The novels, romances and writings of Alphonse Daudet

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II

Alphonse Daudet was born in 1840, and it was at NJmes that he first began to observe mankind; and he has described his birthplace and his boyhood in " Little What's-his-name," a novel even richer in autobiographical revelation than is " David Copperfield." His father was a manufacturer whose business was not prosperous and who was forced at last to remove with the whole family to Lyons in the vain hope of doing better in the larger town. After reading the account of this parent's peculiarities in M. Ernest Daudet's book, we are not surprised that the aiifairs of the family did not improve, but went from bad to worse. Alphonse Daudet suffered bitterly in these years of desperate struggle, but he gained an understanding of the conditions of mercantile life, to be serviceable later in the composition of "Fromont and Risler."

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When he was sixteen he secured a place as pion in a boarding school in the C6vennes, — a pion is a poor devil of a youth hired to keep watch on the boys. How painful this position was to the young poet can be read indirectly in " Little What's-his-name," but more explicitly in the history of that story, printed now in "Thirty Years of Paris." From this remote prison he was rescued by his elder brother, Ernest, who was trying to make his way in Paris and who sent for Alphonse as soon as he had been engaged to help an old gentleman in writing his memoirs. The younger brother has described his arrival in Paris, and his first dress-coat and his earliest literary acquaintances. Ernest's salary was seventy-five francs a month, and on this the two brothers managed to live ; no doubt fifteen dollars went further in Paris in 1857 than they will in 1899.

In those days of privation and ambition Daudet's longing was to make himself famous as a poet ; and when at last, not yet twenty years old, he began his career as a man of letters it was by the publication of a volume of verse, just as his fellow-novelists, M. Paul Bourget and Signor Gabriele d'Annunzio have severally done. Immature as juvenile lyrics are likely to be, these early rhymes of Daudet's have a flavor of their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is more naturally a poet than most modern literators who possess the accomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literary hfe, but who lack a spontaneous

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impulse toward rhythm. It may even be suggested that his little poems are less artificial than most French verse ; they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped in numbers ; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously acquired. His lyric note, although not keen and not deep, is heard again and again in his novels, and it sustains some of the most graceful and tender of his short stories, — " The Death of the Dauphin," for instance, and the "Sous-pr^fet in the Fields."

Daudet extended poetry to include playmaking ; and alone or with a friend he attempted more than one little piece in rhyme — tiny plays of a type familiar enough at the Od^on. He has told us how the news of the production of one of these poetic dramas came to him afar in Algiers whither he had been sent because of a weakness of the lungs, threatening to become worse in the gray Parisian winter. Other plays of his, some of them far more important than this early effort, were produced in the next few years. The most ambitious of these was the "Woman of Aries," which he had elaborated from a touching short story and for which Bizet composed incidental music as beautiful and as overwhelming as that prepared by Mendelssohn for the " Midsummer Night's Dream."

No one of Daudet's dramatic attempts was really successful; not the "Woman of Aries," which is less moving in the theatre than in its briefer narrative form, not even the latest of them all, the xvi Alp house Daudet

freshest and the most vigorous, the " Struggle for Life," with its sinister figure of Paul Astier taken over from the " Immortal." Apparently, with all his desire to write for the stage, Daudet must have been inadequately endowed with the dramaturgic faculty, that special gift of playmaking which many a poet lacks and many a novelist, but which the humblest playwright must needs have and which all the great dramatists have possessed abundantly in addition to their poetic power.

Perhaps it was the unfavorable reception of his successive dramas which is responsible for the chief of Daudet's lapses from the kindliness with which he treats the characters that people his stories. He seems to have kept hot a grudge against the theatre : and he relieves his feelings by taking it out of the stage-folk he introduces into his novels. To actors and actresses he is intolerant and harsh. What is factitious and self-overvaluing in the Provencal type, he understood and he found it easy to pardon ; but what was factitious and self-overvaluing in the player type, he would not understand and he refused to pardon. And here he shows in strong contrast with a successful dramatist, M. Ludovic Hal6vy, whose knowledge of the histrionic temperament is at least as wide as Daudet's and whose humor is as keen, but whose judgment is softened by the grateful memory of many victories won by the united effort of the author and the actor.

Through his brother's influence, Alp honse Daudet

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was appointed by the Duke de Morny to a semisinecure; and he has recorded how he told his benefactor before accepting the place that he was a Legitimist and how the Duke smilingly retorted that the Empress was also. Although it was as a poet that Daudet made his bow in the world of letters, his first appearance as a dramatist was not long delayed thereafter ; and he soon came forward also as a journalist, — or rather as a contributor to the papers. While many of the articles he prepared for the daily and weekly press were of ephemeral interes't only, as the necessity of journalism demands, to be forgotten forty-eight hours after they were printed, not a few of them were sketches having more than a temporary value. Parisian newspapers are more hospitable to literature than are the newspapers of New York or of London ; and a goodly proportion of the young Southerner's journalistic writing proved worthy of preservation.

It has been preserved for us in three volumes of short stories and sketches, of fantasies and impressions. Not all the contents of the " Letters from my Mill," of the "Monday Tales" and of "Artists' Wives," as we have these collections now, were written in these early years of Daudet' s Parisian career, but many of them saw the light before 1870, and what has been added since conforms in method to the work of his 'prentice days. No doubt the war with Prussia enlarged his outlook on life; and there is more depth in the satires this conflict suggested and more pathos xviii Alphonse Daudet.

in the pictures it evoked. The "Last Lesson," for example, that simple vision of the old French^ schoolmaster taking leave of his Alsatian pupils, has a symbolic breath not easy to match in the livelier tales written -before the surrender at S^dan ; and in the " Siege of Berlin " there is a vibrant patriotism far more poignant than we can discover in any of the playful apologues published before the war. He had had an inside view of the Second Empire, he could not help seeing its hollowness, and he revolted against the selfishness of its servants ; no single chapter of M. Zola's splendid and terrible "Downfall" contains a more damning indictment of the leaders of the imperial army than is to be read in Daudet' s "Game of Billiards."

The short story, whether in prose or in verse, is a literary form in which the French have ever displayed an easy mastery; and from Daudet's three volumes it would not be difficult to select half-a-dozen little masterpieces. The Provengal tales lack only rhymes to stand confessed as poesy ; and many a reader may prefer these first flights before Daudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The "Pope's Mule," for instance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy.? And the "Elixir of Father Gaucher," what could be more naively ironic .' Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the Church; and these tales bristle with jibes at ecclesiastical dignitaries ; but his stroke is never

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malignant and there is no barb to his shaft nor poison on the tip.

Scarcely inferior to the war-stories or to the Provencal sketches are certain vignettes of the capital, swift silhouettes of Paris, glimpsed by an unforgetting eye, the "Last Book," for one, in which an unlovely character is treated with kindly contempt; and for another, the "Book-keeper," the most Dickens-like of Daudet's shorter pieces, yet having a literary modesty Dickens never attained. The alleged imitation of the British novelist by the French may be left for later con sideration ; but it is possible now to note that in the earlier descriptive chapters of the " Letters from my Mill " one may detect a certain similar ity of treatment and attitude, not to Dickens but to two of the masters on whom Dickens modelled himself. Goldsmith and Irving. The scene in the diligence, when the baker gently pokes fun at the poor fellow whose wife is intermittent in her fidelity, is quite in the manner of the "Sketch Book."

There is the same freshness and fertility in the collection called " Artists' Wives " as in the "Letters from my Mill," and the "Monday Tales," but not the same playfulness and fun. They are severe studies, all of them; and they all illustrate the truth of Bagehot's saying that a man's mother might be his misfortune, but his wife was his fault. It is a rosary of marital infelicities that Daudet has strung for us in this vol-

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ume, and in every one of them the husband is expiating his blunder. With ingenious variety the author rings the changes on one theme, on the sufferings of the ill-mated poet or painter or sculptor, despoiled of the sympathy he craves, and shackled even in the exercise of his art. And the picture is not out of drawing, for Daudet can see the wife's side of the case also; he can appreciate her bewilderment at the ugly duckling whom it is so difficult for her to keep in the nest. The women have made shipwreck of their lives too, and they are companions in misery, if not helpmeets in understanding. This is perhaps the saddest of all Daudet's books, the least relieved by humor, the most devoid of the gaiety which illumines the "Letters from my Mill" and the first and second " Tartarin " volumes. But it is also one of the most veracious; it is life itself firmly grasped and honestly presented.

It is not matrimonial incongruity at large in all its shifting aspects that Daudet here considers; it is only the married unhappiness of the artist, whatever his mode of expression, and whichever of the muses he has chosen to serve; it is only the wedded life of the man incessantly in search of the ideal, and never relaxing in the strain of his struggle with the inflexible material from which he must shape his vision of existence. Not only in this book, but in many another has Daudet shown that he perceives the needs of the artistic temperament, its demands, its limitations

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and its characteristics. There is a playwright in "Rose and Ninette;" there is a painter in the " Immortal ; " there is an actor in " Fromont and Risler;" there are a sculptor, a poet, and a novelist on the roll of the heroine's lovers in " Sapho. " Daudet handles them gently always, unless they happen to belong to the theatre. Toward the stage-folk he is pitiless ; for all other artists he has abundant appreciation; he is not blind to their little weaknesses, but these he can forgive even though he refuses to forget ; he is at home with them. He is never patronizing, as Thackeray is, who also knows them and loves them. Thackeray's attitude is that of a gentleman born to good society, but glad to visit Bohemia, because he can speak the language; Daudet's is that of a man of letters who thinks that his fellow-artists are really the best society.

III

Not with pictures of artists at home did Daudet conquer* his commanding position in literature, not with short stories, not with plays, not with verses. These had served to make him known to the inner circle of lovers of literature who are quick to appreciate whatever is at once new and true; but they did not help him to break through the crust and to reach the hearts of the broad body of readers who care little for the xxii Alphonse Daudet.

delicacies of the season, but must ever be fed on strong meat. When the latest of the three volumes of short stories was published, and when the " Woman of Aries " was produced, the transformation was complete: the poet had developed into a veritist, without ceasing to be a poet, and the Provencal had become a Parisian. His wander-years were at an end, and he had made a happy marriage. '' Lucky in the risky adventure of matrimony, as in so many others, he chanced upon a woman who was congenial, intelligent and devoted.^and who became almost a collaborator in all his subsequent works.

His art was ready for a larger effort; it was ripe for a richer fruitage. Already had he made more than one attempt at a long story, but this was before his powers had matured, and before he had come to a full knowedge of himself. " Little What 's-his-name," as he himself has confessed, lacks perspective ; it was composed too soon after the personal experiences out of which it was made, — before Time had put the scenes in proper proportion and before his hand was firm in its stroke. " Robert Helmont " is the journal of an observer who happens also to be a poet and a patriot ; but it has scarcely substance enough to warrant calling it a story. Much of the material used in the making of these books was very good indeed; but the handling was a little uncertain, and the result is not quite satisfactory, charming as both of them are, with the seductive grace

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which is Daudet's birthright and his trademark In his brief tales he had shown that he had thi story-telling faculty, the ability to project character, the gift of arousing interest ; but it remained for him to prove that he possessed also the main strength requisite to carry him through the long labor of a full-grown novel. It is not by gentle stories like " Robert Helmont " and " Little What 's-his-name " that a novelist is promoted to the front rank ; and after he had written these two books he remained where he was before, in the position of a promising young author.

The promise was fulfilled by the publication of " Fromont and Risler, " — not the best of his novels, but the earliest in which his full force was displayed. Daudet has told us how this was planned originally as a play, how the failure of the "Woman of Aries" led him to relinquish the dramatic form, and how the supposed necessities of the stage warped the logical structure of the story, turning upon the intrigues of the young wife the interest which should have been concentrated upon the partnership, the business rivalry, the mercantile integrity, whence the novel derived its novelty. The falsifying habit of thrusting marital infidelity into the foreground of fiction when the theme itself seems almost to exclude any dwelling on amorous misadventure, Daudet yielded to only this once; and this is one reason why a truer view of Parisian life can be found in his pages than in those of any of his competitors.

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and why his works are far less monotonous than theirs.

He is not squeamish, as every reader of "Sapho" can bear witness; but he does not wantonly choose a vulgar adultery as the staple of his stories. French fiction, ever since the tale of " Tristan and Yseult " was first told, has tended to be a poem of love triumphant over every obstacle, even over honor ; and Daudet is a Frenchman with French ideas about woman and love and marriage; he is not without his share of Gallic salt; but he is too keen an observer not to see that there are other things in life than illicit wooings, — business, for example, and politics, and religion, — important factors all of them in our complicated modern existence. At the root of him Daudet had a steadfast desire to see life as a whole and to tell the truth about it unhesitatingly ; and this is a characteristic he shares only with the great masters of fiction, — essentially veracious, every one of them.

Probably Dickens, frequently as he wrenched the facts of life into conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he also was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how he came to write "Fromont and Risler " that he discusses the accusation that he was an imitator of Dickens, — an accusation which seems absurd enough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we can compare their complete works. Daudet re-

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cords that the charge was brought against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, and he explains that any likeness that may exist is due not to copying but to kinship of spirit. " I have deep in my heart, " he says, " the same love Dickens has for the maimed and the poor, for the children brought up in all the deprivation of great cities. " This pity for the disinherited, for those that have had no chance in life, is not the only similarity between the British novelist and the French; there is also the peculiar combination of sentiment and humor. Daudet is not so bold as Dickens, not so robust, not so overmastering ; but he is far more discreet, far truer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carry him into caricature, nor his sentiment slop over into sentimentality.

Even the minor French novelists strive for beauty of form, and would be ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the British story-tellers. A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recently remarked acutely that " Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of construction. Where, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he constructs too well, that is to say, on the stage model, we see what a gain it was to him to have before his eyes the Paris stage of the Second Empire, instead of that of London in the earlier Victorian time." Where Dickens emulated the farces and the melodramas of forgotten British playwrights, Daudet was influenced rather by the xxvi Alphonse Daudet.

virile dramas of Dumas fits and Augier. But in " Fromont and Risler," not only is the plot a trifle stagy, but the heroine herself seems almost a refugee of the footlights ; exquisitely presented as Sidonie is, she fails quite to captivate or convince, perhaps because her sisters have been seen so often before in this play and in that. And now and again even in his later novels we discover that Daudet has needlessly achieved the adroit arrangement of events so useful in the theatre and not requisite in the library. In " The Nabob," for example, it is the " long arm of coincidence " that brings Paul de G^ry to the inn on the Riviera, and to the very next room therein at the exact moment when Jenkins catches up with the fleeing F61icia.

Yet these lapses into the arbitrary are infrequent after all ; and as " Fromont and Risler " was followed first by one and then by another novel, the evil influence of theatrical conventionalism disappears. Daudet occasionally permits himself an underplot; but he acts always on the principle he once formulated to his son: "every book is an organism ; if it has not its organs in place, it dies, and its corpse is a scandal."* Sometimes, as in " Fromont and Risler," he starts at the moment when the plot thickens, returning soon to make clear the antecedents of the characters first shown in action; and sometimes, as in "Sapho," he begins right at the beginning and goes straight through to the end. But, whatever his method,

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there is never any doubt as to the theme; and the essential unity is always apparent. This severity of design in no way limits the variety of the successive acts of his drama.

While a novel of Balzac's is often no more than an analysis of character, and while a novel of Zola's is a massive epic of human endeavor, a novel of Daudet' s is a gallery of pictures, brushed in with the sweep and certainty of a master-hand, — portraits, landscapes with figures, marines, battlepieces, bits of genre, views of Paris. And the views of Paris outnumber the others, and almost outvalue them also. Mr. Henry James has noted that "The Nabob" is "full of episodes which are above all pages of execution, triumphs of translation. The author has drawn up a list of the Parisian solemnities, and painted the portrait, or given a summary, of each of them. The opening day at the Salon, a funeral at Pere la Chaise, a debate in the Chamber of Deputies, the premihe of a new play at a favorite theatre, furnish him with so many opportunities for his gymnastics of observation." And "The Nabob " is only a little more richly decorated than the "Immortal," and "Numa Roumestan," and "Kings in Exile."

These pictures, these carefully wrought masterpieces of rendering are not lugged in, each for its own sake; they are not outside of the narrative; they are actually part of the substance of the story. Daudet excels in describing, and every artist is prone to abound in the sense of his supexxviii Alphonse Daudet.

riority. As the French saying puts it, a man has always the defects of his qualities; yet Daudet rarely obtrudes his descriptions, and he generally uses them to explain character and to set off or bring out the moods of his personages. They are so swift that I am tempted to call them flashlights; but photographic is just what they are not, for they are artistic in their vigorous suppression of the unessentials ; they are never gray or cold or hard; they vibrate with color and tingle with emotion.

And just as a painter keeps filling his sketchbooks with graphic hints for elaboration later, so Daudet was indefatigable in note-taking. He explains his method in his paper of " Fromont and Risler ; " how he had for a score of years made a practice of jotting down in little note-books not only his remarks and his thoughts, but also a rapid record of what he had heard with his ears ever on the alert, and what he had seen with those tireless eyes of his. Yet he never let the dust of these note-books choke the life out of him. Every one of his novels was founded on fact, — plot, incidents, characters and scenery.

He used his imagination to help him to see; he used it also to peer into and behind the mere facts. All that he needed to invent was a connecting link now and again ; and it may as well be admitted at once that these mere inventions are sometimes the least satisfactory part of his stories. The two young men in "The Nabob," for

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instance, whom Mr. Henry James found it difficult to tell apart, the sculptor-painter in the " Immortal," the occasional other characters which we discover to be made up, lack the individuality and the vitality of figures taken from real life by a sympathetic effort of interpretative imagination. Delobelle, Gardinois, "all the personages of 'Fromont^ have lived," Daudet declares ; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinois he gave pain to one he loved, but he " could not suppress this type of egotist, aged and terrible."

Since the beginning of the art of story-telling, the narrators must have gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing ; and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist has stolen his characters readymade, — filching them from nature's shop-window, without so much as a by-your-leave. Daudet is bold in committing these larcenies from life and frank in confessing them, — far franker than Dickens, who tried to squirm out of the charge that he had put Landor and Leigh Hunt unfairly into fiction. Perhaps Dickens was bolder than Daudet, if it is true that he drew Micawber from his own father, and Mrs. Nickleby from his own mother. Daudet was taxed with ingratitude that he had used as the model of Mora, the Duke de Morny, who had befriended him; and he defended himself by declaring that he thought the duke would find no fault with the way Mora had been presented. But a great

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artist has never copied his models slavishly; he has utilized them in the effort to realize to his own satisfaction what he has already imagined. Daudet maintained to his son that those who were without imagination cannot even observe accurately. Invention alone, mere invention, an inferior form of mental exercise, suffices to provide a pretty fair romantic tale, remote from the facts of every-day life, but only true imagination can sustain a realistic novel where every reader's experience qualifies him to check off the author's progress, step by step.

IV

It would take too long — although the task would be amusing — to call the roll of Daudet's novels written after "Fromont and Risler" had revealed to him his own powers, and to discuss what fact of Parisian history had been the starting point of each of them and what notabilities of Paris had sat for each of the chief characters. Mr. Henry James, for instance, has seen it suggested that Felicia Ruys is intended as a portrait of Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt ; M. Zola, on the other hand, denies that Felicia Ruys is Mme. Sarah- Bernhardt and hints that she is rather Mme. Judith Gautier. Daudet himself refers to the equally absurd report that Gambetta was the original of Numa Roumestan, — a report over which

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the alleged subject and the real author laughed together. Daudet's own attitude toward his creations is a little ambiguous or at least a little inconsistent ; in one paper he asserts that every character of his has had a living original, and in another he admits that Elys6e M6raut, for example, is only in part a certain Th6rion.

The admission is more nearly exact than the assertion. Every novelist whose work is to endure even for a generation must draw from life, sometimes generalizing broadly and sometimes keeping close to the single individual, but always free to modify the mere fact as he may have observed it to conform with the larger truth of the fable he shall devise. Most story-tellers tend to generalize, and their fictions lack the sharpness of outline we find in nature. Daudet prefers to retain as much of the actual individual as he dares without endangering the web of his composition; and often the transformation is very slight, — Mora, for instance, who is probably a close copy of Morny, but who stands on his own feet in "The Nabob," and lives his own life as independently as though he was a sheer imagination. More rarely the result is not so satisfactory; J. Tom L^vis, for example, for whose authenticity the author vouches, but who seems out of place in "Kings in Exile," like a fantastic invention, such as Balzac sometimes permitted himself as a relief from his rigorous realism.

For incident as well as for character Daudet xxxii Alphonse Daudet.

goes to real life. The escape of Colette from under the eyes of her father-in-law, — that actually happened; but none the less does it fit into " Kings in Exile." And Colette's cutting off her hair in grief at her husband's death, — that actually happened also ; but it belongs artistically in the "Immortal." On the other hand, the fact which served as the foundation of the "Immortal " — the taking in of a savant by a lot of forged manuscripts — has been falsified by changing the savant from a mathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter of autographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past). This borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but it has its dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudet and as imaginative. Perhaps the story of his which is most artistic in its telling, most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a single theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and without rest, is " Sapho ; " and " Sapho " is the novel of Daudet's in which there seems to be the least of this stencilling of actual fact, in which the . generalization is the broadest, and in which the observation is least restricted to single individuals.