while most of these might be omitted, or
others substituted for them, without much or any loss, they exist
without prejudice to mere additions to themselves. As the excellent Mr.
Wall, sometime Professor of Logic at Oxford, and now with God, used to
say, "Gentlemen, I can conceive an elephant," so one may conceive a _Gil
Blas_, not merely in five instead of four, but in fifty or five hundred
volumes. But, on the other hand, it has that still different unity (of
which Aristotle does not seem to have thought highly, even if he thought
of it at all), that all these miscellaneous experiences do not merely
happen to a person with the same name--they happen to the same
person.[316] And they have themselves yet another unity, which I hardly
remember any critic duly insisting on and discussing, in the fact that
they all are possibly human accidents or incidents. Though he was a
native of one of the most idiosyncratic provinces of not the least
idiosyncratic country in Europe, Lesage is a citizen not of Brittany,
not of France, not of Europe even, but of the world itself, in far more
than the usual sense of cosmopolitanism. He has indeed coloured
background and costume, incident and even personage itself so deeply
with essence of "things of Spain," that, as has been said, the
Spaniards, the most jealous of all nationalities except the smaller
Celtic tribes, have claimed his work for themselves. Yet though Spain
has one of the noblest languages, one of the greatest literatures in
quality if not in bulk, one of the most striking histories, and one of
the most intensely national characters in the world, it is--perhaps for
the very reason last mentioned--as little cosmopolitan as any country,
and Lesage, as has been said, is inwardly and utterly cosmopolitan or
nothing.

At Paris, at Rome, at the Hague he's at home;

and though he seems to have known little of England, and, as most
Frenchmen of his time had reason to do, to have disliked us, he has
certainly never been anywhere more at home than in London. In fact--and
it bears out what has been said--there is perhaps no capital in Europe
where, in the two hundred years he has had to nationalise himself,
Lesage has been less at home than at Paris itself. The French are of
course proud of him in a way, but there is hardly one of their great
writers about whom they have been less enthusiastic. The technical, and
especially the neo-classically technical, shortcomings which have b