The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, Alain René le Sage [most read books .txt] 📗

lips of an Alem�n or even a Sorel. Lesage

found ready to his hand one of the most convenient literary forms

tint the novel ever assumed for the achievement of the end he had

in view. That end was to hold a mirror up to Nature, and to the

whole of Nature.

 

This ambitious project has haunted most observers who have

essayed the novel form. It was obviously the end and aim of the

author of Anna Karenina. But such is the complexity of human

relations, such the variety of the kinds of human plights, such

the swift passage of events, such are the endless differences and

the fleeting character of the situations presented to the

artistic consciousness at any moment of time, that only the most

self-confident craftsman would be tempted, in his sane mind, to

undertake their complete representation. The mirror in which a

writer would seek to converge and to foreshorten the vast

spectacle of things must needs be an all-but unmanageable

revolving mirror of gigantic dimensions, unless some way he found

of dispensing with such 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 odours. But, while Lesage came after Sorel and

Alem�n, and a score of other same 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, Bruneti�re, have dwelt in detail on this

fact. What need had Lesage of a Guzm�n 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 t�te.” 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. [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 had Corneille, yet the Cid remains

the Cid.]

 

II

 

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 Comedie Humaine : “J’aurai port� une

soci�t� toute enti�re dans ma t�te.” Gil Blas is a picture,

singularly vivid and comprehensive, of the society of 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 encyclopadia 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 ma�tres, the authors and the actors, the

ministers and the high officials, the servants and the

adventurers, the priests, and the pr�cieuses peering from their

vinaigrettes. From the brigand cave that sheltered the jail-bird

to the drawing-room 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. In this connexion it

is pertinent to quote the verdict of Nodier in the “Notice”

prefixed to the famous and now rare edition of Gil Blas

containing the woodcuts of Jean Gigoux (Paris 1835) : “Comme il

avait embrass� tout ce qui appartient � l’homme dans sa

composition, il osa se prescrire d’embrasser toute la langue dans

son travail.” In other words, the grammarian and the

lexicographer have in Gil Blas what Nodier is justified in

calling “un monument de la langue.”

 

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 humour 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 Marie-Caroline of Naples :“je vois trop que la force seule compte et

que la bonne foi ne sert qu’a �tre 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 indeed 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 humour 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-humoured raillery, just as they form the subject-matter of the

comic verve of his great master, Moli�re. Both have the most

refreshing sense of values and an unimpeachable intellectual

honesty.

 

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 second nature. With what touching

and respectful candour does Gil Blas fall a prey to the