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Updated: June 25, 2025
She wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the caste of professional-man's-wife. She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack, at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident, his foxy mustache was picaresque.
It may be urged that The Bible in Spain disproves these conclusions; but The Bible in Spain was a peculiar book. It was a chronicle of Christian enterprise served up with sauce picaresque. It pleased and astonished everyone, especially those who had grown a little weary of godly missioners.
But in every one of these qualities 'Huckleberry Finn' is superior to 'Gil Blas. Le Sage set the model of the picaresque novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is richer than the French deeper, finer, stronger.
But then there was Cervantes, starving, but straight; he deals us some hard knocks in that second part of his Quixote. Then there were some of the writers of the picaresque novels. No, all literary men are not lickspittles, whether in Italy or Spain, or, indeed, upon the Continent; it is only in England that all—’ ‘Come,’ said I, ‘mind what you are about to say of English literary men.’
Philippe Desmahis was at work before a pigeon-cote in the picaresque manner of Callot and Duplessis. Old Brotteaux who piqued himself on imitating the Flemings, was drawing a cow with infinite care. Élodie was sketching a peasant's hut, while her friend Julienne, who was a colourman's daughter, set her palette.
Veal, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Journal of the Plague Year are such mixtures of fact, fiction, and credulity that they defy classification; while other so-called "novels," like Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, are but, little better than picaresque stories, with a deal of unnatural moralizing and repentance added for puritanical effect.
In this way is constructed the type of story known as picaresque, because in Spain, where the type was first developed, the hero was usually a picaro, or rogue. The narrative expedient in such stories is merely to select a hero capable of adventure, to fling him loose into the roaring and tremendous world, and to let things happen to him one after another.
But that the objection to Defoe as the true and only begetter of the Novel lies in his failure, in his greatest story, to center the interest in man as part of the social order and as human soul, is shown by the fact that his less known, but remarkable, story "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the degenerate woman.
Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett and Fielding? It took me days of talk with the gang boasting and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch.
But his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare Ferdinand Fathom with Jonathan Wild: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it.
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