as a portrait-painter.
Let not the reader then take to himself public property; for if he
does, he may chance to throw an unlucky light on his own character:
as Phaedrus expresses it, Stulte nudabit animi conscientiam.
Certain physicians of Castille, as well as of France, are
sometimes a little too fond of trying the bleeding and lowering
system on their patients. Vices, their patrons, and their dupes,
are of every day’s occurrence, To be sure, I have not always
adopted Spanish manners with scrupulous exactness; and in the
instance of the players at Madrid, those who know their
disorderly modes of living may reproach me with softening down
their coarser traits: but this I have been induced to do from a
sense of delicacy, and in conformity with the manners of my own
country.
GIL BLAS TO THE READER.
READER! hark you, my friend! Do not begin the story of my life
till I have told you a short tale.
Two students travelled together from Penafiel to Salamanca.
Finding themselves tired and thirsty, they stopped by the side of
a spring on the road. While they were resting there, after having
quenched their thirst, by chance they espied on a stone near
them, even with the ground, part of an inscription, in some
degree effaced by time, and by the tread of flocks in the habit
of watering at that spring. Having washed the stone, they were
able to trace these words in the dialect of Castille; Aqui esta
encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcias. “Here lies
interred the soul of the licentiate Peter Garcias.”
Hey-day! roars out the younger, a lively, heedless fellow, who
could not get on with his deciphering for laughter: This is a
good joke indeed: “Here lies interred the soul.” … . A soul
interred! … . I should like to know the whimsical author of
this ludicrous epitaph. With this sneer he got up to go away. His
companion, who had more sense, said within himself: Underneath
this stone lies some mystery; I will stay, and see the end of it.
Accordingly, he let his comrade depart, and without loss of time
began digging round about the stone with his knife till he got it
up. Under it he found a purse of leather, containing an hundred
ducats with a card on which was written these words in Latin:
“Whoever thou art who hast wit enough to discover the meaning of
the inscription, I appoint thee my heir, in the hope thou wilt
make a better use of my fortune than I have done!” The student,
out of his wits at the discovery, replaced the stone in its
former position, and set out again on the Salamanca road with the
soul of the licentiate in his pocket.
Now, my good friend and reader, no matter who you are, you must
be like one or the other of these two students. If you cast your
eye over my adventures without fixing it on the moral concealed
under them, you will derive very little benefit from the perusal:
but if you read with attention you will find that mixture of the
useful with the agreeable, so successfully prescribed by Horace.
INTRODUCTION by WM. MORTON FULLERTON.
WALTER SCOTT, who craved the beatitude — the word is his own —
that would attend the perusal of another book as entrancing as
Gil Blas, was on the side of the untutored public which knows
nothing of technical classifications or of M. Bruneti�re’s theory
of the “evolution des genres.” Lesage’s great book, though
scarcely answering to the exact technical definition of a
picaresque novel — the biography of a picaro or rogue —
belongs, nevertheless, by its external form, to the picaresque
type of fiction; and Scott would certainly 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 was
conspicuously an “honn�te 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.
I
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 “Si�cle 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. [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.] Joubert, whose delicacy
was a hothouse fruit grown in the thin subsoil and the
devitalised 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 caf� 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 in his
remarkable General Introduction to his edition of Celestine in
the Picaresque Section of the “Library of Early Novelists,” to
which this volume belongs, 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 1magination of an idealist.
“It is just because Lesage ignores the idealistic side 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 agr�ment, 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’�cole 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 nowadays 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 “Declaration” to
the reader says expressly: “My sole aim has been to represent
life as it is” : “Je ne me suis propos� que de repr�senter 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 Alem�n’s famous
novel, Guzm�n 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 Alem�n 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
pi�ces.” Francion, less picaresque than the hero of Alem�n, 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
Comments (0)