The difference between Dr Sangrado and our hydropathists is merely that between hot and cold water, by no means excluding an allusion to the latter, under the veil, as M. Neufchateau has it, of Spanish manners. Would it be quite impossible to find in St James’s Street, or in certain buildings at no great distance from the Thames, the exact counterparts of Don Matthias de Silva and his companions? Gongora, indeed, in spite of his detestable taste, was a man of genius; and therefore to find his type among us would be difficult, if not impossible, unless an excess of the former quality, for which he was conspicuous, might counterbalance a deficiency in the latter. Are our employés less pompous and empty than Gil Blas and his companions? our squires less absurd and ignorant than the hidalgoes of Valencia? Let any one read some of the pamphlets on Archbishop Whately’s Logic, or attend an examination in the schools at Oxford, and then say if the race of those who plume themselves on the discovery, that Greek children cried when they were whipped is extinct? To be sure, as the purseproud insolence of a nouveau riche, and indeed of parvenus generally, is quite unknown among us, nobody could rely on those points of resemblance. But with regard to the other topics, would it not be fair to say, in answer to such an argument—All this is mere commonplace generality; such are the characters of every country where European institutions exist, or European habits are to be found? Something more tangible and specific is requisite to support your claim. You are to prove that the picture is a portrait of a particular person—and you say it has eyes and a nose; so have all portraits. But where are the strokes that constitute identity, and determine the original?—There is no mention of Crockford’s or of the Missionary Society, of the Old Bailey or the Foundling Hospital; and if Ordonez is named, who gets rich by managing the affairs of the poor, this can never be meant for a satire on the blundering pedantry of your Somerset-house commissioners.—Here is no hint that can be tortured into a glance at fox-hunters, or game-preservers, of the society for promoting rural deans, at your double system of contradictory law, at special pleading at quarter-sessions,[C] at the technical rigour of your institutions, at the delay, chicanery, and expense of your judicial proceedings, at the refinement, ease, wit, gayety, and disinterested respect for merit, which, as every body knows, distinguish your social character; nothing is said of the annual meeting of chemists, geologists, and mathematicians, so beneficial to the real interests of science, by making a turn for tumid metaphor and the love of display necessary ingredients in the character of its votaries, extirpating from among them that simplicity which was so fatal an obstacle to the progress of Newton,—and turning the newly discovered joint of an antediluvian reptile into a theme of perennial and ambitious declamation; nothing is said about those discussions on baptismal fonts, those discoveries of trochees for iambics, or the invention of new potatoe boilers, which in the days of Hegel, Berryer, Schlosser, Savigny, and Cousin, are the glory and delight of England; in short, there is nothing to fix the allusions on which you rely on to distinguish them from those which might be applicable to Paris, Vienna, or Madrid.
There are no people less disposed than ourselves to detract from the merit of eminent French writers; they are always clear, elegant, and judicious; often acute, eloquent, and profound. There is no department of prose literature in which they do not equal us; there are many in which they are unquestionably our superiors. Unlike our authors, who, on those subjects which address the heart and reason jointly, adopt the style of a treatise on the differential calculus; and when pure science is their topic, lead us to suppose (if it were not for their disgusting pomposity) they had chosen for their model the florid confusion of a tenth-rate novel;—the French write on scientific subjects with simplicity and precision, and on moral, æsthetic, and theoretical questions with spirit, earnestness, and sensibility. Having said so much, we must however add, that a liberal and ingenious acknowledgment of error is not among the shining qualities of our neighbours. When a question is at issue in which they imagine the literary reputation of their country to be at stake, it is the dexterity of the advocate, rather than the candour of the judge, that we must look for in their dissertations. He who has argued on the guilt of Mary with a Scotchman, or the authenticity of the three witnesses with a newly made archdeacon, and with a squire smarting under an increasing poor-rate or the corn-laws, may form a just conception of the task he will undertake in endeavouring to persuade a French critic that his countrymen are in the wrong. The patient, if he does not, as it has sometimes happened in the cases to which we have referred, become “pugil et medicum urget,” is sure, as in those instances, to triumph over all the proofs which reason can suggest, or that the hellebore of nine Anticyras could furnish him with capacity to understand. Of this the work of M. Neufchateau is a striking proof. Truth is on one side, Le Sage’s claim to originality on the other; and he supports the latter: we do not say that he is willing, rather than abandon his client, to assert a falsehood; but we are sure that, in order to defend him, he is ready to believe absurdities.
The degree of moral guilt annexed to such conduct as that which we attribute to Le Sage, is an invidious topic, not necessarily connected with our subject, and upon which we enter with regret.
Lessing accused Wieland of having destroyed a palace, that he might build a cottage with its materials. However highly we may think of the original, we can hardly suppose such an expression applicable to Gil Blas. Of the name of the author whose toil Le Sage thus appropriated, charity obliges us to suppose that he was ignorant; but we should not forget that the case of Le Sage is not precisely that of a person who publishes, as an original, a translation from a printed work, as Wieland did with his copy of Rowe’s Lady Jane Grey, and Lord Byron with his copy of the most musical lines in Goethe. The offence of Le Sage more resembles that imputed (we sincerely believe without foundation) to Raphael; namely, that after the diligent study of some ancient frescoes, he suffered them to perish, in order to conceal his imitation. But we hasten to close these reflections, which tenderness to the friend and companion of our boyhood, and gratitude to him who has enlivened many an hour, and added so much to our stock of intellectual happiness, forbid us to prolong. Let those who feel that they could spurn the temptation, in comparison with which every other that besets our miserable nature is as dross—the praise yielded by a polished and fastidious nation to rare and acknowledged genius—denounce as they will the infirmity of Le Sage. But let them be quite sure, that instead of being above a motive to which none but minds of some refinement are accessible, they are not below it. Let them be sure that they do not take dulness for integrity, and that the virtue, proof to intellectual triumphs, and disdaining “the last infirmity of noble minds,” would not sink if exposed to the ordeal of a service of plate, or admission in some frivolous coterie. For ourselves we will only say, “Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.”
For these reasons, then, which depend on the nature of the thing, and which no testimony can alter—reasons which we cannot reject without abandoning all those principles which carry with them the most certain instruction, and are the surest guides of human life—we think the main fact contended for by M. Llorente, that is, the Spanish origin of Gil Blas, undeniable; and the subordinate and collateral points of his system invested with a high degree of probability; the falsehood of a conclusion fairly drawn from such premises as we have pointed out would be nearer akin to a metaphysical impossibility; and so long as the light of every other gem that glitters in a nation’s diadem is faint and feeble when compared with the splendour of intellectual glory, Spain will owe a debt of gratitude to him among her sons who has placed upon her brow the jewel which France (as if aggression for more material objects could not fill up the measure of her injustice towards that unhappy land) has kept so long, and worn so ostentatiously.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] So in Don Quixote the friars are described “Estando en estas razones, aslomaron por el camino dos Frayles de la Orden de san Benito, Cavalleros sobre dos Dromedarios, que no eran mas pequneas dos mulas en que venian.”
[B] It occurs, however, in Madame de Sevigné’s letters. But that most charming of letter-writers understood Spanish, which Anne of Austria had probably made a fashionable accomplishment at the court of France. The intrigue for which Vardes was exiled, shows, that to write in Spanish was an attainment common among the courtiers of Louis XIV.
[C] We call ourselves a practical people! A man incurred, a few months ago, an expense of £70, for saying that he was “ready,” instead of saying that he was “ready and willing” to do a certain act. The man’s name was Granger. Another unfortunate creature incurred costs to the amount of £3000, by one of the most ordinary proceedings in our courts, called a motion, of course, and usually settled for a guinea. A clergyman libelled two of his parishioners in a Bishop’s Court. The matter never came to be heard, and the expense of the written proceedings was upwards of £800! Can any system be more abominable than one which leads to such results?