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Israel, he nevertheless inspires in his reader a quick and sane recoil before the arbitrary injustice, or, at all events, the incredibility of the author's misanthropy. In literary art, in fact, the only way to convey the illusion of reality is to tell the average truth about the average man.

Lesage, like the Tolstoi of the good period, had the tact and good sense to perceive this. He does not make the unscientific and inartistic blunder of humiliating his heroes. Like a Balzac or a Tolstoi or a Henry James, he gives them their full value, takes them for all they are worth. The pretension that naturalism, because superficially true to a certain aspect of life, is realism in the complete sense of the word, is a view which Lesage in 'Gil Blas' triumphantly repudiates; and he differs from many playwrights of contemporary France, who appear to be so enamoured of caddishness as to regard its manifestations as pre-eminently worthy of presentation in the novel or on the stage. One of the ablest of Lesage's commentators has called him the Homer of naturalism: no neater phrase could be found to define his importance and his manner.

Nor is it the fault of Lesage if his immediate influence upon the literature of his time was perhaps not wholly what he would himself have wished it to be. It is a commonplace to note that Lesage helped to prepare in France that eighteenth century with which he was in so many respects out of sympathy. There was a whole side of Lesage that was out of touch with the modern world surrounding him. M. Faguet seems to me absolutely right as to this point. The spirit, the attitude of iesage are seventeenth-century-for, after all, the seventeenth century was realist while so eminently moralist; he believes in the superiority of the clear old form of expression; he abominates an affected style; he prefers natural utterance that everybody can understand to individual experiments in ingenious phraseology. Moreover, while not at all the conscious moralist, he is a moralist all the same; he has a certain generalising habit, the liking for large vistas, harmonious inclusive ranges of thought; his thought-scapes have the perfection and the proportions of a garden by Le Nôtre. But it is nevertheless certain that the immense success of Lesage as a realist, the fact that he made realism look so easy, constituted a terrible

incentive to imitation; and that, as a matter of fact, his example was just one of those which no writer could afford to follow who had not his marvellous good sense and his mental and moral poise. Without such moral balance and such good sense the would-be realist is almost certain to become addicted to the grosser forms of naturalism, to exercise, that is, his faculty of clear vision on special salient and picturesque, even salacious and perverse cases, rather than upon the types of the average world with which average men are familiar. Thus there can be no doubt that Lesage's unconcern for positive edification, his indifference to matters of conscience, was a trait of the eighteenth century, and a trait for which he may to a certain extent be held responsible. It was inevitable that he should find imitators, and that, in this sense, he may be said to open the way to a Crébillon fils and a Laclos, even to a Louvet, for whom he would have refused to be responsible, and to prepare an eighteenth century with which there is every reason to suppose he would have become utterly out of sympathy, not merely as a man, but as an artist in letters.

It remains to consider Gil Blas' as a work of literary art. In style it is one of the most perfect examples of narrative prose in the world, comparable for limpidity, ease, and precision, with that of Cervantes in Don Quixote.' With regard to its composition, it is noticeable that the novel begins at the same pitch of calm lucidity which is to characterise it to the end. The reader feels that the promise of the author in his 'Declaration,' 'I have merely undertaken to represent life as it is,' is likely to be kept. Lesage speaks with authority. The artists who inspire confidence with their very first stroke are not numerous. They belong to the aristocracy of the masters. What do such certainty and distinction imply? They mean that the product is the fruit of a mature intelligence; that the artist, be he sculptor, writer, or painter, has not undertaken to express until his mind is, as we say, thoroughly made up as to the nature of its content, nor until he is serenely master of the means at his disposal; that, in a word, he knows his business. In the case of Lesage it is peculiarly significant that, when he published the first part of Gil Blas' in 1715, he was

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already forty-seven years of age; that the second part did not appear until 1724, nine years later; and that he was already an old gentleman with a family of boys, one of whom had entered the Church, when he ended his lifework, by the publication of the third part, in 1735. Gil Blas,' in short, is the product of the maturity of one of the keenest observers that ever looked out upon the spectacle of things. The broad good-humoured gaiety of the earlier book, which vibrates with a picaresque lilt, is shaded gradually down, in the second volume, into a finer, serener, more intellectual irony. This change betrays the natural evolution in the author's interests and curiosities during the period reaching from his fortyseventh to his sixty-seventh year. The gaiety of the six books of the first part is to be contrasted with the soberer, more reflective spirit of the tale as it proceeds. We seem to be suiting our pace to the increasingly graver temper of a man whose knowledge of life has become richer, his insight keener, his heart more tolerant and generous. With the steady elimination of the picaresque element the novel becomes more and more an inclusive criticism of life. The author seems to be brooding over his pages with a tenderer care, as if he were more and more conscious of the significance, the magnificence even, of his task.

It is one of the results of this long gestation that 'Gil Blas' has become a book of world-wide popularity. In the history of letters it has been an inexhaustible source of energy. It inspired the realistic novel. From Smollett and Marivaux to Dickens and Zola, and even to an Anatole France and to a Pio Baroja, Lesage has been the avowed or unavowed model of those writers who have been passionately enamoured of life, and irrepressibly compelled to express it. The influence of Lesage on the author, for instance, of 'Le Rouge et le Noir' and of La Chartreuse de Parme'-perhaps particularly on the Stendhal of the 'Chartreuse de Parme-seems incontestable. In August 1804, Beyle, writing to his sister Pauline, recommends her to read Gil Blas' in order to learn to know the world, and cites the famous anecdote of the Archbishop of Granada's sermons. In April 1805, he promises to bring her the book. In another undated letter to his sister, Beyle writes: the most accurate

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picture of human nature as it is, in the France of the eighteenth century, is still the book of Lesage, "Gil Blas." Meditate well this excellent work.' And finally, in his Journal, under the date of 10 Floréal, an XIII, 1805,' Beyle notes his intention to cure himself of romanticism, and to learn to judge men as they are, by re-reading a certain number of books, among which he mentions Beaumarchais, the tales and 'La Pucelle' of Voltaire, Chamfort, and 'Gil Blas.' That is to say, at the most impressionable period of his intellectual life Beyle read and re-read 'Gil Blas'; a fact which a discerning critic might easily guess, as to the truth of which, indeed, such a critic would feel an absolute conviction, and which the documents cited appear to leave beyond a doubt. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to pretend that but for Gil Blas,' Beyle would not have been Stendhal; but I may be permitted to quote the following passage from a private letter of M. Paul Arbelet, the editor of Stendhal's 'Journal d'Italie':

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'Votre hypothèse me paraît très séduisante. Il y a sans aucune doute quelque parenté intellectuelle entre Lesage et Stendhal, tous deux curieux d'observation morale, tous deux juges sans illusions des faiblesses humaines, mais point misanthropes, car ils s'indignent peu des vices ou des ridicules, qui les amusent plutôt ou les intéressent. D'ailleurs l'un et l'autre manquent d'imagination et de poésie. Je comprends donc très bien que vous ayez eu l'idée d'une influence de Lesage sur Stendhal.'

Furthermore, while Lesage is all this, the fountainhead of a great literary current, he is at the same time, as a moralist, in the sanest Latin and French tradition, that which is marked, in successive epochs, by the serene temper of a Horace, by the gay science, the pantagruelism of a Rabelais, by the irony of a Beaumarchais, who 'se hâta de rire de tout, de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer,' and finally by the tranquil mansuetude of a Renan : observers, one and all, who, after having told the towers of all the citadels of science, became amusedly aware that the only really absolute truth in the world is that all things are relative.

WM. MORTON FULLERTON,

Art. 3.-THE REAL GAMBETTA.

1. Après l'Abandon de la Revanche. By Madame Adam. Paris Lemerre, 1910.

2. Gambetta et l'Alsace-Lorraine. By Henri Galli. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1911.

3. Kiel et Tanger. By C. Maurras.

Librairie Nationale, 1910.

4. Bismarck et la France.

Paris: Nouvelle

Paris:

By J. Bainville.

Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1907.

5. Anhang zu den Gedanken und Erinnerungen von Otto Fürst von Bismarck. Two vols. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1901. 6. De la Paix de Francfort à la Conférence d'Algésiras. By A. Mévil. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1909. 7. Histoire de la France contemporaine. By Gabriel Hanotaux. Four vols. Paris: Combet, 1903-9. English translation. Four vols. London: Constable, 1903–9. And other works.

WAS Gambetta a great man? Fifteen years ago, nine Frenchmen out of ten, and ninety-nine foreigners in a hundred who had heard his name, would have answered, yes; he had been a great patriot, and the champion of liberty; and, in spite of his political failures, he would have been a great statesman if death had not cut short his career. Some people, it is true, accused him of having attitudinised during the war of 1870-71; and a greater number held him responsible for the state of confusion in which France has been more or less continuously since the definite establishment of the Republic. But these were uniformly political opponents, embittered by political hatred; their verdict did not count. A subtler power of analysis would distinguish in Gambetta the southern rhetorician, with a quick imagination and hot blood in his veins, from the nonchalant egoist whom his interest guided unconsciously in everything with a truly Italian flexibility of method. This reading appeared in a few historical memoirs, but it was not popular. With the masses, Gambetta remained a hero and the founder of a political system which, in spite of its present shortcomings, was sure to result in an extension of the general welfare.

It dawned gradually on the clear-headed that Gambetta's republic was an unconscionable time maturing,

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