Navy, was denounced and suppressed by the Liberal Ministry as an attempt to lower wages and flood the country with cheap boy-labour.* When the Labour party came to power in October last, one of its first actions was to promise a hearty co-operation with the trustees of the fund. A Government farm, already used for giving elementary agricultural training to Sydney lads was thrown open to the expected boy-immigrants; and the scheme is now in full working order.

The weakest point about the official Labour attitude towards immigration is that no one seems to be in a hurry. We will spend the money lavishly if necessary, they say, 'but we believe that, when once the lands are unlocked, immigrants will flock in unassisted.' The Federal Government will advertise, but considers actual assistance the States' concern; the States reply that the Federal authorities will handle the receipts of the land-tax, and might well spend them on immigration. Definite policies require definite understandings about co-operation, and these are still lacking to Labour. In this Mr Deakin's influence-quite ineffective with Labour since the Fusion of 1909-is sadly missed. Before he left office last year he had almost completed an arrangement with the progressive Victorian Ministry, by which State and Federal authorities would have been assigned definite and appropriate work in a joint immigration scheme; and he hoped that the other States would have then followed Victoria's lead. However, the New South Wales Labour Ministry has recently suggested to its Federal friends a somewhat similar plan of joint work; if that matures, Labour may eventually prove as sound on immigration as it is on direct methods of defence.

Meanwhile, the critic in London ought to remember three things: first, that Labour must be judged for good or ill by what it does, not by what its opponents allege it is going to do; secondly, that the official Labour attitude coincides almost exactly with that of the bulk of the voters; thirdly, that the existence within the Labour camp of a body of insurgents, controlled for the present by the caucus but very restive under control,

It is fair to say that in the last months of its existence the Liberal Ministry showed itself more friendly to the scheme.

hampers official action and is used by political enemies of the party to bias British opinion against Labour as a whole. But British opinion has no need to adopt local partisan standpoints. Its test should be the Imperial test--the effect of a party's administration on the Empire as a whole; and, judged by that test, the present rulers of the Commonwealth suffer nothing by comparison with their predecessors.

Regarding the third matter, Imperial Federation in any shape, there is little to be said at present. Despite Sir Joseph Ward's premature outburst, no party in any Dominion favours any scheme involving more than the establishment of an advisory council in its simplest form-a body of experts from the various parts of the Empire ready to supply information when needed to British Ministers concerned with Imperial affairs. Australian Labour is not prepared for anything beyond this; and in that attitude it fairly represents the general public feeling of the Commonwealth.

This article may seem to the reader too exclusively concerned with the views, the methods, and the actions of a single party in Australian politics. As an historical retrospect, it might justly incur that condemnation. The good work of other parties has been in some cases glanced at, in others neglected; the non-political side of Australian progress has gone almost unmentioned. But we did not set out to write an historical retrospect. We have aimed only at giving some intelligible account of the two forces-Mr Deakin and the Labour party—which have had most to do with the moulding of Australia during its first ten years as a nation. And we have given more space to Labour because that is the force which will have most to do with the moulding of the nation during the next ten years. Whether the solutions of both local and Imperial problems which are suggested here are right or wrong is a thing that every reader must decide for himself; the important point is that those are the probable solutions, under the conditions likely to exist in Australia for some time to come. If other solutions are desired, fresh influences must be brought to bear and new conditions established.

Art. 2.-GIL BLAS.

WALTER SCOTT, who craved the beatitude-the word is his own-that would attend the perusal of another book as entrancing as 'Gil Blas,' was on the side of the untutored public which knows nothing of technical classifications or of M. Brunetière's theory of the 'évolution des genres.' Lesage's great book, though scarcely answering to the exact technical definition of a picaresque novel-the biography of a picaro or rogue -belongs, nevertheless, by its external form, to the picaresque type of fiction; and Scott would certainly have admitted that its picaresqueness was very good of its kind; that it was, in fact, as picaresque as could be expected of a Frenchman who was conspicuously an 'honnête homme' and who signed himself bourgeois de Paris.' But in all likelihood he would have instantly added that it was not the 'picaresqueness' of 'Gil Blas' which has given that production its fame; and that, if Lesage's masterpiece has lived so long, and if it lives to-day with such a fresh and abundant life, this constant appeal has been made in spite of its resemblance to the Spanish picaresque prototype.

The application of the scientific method to literary criticism during the last generation has steadily tended to define works of art as 'documents' of their epoch, and at the same time to classify them according to their structural variations rather than to accept them wholly as sources of human pleasure. The novel of Lesage, for the purposes of classification, may be viewed as a picaresque novel, and it is interesting and legitimate to note that it is no doubt the best of its kind; yet there is equally little doubt that thousands of readers who do not know what the word 'picaresque' means have for several generations regarded Gil Blas' as simply the best of all novels, and that their reasons have been based on qualities quite independent of the mould into which it happened to be run. This is, in fact, the truth which these brief remarks are meant to set forth. In order to become a classic, and in order to hold its own among the books of the world, 'Gil Blas' has had to live down its picaresqueness. The book has survived, and become one of the great books, notwithstanding the characteristics

which seemed destined to confine it to the museum of antique literary forms.

Walter Scott's recognition of the supreme delightfulness of 'Gil Blas' has not been general among the critics; indeed, the sense of its intrinsic value as a definition of life must rather be placed to the credit of the uncritical public. Voltaire, referring to Lesage in his 'Siècle de Louis XIV,' limits his praise to the remark: 'His novel "Gil Blas" has survived because of the naturalness of the style.' The curtness and inadequacy of this remark are probably due rather to the fact that Voltaire did not see beyond the superficial traits of this novel, its general picaresque atmosphere, than, as has so often been asserted, to any malicious intent to decry a book in which he supposed himself to have been held up to ridicule. Joubert, whose delicacy was a hothouse fruit grown in the thin subsoil and the devitalised air in which he was compelled to live, corroborates Voltaire, while revealing his own prejudices-after all, is not the main interest of criticism the light it throws upon the critic?— in a characteristic utterance: Lesage's novels would appear to have been written in a café by a dominoplayer, after spending the evening at the play.' Evidently this is a long way from the 'beatitude' of Walter Scott, but it is nearer the point of view of Mr Warner Allen, who, while he notes that Gil Blas' has a conscience,' is ingeniously effective in arguing that the spirit of Gil Blas' is essentially picaresque-by which he means that realism and materialism are so predominantly its note that it must be classed well below 'Don Quixote,' where the heterogeneous picaresque material is beautifully fused by the imagination of an idealist. 'It is just because Lesage ignores the idealistic side of man,' Mr Allen says, that "Gil Blas" misses being a great creation.' On the other hand, La Harpe, who had read many books, but was no doubt the very opposite of a scientific critic of literature, praises Gil Blas' not merely,

The traditional view is, however, plausible enough, as Mr James Fitzmaurice-Kelly has shown in his introduction to the edition of 'Gil Blas' published in the World's Classics.' There can be no doubt as to Lesage having ridiculed Voltaire in two of his plays.

↑ In his remarkable general introduction to the Picaresque section of the Library of Early Novelists,' published by George Routledge and Sons.

as did Scott, for its entertainment, its agrément, but also for its moral inspiration; utile dulci, he insists, ought to be the device of this excellent book, forgetting that Lesage has himself written the precept of Horace on its title-page. C'est l'école du monde que "Gil Blas," La Harpe continues; and he remarks with singular felicity that Lesage in Gil Blas' has not fallen into that gratuitous profusion of minute detail which is now-adays taken to be truth.' This comment suggests the probability that the reproach addressed to Lesage as to his lack of idealism is one that La Harpe would be disinclined to accept; and that they who make it have other standards for judging a work of art than those of the public to whom it is addressed, or indeed than those of the artist himself, especially such an artist as Lesage, who in his Déclaration' to the reader says expressly: 'My sole aim has been to represent life as it is'; 'Je ne me suis proposé que de représenter la vie des hommes telle qu'elle est.'

6

Certain of Lesage's predecessors had already declared it to be their aim to write books which should be a wholesome reaction against the romanticism of the tales of chivalry that had so long delighted the taste of Europe. The sub-title of Alemán's famous novel, Guzmán de Alfarache,' was 'Atalaya de la Vida,' which Chapelain translated by 'Image' or 'Miroir de la Vie Humaine.' And long before Lesage, the author of 'I'Histoire Comique de Francion' used almost the identical terms of Alemán and Lesage in announcing his tale: 'Nous avons dessein de voir une image de la vie humaine, de sorte qu'il nous en faut montrer ici diverses pièces.' Francion, less picaresque than the hero of Alemán, was undoubtedly what he has been called by one of Lesage's biographers, M. Lintilhac, a direct precursor of Gil Blas; and there can be no question as to the importance of the influence exercised upon Lesage by Charles Sorel's admirable performance. But, however easily even a little erudition can discover possible prototypes of 'Gil Blas' in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century literature of both France and Spain— however picaresque, in a word, 'Gil Blas' may be, and whatever else it may be-its picaresqueness was obviously, for Lesage, not an end in itself, but merely a device for Vol. 215.-No. 429.