Walter Scott’s recognition of the supreme delightfulness of Gil Blas has not been general among the critics; indeed, the sense of its intrinsic value as a definition of life must rather be placed to the credit of the uncritical public.
Voltaire, referring to Lesage in his “Siècle de Louis XIV,” limits his praise to the remark : “His novel Gil Blas has survived because of the naturalness of the style.
” The curtness and inadequacy of this remark are probably due rather to the fact that Voltaire did not see beyond the superficial traits of this novel, its general picaresque atmosphere, than, as has so often been asserted, to any malicious intent to decry a book in which he supposed himself to have been held up to ridicule.
[The traditional view is, however, plausible enough, as Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly has shown in his introduction to the edition of Gil Blas published in the “World’s Classics.
” There can be no doubt as to Lesage having ridiculed Voltaire in two of his plays.] Joubert, whose delicacy was a hothouse fruit grown in the thin subsoil and the devitalised air in which he was compelled to live, corroborates Voltaire, while revealing his own prejudices after all, is not the main interest of criticism the light it throws upon the critic? in a characteristic utterance : “Lesage’s novels would appear to have been written in a cafed by a domino-player, after spending the evening at the play
.” Evidently this is a long way from the “beatitude” of Walter Scott, but it is nearer the point of view of Mr. Warner Allen, who, while he notes in his remarkable General Introduction to his edition of Celestine in the Picaresque Section of the “Library of Early Novelists,” to which this volume belongs, that Gil Blas “has a conscience,” is ingeniously effective in arguing that the spirit of Gil Blas is essentially picaresque by which he means that realism and materialism are so predominantly its note that it must be classed well below “Don Quixote,” where the heterogeneous picaresque material is beautifully fused by the 1magination of an idealist. “It is just because Lesage ignores the idealistic side of man,”
Mr. Allen says, “that Gil Blas misses being a great creation.” On the other hand, La Harpe, who had read many books, but was no doubt the very opposite of a scientific critic of literature, praises Gil Blas not merely, as did Scott, for its entertainment, its argument, but also for its moral inspiration; utile dulci, he insists, ought to be the device of this excellent book, forgetting that Lesage has himself written the precept of Horace on its title-page. “C’est l’�cole du monde que Gil Blas,” La Harpe continues; and he remarks with singular felicity that
Lesage in Gil Blas “has not fallen into that gratuitous profusion of minute detail which is nowadays taken to be truth.
This comment suggests the probability that the reproach addressed to Lesage as to his lack of idealism is one that La Harpe would be disinclined to accept; and that they who make it have other standards for judging a work of art than those of the public to whom it is addressed, or indeed than those of the artist himself, especially such an artist as Lesage, who in his “Declaration” to the reader says expressly:
“My sole aim has been to represent life as it is” : “Je ne me suis proposed que de represented la vie des hommes telle qu’elle est.”
