true that, in the last few clauses, plenty of ground has been
indicated for ascription of classicality in the best sense; and perhaps
Lesage himself has summed the whole thing up when, in the "Declaration"
of the author at the beginning of _Gil Blas_, he claims "to have set
before himself only the representation of human life as it is." He has
said it; and in saying and doing it he has said and done everything for
his merits as a novelist and his place in the history of the novel.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Marivaux--_Les Effets de la Sympathie (?)_]

The Archbishop of Sens, who had the duty of "answering" Marivaux's
"discourse of reception" into the Academy in the usual _aigre-doux_
manner, informed him, with Academic frankness and Archiepiscopal
propriety, that "in the small part of your work which I have run
through, I soon recognised that the reading of these agreeable romances
did not suit the austere dignity with which I am invested, or the purity
of the ideas which religion prescribes me." This was all in the game,
both for an Academician and for an Archbishop, and it probably did not
discompose the novelist much. But if his Grace had read _Les Effets de
la Sympathie_, and had chosen to criticise it, he might have made its
author (always supposing that Marivaux _was_ its author, which does not
seem to be at all certain) much more uncomfortable. Although there is
plenty of incident, it is but a dull book, and it contains not a trace
of "Marivaudage" in style. A hero's father, who dies of poison in the
first few pages, and is shown to have been brought round by an obliging
gaoler in the last few; a hero himself, who thinks he has fallen in love
with a beautiful and rich widow, playing good Samaritaness to him after
he has fallen in among thieves, but a page or two later really does fall
in love with a fair unknown looking languishingly out of a window; a
_corsaire_,[323] with the appropriate name of Turcamene, who is
robustious almost from the very beginning, and receives at the end a
fatal stab with his own poniard from the superfluous widow, herself also
fatally wounded at the same moment by the same weapon (an economy of
time, incident, and munitions uncommon off the stage); an intermediate
personage who, straying--without any earthly business there--into one of
those park "pavilions" which play so large a part in these romances,
finds a lady asleep on the sofa, with her hand invitin