THE ROGUE NOVEL
Democracy in literature.
Few characters in literature have had so large or so honourable a progeny as the gutter-snipe. If the Kings' daughters of High Romance, charming, delicate creatures, had only wedded with Kings' sons, as delicately fashioned as themselves, we should never have known the sterling dynasty of the Tom Joneses and the Humphry Clinkers, with their honest hearts and coarse hides warranted to wear. All those Kings of men, whose thrones were beer-barrels, whose sceptres, oaken cudgels, whose perennial counsellor was Jollity, whose enemy, Introspection, would never have come to their own, and indeed would never have been born, if it had not been for the sixteenth century entry of the rascal into the Palace gardens, for the escapades of such shaggy-headed, smutfaced, barefooted urchins as Lazarillo de Tormes.
To such rogues as he must be attributed much of our present humanity; for until we could laugh at those of low estate, we held them of little account. There is small mention made of serving-men in the Morte Darthur or the Mabinogion, and when, in the Heptameron of Margaret of Navarre, we hear of the drowning of a number of them in trying to render easy the passage of their masters through the floods, the comment is extremely short: 'One must not despair for the loss of servants, for they are easy to replace.' On a similar occasion 'all the company were filled with a joy inestimable, praising the Creator, who, contenting himself with serving-men, had saved the masters and mistresses,' an index alike to the ferocity they still attributed to God and the rather exclusive humanity of themselves. Do you not think with sudden awe of the revolution to come? Do you not hear a long way off the trampling of a million serving-men, prepared to satisfy God with other lives? It is a fine contrast to turn from these queenly sentences to this little book, the autobiography of a beggar, who thinks himself sufficiently important to set down the whole truth about his birth, lest people should make any mistake. 'My father, God be kind to him, had for fifteen years a mill on the river of Tormes.... I was scarcely eight when he was accused of having, with evil intent, made leakage in his check sacks.... Letting himself be surprised, he confessed all, and suffered patiently the chastisement of justice, which makes me hope that he is, according to the Gospel, of the number of those happy in the Glory of God.' No very reputable parentage this, in a day when it was the fashion to derive heroes from Charlemagne or Amadis.
Lazarillo de Tormes.
It is a short step from the ironic to the sincere. The author of the book is laughing at his hero, and makes a huge joke of his pretensions. But to recognise, even in jest, that a vagabond rogue could have pretensions, or indeed any personal character at all beyond that of a tool in the hand of whoever was kind enough to use him, was to look upon him with a humaner eye and, presently, to recognise him in earnest as a fellow creature. It seems to me significant that the first rogues in our literature should come from Spain, a country that has never quite forgotten its Moorish occupation. In the Spanish student, who, so tradition says, wrote Lazarillo while in the University of Salamanca, there must have been something of the spirit of the race that lets the hunchback tell his story to the Caliph, and is glad when the son of the barber marries the daughter of the Grand Vizier. For, joke as it is, the book is the story of a beggar, told as a peculiarly fearless and brazen beggar would tell it, without suggesting or demanding either condescension or pity.
The morality of the underworld.
There is genius in the little book. Its author perhaps did better than he meant, for he brings on every page the moral atmosphere of the underworld, the old folk-morality, the same in sixteenth-century Spain as in the oldest tales of sagacity and cunning. Lazarillo's shameless mother apprentices him to a blind beggar who promises to treat him like a son and begins his education at once. He takes the boy to a big stone on the outskirts of the town, and bids him listen to the noise within it. The boy puts his head close to the stone to hear the better, and the old rascal gives him a thundering blow, which, the stone being an admirable anvil, nearly cracks his skull. That is his first lesson ... never to be unsuspicious ... and it is as characteristic of the others as of Reynard the Fox.
There never was so excellent a beggar as Lazarillo's master; no trick of the trade was unknown to him. As a fortune-teller, he could prophesy what his victims wished to hear. As a doctor he had his remedies for toothache, and for fainting-fits; not an illness could be mentioned but he had a physic ready to his hands. Then too, 'he knew by heart more prayers than all the blind men of Spain. He recited them very distinctly, in a low tone, grave and clear, calling the attention of the whole church; he accompanied them with a posture humble and devout, without gesticulations or grimaces of mouth, after the manner of those blind men who have not been properly brought up.' Indeed his only fault was avarice. 'He was not content with making me die of hunger,' says his pupil; 'he was doing the same himself.'
Under such a master Lazarillo's wits sharpen quickly. 'A fool would have been dead a hundred times; but by my subtlety and my good tricks, I always, or mostly (in spite of all his care), succeeded in getting hold of the biggest and best portion.' Lazarillo becomes as astute a rascal as his teacher, and, living fairly and squarely in the conditions of the underworld, his villainy does not damp his spirits, or disturb his peace of nights. I was reminded of him by a young tramp with whom I walked in the north country, a rogue with as merry a heart as he, and a similar well-fitting morality. With me, from whom he knew there was nothing to gain but good fellowship, he was a good fellow, walked with a merry stride, whistled as he went, sang me songs in the Gaelic of his childhood, and told me of the jolly tricks he had played with a monkey he had brought from over sea. We walked like men in the sunshine. But when, beyond a turn in the road, he saw some person coming a little better dressed, why then his face flashed into a winking melancholy, his stride degenerated as if by magic into a slouch, and it was odd if his mean figure and despairing hand did not attract a copper, for which he would call down a blessing. Then, as soon as we were out of sight of his benefactor, he would resume his natural walk and burst again into whistling and merriment. Lazarillo is as frank as he. He recognises his needs (Hunger is not an easy fellow to ignore), and would be much surprised if you denied his right to satisfy them. Nor is he disappointed in you. Every honest man must love a rogue, and you are as consciencelessly glad as himself when Lazarillo, by kneeling before him and sucking the liquor through a straw, diddles the blind man who greedily guards the wine bowl between his ragged knees. You feel that he has but his due when he happens upon a wife and a living and (if you read the continuation of his history[4]) find nothing blameworthy in the fact that he spends his last years in the clothes and reputation of a dead hermit, subsisting on the charity of the religious.
The form of the rogue novel.
I have talked at some length about the contents of this little book in order to illustrate the new material then brought into story-telling. Let me now consider the new form that came with it. Lazarillo de Tormes was a very simple development from the plain anecdote or merry quip of folklore or gossip, which was, as we have seen in the last chapter, one of the popular early forms of narrative. Boccaccio raised the anecdote to a higher level of art by giving it a fuller technique and expanding it into the short story. The inventors of the rogue novels achieved a similar result by stringing a number of anecdotes together about a particular hero, making as it were cycles of anecdotes comparable in their humbler way with the grand cycles of romance. Lazarillo himself is not an elaborate conception, but simply a fit rogue to play the main part in a score or so of roguish exploits, idly following one another as they occurred to the mind of the narrator. His life is a jest-book turned into a biography, a collection of anecdotes metamorphosed into a novel.
Its satirical material.
The new form gave story-telling a wider scope. In writing a collection of anecdotes it was difficult to realise the hero who was no more than a name that happened to be common to them all. It was impossible to make much of the minor characters who walk on or off the tiny stage of each adventure. But in stringing them along a biography, in producing instead of a number of embroidered exploits a single embroidered life, there need be no limit to the choice and elaboration of the embroidery. Though the hero was no more than a quality, a puppet guaranteed to jump on the pull of a string, the setting of his life turned easily into a satirical picture of contemporary existence, and satire became eventually one of the principal aims with which such novels were written.
The low estate of the rogue novel's hero made satire from his lips not only easy but palatable. In writing the opinions of a rogue you can politely assume that his standpoint is not that of his readers. For that reason they can applaud the rascal's wit playing over other people, or, if it touches them too closely, regard it with compassion as lions might listen to the criticism of jackals. Lazarillo contains plenty of good-humoured, bantering portraits: the seller of forged indulgences, the miserly priest, and particularly the out-at-elbows gentleman who walks abroad each day to lunch with a rich friend, and is unable on his return from his hungry promenade to keep from eyeing, and at last from sharing, the rough bread that his servant has begged or stolen for himself. Lazarillo's merit is that he writes of himself à propos of other people, and never barrenly of himself for his own sake. Smollett in writing Roderick Random is true to his traditions in getting his own back from schoolmasters and the Navy Office. And the arms of Dickens, who reformed the workhouses in telling the story of Oliver Twist, must have had quartered upon them the rampant begging bowl of the little Spanish rogue.
Now the characteristic language of satire is as pointed as the blade of a rapier, and for this we owe some gratitude to these rascally autobiographies whose plainness of style was nearer talk than that of any earlier form of narrative. The prose of the picaresque novel has been in every age remarkably free from the literary tricks most fashionable at the time. When your hero dresses in rags you cannot do better than clothe his opinions in simplicity. The writing of Lazarillo, of Tom Jones, of Captain Singleton, of Lavengro, is clear, virile, not at all ornate, the exact opposite to that of the Pastorals. Such heroes deliver their sentences, like Long Melford, straight from the shoulder, and would consider fine writing as so much aimless trifling in the air.
Picaresque autobiographies.
Mention of Lavengro suggests a paragraph on one of the most curious developments to be noticed in the history of the art. All that we have examined so far have been from truth to fiction; this is a movement from fiction to truth. Stories of the deeds of a man have become romances of the deeds of a hero. A biography has changed as we watched it into a tale of miracle. Here is a quite different phenomenon. An imaginary autobiography that pretends to be real, of a rascally hero, makes it possible for rogues to write real autobiographies that pretend to be imaginary. Lavengro and the Romany Rye are two parts of a rogue novel constructed like the oldest of the kind. They contain a hero somehow put on a different plane from that of respectable society, and the books are made up of the people he meets and the things they say and do to him, or make him do and say. 'Why,' says Borrow, whose attitude towards life is as confident as Lazarillo's, 'there is not a chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated.'
The development of the rogue novel.
But Borrow and other makers of confessions are not of the direct line, in spite of the roguish and adventurous air that clings about them as they rest upon our shelves. Lazarillo had many sincerer and more immediate flatterers—Thomas Nash, for example, whose Jacke Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller, holds in itself, as one of the earliest pieces of realism in English literature, more than enough of interest for an essay. He had also many younger brothers at home, and an enormous progeny, and it has so happened that the influence of the rogue novel on our own fiction was exerted through them, and not through his early imitations in France and England. Cervantes used its form for the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, combining the picaresque spirit with that of the tales of chivalry, produced the first realistic romance. Many lesser writers were content to follow Lazarillo's lead without such independent ingenuity. They brought up their literary children to be heroes after Lazarillo's fashion and were proud to have him as a godfather. In their hands the rogue novel retained its form and gained only a multiplicity of incident, a hundred writers earnestly devising new swindles and more exciting adventures for the hero, whose personality under all their buffetings remained constant to its original characteristics. No nation has shown more fertility in fancy than the Spanish. We owe to Spain half the trap-door excitements, half the eavesdropping discoveries, half the ingenious plots and counter-plots of the theatre. And when we remember that for a hundred and fifty years the rogue novel had been one of the most popular forms of Spanish literature, we need not wonder that Le Sage, in turning over volume after volume of the lives of Spanish rascals, should find that the Spanish language was an Open Sesame to an Ali Baba's cave of opulent invention. Just as a hundred forgotten trouveurs chanted the tales of the Morte Darthur, before Malory made from their songs the epic that we know, so the rogue novel had seeded and repeated itself again and again, before it met its great man who seized the vitality of a hundred bantlings to make a breeched book.
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE
Its culmination in Le Sage.
Just as Malory was not a Frenchman but an Englishman, so Le Sage was not a Spaniard but a Frenchman, and a Frenchman in a very different age from that which produced his models. The
'Stately Spanish galleons
Sailing from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores,
With cargoes of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5]
no longer brought the wealth of the Incas to Cadiz and Barcelona, but had been burnt as firewood in the cabins on the Irish coast. The Elizabethan age had come and gone. Cervantes had been dead a hundred years. Molière had brought comedy to the French stage. Watteau was painting, and Boileau was formulating the eighteenth-century code of letters, when in a little garden summer-house behind a Paris street, Le Sage sat at his desk, dipped through Spanish books, and wrote with a light heart of the people that he knew, disguised in foreign clothes, and moving in places he had never seen. He made his travels by his own fireside, and the contrast between Cervantes' active life and his peaceable Galatea is no greater than that between the adventurous Gil Blas and Le Sage's sedentary industry. His lack of personal experience left him very free in the handling of his material, and made him just the man to recast the old adventures of a century before, to translate them, spilling none of their vitality, to a later time, to fill them out with a more delicate fancy, to finish them with a more fastidious pen, and to build from them a new and delicious French book, Spanish in colouring, but wholly Parisian in appeal.
Gil Blas is a Frenchman in a Spanish cloak, Le Sage, as he imagined himself under the tattered mantle of Lazarillo. His disguise left him doubly licensed for the criticism of contemporary France. He was of low estate, so that he could see things from below, upside down, and comment upon them. His circumstances were Spanish, so that he could observe French things, call them by Spanish names, and laugh at them without being inexcusably impertinent. He had also a very excellent technique. Le Sage had read La Bruyère and La Bruyère's translation of Theophrastus, and was the better able to allow his hero to take the hint from Lazarillo, and use his autobiography as an outlet for his social satire. Everything that Lazarillo had done, Gil Blas did in a larger and more skilful fashion. The book summed up the rogue novels in itself, and in its own right brought their influence to bear on English narrative. Smollett translated it, and it shares with Don Quixote the parentage of the masculine novel.