It has already been observed that Lesage's manner of dealing with his originals when he wrote prose fiction sometimes resembled the usual manner of dramatic authors. If, however, this latter manner resembled the conduct of the author of Le Diable Boiteux in the composition of this work, the charge of plagiarism which is constantly brought against dramatists could hardly stand. The Diable Boiteux of Lesage and the Diablo Cojuelo of Luis Velez de Guevara stand to each other in a very curious relation. At first the later work looks almost like a translation of the earlier; for two chapters it is a translation and very little more. But suddenly Lesage seems to have felt his own power and strikes off on an entirely new path. Neither the course of the story, nor the conclusion, nor even the great majority of the episodes and detached anecdotes in the Diable Boiteux are derived, even by suggestion, from Guevara, while the simplicity of the French style and the unbroken stream of lively narquois narration contrast as strongly as anything can do with the euphuism of Guevara and the singular encomiastic digressions on all sorts of personages which figure largely in the Diablo Cojuelo. The substance of the book is made up partly, no doubt, of anecdotes borrowed from divers Spanish sources, partly of more or less historical gossip about French men and women of the author's own time—Dufresny the comic author, Baron the actor, Ninon de L'Enclos are usually specified as figuring—partly of inventions of Lesage's own. As most people know, or ought to know, the plot is sufficiently simple. A young student, for whom an ambush has been laid by his perfidious mistress, escapes by way of the roof, makes his way into a neighbouring garret, which happens to be the laboratory of a magician, and is besought by a voice out of a phial to deliver the speaker from durance by breaking the bottle. The request is complied with, and the imprisoned sprite turns out to be Asmodeus, Démon de la Luxure. Here almost all borrowing from Guevara ceases. In the Spanish the new confederates journey to different parts of Spain, and the incidents of the story are mainly supplied by the efforts of envious devils to recapture Asmodeus. In the French the general plan is based on an exertion of the power of Asmodeus, whereby he unroofs the houses of Madrid and exhibits the fortunes of the inmates to the student, Don Cleofas, while an additional human interest is imparted by a fire, in which the good-natured and grateful demon rescues a young lady of high birth in the shape of Cleofas, and thereby secures for his liberator a prosperous marriage. As a connected story, the original, despite its digressions and episodes, perhaps has the advantage, though the ultimate decision on this point must be left to those who, unlike the present writer, can speak with equal authority on Spanish and on French literature. Lesage's pre-eminence must be sought in the scattered traits of wit and knowledge of human nature which he sprinkles liberally over his work, and in the brisk and vigorous style wherein the book is written. This latter is the real charm of the Diable Boiteux. Lesage took something from La Rochefoucauld, something and perhaps more from St. Evremond, and, availing himself of the general improvement in French prose style which had resulted from the schoolmastering of the academic critics, from Balzac to Boileau, produced a mixture of singular pungency and elegance. Couched as the whole work is in the form of a lengthy dialogue between the demon and Don Cleofas, the author has availed himself of the characteristics of his characters in a sufficiently artful fashion. The petulance of the student never allows the good demon to engage uninterrupted in too long a narration, but constantly recalls him to this or that interesting incident, which makes a digression in the midst of the histories and prevents any feeling of longueur from stealing on the reader. Now this is a feeling which the general plan of the French-Spanish Roman d'Aventures adopted by Lesage was only too much calculated to produce. The pedigree of stories of this kind was a long one. They arose unquestionably, on the one hand, from the prose Greek romances to which the Byzantine period gave rise, and on the other from the incomparable romances of chivalry, to use the usual though rather indiscriminate term of which France must claim the invention. To do the Chanson de Geste, the oldest form of the latter variety, justice, digression was not among its faults. But from the first the Greek prose romance seems to have been liable to it, and from the date of the Romans d'Aventures, which express in a way the union of the two, it was a crying sin of the western romance, whether it was written in verse or in prose. Everything by degrees became sacrificed to length, and the easiest way of attaining length was by indulging in numerous episodic excursions. Moral disquisitions, personal panegyrics, sentimental discussions on points of amatory law, which the earlier seventeenth century had endured, were impossible at the time when Lesage wrote, and he confined himself solely to the story within a story which his English followers, Smollett and Fielding, adopted from him, and which lasted even to the days of Scott, with the advantage to literature of producing what is, perhaps, the best short tale in any language—Wandering Willie's legend in Redgauntlet. By that time, however, the necessity of connecting the digressions definitely and directly with the general story had forced itself on the consideration of the romancer. Lesage's age was less difficult, and his episodes might be cut out without damaging such central story as he has, but with a woful consequence to the total interest and attraction of the book. What saved Le Diable Boiteux was, let it be once more repeated, the smartness of the satire, the acuteness of the observation of life, and the pure fluent style in which the whole was embodied. The one means which has always been able to move a French audience or body of readers has been the untranslatable malice; and Lesage possessed the secret of this in an eminent degree. But he had more than this—he had also the faculty of informing his malicious side-hits at human nature, with a certain breadth and truth in which Voltaire himself fails except when he is at his very best, and of never going out of his way for a gibe, a mistake only too common among French authors. The fantastic setting; the absence of any attempt to get into the pulpit and preach, while a certain subtle under-flavour of moralizing reconciled the most moralizing of all centuries; the urbanity of the style, and the allusions, artfully scattered here and there, to personal adventures and personal gossip, were quite sufficient to attract contemporaries. That the popularity of the Diable Boiteux has been more than ephemeral shows—let us repeat it, for it cannot be too often repeated—that observation of Nature, enbalmed with due preparation of art, is never likely to lose its hold upon men; if it were, adieu to literature.
The good qualities of Turcaret and the Diable Boiteux appeared in far more striking measure and co-ordinated far more skilfully in the great work which these volumes present once more to the reader in the version of the greatest but one of Lesage's followers. Of the general merits of Gil Blas it is necessary to say very little. Nor is it necessary to add in this particular place anything to what has been said and will be said of the comparatively half-hearted estimation in which his countrymen have held the writer of this masterpiece. In French histories of literature Lesage holds but a subordinate place, and he is sometimes treated as second in the race to Defoe, though it is hardly necessary to say that the first and best of the great Englishman's romances is younger than Gil Blas by nearly five years. Argument and abstract are equally superfluous. How Gil Blas left his scarcely-unwilling kin, how he learnt by bitter experience not to trust too much to flatterers, how he fell among thieves, among the minions of the law, among actors (on whom Lesage took a terrible vengeance in this book for the treatment they had accorded to him), even those to whom the pleasure—pace Mr. James Payn—of reading our book is yet to come, know, in virtue of a thousand quotations and allusions in every kind of literature. Of the latter parts of the book, which show in the author some such an idea as that by which Dickens, either before or after the fact, excused the transformation of Mr. Pickwick's character, perhaps less is known by those who have not actually read it. Only one episode—the famous and, indeed, immortal relapse of Gil Blas into youthfulness in the matter of the Archbishop of Granada—has passed into general knowledge. I shall only say that it is perhaps the very happiest holding up of a mirror to one particular weak place of human nature that I know. Few people perhaps, save reviewers, who are in continual receipt of expostulations from the reviewed, know how eternal is the verity of the presentment. By some unhappy fortune the particular stanza of the poem, the particular chapter of the novel, the particular juncture of the plot, which the critic happens to blame is the very thing that is best in the book. "On n'a jamais composé de meilleur homélie que celle qui a le malheur de n'avoir pas notre approbation." This is only an illustration of the supreme merit of the book—its absolute truth to Nature. But another illustration may, perhaps, be pardonably given. It has been said, or hinted, that in the last two volumes Gil Blas is a much better as well as a much less ridiculous personage than he is in the first—this is especially the case in the last. Prosperity, age, the absence of temptation, account for this. But Lesage's unpitying, because absolutely veracious, talent would not suffer him to turn his intriguing fortune-hunter into a saint. The ugly episode of the journey to Toledo, in which the admired minister Olivarez and the respectable reformed rake Gil Blas play such awkward parts, is an instance of the truth which is put in the homely phrase Defoe loved—"What is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh." Now-a-days, perhaps, when the naturalist school, in its scorn of the namby-pamby, rushes into the opposite extreme and will have nothing but vice and ugliness, such a book as Gil Blas is infinitely more instructive, as well as more refreshing to read, than all the rose-pink pictures of impossible virtues and all the half-told tales of life with the dark side of it kept out of sight that literature can muster. It will scarcely be pretended by any brisk young novelist of the nineteenth century that he has more insight than Lesage, scarcely, either, that Lesage was afraid to say what occurred to him or that his literary vocabulary and general equipment were unequal to the task. Yet here is a book as free from cant or from taint of the hérésie de l'enseignement as any one can desire, and which yet leaves no bad taste in the mouth, meddles with no abnormal crimes, and suggests as a total reflexion not merely that all's well that ends well, but that in most cases with fair luck all does end fairly well.
The question of the origin, or, if the word be preferred, of the originality, of Gil Blas may not be of much intrinsic importance. But its traditional importance in the history of literature is considerable, and something, perhaps, must be said about it here. The assertions of the more or less complete indebtedness of the author to a Spanish original may be classed under three heads. There is, first, the assertion that Gil Blas is taken from the Marcos de Obregon of Vincent Espinel. This was advanced very shortly after the appearance of the book, and currency was given to it by Voltaire, who roundly repeated it, in consequence, beyond all doubt, of the galling attacks which Lesage had made upon his early dramatic and epic efforts, not merely in his farces but in Gil Blas itself, where the author of Zaire figures as Don Gabriel Triaquero. The second is due to a Spanish Jesuit author, who, avowedly setting before him the object of claiming Gil Blas for his own country, endeavours to make out that it is simply a translation of a Spanish original. The third is a more elaborate hypothesis and more difficult of disproof—its foundation, such as it is, has been already alluded to. It is supposed that Lesage extracted the matter, at least, of Gil Blas, as well as that of the Bachelier de Salamanque, from a manuscript Spanish original which has since disappeared. As to the first charge, it is one of those curiously hazardous ones, the making of which can only be accounted for on the general principle that some of most handfuls of mud which are thrown is likely to stick, for Espinel's work is unanimously confessed by competent examiners to be not in the least like Gil Blas on the whole, though a very few detached traits may have been taken by Lesage from it, as they almost certainly were for others of his prose fictions. The patriotic hypothesis of Father Isla suffers only from the fact that there is not the faintest trace of a Spanish Gil Blas or of any allusion to such a work. As for the third, it is obviously, and on the face of it, as impossible to disprove as to prove. There may have been French Macbeths and Lears from which Shakspeare adapted the existing pieces, for aught we know. But, when we dismiss merely hypothetical argument and examine the matter coolly, we find, first, that there is absolutely no external evidence that Lesage did in any way plagiarize Gil Blas; secondly, that there is overwhelming internal evidence that, while he made free use of his Spanish predecessors for details, for local colour and so forth the essential part of the book is fairly his own. The "picaroon" romance, as it is called, was a specially Spanish variety of Roman d'Aventures which, abandoning giants and enchanters on the one hand and the long-winded sentimentalities of the Amadis and the Scudéry romances on the other, confined itself to the actual life of the still but half-civilized dominions of the King of Spain and to the most exciting incidents of that life. Immense numbers of these books were written by Spaniards during the seventeenth century; and with many, if not the majority, of these Lesage was, we know, familiar. Many of the separate incidents of Gil Blas have been traced to this literature, and, perhaps, more might be so. But there is no reason to believe that the general cadre into which Lesage fitted these is not his own, and there is every reason to believe that the peculiar spirit with which he informs the whole and which gives it its peculiar value is absolutely his. The shrewd wit, neither sententious nor solemn, of his isolated sayings is assuredly not Spanish; the peculiar universality of his indications of the weaknesses of human nature is still less so. There is little of the kind, I may venture to say, in the greatest of Spanish writers, in Cervantes himself; there is nothing of the kind—competent authorities vouch for it—in any lesser Spanish writer. To the higher side of Spanish imagination, its poetry, its magnificence, its forgetfulness of the baser sides of life, Lesage has no claim to approach. But in regard to a sort of prosaic infallibility and universality which he has he may as fairly pretend that the Spaniards have nothing of his. If there is little of Don Quixote there is, perhaps, something of Sancho in some of his characters; but it is only such an agreement as writers starting from the most diverse points might attain.
To one charge which has been brought against Gil Blas, that of undue length, it is difficult to offer a very valid defence. That this length conduced to the anachronisms which the author admits in a characteristic and sarcastic avertissement is very probable, but these are matters of very little consequence and may be ranked with the sea-coast of Bohemia and Hector's reference to Aristotle. It is of more importance that the extreme prolongation of the book has made it—it may freely be admitted—to a certain extent tedious. Nor does it seem reasonable to doubt that this prolongation was, in some degree, artificial—that is to say, that the favour with which the book was received and the offers of the publishers very likely induced the author to extend it a good deal more than he had at first designed. Per contra it can only be alleged that, in the peculiar style of which Gil Blas is an example, there is no natural limit to the exposition. The book having no defined plot, but being a picture of quotquot agunt homines in so far as the life of a particular person touches that action, nothing but the death of the hero can be said to bring it to a close. This, indeed, is of the essence of the romance as opposed to the epic, and, in its so-called regular or non-Shakspearean form, the drama. These two latter presuppose a definite and limited plot. The romance does not, and it admits not only an indefinite extension in a straight line, but also digressions and episodes ad infinitum. That this is rather a weakness than a strength of the style may certainly be admitted, and the fact had been sufficiently exemplified, not merely in the mediæval poem and prose romances but in the Amadis cycle, where the reader is conducted from generation to generation in a manner sufficient to weary the patience of the most robust. But it was characteristic of Lesage that he was an innovator rather in detail than in the general. He did not produce the modern novel—that was reserved for his younger contemporary Prévost. He only took an existing genre, made many small improvements in it, and produced a masterpiece therein. Perhaps it would be ungrateful to complain when he did so much that he did no more.
In the controversies which have arisen about Lesage's greatest work it is not very difficult to find a satisfactory explanation of his great and peculiar value. For the Spanish claim—absolutely unsupported as it is by one tittle of external evidence, and, indeed, as we may almost say, completely as it is rebutted by all such evidence—rests in reality on an expressed or understood idea that no one but a native writer could have so dealt with Spain and Spaniards. The retort to the charge is as instructive as the charge itself. Frenchmen appeal to Germans, Englishmen, and other foreigners to decide the cause, and the referees give their decision in a manner which is decisive. Gil Blas, they say, is not specially a Spaniard, though the art of his creator has dressed him up marvellously in the habits, garments and speech of Spain. He is simply a man, and the accuracy with which the author has hit the universal beneath the particular would have equally enabled him, had he chosen, to draw an Englishman or a German, and would have entitled Englishmen or Germans, had they been sufficiently shortsighted, to claim his work as borrowed or stolen from an English or German original. The reply is unanswerable, and the more one reads Lesage the more convinced one is of the sufficiency of it and the more proof one finds of its truth. It is in this quality of universality, of striking at the essential humanity of men and dealing with their accidental nationality only in such manner as might suit his purpose that Lesage's great genius consists, and in this quality he is, as it seems to me, at the head of all French writers, and only second to Shakspeare. Of course the range of the two is very different, it is even hardly commensurable. Lesage had his faculty at complete command within certain very restricted limits, but beyond those limits he was not in the least master of it, indeed it can hardly be said that he endeavoured to show it at all. Whether his thorough and comparatively early steeping in one peculiar and extremely artificial kind of literature—the picaroon romances and intrigue-dramas of Spain—narrowed his mind at the same time that it sharpened it is a question rather of psychology than of literature; but it is certain that he shows very little tendency to wander out of his own narrow circle, and that when he does so he becomes merely an ordinary man of letters, possessed of a pleasant wit and of a ready and skilful pen. But within his circle he hardly yields to the master himself. Indeed, Gil Blas may hold up his head in any company, even in the company of Shakspeare's children. There is the same invariable consistency, the same total absence of false notes, the same completeness of presentation. It was in this latter that Lesage differed most from his countrymen. The fatal doctrine of the ruling passion had made but little impression upon him. In drawing Gil Blas he has not an abstraction of intrigue and courtiership of the lower class before him as a model, he has a man who, for a long time, is given up partly by the unkindness of fortune, partly by natural bent, to intrigue and courtiership. To the last, touches of Nature, though they naturally grow fewer and fewer, chequer and diversify the presentment. Now this was what the French, since they had given themselves up to swallow the doctrines and do the bidding of Horace, as represented or misrepresented by the native critics of the Malherbe-Boileau school, could not attain to, and could hardly even understand. Had Boileau lived a little longer it may be shrewdly suspected that he would have regarded Gil Blas with much more indignation than that with which he regarded Le Liable Boiteux, and it is noteworthy that the greater work was far less popular with its author's countrymen than the lesser. They would, doubtless, have liked Achilles to be always iracundus inexorabilis acer, and would have preferred that Gil Blas should have outwitted the parasite in the matter of the trout and kept the favour of the Archbishop of Granada. Gil Blas, too, is far less full than Le Diable Boiteux of the epigrammatic pointes which have never ceased to delight the true Frenchman—and, indeed, they are delightful enough—and which reach their climax in the writings of Voltaire. Such sayings as: "Vous n'avez pas des idées justes de notre enfer"—"On nous reconcilia, nous nous embrassames, et depuis ce temps nous sommes ennemis mortels"—"Je sais qu'il-y-a de bons remèdes mais je ne sais pas s'il-y-a de bons médecins"—"Tout payeur est traité comme un mari," and a hundred things besides, are worthy of the author of Candide at his very best, and his countrymen could not fail to relish them. They were less keen to relish such a presentment as that of Gil Blas, and therefore Lesage's fame, great as it has been even in France, has been more European than French, and he is to be quoted and compared with foreigners rather than with his countrymen.
There is another point of importance in which Lesage has a resemblance to Shakspeare. He has not merely in some not small measure the quality of universality, but he has, and this in very great measure, the quality of detachment. He seems to look at his characters with the same inscrutable impartiality as that with which their creator contemplates Iago and Goneril, Macbeth and Claudius. He does not describe their monkey tricks with any particular gusto, at least of a personal kind, nor does he regard them with the least moral indignation. All that does not concern him. Writing as he did in a period of very low morality—there probably never was a time when the general moral standard was lower in Europe than in the first half of the eighteenth century—and taking for his models a mass of writings dealing with unscrupulous adventures and intrigue, he has had to describe what is bad much oftener than what is good. But it is impossible to say either that he gloats over the vices and follies which he describes, or that he records them with cynical amusement, or that he holds them up for righteous detestation. The least little appearance of the second attitude may sometimes be found in the utterances of Asmodeus, which are as personal as anything we have of his; but even this is, for the most part, dramatic merely. This quality, beyond all doubt, is connected with the former, and is, indeed, to a great extent implied by it. When a man is very much in earnest about points of morality, still more when he writes definitely with a moral or immoral purpose, he seldom succeeds in giving us the complete presentation of his characters. He is bribed, without knowing it, by his prepossessions, he cannot help, if he objects to the established standards of morality, softening the vicious characters unduly, or hardening them unduly if he be among the moral sub-division of the heretics of instruction. I do not know that Lesage has been much examined by the strenuous advocates of the moral element in literature, though they have not neglected Fielding, his English parallel. The fact is that Fielding's irregular life rather assists them, while the little that is known of Lesage goes to show that he was in his own person an exemplary liver. It is, however, true that the resemblances between Fielding and Lesage are great, not merely in that they adopted the same general conception of the novel, but that they succeeded in working out that conception and in bringing their characters, or some of them, under the species œternitatis. An Englishman naturally speaks with some caution about Fielding, because he himself is not in so good a position as foreigners to judge how far Fielding has accomplished this. Englishmen, however, are the best possible judges of Lesage, because they are equally free from bias connected with the language in which he writes and from bias connected with the country which he illustrates.
There is one important and intricate question which can hardly be passed over, though here, at least, it can only be very summarily dealt with. It has been said that until the present century no French writer, except Montaigne and Rabelais deserves the title of humorist, and this would, of course, exclude Lesage. On the other hand, the exclusion has been objected to in the interest of some mediæval writers. The truth is, that the whole question turns on one of the most disputed points in literature—the definition of humour. If, as it has been admirably put, the humorist is a man who "thinks in jest when he feels in earnest;" or if, as Thackeray puts it, he is a weekday preacher, then Lesage most assuredly is not one. For not only has he no direct moral purpose, which, indeed, is oftener than not fatal to humour, but it is difficult to discern that he has, as Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakspeare had, any general theory or grasp of the world or of life, whether poetical, ironical, or sceptical, which could supply him with the necessary background for humour. Neither had he, like Fielding and Thackeray himself, a passionate interest in that world—a sympathy with it which, in its way, is also sufficient to bring out the strokes of the strange invisible ink called humour. It would seem, therefore, that his exclusion is justified, and as he shares it with Molière, and even with Lafontaine, he need not be ashamed of his company. Like these still greater men, however, he had a wit so fine, so flexible, so far transcending the ordinary limitations of wit, that it almost amounted to humour, and may be said to be practically a substitute for it.
This brings us to the consideration of a point of very great importance—the style of Lesage. In all such cases the modern reader who merely looks back is very likely to be deceived by his point of view. Yet even the modern reader, if he has but some notion of the date of his author, must, I should think, be conscious of a singular modernness in Gil Blas and the Diable Boiteux compared with Bossuet, Fénelon, even Malebranche, and still more with Madame de Sévigné and Saint-Simon. Lesage, indeed, was one of a line of great writers chiefly of the lighter kind, who, perhaps, did most of any of their contemporaries to shape French style, as it has been generally understood until recently. Saint-Evremond and Pascal are the earliest of these, and Lesage, taking up the torch, handed it on to Voltaire. It is noteworthy that Voltaire, perhaps on the principle of kicking down his ladders, was unjust both to Saint-Evremond and to Lesage, though, as has been said, the latter had certainly provoked him. The great distinction of Lesage is the extreme ease of his writing and the manner in which his good things, such as those already cited above, drop naturally out in the midst of his narrative or dialogue, without any effort or apparent leading up. It would demand a much greater acquaintance with Spanish literature than any to which I, even at second-hand, can pretend, to decide whether his studies had anything to do with this; but I think that it may be tolerably safely assumed that they had not, except by way of contrast; for many, if not most, of the works which Lesage translated or followed were written in the extremest gongorist or conceited style—a style as remote from his as Lyly's from Steele's. It may possibly be contended that it was in fighting against this excess that Lesage learnt the secret of a wise economy. Certainly, there are not merely few writers in whom there is so little archaism, affectation, mannerism, or deliberate oddity and obscurity, but also few in whom the style is so absolutely plain and unadorned, without being in the least vulgar, or, in the unfavourable sense, homely. His autobiographies, probably owing to this, have, more than most autobiographies, the air of being really told by a speaker and not elaborated in the study. There are no ponderous sentences, no phrases over which the reader sees that the pen has hung a long time, and, as has been already noted, none of the leading-up and preparation which certain witty writers are unable to avoid or to conceal. The most commonplace things are said with perfect simplicity, and yet, somehow or other, in a way on which it is impossible to improve. It must be a bold man who thinks he can better a saying of Lesage's, and that not because of any tour de force of unusual phrase or out-of-the-way thought, but, on the contrary, because the simplicity has reached the lowest term. Nothing can be taken away, and nothing can be added that is not a useless addition.
The question of his alleged plagiarisms has been already, to some extent, dealt with. It has been shown, that is to say, that in the way of absolute stealing the charge has not the slightest probability. The strongest argument of all is, indeed, that when we see what he did with originals which we possess, such as Guzman d'Alfarache and the Diablo Cojuelo, there could be no motive for discreditable appropriation in other cases. But, when the charge in its offensive sense has been laid aside, it remains to consider the use which he did make of publica materies. There can be no doubt that, as was the case with Shakspeare and Molière and many other men of the very greatest genius, he made wholesale and indiscriminate use thereof. There is proof of this in many cases; there is probability of it in many more. Indeed, there is in this and other instances almost ground for the paradox that it is only men of little creative power who are scrupulously original. Many very small poets, by luck or by care, have kept free from the charge of indebtedness to anybody, while Shakspeare calmly versifies whole pages of North's "Plutarch;" while Molière compels restitution of his goods from the unlucky people who happened to possess them first without the least scruple; while Milton lays Dutch dramatists and French epic poets and Italian opera librettists under contribution as coolly as if they had been Royalist squires. In Lesage's case there is, however, something more than this. In the three great cases just mentioned, and in many others, it is only now and then that the borrowers condescend to borrow; it is a passing freak, or, to speak more respectfully and with more critical truth, an occasional conviction that here are the tools of which they themselves can make the best use. But there are some men, and those not among the least in literature, who, from a certain idiosyncrasy, which may, perhaps, be termed an indolence of brain, have seemed to prefer always, when it was possible, to work on beaten tracks and to take their start from some already-accomplished work. The most remarkable example of this variety of talent in English literature is Dryden; the most remarkable in French literature is beyond all question Lesage. Yet Lesage must in respect of absolute originality be ranked below Dryden, because his greatest work, though its substance may be independent enough, springs in point of general design directly from Spanish originals, while the greatest work of Dryden, his satiric and didactic pieces, was not directly suggested by anything precedent. It may be said, indeed, that, of the four productions which we have singled out as exhibiting Lesage at his best, the two dramas are far more original than the two novels. Whether Lesage, had he been more favoured by the exponents of the regular drama and had he devoted himself longer thereto, would have produced something even more original than Crispin and Turcaret must be left among the merely scholastic problems of literature, the "might-have-beens" inquiry into which is bootless and idle. The time, however, had not come for any innovation on the set lines of French comedy and tragedy, even had the author been disposed for such innovation, and it is noteworthy enough that, when in his specially-chosen province of the Théâtre de la Foire an opportunity appeared for a bold stroke, he declined it. On one occasion the jealousy of the regular actors had procured a police edict restricting their rivals to a single personage. The managers of the fair stage were in despair, for neither Lesage nor any of their other regular contributors would attempt the task of a monodrama, and recourse had to be had to the untried and fitful but fertile genius of Piron, whose Arlequin Deucalion got them out of the difficulty. This anecdote seems to argue a certain indisposition to try experiments which is consistent enough with what we have of Lesage's work. It must be remembered, too, that he did not begin literary labour very young, and that he did not make any great success in it until he was already a man of middle age. There are not wanting examples of striking originality in conception as well as striking power of execution displayed by late-writing authors. But on the whole it may, perhaps, be safely said that invention is a habit as much as any other, and that it is a habit which is for the most part only acquired in youth.
Such are the principal critical points which present themselves in the life of this great novelist and master of French prose. As one turns over the leaves of a library catalogue and sees the immense number of editions, translations, and what not, that Gil Blas has gone through and undergone in its century-and-a-half of life, it is impossible not to draw the conclusion that its goodness is a matter settled and out of hand. One generation may make egregious mistakes, and constantly does make egregious mistakes, about an author, leaving him to unjust neglect, or awarding to him still more absurd triumphs. Subsequent generations may, in a way, continue the mistake by leaving the justice of the verdict, for or against, undisturbed, because the evidence is undisturbed likewise. But when a book has actually been read by half-a-dozen successive sets of the inhabitants of the earth, when its most remarkable incidents and characters have become part of the common stock of furniture possessed even by a very modest housekeeper in things literary, then there is not much reason for questioning the value. The works, even the best works, of Lesage are, of course, not good throughout. Even in Le Diable Boiteux, despite its moderate length, there are longueurs, and there are most assuredly longueurs in Gil Blas. Some of it is obsolete, some could be well spared now, some, it is difficult not to think, could have been well spared at any time. But its best things are as fresh as ever and are likely to continue so as long as human nature exists. The opening chapters, the address to the reader—Lesage was never happier than his addresses to the reader, prefaces, and such like things—the episodes of Sangrado and the Archbishop, half a hundred things beside, are as amusing to read for the twentieth time as for the first. What is, perhaps, of more importance, the same may be said of the best passages, even in the work which has been less favoured by the general approbation. But at the same time no one who weighs his words will attempt to deny that Lesage has produced a considerable amount of inferior work side by side with his masterpieces. Nor can it be denied that, as has been more than once here allowed, his range is but limited and that he seems to require a somewhat unusual amount of prompting and crutching before he is able to make his bow and say his say. These things debar him from the place among the chosen few of the writers of his country to which the wonderful success of his best work and the purity of his style would otherwise entitle him. In theoretical originality, in variety of work, in construction, he is very deficient. Gil Blas drags rather than hastens to its end, the author having failed completely to extricate himself from the toils of the endless episodes and digressions of his Spanish models. Turcaret in the same manner lacks unity and precision of plot. Excellence of style and surprising fidelity to human nature in character-drawing—these are the two pillars of Lesage's renown, and it is solidly established upon them. He is thus one of the few writers, to return to the point from which we started, of whom it can be definitely said that, if he had been in more fortunate worldly circumstances, he would have done better, unless, which is, perhaps, equally probable, he had done nothing at all. Necessity was with him, as with others, the mother of invention—the invention, that is to say, of his own talent. But with gifts which do not fall to the lot of one writer in a thousand, he did not always or very often succeed in getting those gifts into perfect working order. His selection of foreign subjects, and the very natural, though very unjust, suspicion of grave indebtedness to foreign models, have also worked against his fame. Yet, with those who have considered novel-writing seriously, he will always rank as one of the princes of character-drawing in its largest and most human sense, while with those who busy themselves with the history of French literature he will always hold the rank of the best writer of the first quarter of the eighteenth century.