Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/65

Rh is a couplet the frankness of which has always recommended itself to me (though I like the "Excursion"); but, except for the rhyme, it has a fatal facility of application to other long poems. Heaven forbid that I should "with shadowed hint confuse" the faith in a British classic; but, ye gods, how men have gaped (in private) over "Childe Harold"!

"Gil Blas," though not a native classic, is included in the articles of the British literary faith, not as a matter of pious opinion, but de fide—a necessity of intellectual salvation. I remember an interview I once had with a boy of letters concerning this immortal work. He is a well-known writer now, but at the time I speak of he was only budding and sprouting in the magazines—a lad of promise, no doubt, but given, if not to kick against authority, to question it, and, what was worse, to question me about it, in an embarrassing manner. The natural affability of my disposition had caused him, I suppose, to treat me as his father confessor in literature; and one of the sins of omission he confided to me was in connection with the divine Le Sage.

"I say—about 'Gil Blas,' you know Bias [a great critic of that day] was saying last night that, if he were to be imprisoned for life with only two books to read, he would choose the Bible and 'Gil Blas.'"

"It is very gratifying to me," said I, wishing to evade my young friend, and also because I had no love for Bias, "that he should have selected the Bible, and all the more so since I should never have expected it of him."

"Yes, papa" (that is what the young dog was wont to call me, though he was no son of mine—far from it); "but about 'Gil Blas'? Is it really the next best book? And after he had read it say, ten times would he not have been rather sorry that he had not chosen—well, Shakespeare, for instance?"

The picture of Bias with a long white beard, the growth of twenty years, reading that tattered copy of "Gil Blas" in his cell, almost affected me to tears, but I made shift to answer gravely: "Bias is a professional critic, and persons of that class are apt to be a little dogmatic and given to exaggeration. But 'Gil Blas' is a great work. As a picture of the seamy side of human life, of its vices and its weaknesses at least, it is unrivaled. The archbishop—"

"Oh, I know that archbishop—well" interrupted my young tormentor. "I sometimes think, if it hadn't been for that archbishop, we should never perhaps have heard of 'Gil Blas.'"

"Tchut, tchut!" said I; "you talk like a child."

"But to read it all through, papa three times, ten times, for all one's life? Poor Mr. Bias!"

"It is a matter of opinion, my dear boy," I said. "Bias has this great advantage over you in literary matters, that he knows what he is talking about, and if he was quite sure—"