one’s self away in one’s books, has never been, and will never be, the
ideal of us of English speech; but that does not prevent our enjoying
immensely, when we meet it, a happy example of this alien spirit. For
myself, I am free to confess, half my affection for Alphonse Daudet
comes from the fact that he writes in a way in which I would not write
even if I could. There are certain kinds of feeling and observation,
certain impressions and ideas, to which we are rather ashamed to give a
voice, and yet are ashamed not to have in our scale. In these matters
Alphonse Daudet renders us a great service: he expresses such things on
our behalf. I may add that he usually does it much better than the
cleverest of us could do even if we were to try. I have said that he is
a Provençal converted, and I should do him a great injustice if I did
not dwell upon his conversion. His brother relates the circumstances
under which he came up to Paris, at the age of twenty (in a threadbare
overcoat and a pair of india-rubbers), to seek his literary fortune. His
beginnings were difficult, his childhood had been hard, he was familiar
with poverty and disaster. He had no adventitious aid to success--his
whole fortune consisted in his exquisite organisation. But Paris was to
be, artistically, a mine of wealth to him, and of all the anxious and
eager young spirits who, on the battle-field of uncarpeted _cinquièmes_,
have laid siege to the indifferent city, none can have felt more deeply
conscious of the mission to take possession of it. Alphonse Daudet, at
the present hour, is in complete possession of Paris; he knows it, loves
it; uses it; he has assimilated it to its last particle. He has made of
it a Paris of his own--a Paris like a vast crisp water-colour, one of
the water-colours of the school of Fortuny. The French have a great
advantage in the fact that they admire their capital very much as if it
were a foreign city. Most of their artists, their men of letters, have
come up from the provinces, and well as they may learn to know the
metropolis, it never ceases to be a spectacle, a wonder, a fascination
for them. This comes partly from the intrinsic brilliancy and interest
of the place, partly from the poverty of provincial life, and partly
from the degree to which the faculty of appreciation is developed in
Frenchmen of the class of which I speak. To Daudet, at any rate, the
familiar aspects of Paris are endlessly pictorial, and part of the charm
of his novels (for those who share his relish for that huge flower of
civilisation) is in the way he recalls it, evokes it, suddenly presents
it, in parts or as a whole, to our senses. The light, the sky, the
feeling of the air, the odours of the streets, the look of certain
vistas, the silvery, muddy Seine, the cool, grey tone of colour, the
physiognomy of particular quarters, the whole Parisian expression, meet
you suddenly in his pages, and remind you again and again that if he
paints with a pen he writes with a brush. I remember that when I read
_Le Nabab_ and _Les Rois en Exil_ for the first time, I said to myself
that this was the _article de Paris_ in supreme perfection, and that no
reader could understand such productions who had not had a copious
experience of the scene. It is certain, at any rate, that those books
have their full value only for minds more or less Parisianised; half
their meaning, their magic, their subtlety of intention is liable to be
lost. It may be said that this is a great limitation--that the works of
the best novelists may be understood by all the world. There is
something in that; but I know not, all the same, whether the fact I
indicate be a great limitation. It is certainly a very illustrative
quality. Daudet has caught the tone of a particular pitch of manners; he
applies it with the lightest, surest hand, and his picture shines and
lives. The most generalised representation of life cannot do more than
that.
I shrink very much from speaking of systems, in relation to such a
genius as this: I should incline to believe that Daudet’s system is
simply to be as vivid as he can. Emile Zola has a system--at least he
says so; but I do not remember, on the part of the author of _Numa
Roumestan_, the smallest technical profession of faith. Nevertheless, he
has taken a line, as we say, and his line is to sail as close as
possible to the actual. The life of Paris being his subject, his
attempt, most frequently, is to put his finger upon known examples; so
that he has been accused of portraying individuals instead of portraying
types. There are few of his figures to which the name of some celebrity
of the day has not been attached. The Nabob is François Bravais; the Duc
de Mora is the Duc de Morny. The Irish Doctor Jenkins is an English
physician who flourished in Paris from such a year to such another;
people are still living (wonderful to say), who took his little pills _à
base arsénicale_. Félicia Ruys is Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt;
Constance Crenmitz is Madame Taglioni; the Queen of Illyria is the Queen
of Naples; the Prince of Axel is the Prince of Orange; Tom Lévis is an
English house-agent (_not_ in the Rue Royale, but hard by); Elysée
Méraut is a well-known journalist, and Doctor Bouchereau a well-known
surgeon. Such is the key, we are told, to these ingenious
mystifications, and to many others which I have not the space to
mention. It matters little, to my mind, whether in each case the cap
fits the supposed model; for nothing is more evident than that Alphonse
Daudet has proposed to himself to represent not only the people but the
persons of his time. The conspicuity of certain individuals has added to
the force with which they speak to his imagination. His taste is for
salient figures, and he has said to himself that there is no greater
proof of being salient than being known. The temptation to “put people
into a book” is a temptation of which every writer of fiction knows
something, and I hold that to succumb to it is not only legitimate but
inevitable. Putting people into books is what the novelist lives upon;
the question in the matter is the question of delicacy, for according to
that delicacy the painter conjures away recognition or insists upon it.
Daudet has been accused of the impertinence of insisting, and I believe
that two or three of his portraits have provoked a protest. He is
charged with ingratitude for having produced an effigy of the Duke of
Morny, who had been his benefactor, and employed him as a secretary.
Such a matter as this is between M. Daudet and his conscience, and I am
far from pretending to pronounce upon it. The uninitiated reader can
only say that the figure is a very striking one--such a picture as (it
may be imagined) the Duc de Morny would not be displeased to have
inspired. It may fairly be conceded, however, that Daudet is much more
an observer than an inventor. The invented parts of his tales, like the
loves of Jack and of Paul de Géry and the machinations of Madame
Autheman (the theological vampire of _L’Evangéliste_, to whom I shall
return for a moment), are the vague, the ineffective as well as the
romantic parts. (I remember that in reading _Le Nabab_, it was not very
easy to keep Paul de Géry and André Maranne apart.) It is the real--the
transmuted real--that he gives us best; the fruit of a process that adds
to observation what a kiss adds to a greeting. The joy, the excitement
of recognition, are keen, even when the object recognised is dismal.
They are part of his spirit--part of his way of seeing things.
_L’Evangéliste_ is the saddest story conceivable; but it is lighted,
throughout, by the author’s irrepressibly humorous view of the
conditions in which its successive elements present themselves, and by
the extraordinary vivacity with which, in his hands, narration and
description proceed. His humour is of the finest; it is needless to say
that it is never violent nor vulgar. It is a part of the high
spirits--the animal spirits, I should say, if the phrase had not an
association of coarseness--that accompany the temperament of his race;
and it is stimulated by the perpetual entertainment which so rare a
visual faculty naturally finds in the spectacle of life, even while
encountering there a multitude of distressing things. Daudet’s gaiety is
a part of his poetry, and his poetry is a part of everything he touches.
There is little enough gaiety in the subject of _Jack_, and yet the
whole story is told with a smile. To complete the charm of the thing,
the smile is full of feeling. Here and there it becomes an immense
laugh, and the result is a delightful piece of drollery. _Les Aventures
Prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon_ contains all his high spirits; it
is one of his few stories in which laughter and tears are not
intermingled.
This little tale, which is one of his first, is, like _Numa Roumestan_,
a satire on a southern foible. Tartarin de Tarascon is an excellent man
who inhabits the old town on the Rhone over which the palace of the good
King René keeps guard; he has not a fault in the world except an
imagination too vivid. He is liable to visions, to hallucinations; the
desire that a thing shall happen speedily resolves itself into the
belief that the thing will happen--then that it is happening--then that
it _has_ happened. Tartarin accordingly presents himself to the world
(and to himself) as a gentleman to whom all wonders are familiar; his
experience blooms with supposititious flowers. The coveted thing for a
man of his romantic mould is that he shall be the bravest of the brave,
and he passes his life in a series of heroic exploits, in which, as you
listen to him, it is impossible not to believe. He passes over from
Marseilles to Algiers, where his adventures deepen to a climax, and
where he has a desperate flirtation with the principal ornament of the
harem of a noble Arab. The lady proves at the end to be a horribly
improper little Frenchwoman, and poor Tartarin, abused and disabused,
returns to Tarascon to meditate on what might have been. Nothing could
be more charming than the light comicality of the sketch, which fills a
small volume. This is the most mirthful, the most completely diverting
of all Daudet’s tales; but the same element, in an infinitely subtler
form, runs through the others. The essence of it is the wish to please,
and this brings me back to the point to which I intended to return. The
wish to please is the quality by which Daudet persuades his readers
most; it is this that elicits from them that friendliness, that
confession that they are charmed, of which I spoke at the beginning of
these remarks. It gives a sociability to his manner, in spite of the
fact that he describes all sorts of painful and odious things. This
contradiction is a part of his originality. He has no pretension to
being simple, he is perfectly conscious of being complex, and in
nothing is he more modern than in this expressive and sympathetic
smile--the smile of the artist, the sceptic, the man of the world--with
which he shows us the miseries and cruelties of life. It is singular
that we should like him for that--and doubtless many people do not, or
think they do not. What they really dislike, I believe, is the things he
relates, which are often lamentable.
IV
The first of these were slight and simple, and for the most part
cheerful; little anecdotes and legends of Provence, impressions of an
artist’s holidays in that strange, bare, lovely land, and of wanderings
further afield, in Corsica and Algeria; sketches of Paris during the
siege; incidents of the invasion, the advent of the Prussian rule in
other parts of the country. In all these things there is _la note émue_,
the smile which is only a more synthetic sign of being moved. And then
such grace of form, such lightness of touch, such alertness of
observation! Some of the chapters of the _Lettres de mon Moulin_ are
such perfect vignettes, that the brief treatment of small subjects might
well have seemed, at first, Alphonse Daudet’s appointed work. He had
almost invented a manner, and it was impossible to do better than he the
small piece, or even the passage. Glimpses, reminiscences, accidents, he
rendered them with the brilliancy of a violinist improvising on a sudden
hint. The _Lettres de mon Moulin_, moreover, are impregnated with the
light, with the fragrance of a Provençal summer; the rosemary and thyme
are in the air as we read, the white rocks and the grey foliage stretch
away to an horizon of hills--the Alpilles, the little Alps--on which
colour is as iridescent as the breast of a dove. The Provence of
Alphonse Daudet is a delightful land; even when the mistral blows there
it has a music in its whistle. Emile Zola has protested against this; he
too is of Provençal race, he passed his youth in the old Languedoc, and
he intimates that his fanciful friend throws too much sweetness into the
picture. It is beyond contradiction that Daudet, like Tartarin de
Tarascon and Numa Roumestan, exaggerates a little; he sees with great
intensity, and is very sensitive to agreeable impressions. _Le Petit
Chose_, his first long story, reads to-day like the attempt of a
beginner, and of a beginner who had read and enjoyed Dickens. I risk
this allusion to the author of _Copperfield_ in spite of a conviction
that Alphonse Daudet must be tired of hearing that he imitates him. It
is not imitation; there is nothing so gross as imitation in the length
and breadth of Daudet’s work; but it is conscious sympathy, for there is
plenty of that. There are pages in his tales which seem to say to us
that at one moment of his life Dickens had been a revelation to
him--pages more particularly in _Le Petit Chose_, in _Fromont Jeune_ and
in _Jack_. The heroine of the first of these works (a very shadowy
personage) is never mentioned but as the “black eyes”; some one else is
always spoken of as the _dame de grand mérite_; the heroine’s father,
who keeps a flourishing china-shop, never opens his mouth without saying
“C’est le cas de le dire.” These are harmless, they are indeed sometimes
very happy, Dickensisms. We make no crime of them to M. Daudet, who must
have felt as intelligently as he has felt everything else the
fascinating form of the English novelist’s drollery. _Fromont Jeune et
Risler Aîné_ is a study of life in the old quarter of the Marais, the
Paris of the seventeenth century, whose stately _hôtels_ have been
invaded by the innumerable activities of modern trade. When I say a
study, I use the word with all those restrictions with which it must be
applied to a genius who is truthful without being literal, and who has a
pair of butterfly’s wings attached to the back of his observation. If
sub-titles were the fashion to-day, the right one for _Fromont Jeune_
would be--_or the Dangers of Partnership_. The action takes place for
the most part in a manufactory of wall-papers, and the persons in whom
the author seeks to interest us are engaged in this useful industry.
There are delightful things in the book, but, as I intimated at the
beginning of these remarks, there are considerable inequalities. The
pages that made M. Daudet’s fortune--for it was with _Fromont Jeune_
that his fortune began--are those which relate to the history of M.
Delobelle, the superannuated tragedian, his long-suffering wife, and his
exquisite lame daughter, who makes butterflies and humming-birds for
ladies’ head-dresses. This eccentric and pathetic household was an
immense hit, and Daudet has never been happier than in the details of
the group. Delobelle himself, who has not had an engagement for ten
years, and who never will have one again, but who holds none the less
that it is his duty not to leave the stage, “not to give up the
theatre,” though his platonic passion is paid for by the weary eyesight
of his wife and daughter, who sit up half the night attaching bead-eyes
to little stuffed animals--the blooming and sonorous Delobelle,
ferociously selfish and fantastically vain, under the genial forms of
melodrama, is a beautiful representation of a vulgarly factitious
nature. The book revealed a painter; all the descriptive passages, the
pictorial touches, had the truest felicity. No one better than Daudet
gives what we call the feeling of a place. The story illustrates, among
other things, the fact that a pretty little woman who is consumed with
the lowest form of vanity, and unimpeded in her operations by the
possession of a heart, may inflict an unlimited amount of injury upon
people about her, if she only have the opportunity. The case is well
demonstrated, and Sidonie Chèbe is an elaborate study of flimsiness; her
papery quality, as I may call it, her rustling dryness, are effectively
rendered. But I think there is a limit to the interest which the
English-speaking reader of French novels can take to-day in the
adventures of a lady who leads the life of Madame Sidonie. In the first
place he has met her again and again--he knows exactly what she will do
and say in every situation; and in the second there always seems to him
to be in her vices, her disorders, an element of the conventional. There
is a receipt among French novelists for making little high-heeled
reprobates. However this may be, he has at least a feeling that at night
all cats are grey, and that the particular tint of depravity of a woman
whose nature has the shallowness of a sanded floor is not a very
important _constatation_. Daudet has expended much ingenuity in
endeavouring to hit the particular tint of Sidonie; he has wished to
make her a type--the type of the daughter of small unsuccessful
shopkeepers (narrow-minded and self-complacent to imbecility), whose
corruption comes from the examples, temptations, opportunities of a
great city, as well as from her impure blood and the infection of the
meanest associations. But what all this illustrates was not worth
illustrating.
The early chapters of _Jack_ are admirable; the later ones suffer a
little, I think, from the story being drawn out too much, like an
accordion when it wishes to be plaintive. Jack is a kind of younger
brother of the Petit Chose, though he takes the troubles of life rather
more stoutly than that delicate and diminutive hero; a poor boy with a
doting and disreputable mother, whose tenderness is surpassed by her
frivolity, and who sacrifices her son to the fantastic egotism of an
unsuccessful man of letters with whom she passes several years of her
life. She is another study of _coquinerie_--she is another shade; but
she is a more apprehensible figure than Sidonie Chèbe--she is, indeed,
a very admirable portrait. The success of the book, however, is the
figure of her lover, that is of her protector and bully, the
unrecognised genius aforesaid, author of _Le Fils de Faust_, an
uncirculated dramatic poem in the manner of Goethe, and centre of a
little group of _ratés_--a collection of dead-beats, as we say to-day,
as pretentious, as impotent, as envious and as bilious as himself. He
conceives a violent hatred of the offspring of his amiable companion,
and the subject of _Jack_ is the persecution of the boy by this
monstrous charlatan. This persecution is triumphantly successful; the
youthful hero dies on the threshold of manhood, broken down by his
tribulations and miseries: he has been thrown upon the world to earn his
bread, and among other things seeks a livelihood as a stoker on an
Atlantic steamer. Jack has been taken young, and though his nature is
gentle and tender, his circumstances succeed in degrading him. He is
reduced at the end to a kind of bewildered brutishness. The story is
simply the history of a juvenile martyrdom, pityingly, expansively told,
and I am afraid that Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, who, in writing lately
about “Modern Fiction,”[4] complains of the abuse of pathetic effects in
that form of composition, would find little to commend in this brilliant
paraphrase of suffering. Mr. Warner’s complaint is eminently just, and
the fault of _Jack_ is certainly the abuse of pathos. Mr. Warner does
not mention Alphonse Daudet by name, but it is safe to assume that in
his reflections upon the perversity of those writers who will not make a
novel as comfortable as one’s stockings, or as pretty as a Christmas
card, he was thinking of the author of so many uncompromising
_dénouements_. It is true that this probability is diminished by the
fact that when he remarks that surely “the main object in the novel is
to entertain,” he appears to imply that the writers who furnish his text
are faithless to this duty. It is possible he would not have made that
implication if he had had in mind the productions of a story-teller who
has the great peculiarity of being “amusing,” as the old-fashioned
critics say, even when he touches the source of tears. The word
entertaining has two or three shades of meaning; but in whatever sense
it is used I may say, in parenthesis, that I do not agree with Mr.
Warner’s description of the main object of the novel. I should put the
case differently: I should say that the main object of the novel is to
represent life. I cannot understand any other motive for interweaving
imaginary incidents, and I do not perceive any other measure of the
value of such combinations. The _effect_ of a novel--the effect of any
work of art--is to entertain; but that is a very different thing. The
success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to
which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to
us for the time that we have lived another life--that we have had a
miraculous enlargement of experience. The greater the art the greater
the miracle, and the more certain also the fact that we have been
entertained--in the best meaning of that word, at least, which signifies
that we have been living at the expense of some one else. I am perfectly
aware that to say the object of a novel is to represent life does not
bring the question to a point so fine as to be uncomfortable for any
one. It is of the greatest importance that there should be a very free
appreciation of such a question, and the definition I have hinted at
gives plenty of scope for that. For, after all, may not people differ
infinitely as to what constitutes life--what constitutes representation?
Some people, for instance, hold that Miss Austen deals with life, that
Miss Austen represents. Others attribute these achievements to the
accomplished Ouida. Some people find that illusion, that enlargement of
experience, that miracle of living at the expense of others, of which I
have spoken, in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. Others revel in them in
the pages of Mr. Howells.
V