een
pointed out may have had something to do with this; but the
cosmopolitanism has perhaps more.

[Sidenote: And its adoption of the _homme sensuel moyen_ fashion.]

For us Lesage occupies a position of immense importance in the history
of the French novel; but if we were writing a history of the novel at
large it would scarcely be lessened, and might even be relatively
larger. He had come to it perhaps by rather strange ways; but it is no
novelty to find that conjunction of road and goal. The Spanish
picaresque romance was not in itself a very great literary kind; but it
had in it a great faculty of _emancipation_. Outside the drama[317] it
was about the first division of literature to proclaim boldly the
refusal to consider anything human as alien from human literary
interest. But, as nearly always happens, it had exaggerated its
protests, and become sordid, merely in revolt from the high-flown
non-sordidness of previous romance. Lesage took the principle and
rejected the application. He dared, practically for the first time, to
take the average man of unheroic stamp, the _homme sensuel moyen_ of a
later French phrase, for his subject. _Gil Blas_ is not a virtuous
person,[318] but he is not very often an actual scoundrel.[319] (Is
there any of us who has never been a scoundrel at all at all?) He is
clever after his fashion, but he is not a genius; he is a little bit of
a coward, but can face it out fairly at a pinch; he has some luck and
ill-luck; but he does not come in for _montes et maria_, either of gold
or of misery. I have no doubt that the comparison of _Gil Blas_ and _Don
Quixote_ has often been made, and it would be rather an _excursus_ here.
But inferior as Lesage's work is in not a few ways, it has, like other
non-quintessential things, much more virtue as model and pattern.
Imitations of _Don Quixote_ (except Graves's capital book, where the
following is of the freest character) have usually been failures. It is
hardly an extravagance to say that every novel of miscellaneous
adventure since its date owes something, directly or indirectly, to _Gil
Blas_.

One of the "faults"--it must be understood that between "faults" with
inverted commas and faults without them there is a wide and sometimes an
unbridgeable gulf--lies in the fact that the book is after all not much
more of a whole, in any sense but that noted above, than _Le Diable
Boiteux_ itself. The innumerable incidents are to a very large extent