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