The Behavior of Aurora de Guzman on her Arrival at Salamanca.
Aurora's Devices to secure Don Lewis Pacheco's Affections.
ALAIN RENÉ LESAGE.
A critic of whom I desire to speak with all respect—the Rector of Lincoln—has said that "mere style cannot confer immortality upon any book apart from its contents." The context from which this remark is taken deals with the Provinciales and Pensées of Pascal, concerning which Mr. Pattison thinks that the former are but an ephemeral pamphlet, the latter are for all time. So startling a judgment makes the reader a little inclined to dogmatize hyperbolically in his turn, and to say that there is nothing perennial but style. This, indeed, would be merely running from one extreme to another; nevertheless, there is more truth in it than in the other exaggeration, for the attitude of men's minds changes singularly, from one time to another, with regard to any "contents;" it changes very little with regard to the expression of those contents. This is, perhaps, nowhere seen more clearly than in the case of very voluminous authors whose works are preserved in unequal remembrance. When such cases are examined, it will generally be found that the reason for the preference which posterity has expressed has been almost entirely due to literary merit. Between the merit of the contents of Defoe's different novels there is not very much to choose; yet no one who speaks with competence will question that the literary art of Robinson Crusoe is, on the whole, far superior to that of Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. So, in the not wholly dissimilar case of our present author, the contents of Estévanille Gonzales and The Bachelor of Salamanca are not much less interesting, if they are less interesting at all, than those of Le Diable Boiteux and Gil Blas, while Guzman d'Alfarache has perhaps a positive advantage over much of the latter. But Lesage was never so well inspired from the literary point of view as in the two works which have been justly deemed his masterpieces, and in this lies the justice of the selection.
The reasons of the inequality of Lesage's work are to be sought in the same cause which, in all probability, accounts for such inequality in all cases. Where men never write below themselves, it will almost invariably be found that their work has either been thrown off in the heyday of youth, or, if spread over a long course of years, has been written for pleasure merely; at any rate, without any immediate pressure of want. Pegasus, as one of the greatest of English writers in our time has put it, must, in the unhappier cases, be too frequently spurred, and will not always answer to the spur. Now the long life of the author of Gil Blas was anything but one of ease. He had few patrons, and was not of a temper to have many. Literature, unfortunately, was stick, crutch and all to him, and he was unlucky in his law affairs, a fact which probably accounts for the continual satire he pours on law and lawyers. Yet, by birth, at any rate, he belonged to the profession. His father, Claude Lesage, was at once Advocate, Notary and Greffier (Registrar) of the Royal Court of the small district of Rhuys, the out-of-the-way peninsula which bounds the Morbihan on its eastern side. Alain René was born on the 8th of May, 1668 (his mother being by name Jeanne Brenugat), at Sarzeau, the chief town of the district, which, it may be well to remind readers, was also the locality of the Abbey of St. Gildas de Rhuys, the very uneasy refuge of Abelard after his calamities. It is not a little characteristic of the peculiar bent of Lesage's genius, that it shows hardly any local colour, though Brittany has, of all French provinces, left most mark on her children as a rule, and though Lesage's birthplace lay in perhaps the most striking part of the Duchy, But Lesage left his native province young; he never, so far as I know, returned to it, and he very probably had unpleasant associations connected therewith. The father's triple office was profitable enough, but he died when his son was young, and the property he left him was dissipated or embezzled by a dishonest guardian, a personage of frequent occurrence in those days, and one whom Lesage smites again and again in his novels. That the boy was at school at Vannes, the neighbouring episcopal city, until 1686, is known; but this is almost all that is known about his youth, and then he disappears for some eight years. It has been supposed that he may have held some small post in the financial department of the province, or that he may have continued his studies at Paris, the latter being by far the more probable hypothesis. Anyhow, in 1692 he was admitted as an advocate at the Bar of Paris. But he apparently got no clients, and when he was six-and-twenty he took to himself a wife, Marie Elisabeth Huyard. She is said to have been remarkably beautiful, and they lived for many years together, it would seem, happily enough; but she had no fortune, she was only a tradesman's daughter, and his marriage can hardly have added to the young lawyer's resources. Falling in with an old schoolfellow, Danchet, who had already made some mark in literature, he was recommended by him to seek the same refuge for the destitute. His coup d'essai, a translation of the letters of Aristænetus, which appeared in 1695 (he had been married in August or September, 1694), has made his biographers and critics rather merry. He certainly might have done better, but it is doubtful whether the oddity of the choice—comparatively worthless as the book is—struck that age as it strikes ours. The indiscriminate reign of the classics, early and late, good and bad, genuine and spurious, was not yet over, and many a young man of letters had made his début with work not intrinsically better. Lesage, however, had no luck—he had not much at any period during his life—and the book fell flat. A more useful adviser in every sense, however, fell to his lot in the person of the Abbe de Lyonne. Lyonne not merely gave him, or procured him, a pension or annuity of six hundred livres—no despicable assistance to modest housekeeping at that time, when living at Paris was extraordinarily cheap—but recommended him to study Spanish literature, of which he himself was a great lover. Three-quarters of a century before, this literature had been greatly admired and largely borrowed from in France, but the age of the great writers of Louis the Thirteenth's time and his son's had put it out of fashion. Lesage began by simple translation or adaptation, and, as in the case of Aristænetus, he was not too fortunate in his models. In drama, at least, he did not go far wrong, choosing Rojas, Lope de Vega and Calderon for his originals, and producing plays which were sometimes acted. But a version of the worthless New Don Quixote of Avellaneda was sorry work for the future author of Gil Blas. The play which he conveyed from Calderon—Don César Ursin—had some merit; and in 1707, being then hard upon his fortieth year, he scored two great successes. His little piece of Crispin Rival de son Maître appeared, and was loudly and deservedly applauded, while the Diable obtained still greater favour. It ran through several editions in the year, and many legends of the usual character we told about its success. The most characteristic, and probably the truest, is that Boileau found his footboy with a copy, and declared that if such a book stayed a night in his house the boy should not stay another. Lesage was already hailed as a Molière Redivivus, and this of itself was sufficient to irritate Boileau in his sour old age. But it would probably have been sufficient for that vigorous but narrow critic that the book was not in any style which he had himself recommended, or which he could understand; for Boileau was the incarnation of the merely French spirit of literature in its most contracted form; Lesage, as we shall see, was not specially or primarily French at all except in his wit, the very quality which the author of the Namur Ode was least qualified to appreciate. Lesage, however, had not yet arrived at his apogee. Despite his theatrical successes he was never on very good terms with the players of the regular theatre, and a small piece—Les Etrennes—was refused by them at the beginning of 1708. The author took it back, set to work on it, and refashioned it into Turcaret, the best French comedy, beyond all doubt, of the eighteenth century, and probably the best of its kind to be found outside the covers of Molière's works. It is in connection with Turcaret, the success of which was very great, though the powerful class offended by it did not conceal their displeasure, that one of the few personal and characteristic anecdotes we possess of Lesage is told. He had been asked to read his play to a fashionable company at the Duchess of Bouillon's, and, being delayed by law business, was late. The Duchess—let it be remembered that it was some half-century before all Paris interested itself in the quarrel of two "miserable scribblers who live in garrets"—rebuked him with some asperity for keeping her an hour waiting. "Eh bien, Madame," replied the poet; "je vous ai fait perdre une heure, je vais vous en faire gagner deux;" and he put his manuscript in his pocket, and, resisting all entreaties, went away. The anecdote rests on the authority of Colle, who, in such a case, is fairly trustworthy, and it probably explains why Lesage's life was one of struggle. Though his independence was, most likely, natural and usual, it is said to have been made more touchy on this particular occasion by the fact that he had lost the case which had detained him. However this may be, his dissatisfaction with the Maison de Molière soon assumed a still more active form, and for five-and-twenty years the best living comic dramatist of France gained his bread chiefly by writing for the stage of the Foire, the irregular but licensed booths set up during fair time. Lesage is said to have written no less than twenty-four farce-operettas, as they may perhaps best be termed, for these boards, and the number of his works for them alone, or in collaboration, is sometimes put at sixty-four and sometimes at a hundred and one. It was about the time that he took to this occupation, in which he was kept in company by not a few writers of talent, if not of genius, notably by Piron, that Gil Blas appeared in 1715. This, his greatest work, was scarcely so popular as Le Diable Boiteux, and it was long before it was finished, while the number of editions during the thirty years of the author's life was by comparison surprisingly small. Among the few positive statements that we have about Lesage's literary gains is one to the effect that a hundred pistoles had been advanced to him as prepayment for the last volume several years before it was completed. It does not of course follow that this was the whole price. The two first parts, as has been said, appeared in 1715, the third in 1724, the fourth in 1735. Thus Lesage evidently took time about his greatest work, though he was compelled to do much else in a hurry. His productions were sufficiently miscellaneous, though most of them had to do with the vein of literary ore which had been so fortunately indicated to him. A version of Guzman d'Alfarache, much altered and improved; Histoire d'Estévanille Gonzales and Le Bachelier de Salamanque, were the chief of these, while he also translated the Orlando Inamorato. A curious collection of imaginary letters, called the Valise Trouvée, and some minor works, came from his pen; besides which he was at the close of his life occupied on a collection of anecdotes which appeared after his death. He also superintended a collection of his Théâtre de la Foire, as he had previously one of his regular pieces. One work not yet mentioned, the "Life and Adventures of M. de Beauchêne, Captain of Flibustiers," brings him curiously near to Defoe, especially as in this, not less than in the English cases, a groundwork of actual memoirs is said or supposed to have existed. From his children Lesage had both trouble and profit. The eldest was bred a lawyer, but became an actor and was disowned by his father. The second took orders, obtained a canonry at Boulogne, and became the mainstay of the family. Worn out by seventy years of life and thirty or forty of literary work, Lesage about 1740 retired with his wife and daughter to the city where his son lived, and spent there his remaining years, dying on the 17th of November, 1747. A very curious and interesting letter from the Count de Tressan is in existence, giving an account of him in his very last days. Tressan is known to all students of French literature as having laboriously dressed the stories of the Chansons de Gestes in eighteenth-century garments for the readers of the Biblothèque des Romans—to which act we owe Wieland's Oberon—and as having, in ignorance of the existence of the original, bravely extemporized a Chanson de Roland, which stands, perhaps, in more absurd contrast to the true Chanson than any other conjectural restoration does to any other original. But he had a real interest is literature, and seems to have been amiable enough at this time. He was a military officer of high standing in the days of Fontenoy, and after that battle was for some time at Boulogne, where he used to visit Lesage. "The old man (he was then about seventy-seven) was," says Tressan, "in a state of half torpor till midday, but he then revived, and was. fairly in possession of his faculties till sundown"—a fact from which the philosophic Count makes some large inferences in proper eighteenth-century style. But, even when most wide awake, Lesage was very deaf, and nothing would induce him to put his trumpet to his ear when persons he disliked were his interlocutors, though it went up readily enough when any one he liked approached. This is the last and one of the very few personal pieces of gossip we have about him, and it proves satisfactorily that a hard worker and a great benefactor of his species, who had not in his time enjoyed too many of the gifts of fortune, at any rate passed his last years in peace and in such comfort as might be. His wife outlived him but a very short time and died at the age of eighty.
If an author is to be judged only by those works whose popularity has stood the test of time, Lesage need only be considered as the author of Crispin Rival de son Maître, of Turcaret, of Le Diable Boiteux, and of Gil Blas de Santillane. His other prose works are, indeed, of considerable bulk, but they are for the most part distinguished by the merits of the more celebrated pieces in a less prominent, and by the faults in a more prominent, degree. His Guzman d'Alfarache is chiefly interesting as a specimen of extremely skilful remaniement, a process more often applied in modern times to dramatic work than to prose fiction, and which, perhaps, in the case of prose fiction, has never been so well managed as here. M. de Beauchêne has, as has been already mentioned, some interesting points of resemblance to the methods of Defoe. Le Bachelier de Salamangue has a certain interest, because of its connection with the theory or hypothesis of a lost Spanish original of Gil Blas. If Lesage himself may be trusted, there was certainly such an original in the case of the Bachelor, and one of the many suppositions tending to deprive him of the credit of his greatest work supposes that both were extracted or rehandled from the same work. Estévanille Gonzales is, perhaps, the least attractive of all, while it is also one of the least original, and the translations from the Italian, &c., need not delay us. Among the minor works the chief are:—first, a lively and well-written little dialogue, called Une Journée des Parques, which has had the luck to be oftener reprinted than most of Lesage's opuscula; secondly, the already-mentioned collection of imaginary letters called La Valise Trouvée; and, lastly, the collection of anecdotes which was the author's last work and which was not published until after his death. Of Lesage, however, it is truer than of most writers, that he is best seen in his best work. His pot-boilers usually have something of his easy style and much of his pleasant subacid wit, but they fail, as a rule, to show the power of truthful character-drawing which was his greatest merit, and their wit itself degenerates into mere smartness more frequently than could be wished.
Somewhat more notice must be given to his work for the Théâtre de la Foire, not merely because it has considerable intrinsic merit, but because of its volume, of the constant labour spent on it for full a quarter of a century by the author, and last, but not least, because of its curious form. The pieces which were played at the fairs of Paris were very popular, and their popularity was the subject of constant jealousy on the part of the regular actors of the Théâtre Français, though the other two branches of the legitimate drama, the opera and the Comédie Italienne, were sometimes more or less in alliance with their little sister. Not a few of Lesage's pieces deal directly with the vicissitudes of la Foire. The plays represented on these boards were a curious mixture of the commedia dell' arte and the old French farce. Harlequin in particular is an almost invariable character, though the full complement of Pierrot, Scaramouche, Colombine, &c., only occasionally appears. The plays were of three kinds. One of these was drama reduced to nearly its simplest terms. There was no speaking on the stage and the actors confined themselves to pantomime in dumbshow, while two little cherubs sat up aloft with a long roller of wood, from which, from time to time, they unrolled placards on which short songs, set to popular airs, were inscribed. These songs were sung by the audience, assisted by the actors and orchestra. Here, of course, the author's work was limited to the conception of the action, the expression of it by stage directions to the actors, and the composition of the songs. A second kind of piece was the Vaudeville proper, in which the whole play is written in lyrical couplets. In the third and most elaborate, ordinary prose dialogue is mixed up with songs. This last sometimes attained considerable dimensions and was divided into acts. These popular pieces were, throughout the eighteenth century, composed by authors whose literary standing was by no means low—such as Lesage, Piron, Collé, and many others—and when a piece had a particular vogue it was not unfrequently transferred, at the command of some great personage, to the boards of the opera. Our author, as has been said, wrote a very large number of these curious compositions in all the three styles just described. Their literary value is, of course, far from great, but they display a good deal of invention, a command of easy verse, and much less indulgence in the besetting sin of the fair theatre, license of language, than most of their fellows. La Princesse de Carizme, one of the longest, and possessing something like a plot, is also one of the best. It turns on the well-known story of a princess whose beauty turns all who behold her mad. But, on the whole, the pieces which deal with the rivalry of the Foire and the graver dramatic institutions are, perhaps, the most amusing. The contrasted display of the Comédie Française, her solemn tragic airs and the mannerisms of her lighter mood, with the impudent coquettishness of the personified Foire, gave Lesage a good opportunity, of which he did not scruple to avail himself. The contrast, of course, is an old one, and something like it had been frequently brought with success on the popular stage, even in early times. La Querelle des Théâtres has something in it which reminds the reader of the old morality of Science et Anerye. The music of the pieces, too, has its interest, because it shows the remarkable conservatism of the French populace in these matters. Now-a-days new airs are a sine quâ non for a comic opera that is to be successful. Lesage's pieces are all written to a few score tunes, which remained on duty during the whole eighteenth century, and may be still seen at the head of Béranger's songs a hundred years and more afterwards. But it must, of course, be understood that only regular students of literature can be recommended to attack Lesage's Théâtre de la Foire. It has received some mention here chiefly because most of his critics have been content to give second-hand judgments of it, and a second-hand judgment in matters literary has a habit of going farther and farther from the truth as it passes from pen to pen.
The two pieces of Lesage which, if they have not actually kept the stage, have at least secured their place in collections of the French drama, demand a longer mention. I say if they have not kept the stage, for I have no positive knowledge as to the question whether Crispin and Turcaret have of late years been represented. They are certainly amusing enough to read, and Turcaret is something more than amusing. Crispin Rival de son Maître is a much less ambitious piece than Turcaret. It is, in fact, only a longish farce in one act, but in a great number of scenes. Something of what an English critic once very unjustly called the "exaggerated manner of Molière" may be observed in it. Indeed, this phrase of Hazlitt has a good deal of truth when applied to this little piece; it is Molière's manner exaggerated by recourse to the Spanish style of comedy, from which the great playwright had refined and purified his own. There is the usual impecunious and unlucky lover, but the usual valet, instead of backing his master, enters with another valet into a wild plan for marrying the heroine himself. By playing into each other's hands the two rascals succeed for a time in hoodwinking the father, and, by gross flattery, in winning over the mother to their side. The scheme is upset by the simple fact that the father of the suitor whom Crispin personates soon appears, and by the still simpler one that the master, of course, recognizes and identifies his servant. But the intrigue, impossible as it is, is very briskly kept up, and the short bustling scenes hardly allow the audience to reflect on the improbability of the thing. The dialogue is full of brilliancy, rather resembling Congreve than Molière, and this, being unquestionably the best of its kind that a Parisian audience had heard for a generation, probably secured the popularity of the piece. Turcaret is a much more important production. It has the full five acts of a regular comedy, and, though its plot is rather loose, the ruin and discomfiture of the financier Turcaret give a sufficient unity to it. The action, too, is well sustained, but the merit of the piece—a merit for which it stands almost alone in the French comedy of the eighteenth century—lies in the striking projection of the characters and the lively natural traits with which they are drawn. The objection which has been made to these characters—that they are rather partial than complete sketches of human nature—applies to all French drama and to almost all artificial comedy, whether French or English. It would not be easy to find a French drama, out of Molière, in which so many figures stand out so strikingly from the canvass, as is the case in Turcaret. The financier, ashamed of the lowness of his origin, ruthless to his debtors, and a swindler in his dealings with his associates, but capable of being bubbled of his money in the most open fashion by a great lady who condescends to permit his addresses; his wife, an incarnation of vulgar provincial vice, as desperately jealous of her husband as she is shamelessly unfaithful to him; the chevalier who exploits Turcaret's mistress just as that mistress exploits Turcaret; the baroness, not too scrupulous to plunder her suitor so long as she believes his addresses to be honourable, but generous enough and not wholly corrupted; the reckless marquis, who has at least the advantage over his friend, the chevalier, that he is not a knave: all these characters, in themselves mere stock characters of the oldest date, are made to live and breathe by touches of Lesage's genius. The most often-quoted scene of the play, where Madame Turcaret, introduced to the baroness's salon, gives an account of the diversions of Valognes, where "on lit tout les ouvrages d'esprit qu'on fait à Cherbourg, à St. Lo et à Coutances, qui valent bien les ouvrages de Vire et de Caen" is a masterpiece of its kind, and not much less can be said of the adroit servility of the waiting-maid Lisette. Frontin, her lover, has the defect of all the valets who descend from the Menandrian comedy—the defect of exceeding improbability—but he is not more improbable than Molière's Scapins and Gros Renés, and, indeed, not so improbable as some of them. It is also noticeable that, though the dialogue of Turcaret is as full of witticisms as any reasonable man can desire, it has not the fault which is frequently noticeable in French manner-comedies and almost always in English—the fault of letting mere wit combats occupy the characters to the detriment of the dramatic interest of the play. Everything in Turcaret tends duly to its end. There are few things more surprising, and perhaps it may be added, less satisfactory, in connection with the theory that a subsidized and established theatre tends to encourage the production of works of genius, than the fact of the subsequent disagreement of the players with Lesage. It is almost inconceivable that the man who wrote such a play should not have had it in him to write others of equal, if not greater, goodness. But, as we have seen, Lesage had no opportunity of improving upon Turcaret or repeating his success, being almost immediately diverted from the regular theatre to the Foire, where, whatever he may have done, he certainly did not work for posterity. His dramatic career, indeed, was that of Molière reversed. The earlier writer began with a long apprenticeship to farce-writing and then turned his attention to regular comedy, the other began with regular comedy and was afterwards driven to farce. When one considers the special opening which drama presents to a man who, like Lesage, prefers to work on the inventions of others rather than to spin everything out of his own brains, his abandonment of it seems much to be regretted. Perhaps, however, on the whole the world has not lost; for where a play gives amusement now and then to hundreds, a novel gives it constantly to thousands, and it is extremely improbable that the very best work that Lesage could ever have produced in the way of drama would have added to the sum of human enjoyment as much as Gil Blas has added.