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

>pretensions and foibles of the great! Note the art with which

Lesage, juxtaposing his hero with, for instance, an Archbishop of

Granada, shows the vain prelate so enamoured 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 � la mode, after

having been the astute lackey who early in life defined with such

cold-blooded cynicism the ideals of a servant:

 

“le m�tier de laquais est impossible, je l’avoue, pour un

imbecile; mais il a des charmes pour un gar�on d’esprit. Un g�nie

sup�rieur qui se met en condition ne fait pas son service

mat�riellement comme un nigaud. Il entre dans une maison

pour commander plut�t que pour servir. Il commence par �tudier

son ma�tre, il se pr�te � ses d�fauts, gagne sa confiance et le

m�ne ensuite par le nez.”

 

Fabrice, seized by “la rage d’�crire,” 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 “�crivain naturel qui

parle comme le commun des hommes,” and who detested “le langage

pr�cieux” 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 b�te 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 adventures. 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: “�a n’est pas �a; there must be some

thing 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 Lirias 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:

 

“Inveni portum. Spes et Fortuna, valete!

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 recognised 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 recognise him. He is hardly changed.

It’s that wide-awake little Gil Blas who had more intelligence

than inches. I can still see him dropping 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 purifi� ma virtu; et j’ai appris a

l’�cole de l’adversit� � jouir des richesses sans m’en laisser

poss�der.” 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 � galantuomo.”

 

III

 

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 me, all one’s antennae out

For Lesage the logical result of having been frequently a fool is

to cease being 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

characterisation 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 �me � soufirir ce qu’ils font …

Oui, je vois ces d�fauts dont votre �me murmure

Comme vices unis � l’humaine nature,

Et mon esprit enfin n’est pas plus offens�

De voir un homme fourbe, injuste, int�ress�,

Que de voir des vautours affam�s 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 Moli�re are moralists. Moreover, Lesage has no

cynical Blas 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 strenuous 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 story — we 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 endeavour.”

(The Times, July 17, 1911.)

 

The idea of “howling to a congregation of fools” would have

struck Lesage as a counsel of impertinent illbreeding, 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 Progress; 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