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