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THE NABOB
BY
ALPHONSE DAUDET
TRANSLATED BY
GEORGE BURNHAM IVES
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1902
_Copyright, 1898_,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
_All rights reserved._
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE TO FRENCH EDITION
We have been informed that at the time of the publication of _The
Nabob_ in serial form, the government of Tunis was offended at the
introduction therein of individuals whom the author dressed in names
and costumes peculiar to that country. We are authorized by M. Alphonse
Daudet to declare that those scenes in the book which relate to Tunis
are entirely imaginary, and that he never intended to introduce any of
the functionaries of that state.
ALPHONSE DAUDET.
Alphonse Daudet is one of the most richly gifted of modern French
novelists and one of the most artistic; he is perhaps the most
delightful; and he is certainly the most fortunate. In his own country
earlier than any of his contemporaries he saw his stories attain to the
very wide circulation that brings both celebrity and wealth. Beyond the
borders of his own language he swiftly won a popularity both with the
broad public and with the professed critics of literature, second only
to that of Victor Hugo and still surpassing that of Balzac, who is only
of late beginning to receive from us the attention he has so long
deserved.
Daudet has had the rare luck of pleasing partisans of almost every
school; the realists have joyed in his work and so have the romanticists;
his writings have found favor in the eyes of the frank impressionists
and also at the hands of the severer custodians of academic standards.
Mr. Henry James has declared that Daudet is "at the head of his
profession" and has called him "an admirable genius." Mr. Robert Louis
Stevenson thought Daudet "incomparably" the best of the present French
novelists and asserted that "Kings in Exile" comes "very near to being
a masterpiece." M. Jules Lemaitre tells us that Daudet "trails all
hearts after him,--because he has charm, as indefinable in a work of
art as in a woman's face." M. Ferdinand Brunetière, who has scant
relish for latter-day methods in literature, admits ungrudgingly that
"there are certain corners of the great city and certain aspects of
Parisian manners, there are some physiognomies that perhaps no one has
been able to render so well as Daudet, with that infinitely subtle and
patient art which succeeds in giving even to inanimate things the
appearance of life."
I.
The documents are abundant for an analysis of Daudet such as
Sainte-Beuve would have undertaken with avidity; they are more abundant
indeed than for any other contemporary French man of letters even in
these days of unhesitating self-revelation; and they are also of an
absolutely impregnable authenticity. M. Ernest Daudet has written a
whole volume to tell us all about his brother's boyhood and youth and
early manhood and first steps in literature. M. Léon Daudet has written
another solid tome to tell us all about his father's literary
principles and family life and later years and death. Daudet himself
put forth a pair of pleasant books of personal gossip about himself,
narrating his relations with his fellow authors and recording the
circumstances under which he came to compose each of his earlier
stories. Montaigne--whose "Essays" was Daudet's bedside book and who
may be accepted not unfairly as an authority upon egotism--assures us
that "there is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great
utility, as that of one's self." And Daudet's own interest in himself
is not unlike Montaigne's,--it is open, innocent and illuminating.
Cuvier may have been able to reconstruct an extinct monster from the
inspection of a single bone; but it is a harder task to revive the
figure of a man, even by the aid of these family testimonies, this
self-analysis, the diligence of countless interviewers of all
nationalities, and indiscretion of a friend like Edmond de Goncourt
(who seems to have acted on the theory that it is the whole duty of man
to take notes of the talk of his fellows for prompt publication). Yet
we have ample material to enable us to trace Daudet's heredity, and to
estimate the influence of his environment in the days of his youth, and
to allow for the effect which certain of his own physical peculiarities
must have had upon his exercise of his art. His near-sightedness, for
example,--would not Sainte-Beuve have seized upon this as significant?
Would he not have seen in this a possible source of Daudet's mastery of
description? And the spasms of pain borne bravely and uncomplainingly,
the long agony of his later years, what mark has this left on his work,
how far is it responsible for a modification of his attitude,--for the
change from the careless gaiety of "Tartarin of Tarascon" to the sombre
satire of "Port-Tarascon"? What caused the joyous story-teller of the
"Letters from my Mill" to develop into the bitter iconoclast of the
"Immortal."
These questions are insistent; and yet, after all, what matters the
answer to any of them? The fact remains that Daudet had his share of
that incommunicable quality which we are agreed to call genius. This
once admitted, we may do our best to weigh it and to resolve it into
its elements, it is at bottom the vital spark that resists all
examination, however scientific we may seek to be. We can test for this
and for that, but in the final analysis genius is inexplicable. It is
what it is, because it is. It might have been different, no doubt, but
it is not. It is its own excuse for being; and, for all that we can say
to the contrary, it is its own cause, sufficient unto itself. Even if
we had Sainte-Beuve's scalpel, we could not surprise the secret.
Yet an inquiry into the successive stages of Daudet's career, a
consideration of his ancestry, of his parentage, of his birth, of the
circumstances of his boyhood, of his youthful adventures,--these things
are interesting in themselves and they are not without instruction.
They reveal to us the reasons for the transformation that goes so far
to explain Daudet's peculiar position,--the transformation of a young
Provençal poet into a brilliant Parisian veritist. Daudet was a
Provençal who became a Parisian,--and in this translation we may find
the key to his character as a writer of fiction.
He was from Provence as Maupassant was from Normandy; and Daudet had
the Southern expansiveness and abundance, just as Maupassant had the
Northern reserve and caution. If an author is ever to bring forth fruit
after his kind he must have roots in the soil of his nativity. Daudet
was no orchid, beautiful and scentless; his writings have always the
full flavor of the southern soil. He was able to set Tartarin before us
so sympathetically and to make Numa Roumestan so convincing because he
recognized in himself the possibility of a like exuberance. He could
never take the rigorously impassive attitude which Flaubert taught
Maupassant to assume. Daudet not only feels for his characters, but he
is quite willing that we should be aware of his compassion.
He is not only incapable of the girding enmity which Taine detected and
detested in Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp, but he is also devoid
of the callous detachment with which Flaubert dissected Emma Bovary
under the microscope. Daudet is never flagrantly hostile toward one of
his creatures; and, however contemptible or despicable the characters
he has called into being, he is scrupulously fair to them. Sidonie and
Félicia Ruys severally throw themselves away, but Daudet is never
intolerant. He is inexorable, but he is not insulting. I cannot but
think that it is Provence whence Daudet derived the precious birthright
of sympathy, and that it is Provence again which bestowed on him the
rarer gift of sentiment. It is by his possession of sympathy and of
sentiment that he has escaped the aridity which suffocates us in the
works of so many other Parisian novelists. The South endowed him with
warmth and heartiness and vivacity; and what he learnt from Paris was
the power of self-restraint and the duty of finish.
He was born in Provence and he died in Paris; he began as a poet and he
ended as a veritist; and in each case there was logical evolution and
not contradiction. The Parisian did not cease to be a Provençal; and
the novelist was a lyrist still. Poet though he was, he had an intense
liking for the actual, the visible, the tangible. He so hungered after
truth that he was ready sometimes to stay his stomach with facts in its
stead,--mere fact being but the outward husk, whereas truth is the rich
kernel concealed within. His son tells us that Daudet might have taken
as a motto the title of Goethe's autobiography, "Dichtung und
Wahrheit,"--Poetry and Truth. And this it is that has set Daudet apart
and that has caused his vogue with readers of all sorts and
conditions,--this unique combination of imagination and verity. "His
originality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely to
unite observation and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that it
contains of the improbable and the surprising, to satisfy at the same
time the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to write
novels which are at the same time realistic and romantic, and which
seem romantic only because they are very sincerely and very profoundly
realistic."
II.
Alphonse Daudet was born in 1840, and it was at Nîmes 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
affairs 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."
When he was sixteen he secured a place as _pion_ in a boarding school
in the Cévennes,--_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
life, but who lack a spontaneous 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-préfet 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 Odéon. 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 Arles," 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 Arles," which is less moving in the theatre than in its
briefer narrative form, not even the latest of them all, the 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 Provençal 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 Halévy, 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, Alphonse Daudet was appointed by the
Duke de Morny to a semi-sinecure; 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 interest 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 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 Sédan; 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 Provençal 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 naïvely 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 malignant and there is no barb to his shaft nor poison
on the tip.
Scarcely inferior to the war-stories or to the Provençal 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
consideration; but it is possible now to note that in the earlier
descriptive chapters of the "Letters from my Mill" one may detect a
certain similarity 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 volume, 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 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 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 Arles" was produced, the transformation was
complete: the poet had developed into a veritist, without ceasing to be
a poet, and the Provençal 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 knowledge 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 which is Daudet's birthright and his
trademark. In his brief tales he had shown that he had the
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 Arles" 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, 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 records 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 over-mastering; 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 virile dramas of Dumas
_fils_ 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 Géry to the inn on the Riviera, and to
the very next room therein at the exact moment when Jenkins catches up
with the fleeing Félicia.
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, 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 pieces, 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 Père la Chaise, a debate in the Chamber of
Deputies, the _première_ 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 superiority. 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 flash-lights; 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 sketch-books 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 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 ready-made,--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 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 Félicia Ruys is intended as a
portrait of Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt; M. Zola, on the other hand, denies
that Félicia 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
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 Elysée
Méraut, for example, is only in part a certain Thérion.
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 Lévis, 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 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.
But in "Sapho" the theme itself is narrow, narrower than in "Numa
Roumestan," and far narrower than in either "The Nabob" or "Kings in
Exile;" and this is why "Sapho," fine as it is, and subtle, is perhaps
less satisfactory. No other French novelist of the final half of the
nineteenth century, not Flaubert, not Goncourt, not M. Zola, not
Maupassant, has four novels as solid as these, as varied in incident,
as full of life, as rich in character, as true. They form the
quadrilateral wherein Daudet's fame is secure.
"Sapho" is a daughter of the "Lady of the Camellias," and a
grand-daughter of "Manon Lescaut,"--Frenchwomen, all of them, and of a
class French authors have greatly affected. But Daudet's book is not a
specimen of what Lowell called "that _corps-de-ballet_ literature in
which the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by
a veil of French gauze." It is at bottom a moral book, much as "Tom
Jones" is moral. Fielding's novel is English, robust, hearty, brutal in
a way, and its morality is none too lofty. Daudet's is French, softer,
more enervating, and with an almost complacent dwelling on the sins of
the flesh. But neither Fielding nor Daudet is guilty of sentimentality,
the one unforgivable crime in art. In his treatment of the relation of
the sexes Daudet was above all things truthful; his veracity is
inexorable. He shows how man is selfish in love and woman also, and how
the egotism of the one is not as the egotism of the other. He shows how
Fanny Legrand slangs her lover with the foul language of the gutter
whence she sprang, and how Jean when he strikes back, refrains from
foul blows. He shows how Jean, weak of will as he was, gets rid of the
millstone about his neck, only because of the weariness of the woman to
whom he has bound himself. He shows us the various aspects of the love
which is not founded on esteem, the Héttema couple, De Potter and Rose,
Déchelette and Alice Doré, all to set off the sorry idyl of Fanny and
Jean.
In "Numa Roumestan" there is a larger vision of life than in "Sapho,"
even if there is no deeper insight. The construction is almost as
severe; and the movement is unbroken from beginning to end, without
excursus or digression. The central figure is masterly,--the kindly and
selfish Southerner, easy-going and soft-spoken, an orator who is so
eloquent that he can even convince himself, a politician who thinks
only when he is talking, a husband who loves his wife as profoundly as
he can love anybody except himself, and who loves his wife more than
his temporary mistress, even during the days of his dalliance. Numa is
a native of the South of France, as was Daudet himself; and it is out
of the fulness of knowledge that the author evolves the character,
brushing in the portrait with bold strokes and unceasingly adding
caressing touches till the man actually lives and moves before our
eyes. The veracity of the picture is destroyed by no final
inconsistency. What Numa is, Numa will be. Daudet never descends at the
end of his novels like a god from the machine to change character in
the twinkling of an eye, and to convert bad men to good thoughts and
good deeds.
He can give us goodness when he chooses, a human goodness, not
offensively perfect, not preaching, not mawkish, but high-minded and
engaging. There are two such types in "Kings in Exile," the Queen and
Elysée Méraut, essentially honest both of them, thinking little of
self, and sustained by lofty purpose. Naturalistic novelists generally
(and M. Zola in particular), live in a black world peopled mainly by
fools and knaves; from this blunder Daudet is saved by his Southern
temperament, by his lyric fervor, and, at bottom, by his wisdom. He
knows better; he knows that while a weak creature like Christian II. is
common, a resolute soul like Frédérique is not so very rare. He knows
that the contrast and the clash of these characters is interesting
matter for the novelist. And no novelist has had a happier inspiration
than that which gave us "Kings in Exile," a splendid subject,
splendidly handled, and lending itself perfectly to the display of
Daudet's best qualities, his poetry, his ability to seize the actual,
and his power of dealing with material such as the elder Dumas would
have delighted in with a restraint and a logic the younger Dumas would
have admired. Plot and counter-plot, bravery, treachery, death,--these
are elements for a romanticist farrago; and in Daudet's hands they are
woven into a tapestry almost as stiff as life itself. The stuff is
romantic enough, but the treatment is unhesitatingly realistic; and
"Kings in Exile," better than any other novel of Daudet's, explains his
vogue with readers of the most divergent tastes.
In "The Nabob," the romantic element is slighter than in "Kings in
Exile;" the subject is not so striking; and the movement of the story
is less straightforward. But what a panorama of Paris it is that he
unrolls before us in this story of a luckless adventurer in the city of
luxury then under the control of the imperial band of brigands! No
doubt the Joyeuse family is an obtrusion and an artistic blemish, since
they do not logically belong in the scheme of the story; and yet they
(and their fellows in other books of Daudet's) testify to his effort to
get the truth and the whole truth into his picture of Paris life. Mora
and Félicia Ruys and Jenkins, these are the obverse of the medal,
exposed in the shop-windows that every passer-by can see. The Joyeuse
girls and their father are the reverse, to be viewed only by those who
take the trouble to look at the under side of things. They are samples
of the simple, gentle, honest folk, of whom there must be countless
thousands in France and even in its capital, but who fail to interest
most French novelists just because they are not eccentric or wicked or
ugly. Of a truth, Aline Joyeuse is as typically Parisian as Félicia
Ruys herself; both are needed if the census is to be complete; and the
omission of either is a source of error.
There is irony in Daudet's handling of these humbler figures, but it is
compassionate and almost affectionate. If he laughs at Father Joyeuse
there is no harshness and no hostility in his mirth. For the Joyeuse
daughters he has indulgence and pity; and his humor plays about them
and leaves them scart-free. It never stings them or scorches or sears,
as it does Astier-Réhu and Christian II. and the Prince of Axel, in
spite of his desire to be fair toward all the creatures of his brain.
Irony is only one of the manifestations of Daudet's humor. Wit he has
also, and satire. And he is doubly fortunate in that he has both humor
and the sense-of-humor--the positive and the negative. It is the
sense-of-humor, so called, that many humorists are without, a
deprivation which allows them to take themselves so seriously that they
become a laughing-stock for the world. It is the sense-of-humor that
makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in due
proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and
emphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is the
sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humor
itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves
ridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor
chiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyère's assertion that "he who
makes us laugh rarely is able to win esteem for himself." His positive
humor,--gay, exuberant, contagious,--finds its full field for display
in some of the short stories, and more especially in the Tartarin
series.
Has any book of our time caused more laughter than "Tartarin of
Tarascon"--unless it be "Tartarin on the Alps"? I can think only of one
rival pair, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn,"--for Mark Twain and
Alphonse Daudet both achieved the almost impossible feat of writing a
successful sequel to a successful book, of forcing fortune to a
repetition of a happy accident. The abundant laughter the French
humorist excited is like that evoked by the American humorist,--clean,
hearty, healthy, self-respecting; it is in both cases what George Eliot
in one of her letters called "the exquisite laughter that comes from a
gratification of the reasoning faculty." Daudet and Mark Twain are
imaginative realists; their most amusing extravagance is but an
exaggeration of the real thing; and they never let factitious fantasy
sweep their feet off the ground. Tartarin is as typical of Provence as
Colonel Sellers--to take that figure of Mark Twain's which is most
like--is typical of the Mississippi Valley.
Tartarin is as true as Numa Roumestan; in fact they may almost be said
to be sketched from the same model but in a very different temper. In
"Numa Roumestan" we are shown the sober side of the Southern
temperament, the sorrow it brings in the house though it displays joy
in the street; and in "Tartarin" we behold only the immense comicality
of the incessant incongruity between the word and the deed. Tartarin is
Southern, it is true, and French; but he is very human also. There is a
boaster and a liar in most of us, lying in wait for a chance to rush
out and put us to shame. It is this universality of Daudet's satire
that has given Tartarin its vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. The
ingenuity of Tartarin's misadventures, the variety of them in Algiers
and in Switzerland, the obvious reasonableness of them all, the
delightful probability of these impossibilities, the frank gaiety and
the unflagging high spirits,--these are precious qualities, all of
them; but it is rather the essential humanness of Tartarin himself that
has given him a reputation throughout the world. Very rarely indeed now
or in the past has an author been lucky enough to add a single figure
to the cosmopolitan gallery of fiction. Cervantes, De Foe, Swift, Le
Sage, Dumas, have done it; Fielding and Hawthorne and Turgenef have
not.
It is no wonder that Daudet takes pride in this. The real joy of the
novelist, he declares, is to create human beings, to put on their feet
types of humanity who thereafter circulate through the world with the
name, the gesture, the grimace he has given them and who are cited and
talked about without reference to their creator and without even any
mention of him. And whenever Daudet heard some puppet of politics or
literature called a Tartarin, a shiver ran through him--"the shiver of
pride of a father, hidden in the crowd that is applauding his son and
wanting all the time to cry out 'That's my boy!'"
V.