The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane - Alain René le Sage (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

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