Daudet once remarked that England was the last of foreign countries to
welcome his novels, and that he was surprised at the fact, since for
him, as for the typical Englishman, the intimacy of home life had great
significance. However long he may have taken to win Anglo-Saxon hearts,
there is no question that he finally won them more completely than any
other contemporary French novelist was able to do, and that when but
a few years since the news came that death had released him from his
sufferings, thousands of men and women, both in England and in America,
felt that they had lost a real friend. Just at the present moment one
does not hear or read a great deal about him, but a similar lull in
criticism follows the deaths of most celebrities of whatever kind, and
it can scarcely be doubted that Daudet is every day making new friends,
while it is as sure as anything of the sort can be that it is death, not
estrangement, that has lessened the number of his former admirers.
“Admirers”? The word is much too cold. “Lovers” would serve better, but
is perhaps too expansive to be used of a self-contained race. “Friends”
is more appropriate because heartier, for hearty the relations between
Daudet and his Anglo-Saxon readers certainly were. Whether it was that
some of us saw in him that hitherto unguessed-at phenomenon, a French
Dickens--not an imitator, indeed, but a kindred spirit--or that others
found in him a refined, a volatilized “Mark Twain,” with a flavour of
Cervantes, or that still others welcomed him as a writer of naturalistic
fiction that did not revolt, or finally that most of us enjoyed him
because whatever he wrote was as steeped in the radiance of his own
exquisitely charming personality as a picture of Corot’s is in the light
of the sun itself--whatever may have been the reason, Alphonse Daudet
could count before he died thousands of genuine friends in England and
America who were loyal to him in spite of the declining power shown in
his latest books, in spite even of the strain which _Sapho_ laid upon
their Puritan consciences.
It is likely that a majority of these friends were won by the two great
Tartarin books and by the chief novels, _Fromont_, _Jack_, _The Nabob_,
_Kings in Exile_, and _Numa_, aided by the artistic sketches and short
stories contained in _Letters from my Mill_ and _Monday Tales (Contes
du Lundi)_. The strong but overwrought _Evangelist_, _Sapho_--which of
course belongs with the chief novels from the Continental but not from
the insular point of view--and the books of Daudet’s decadence, _The
Immortal_, and the rest, cost him few friendships, but scarcely gained
him many. His delightful essays in autobiography, whether in fiction,
_Le Petit Chose (Little What’s-his-Name)_, or in _Thirty Years of Paris_
and _Souvenirs of a Man of Letters_, doubtless sealed more friendships
than they made; but they can be almost as safely recommended as the more
notable novels to readers who have yet to make Daudet’s acquaintance.
For the man and his career are as unaffectedly charming as his style,
and more of a piece than his elaborate works of fiction. A sunny
Provencal childhood is clouded by family misfortunes; then comes a year
of wretched slavery as usher in a provincial school; then the inevitable
journey to Paris with a brain full of verses and dreams, and the
beginning of a life of Bohemian nonchalance, to which we Anglo-Saxons
have little that is comparable outside the career of Oliver Goldsmith.
But poor Goldsmith had his pride wounded by the editorial tyranny of a
Mrs. Griffiths. Daudet, by a merely pretty poem about a youth and
maiden making love under a plum-tree, won the protection of the Empress
Eugenie, and through her of the Duke de Morny, the prop of the Second
Empire. His life now reads like a fairy-tale inserted by some jocular
elf into that book of dolors entitled _The Lives of Men of Genius_.
A _protege_ of a potentate not usually lavish of his favours, and a
valetudinarian, he is allowed to flit to Algiers and Corsica, to enjoy
his beloved Provence in company with Mistral, to write for the theatres,
and to continue to play the Bohemian. Then the death of Morny seems to
turn the idyl into a tragedy, but only for a moment. Daudet’s delicate,
nervous beauty made his friend Zola think of an Arabian horse, but
the poet had also the spirit of such a high-bred steed. Years of
conscientious literary labour followed, cheered by marriage with a woman
of genius capable of supplementing him in his weakest points, and then
the war with Prussia and its attendant horrors gave him the larger and
deeper view of life and the intensified patriotism--in short, the final
stimulus he needed. From the date of his first great success--_Fromont,
Jr., and Risler, Sr._--glory and wealth flowed in upon him, while
envy scarcely touched him, so unspoiled was he and so continuously and
eminently lovable. One seemed to see in his career a reflection of his
luminous nature, a revised myth of the golden touch, a new version of
the fairy-tale of the fair mouth dropping pearls. Then, as though grown
weary of the idyllic romance she was composing, Fortune donned the
tragic robes of Nemesis. Years of pain followed, which could not abate
the spirits or disturb the geniality of the sufferer, but did somewhat
abate the power and disturb the serenity of his work. Then came the
inevitable end of all life dramas, whether comic or romantic or tragic,
and friends who had known him stood round his grave and listened sadly
to the touching words in which Emile Zola expressed not merely his own
grief but that of many thousands throughout the civilized world. Here
was a life more winsome, more appealing, more complete than any creation
of the genius of the man that lived it--a life which, whether we know it
in detail or not, explains in part the fascination Daudet exerts upon us
and the conviction we cherish that, whatever ravages time may make among
his books, the memory of their writer will not fade from the hearts of
men. Many Frenchmen have conquered the world’s mind by the power or
the subtlety of their genius; few have won its heart through the
catholicity, the broad sympathy of their genius. Daudet is one of these
few; indeed, he is almost if not quite the only European writer who has
of late achieved such a triumph, for Tolstoi has stern critics as well
as steadfast devotees, and has won most of his disciples as moralist and
reformer. But we must turn from Daudet the man to Daudet the author of
_The Nabob_ and other memorable novels.
If this were a general essay and not an introduction, it would be proper
to say something of Daudet’s early attempts as poet and dramatist. Here
it need only be remarked that it is almost a commonplace to insist that
even in his later novels he never entirely ceased to see the outer world
with the eyes of a poet, to delight in colour and movement, to seize
every opportunity to indulge in vivid description couched in a style
more swift and brilliant than normal prose aspires to. This bent
for description, together with the tendency to episodic rather than
sustained composition and the comparative weakness of his character
drawing--features of his work shortly to be discussed--partly explains
his failure, save in one or two instances, to score a real triumph
with his plays, but does not explain his singular lack of sympathy with
actors. Nor was he able to win great success with his first book
of importance, _Le Petit Chose_, delightful as that mixture of
autobiography and romance must prove to any sympathetic reader. He was
essentially a romanticist and a poet cast upon an age of naturalism
and prose, and he needed years of training and such experience as the
Prussian invasion gave him to adjust himself to his life-work. Such
adjustment was not needed for _Tartarin de Tarascon_, begun shortly
after _Le Petit Chose_, because subtle humour of the kind lavished in
that inimitable creation and in its sequels, while implying observation,
does not necessarily imply any marked departure from the romantic and
poetic points of view.
The training Daudet required for his novels he got from the sketches
and short stories that occupied him during the late sixties and early
seventies. Here again little in the way of comment need be given, and
that little can express the general verdict that the art displayed
in these miniature productions is not far short of perfect. The two
principal collections, _Lettres de mon Moulin_ and _Contes du Lundi_,
together with _Artists’ Wives (Les Femmes d’Artistes)_ and parts at
least of _Robert Helmont_, would almost of themselves suffice to put
Daudet high in the ranks of the writers who charm without leaving upon
one’s mind the slightest suspicion that they are weak. It is true
that Daudet’s stories do not attain the tremendous impressiveness that
Balzac’s occasionally do, as, for example, in _La Grande Breteche_,
nor has his clear-cut art the almost disconcerting firmness, the
surgeon-like quality of Maupassant’s; but the author of the ironical
_Elixir of Father Gaucher_ and of the pathetic _Last Class_, to name no
others, could certainly claim with Musset that his glass was his own,
and had no reason to concede its smallness.
As we have seen, the production of _Fromont jeune et Risler aine_
marked the beginning of Daudet’s more than twenty years of successful
novel-writing. His first elaborate study of Parisian life, while it
indicated no advance of the art of fiction, deserved its popularity
because, in spite of the many criticisms to which it was open, it was a
thoroughly readable and often a moving book. One character, Delobelle,
the played-out actor who is still a hero to his pathetic wife and
daughter, was constructed on effective lines--was a personage worthy of
Dickens. The vile heroine, Sidonie, was bad enough to excite disgusted
interest, but, as Mr. Henry James pointed out later, she was not
effective to the extent her creator doubtless hoped. She paled beside
Valerie Marneffe, though, to be sure, Daudet knew better than to attempt
to depict any such queen of vice. Yet, after all, it is mainly the
compelling power of vile heroines that makes them tolerable, and neither
Sidonie nor the web of intrigue she wove can fairly be said to be
characterized by extraordinary strength. But the public was and is
interested greatly by the novel, and Daudet deserved the fame and money
it brought him. His next book, _Jack_, was not so popular. Still, it
showed artistic improvement, although, as in its predecessor, that bias
towards the sentimental, which was to be Daudet’s besetting weakness,
was too plainly visible. Its author took to his heart a book which the
general reader found too long and perhaps overpathetic. Some of us,
while recognising its faults, will share in part Daudet’s predilection
for it--not so much because of the strong and early study made of the
artisan class, or of the mordantly satirical exposure of D’Argenton
and his literary “dead-beats” (_rates_), or of any other of the special
features of a story that is crowded with them, as because the ill-fated
hero, the product of genuine emotions on Daudet’s part, excites cognate
and equally genuine emotions in us. We cannot watch the throbbing
engines of a great steamship without seeing Jack at work among them. But
the fine, pathetic _Jack_ brings us to the finer, more pathetic _Nabob_.
Whether _The Nabob_ is Daudet’s greatest novel is a question that may be
postponed, but it may be safely asserted that there are good reasons why
it should have been chosen to represent Daudet in the present series.
It has been immensely popular, and thus does not illustrate merely the
taste of an inner circle of its author’s admirers. It is not so subtle
a study of character as _Numa Roumestan_, nor is it a drama the scene of
which is set somewhat in a corner removed from the world’s scrutiny and
full comprehension, as is more or less the case with _Kings in Exile_.
It is comparatively unamenable to the moral, or, if one will, the
puritanical, objections so naturally brought against _Sapho_. It
obviously represents Daudet’s powers better than any novel written after
his health was permanently wrecked, and as obviously represents fiction
more adequately than either of the Tartarin masterpieces, which belong
rather to the literature of humour. Besides, it is probably the most
broadly effective of all Daudet’s novels; it is fuller of striking
scenes; and as a picture of life in the picturesque Second Empire it is
of unique importance.
Perhaps to many readers this last reason will seem the best of all.
However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether
with the Hugo of _Les Chatiments_ we scorn and vituperate its charlatan
head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola’s
_Debacle_, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second
Empire, especially the Paris of Morny and Hausmann, of cynicism and
splendour, of frivolity and chicane, of servile obsequiousness and
haughty pretension, the France and the Paris that drew to themselves the
eyes of all Europe and particularly the eyes of the watchful Bismarck,
have for us a fascination almost as great as they had for the gay and
audacious men and women who in them courted fortune and chased pleasure
from the morrow of the _Coup d’Etat_ to the eve of Sedan. A nearly
equal fascination is exerted upon us by a book which is the best sort of
historical novel, since it is the product of its author’s observation,
not of his reading--a story that sets vividly before us the political
corruption, the financial recklessness, the social turmoil, the public
ostentation, the private squalor, that led to the downfall of an empire
and almost to that of a people.
Daudet drew on his experiences, and on the notes he was always
accumulating, more strenuously than he should have done. He assures
us that he laboured over _The Nabob_ for eight months, mainly in his
bed-room, sometimes working eighteen consecutive hours, often waking
from restless sleep with a sentence on his lips. Yet, such is the irony
of literary history, the novel is loosely enough put together to have
been written, one might suppose, in bursts of inspiration or else more
or less methodically--almost with the intention, as Mr. James has noted,
of including every striking phase of Parisian life. For it is a series
of brilliant, effective episodes and scenes, not a closely knit drama.
Jenkins’s visit to Monpavon at his toilet, the _dejeuner_ at the
Nabob’s, the inspection of the OEuvre de Bethleem--which would have
delighted Dickens--the collapse of the fetes of the Bey, the Nabob’s
thrashing Moessard, the death of Mora, Felicia’s attempt to escape the
funeral of the duke, the interview between the Nabob and Hemerlingue,
the baiting in the Chamber, the suicide of that supreme man of tone,
Monpavon, the Nabob’s apoplectic seizure in the theatre--these and many
other scenes and episodes, together with descriptions and touches, stand
out in our memories more distinctly and impressively than the characters
do--perhaps more so than does the central motive, the outrageous
exploitation of the naive hero. For from the beginning of his career to
the end Daudet’s eye, like that of a genuine but not supereminent poet,
was chiefly attracted by colour, movement, effective pose--in other
words, by the surfaces of things. One may almost say that he was more of
a landscape engineer than of an architect and builder, although one must
at once add that he could and did erect solid structures. But the
reader at least helps greatly to lay the foundations, for, to drop the
metaphor, Daudet relied largely on suggestion, contenting himself with
the belief that a capable imagination could fill up the gaps he left
in plot and character analysis. Thus, for example, he indicated and
suggested rather than detailed the way in which Hemerlingue finally
triumphed over the Nabob, Jansoulet. To use another figure, he drew the
spider, the fly, and a few strands of the web. The Balzac whose bust
looked satirically down upon the two adventurers in Pere la Chaise would
probably have given us the whole web. This is not quite to say that
Daudet is plausible, Balzac inevitable; but rather that we stroll
with the former master and follow submissively in the footsteps of the
latter. Yet a caveat is needed, for the intense interest we take in the
characters of a novel like _The Nabob_ scarcely suggests strolling.
For although Daudet, in spite of his abounding sympathy, which is one
reason of his great attractiveness, cannot fairly be said to be a great
character creator, he had sufficient flexibility and force of genius to
set in action interesting personages. Part of the early success of _The
Nabob_ was due to this fact, although the brilliant description of the
Second Empire and the introduction of exotic elements, the Tunisian and
Corsican episodes and characters, counted, probably, for not a little.
Readers insisted upon seeing in the book this person and that more or
less thinly disguised. The Irish adventurer-physician, Jenkins, was
supposed to be modelled upon a popular Dr. Olliffe; the arsenic pills
were derived from another source, as was also the goat’s-milk hospital
for infants. Felicia Ruys was thought by some to be Sarah Bernhardt,
and originals were easily provided for Monpavon and the other leading
figures. But Daudet confessed to only two important originals, and if
one does not take an author’s word in such matters one soon finds one’s
self in a maze of conjectures and contradictions.
The two characters drawn from life in a special sense--for Daudet, like
most other writers of fiction, had human life in general constantly
before him--are Jansoulet and Mora, precisely the most effective
personages in the book, and scarcely surpassed in the whole range of
Daudet’s fiction. The Nabob was Francois Bravay, who rose from poverty
to wealth by devious transactions in the Orient, and came to grief in
Paris, much as Jansoulet did. He survived the Empire, and his relatives
are said to have been incensed at the treatment given him in the novel,
an attitude on their part which is explicable but scarcely justifiable,
since Daudet’s sympathy for his hero could not well have been greater,
and since the adventurer had already attained a notoriety that was not
likely to be completely forgotten. Whether Daudet was as much at liberty
to make free with the character of his benefactor Morny is another
matter. He himself thought that he was, and he was a man of delicate
sensitiveness. Probably he was right in claiming that the natural son
of Queen Hortense, the intrepid soldier, the author of the _Coup
d’Etat_ that set his weaker half-brother on the throne, the dandy, the
libertine, the leader of fashion, the cynical statesman--in short, the
“Richelieu-Brummel” who drew the eyes of all Europe upon himself,
would not have been in the least disconcerted could he have known that
thirteen years after his death the public would be discussing him as the
prototype of the Mora of his young _protege’s_ masterpiece. In fact,
it is easy to agree with those critics who think that Daudet’s kindly
nature caused him to soften many features of Morny’s unlovely character.
Mora does not, indeed, win our love or our esteem, but we confess him to
have been in every respect an exceptional man, and there is not a page
in which he appears that is not intensely interesting. He must be an
unimpressionable reader who soon forgets the death-room scenes, the
destruction of the compromising letters, the spectacular funeral.
Of the other characters there is little space to speak here. Nearly all
have their good points, as might be expected of the creator of his two
fellow Provencals, Numa and Tartarin, the latter being probably the
only really cosmopolitan figure in recent literature; but some, like the
Hemerlingues, verge upon mere sketches; others, like Jansoulet’s obese
wife, upon caricatures. The old mother is excellently done, however, and
Monpavon, especially in his suicide, is nothing short of a triumph of
art. It is the more or less romantic or sentimental personages that give
the critic most qualms. Daudet seems to have introduced them--De Gery,
the Joyeuse family, and the rest--as a concession to popular taste, and
on this score was probably justified. A fair case may also be made
out for the use of idyllic scenes as a foil to the tragical, for
the Shakespearian critics have no monopoly of the overworked plea,
“justification by contrast.” Nor could a French analogue of Dickens
easily resist the temptation to give us a fatuous Passajon, an
ebullient Pere Joyeuse--who seems to have been partly modelled on a
real person--an exemplary “Bonne Maman,” a struggling but eventually
triumphant Andre Maranne. The home-lover Daudet also felt the necessity
of showing that Paris could set the Joyeuse household, sunny in its
poverty, over against the stately elegance of the Mora palace, the walls
of which listened at one and the same moment to the music of a ball and
the death-rattle of its haughty owner. But when all is said, it remains
clear that _The Nabob_ is open to the charge that applies to all the
greater novels save _Sapho_--the charge that it exhibits a somewhat
inharmonious mixture of sentimentalism and naturalism. Against this
charge, which perhaps applies most forcibly to that otherwise almost
perfect work of art, _Numa Roumestan_, Daudet defended himself,
but rather weakly. Nor does Mr. Henry James, who in the case of the
last-named novel comes to his help against Zola, much mend matters. But
the fault, if fault it be, is venial, especially in a friend, though not
strictly a coworker, of Zola’s.
Naturally an elaborate novel like _The Nabob_ lends itself indefinitely
to minute comment, but we must be sparing of it. Still it is worth while
to call attention to the skill with which, from the opening page, the
interest of the reader is controlled; indeed, to the remarkable art
displayed in the whole first chapter devoted to the morning rounds of
Dr. Jenkins. The note of romantic extravagance is on the whole avoided
until the Nabob brings out his check-book, when the money flies with
a speed for which, one fancies, Daudet could have found little
justification this side of Timon of Athens. In the description of the
_Caisse Territoriale_ given by Passajon this note is relieved by a
delicate irony, but seems still somewhat incongruous. One turns more
willingly to the description of Jansoulet’s sitting down to play
_ecarte_ with Mora, to the story of how he gorged himself with the
duke’s putative mushrooms, and to similar episodes and touches. In the
matter of effective and ironically turned situations few novels
can compare with this; indeed, it almost seems as if Daudet made an
inordinate use of them. Think of the poor Nabob reading the announcement
of the cross bestowed on Jenkins, and of the absurd populace mistaking
him for the ungrateful Bey! As for great dramatic moments, there is at
least one that no reader can forget--the moment when Jansoulet, in the
midst of the speech on which his fate depends, catches sight of his old
mother’s face and forbears to clear himself of calumny at the expense of
his wretched elder brother. The situation may not bear close analysis,
but who wishes to analyze? Or who, indeed, wishes to indulge in further
comment after the scene has risen to his mind?
_The Nabob_ was followed by _Kings in Exile_; then came _Numa Roumestan_
and _The Evangelist_; then, on the eve of Daudet’s breakdown, _Sapho_;
and the greatest of his humorous masterpieces, _Tartarin in the Alps_.
It is not yet certain what rank is to be given to these books. Perhaps
the adventures of the mountain-climbing hero of the Midi, combined
with his previous exploits as a slayer of lions--his experiences as a
colonist in _Port-Tarascon_ need scarcely be considered--will prove, in
the lapse of years, to be the most solid foundation of that fame which
even envious Time will hardly begrudge Daudet. As for _Kings in Exile_,
it is difficult to see how even the art with which the tragedy of Queen
Frederique’s life is unfolded or the growing power of characterization
displayed in her, in the loyal Merault, in the facile, decadent
Christian, can make up for the lack of broadly human appeal in the
general subject-matter of a book which was so sympathetically written
as to appeal alike to Legitimists and to Republicans. Good as _Kings
in Exile_ is, it is not so effective a book as _The Nabob_, nor such
a unique and marvellous work of art as _Numa Roumestan_, due allowance
being made for the intrusion of sentimentality into the latter. Daudet
thought _Numa_ the “least incomplete” of his works; it is certainly
inclusive enough, since some critics are struck by the tragic relations
subsisting between the virtuous discreet Northern wife and the peccable,
expansive Southern husband, while others see in the latter the hero of
a comedy of manners almost worthy of Moliere. If _Numa_ represents the
highest achievement of Daudet in dramatic fiction or else in the art
of characterization, _The Evangelist_ proved that his genius was not
at home in those fields. Instead of marking an ordered advance, this
overwrought study of Protestant bigotry marked not so much a halt, or a
retreat, as a violent swerving to one side. Yet in a way this swerving
into the devious orbit of the novel of intense purpose helped Daudet in
his progress towards naturalism, and imparted something of stability to
his methods of work. _Sapho_, which appeared next, was the first of his
novels that left little to be desired in the way of artistic unity and
cumulative power. If such a study of the _femme collante_, the mistress
who cannot be shaken off--or rather of the man whom she ruins, for it
is Gaussin, not Sapho, that is the main subject of Daudet’s acute
analysis--was to be written at all, it had to be written with a resolute
art such as Daudet applied to it. It is not then surprising that
Continental critics rank _Sapho_ as its author’s greatest production; it
is more in order to wonder what Daudet might not have done in this line
of work had his health remained unimpaired. The later novels, in which
he came near to joining forces with the naturalists and hence to losing
some of the vogue his eclecticism gave him, need not detain us.
And now, in conclusion, how can we best characterize briefly this
fascinating, versatile genius, the most delightful humorist of his time,
one of the most artistic story-tellers, one of the greatest novelists?
It is impossible to classify him, for he was more than a humorist, he
nearly outgrew romance, he never accepted unreservedly the canons of
naturalism. He obviously does not belong to the small class of the
supreme writers of fiction, for he has no consistent or at least
profound philosophy of life. He is a true poet, yet for the main he has
expressed himself not in verse, but in prose, and in a form of prose
that is being so extensively cultivated that its permanence is daily
brought more and more into question. What is Daudet, and what will he
be to posterity? Some admirers have already answered the first question,
perhaps as satisfactorily as it can be answered, by saying, “Daudet is
simply Daudet.” As for the second question, a whole school of critics is
inclined to answer it and all similar queries with the curt statement,
“That concerns posterity, not us.” If, however, less evasive answers are
insisted upon, let the following utterance, which might conceivably be
more indefinite and oracular, suffice: Alphonse Daudet is one of
those rare writers who combine greatness with a charm so intimate and
appealing that some of us would not, if we could, have their greatness
increased.