for it. In the first place it was born there, and a plant always
flourishes in its own country.” So wrote M. Taine, the French critic,
many years ago. But those were the years of Dickens and Thackeray (as a
prelude to a study of the latter of whom the remark was made); and the
branch of literature mentioned by M. Taine has no longer, in the soil of
our English-speaking genius, so strong a vitality. The French may bear
the palm to-day in the representation of manners by the aid of fiction.
Formerly, it was possible to oppose Balzac and Madame Sand to Dickens
and Thackeray; but at present we have no one, either in England or in
America, to oppose to Alphonse Daudet. The appearance of a new novel by
this admirable genius is to my mind the most delightful literary event
that can occur just now; in other words Alphonse Daudet is at the head
of his profession. I say of his profession advisedly, for he belongs to
our modern class of trained men of letters; he is not an occasional or a
desultory poet; he is a novelist to his finger-tips--a soldier in the
great army of constant producers. But such as he is, he is a master of
his art, and I may as well say definitely that if I attempt to sketch in
a few pages his literary countenance, it will be found that the portrait
is from the hand of an admirer. We most of us feel that among the
artists of our day certain talents have more to say to us and others
less; we have our favourites, and we have our objects of indifference.
The writer of these remarks has always had a sympathy for the author of
the _Lettres de mon Moulin_; he began to read his novels with a
prejudice in their favour. This prejudice sprang from the Letters
aforesaid, which do not constitute a novel, but a volume of the lightest
and briefest tales. They had, to my mind, an extraordinary charm; they
put me quite on the side of Alphonse Daudet, whatever he might do in the
future. One of the first things he did was to publish the history of
_Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné_. It is true that this work did not give
me the pleasure that some of its successors have done, and though it has
been crowned by the French Academy, I still think it weaker than _Les
Rois en Exil_ and _Numa Roumestan_. But I liked it better on a second
reading than on a first; it contains some delightful things. After that
came _Jack_ and _Le Nabab_, and the two novels I have just mentioned,
and that curious and interesting tale of _L’Evangéliste_, which
appeared a few months since, and which proves that the author’s genius,
though on the whole he has pressed it hard, is still nervous, fresh, and
young. Each of these things has been better than the last, with the
exception, perhaps, of _L’Evangéliste_, which, to my taste, is not
superior to _Numa Roumestan_. _Numa Roumestan_ is a masterpiece; it is
really a perfect work; it has no weakness, no roughness; it is a compact
and harmonious whole. Daudet’s other works have had their inequalities,
their infirmities, certain places where, if you tapped them, they
sounded hollow. His danger has always been a perceptible tendency to the
factitious; sometimes he has fallen into the trap laid for him by a
taste for superficial effects. In _Fromont Jeune_, for instance, it
seems to me difficult to care much for the horrid little heroine
herself, carefully as she is studied. She has been pursued, but she has
not been caught, for she is not interesting (even for a _coquine_), not
even human. She is a mechanical doll, with nothing for the imagination
to take hold of. She is one more proof of the fact that it is difficult
to give the air of consistency to vanity and depravity, though the
portraiture of the vicious side of life would seem, from the pictorial
point of view, to offer such attractions. The reader’s quarrel with
Sidonie Chèbe is not that she is bad, but that she is not _felt_, as the
æsthetic people say. In _Jack_ the hollow spot, as I have called it, is
the episode of Doctor Rivals and his daughter Cécile, which reminds us
of the more genial parts of Dickens. It is perhaps because to us readers
of English speech the figure of the young girl, in a French novel, is
almost always wanting in reality--seems to be thin and conventional; in
any case poor Jack’s love-affair, at the end of the book, does not
produce the illusion of the rest of his touching history. In _Le Nabab_
this artificial element is very considerable; it centres about the
figure of Paul de Géry and embraces the whole group of M. Joyeuse and
his blooming daughters, with their pretty attitudes--taking in also the
very shadowy André Maranne, so touchingly re-united to his mother, who
had lived for ten years with an Irish doctor to whom she was not
married. In _Les Rois en Exil_, Tom Lévis and the diabolical Séphora
seem to me purely fanciful creations, without any relation to reality;
they are the inferior part of the book. They are composed by a master of
composition, and the comedian Tom is described with immense spirit, an
art which speaks volumes as to a certain sort of Parisian initiation.
But if this artistic and malignant couple are very clever water-colour,
they are not really humanity. Ruffians and rascals have a certain moral
nature, as well as the better-behaved; but in the case I have mentioned
M. Daudet fails to put his finger upon it. The same with Madame
Autheman, the evil genius of poor Eline Ebsen, in the _L’Evangéliste_.
She seems to me terribly, almost grotesquely, void. She is an elaborate
portrait of a fanatic of Protestantism, a bigot to the point of
monstrosity, cold-blooded, implacable, cruel. The figure is painted with
Alphonse Daudet’s inimitable art; no one that handles the pen to-day is
such a pictorial artist as he. But Madame Autheman strikes me as quite
automatic; psychologically she is a blank. One does not see the
operation of her character. She must have had a soul, and a very curious
one. It was a great opportunity for a piece of spiritual portraiture;
but we know nothing about Madame Autheman’s inner springs, and I think
we fail to believe in her. I should go so far as to say that we get
little more of an inside view, as the phrase is, of Eline Ebsen; we are
not shown the spiritual steps by which she went over to the
enemy--vividly, admirably as the outward signs and consequences of this
disaster are depicted. The logic of the matter is absent in both cases,
and it takes all the magic of the author’s legerdemain to prevent us
from missing it. These things, however, are exceptions, and the tissue
of each of his novels is, for all the rest, really pure gold. No one has
such grace, such lightness and brilliancy of execution; it is a
fascination to see him at work. The beauty of _Numa Roumestan_ is that
it has no hollow places; the idea and the picture melt everywhere into
one. Emile Zola, criticising the work in a very friendly spirit, speaks
of the episode of Hortense Le Quesnoy and the Provençal _tambourinaire_
as a false note, and declares that it wounds his sense of delicacy.
Valmajour is a peasant of the south of France; he is young, handsome,
wears a costume, and is a master of the rustic fife and
tambourine--instruments that are much appreciated in his part of the
country. Mademoiselle Le Quesnoy, living in Paris, daughter of a
distinguished member of the French judiciary--“le premier magistrat de
France”--young, charming, imaginative, romantic, marked out for a malady
of the chest, and with a certain innocent perversity of mind, sees him
play before an applauding crowd in the old Roman arena at Nîmes, and
forthwith conceives a secret, a singular but not, under the
circumstances, an absolutely unnatural passion for him. He comes up to
Paris to seek his fortune at the “variety” theatres, where his feeble
and primitive music quite fails to excite enthusiasm. The young girl,
reckless and impulsive, and full of sympathy with his mortification,
writes him in three words (upon one of her little photographs) an
assurance of her devotion; and this innocent missive, falling soon into
the hands of his rapacious and exasperated sister (a wonderful figure,
one of the most living that has ever come from Daudet’s pen), becomes a
source of infinite alarm to the family of Mademoiselle Le Quesnoy, who
see her compromised, calumniated and black-mailed, and finally of
complete humiliation to poor Hortense herself, now fallen into a rapid
consumption, and cured of her foolish infatuation by a nearer view of
the vain and ignorant Valmajour. An agent of the family recovers the
photograph (with the aid of ten thousand francs), and the young girl,
with the bitter taste of her disappointment still in her soul, dies in
her flower.
This little story, as I say, is very shocking to M. Zola, who cites it
as an example of the folly of a departure from consistent realism. What
is observed, says M. Zola, on the whole very justly, is strong; what is
invented is always weak, especially what is invented to please the
ladies. “See in this case,” he writes, “all the misery of invented
episodes. This love of Hortense, with which the author has doubtless
wished to give the impression of something touching, produces a
discomfort, as if it were a violation of nature. It is therefore the
pages written for the ladies that are repulsive--even to a man
accustomed to the saddest dissections of the human corpse.” I am not of
M. Zola’s opinion--delightful as it would be to be of that opinion when
M. Zola’s sense of propriety is ruffled. The incident of Hortense and
Valmajour is not (to my sense) a blot upon _Numa Roumestan_; on the
contrary, it is perfectly conceivable, and is treated with admirable
delicacy. “This romantic stuff,” says M. Zola, elsewhere, “is as painful
as a pollution. That a young girl should lose her head over a tenor,
that may be explained, for she loves the operatic personage in the
interpreter. She has before her a young man sharpened and refined by
life, elegant, having at least certain appearances of talent and
intelligence. But this tambourinist, with his drum and penny-whistle,
this village dandy, a poor devil who doesn’t even know how to speak!
No, life has not such cruelties as that, I protest, I who certainly, as
a general thing, am not accustomed to give ground before human
aberrations!” This objection was worth making; but I should look at the
matter in another way. It seems to me much more natural that a girl of
the temper and breeding that M. Daudet has described should take a
momentary fancy to a prepossessing young rustic, bronzed by the sun of
Provence (even if it be conceded that his soul was vulgar), than that
she should fasten her affections upon a “lyric artist,” suspected of
pomatum and paint, and illuminated by the footlights. These are points
which it is vain to discuss, however, both because they are delicate and
because they are details. I have come so far simply from a desire to
justify my high admiration of _Numa Roumestan_. But Emile Zola, again,
has expressed this feeling more felicitously than I can hope to do.
“This, moreover, is a very slight blemish in a work which I regard as
one of those, of all Daudet’s productions, that is most personal to
himself. He has put his whole nature into it, helped by his southern
temperament, having only to make large draughts upon his innermost
recollections and sensations. I do not think that he has hitherto
reached such an intensity either of irony or of geniality.... Happy the
books which arrive in this way, at the hour of the complete maturity of
a talent! They are simply the widest unfolding of an artist’s nature;
they have in happy equilibrium the qualities of observation and the
qualities of style. For Alphonse Daudet _Numa Roumestan_ will mark this
interfusion of a temperament and a subject that are made for each other,
the perfect plenitude of a work which the writer exactly fills.”
II
As I say, however, these are details, and I have touched them
prematurely. Alphonse Daudet is a charmer, and the effect of his
brilliant, friendly, indefinable genius is to make it difficult, in
speaking of him, to take things in their order or follow a plan. In
writing of him some time ago, in another place, I so far lost my head as
to remark, with levity, that he was “a great little novelist.” The
diminutive epithet then, I must now say, was nothing more than a term of
endearment, the result of an irresistible impulse to express a sense of
personal fondness. This kind of feeling is difficult to utter in
English, and the utterance of it, so far as this is possible, is not
thought consistent with the dignity of a critic. If we were talking
French, nothing would be simpler than to say that Alphonse Daudet is
adorable, and have done with it. But this resource is denied me, and I
must arrive at my meaning by a series of circumlocutions. I am not able
even to say that he is very “personal”; that epithet, so valuable in the
vocabulary of French literary criticism, has, when applied to the talent
of an artist, a meaning different from the sense in which we use it. “A
novelist so personal and so penetrating,” says Emile Zola, speaking of
the author of _Numa Roumestan_. That phrase, in English, means nothing
in particular; so that I must add to it that the charm of Daudet’s
talent comes from its being charged to an extraordinary degree with his
temperament, his feelings, his instincts, his natural qualities. This,
of course, is a charm, in a style, only when nature has been generous.
To Alphonse Daudet she has been exceptionally so; she has placed in his
hand an instrument of many chords. A delicate, nervous organisation,
active and indefatigable in spite of its delicacy, and familiar with
emotion of almost every kind, equally acquainted with pleasure and with
pain; a light, quick, joyous, yet reflective, imagination, a faculty of
seeing images, making images, at every turn, of conceiving everything in
the visible form, in the plastic spirit; an extraordinary sensibility to
all the impressions of life and a faculty of language which is in
perfect harmony with his wonderful fineness of perception--these are
some of the qualities of which he is the happy possessor, and which make
his equipment for the work he has undertaken exceedingly rich. There are
others besides; but enumerations are ponderous, and we should avoid that
danger in speaking of a genius whose lightness of touch never belies
itself. His elder brother, who has not his talent, has written a little
book about him in which the word _modernité_ perpetually occurs. M.
Ernest Daudet, in _Mon Frère et Moi_, insists upon his possession of
the qualities expressed by this barbarous substantive, which is so
indispensable to the new school. Alphonse Daudet is, in truth, very
modern; he has all the newly-developed, the newly-invented, perceptions.
Nothing speaks so much to his imagination as the latest and most
composite things, the refinements of current civilisation, the most
delicate shades of the actual. It is scarcely too much to say that
(especially in the Parisian race), modern manners, modern nerves, modern
wealth, and modern improvements, have engendered a new sense, a sense
not easily named nor classified, but recognisable in all the most
characteristic productions of contemporary art. It is partly physical,
partly moral, and the shortest way to describe it is to say that it is a
more analytic consideration of appearances. It is known by its tendency
to resolve its discoveries into pictorial form. It sees the connection
between feelings and external conditions, and it expresses such
relations as they have not been expressed hitherto. It deserves to win
victories, because it has opened its eyes well to the fact that the
magic of the arts of representation lies in their appeal to the
associations awakened by things. It traces these associations into the
most unlighted corners of our being, into the most devious paths of
experience. The appearance of things is constantly more complicated as
the world grows older, and it needs a more and more patient art, a
closer notation, to divide it into its parts. Of this art Alphonse
Daudet has a wonderfully large allowance, and that is why I say that he
is peculiarly modern. It is very true that his manner is not the manner
of patience--though he must always have had a great deal of that virtue
in the preparation of his work. The new school of fiction in France is
based very much on the taking of notes; the library of the great
Flaubert, of the brothers de Goncourt, of Emile Zola, and of the writer
of whom I speak, must have been in a large measure a library of
memorandum-books. This of course only puts the patience back a stage or
two. In composition Daudet proceeds by quick, instantaneous vision, by
the happiest divination, by catching the idea as it suddenly springs up
before him with a whirr of wings. What he mainly sees is the great
surface of life and the parts that lie near the surface. But life is,
immensely, a matter of surface, and if our emotions in general are
interesting, the _form_ of those emotions has the merit of being the
most definite thing about them. Like most French imaginative writers
(judged, at least, from the English standpoint), he is much less
concerned with the moral, the metaphysical world, than with the
sensible. We proceed usually from the former to the latter, while the
French reverse the process. Except in politics, they are uncomfortable
in the presence of abstractions, and lose no time in reducing them to
the concrete. But even the concrete, for them, is a field for poetry,
which brings us to the fact that the delightful thing in Daudet’s talent
is the inveterate poetical touch. This is what mainly distinguishes him
from the other lights of the realistic school--modifies so completely in
his case the hardness of consistent realism. There is something very
hard, very dry, in Flaubert, in Edmond de Goncourt, in the robust Zola;
but there is something very soft in Alphonse Daudet. “Benevolent
nature,” says Zola, “has placed him at that exquisite point where poetry
ends and reality begins.” That is happily said; Daudet’s great
characteristic is this mixture of the sense of the real with the sense
of the beautiful. His imagination is constantly at play with his theme;
it has a horror of the literal, the limited; it sees an object in all
its intermingled relations--on its sentimental, its pathetic, its
comical, its pictorial side. Flaubert, in whom Alphonse Daudet would
probably recognise to a certain degree a literary paternity, is far from
being a simple realist; but he was destitute of this sense of the
beautiful, destitute of facility and grace. He had, to take its place, a
sense of the strange, the grotesque, to which _Salammbo_, _La Tentation
de Saint-Antoine_, his indescribable posthumous novel of _Bouvard et
Pécuchet_, abundantly testify. The talent of the brothers Goncourt
strikes us as a talent that was associated originally with a sense of
beauty; but we receive an impression that this feeling has been
perverted and warped. It has ceased to be natural and free; it has
become morbid and peevish, has turned mainly to curiosity and mannerism.
And these two authors are capable, during a whole book (as in _Germinie
Lacerteux_ or _La Fille Elisa_), of escaping from its influence
altogether. No one would probably ever think of accusing Emile Zola of
having a perception of the beautiful. He has an illimitable, and at
times a very valuable, sense of the ugly, of the unclean; but when he
addresses himself to the poetic aspect of things, as in _La Faute de
l’Abbé Mouret_, he is apt to have terrible misadventures.
III
It is for the expressive talents that we feel an affection, and Daudet
is eminently expressive. His manner is the manner of talk, and if the
talk is sincere, that makes a writer touch us. Daudet expresses many
things; but he most frequently expresses himself--his own temper in the
presence of life, his own feeling on a thousand occasions. This personal
note is especially to be observed in his earlier productions--in the
_Lettres de mon Moulin_, the _Contes du Lundi_, _Le Petit Chose_; it is
also very present in the series of prefaces which he has undertaken to
supply to the octavo edition of his works. In these prefaces he gives
the history of each successive book--relates the circumstances under
which it was written. These things are ingenuously told, but what we are
chiefly conscious of in regard to them, is that Alphonse Daudet must
express himself. His brother informs us that he is writing his memoirs,
and this will have been another opportunity for expression. Ernest
Daudet, as well (as I have mentioned), has attempted to express him.
_Mon Frère et Moi_ is one of those productions which it is difficult
for an English reader to judge in fairness: it is so much more
confidential than we, in public, ever venture to be. The French have, on
all occasions, the courage of their emotion, and M. Ernest Daudet’s
leading emotion is a boundless admiration for his junior. He lays it
before us very frankly and gracefully--not, on the whole, indiscreetly;
and I have no quarrel whatever with his volume, for it contains a
considerable amount of information on a very interesting subject.
Indirectly, indeed, as well as directly, it helps us to a knowledge of
his brother. Alphonse Daudet was born in Provence; he comes of an
expansive, a confidential race. His style is impregnated with the
southern sunshine, and his talent has the sweetness of a fruit that has
grown in the warm, open air. He has the advantage of being a Provençal
converted, as it were--of having a southern temperament and a northern
reason. We know what he thinks of the southern temperament--_Numa
Roumestan_ is a vivid exposition of that. “_Gau de carriero, doulou
d’oustau_,” as the Provençal has it; “_joie de rue, douleur de
maison_--joy in the street and pain in the house”--that proverb, says
Alphonse Daudet, describes and formulates a whole race. It has given him
the subject of an admirable story, in which he has depicted with equal
force and tenderness the amiable weaknesses, the mingled violence and
levity of the children of the clime of the fig and olive. He has put
before us, above all, their mania for talk, their irrepressible chatter,
the qualities that, with them, render all passion, all purpose,
inordinately vocal. Himself a complete “_produit du Midi_,” like the
famille Mèfre in _Numa Roumestan_, he has achieved the feat of becoming
objective to his own vision, getting outside of his ingredients and
judging them. This he has done by the aid of his Parisianised
conscience, his exquisite taste, and that finer wisdom which resides in
the artist, from whatever soil he springs. Successfully as he has done
it, however, he has not done it so well but that he too does not show a
little of the heightened colour, the super-abundant statement, the
restless movement of his compatriots. He is nothing if not
demonstrative; he is always in a state of feeling; he has not a very
definite ideal of reserve. It must be added that he is a man of genius,
and that genius never spends its capital; that he is an artist, and that
an artist always has a certain method and order. But it remains
characteristic of his origin that the author of _Numa Roumestan_, one of
the happiest and most pointed of satires, should have about him the
aroma of some of the qualities satirised. There are passages in his
tales and in his prefaces that are genuine “produits du Midi,” and his
brother’s account of him could only have been written by a Provençal
brother.