eteenth
century in England from Fielding to Scott, if not to Dickens. Now, I
suppose, that we are told to start with the axiom that even Fielding's
structure of humanity is a simple toy-like thing, how much more is
Lesage's? But for those of us who have not bowed the knee to foolish
modern Baals, "They reconciled us; we embraced, and we have since been
mortal enemies"; and the trout; and the soul of the licentiate; and Dr.
Sangrado; and the Archbishop of Granada--to mention only the most famous
and hackneyed matters--are still things a little larger, a little more
complex, a little more eternal and true, than webs of uninteresting
analysis told in phrase to which Marivaudage itself is golden and
honeyed Atticism.

Yet once more we can banish, with a joyful and quiet mind, a crowd of
idle fancies and disputes, apparently but not really affecting our
subjects. The myth of a direct Spanish origin for _Gil Blas_ is almost
as easily dispersible by the clear sun of criticism as the exaggeration
of the debt of the smaller book to Guevara. On the other hand, the
_general_ filiation of Lesage on his Spanish predecessors is undeniable,
and not worth even shading off and toning down. A man is not ashamed of
having good fathers and grandfathers, whose property he now enjoys,
before him in life; and why should he be in literature?

[Sidenote: Peculiarity of his work generally.]

Lesage's work, in fiction and out of it, is considerable in bulk, but it
is affected (to what extent disadvantageously different judges may judge
differently) by some of the peculiarities of the time which have been
already mentioned, and by some which have not. It is partly original,
partly mere translation, and partly also a mixture of the strangest
kind. Further, its composition took place in a way difficult to adjust
to later ideas. Lesage was not, like Marivaux, a professed and shameless
"_un_finisher," but he took a great deal of time to finish his
work.[310] He was not an early-writing author; and when he did begin, he
showed something of that same strange need of a suggestion, a
"send-off," or whatever anybody likes to call it, which appears even in
his greatest work. He began with the _Letters_ of Aristaenetus, which,
though perhaps they have been abused more than they deserve by people
who have never read them, and would never have heard of them if it had
not been for Alain Rene, are certainly not the things that most
scholars, with the whole ra