It is not every country and every period gives birth to a comic giant.
Tragic and sentimental heroes are common, and make upon the history of
literature a mark of sorts; we have Achilles and Werther, William Tell,
d'Artagnan, Tristan, Sir Galahad, others, too, with equal claims to
fame: but comic giants are few. The literature of the world is full of
comic pigmies; it is fairly rich in half-growns such as Eulenspiegel, Mr
Dooley, Tchitchikoff, and Mr Pickwick, but it does not easily produce
the comic character who stands alone and massive among his fellows, like
Balzac among novelists. There are not half a dozen competitors for the
position, for Pantagruel and Gargantua are too philosophic, while Don
Quixote does not move every reader to laughter; he is too romantic, too
noble; he is hardly comic. Baron von Muenchausen, Falstaff, and Tartarin
alone remain face to face, all of them simple, all of them adventurous,
but adventurous without literary inflation, as a kitten is adventurous
when it explores a work-basket. There is no gigantic quality where there
is self-consciousness or cynicism; the slightest strain causes the
gigantic to vanish, the creature becomes human. The comic giant must be
obvious, he must be, to himself, rebellious to analysis; he must also be
obvious to the beholder, indeed transparent. That is not a paradox, it
is a restatement of the fact that the comic giant's simplicity must be
so great that everybody but he will realise it.
All this Tartarin fulfils. He is the creature of Alphonse Daudet, a
second-rate writer who has earned for him a title maybe to immortality.
There is no doubt that Daudet was a second-rate writer, and that Mr
George Moore was right when he summed him up as _de la bouillabaisse_;
his novels are sentimental, his reminiscences turgid, his verses
suitable for crackers, but Daudet had an asset--his vivid feeling for
the South. It was not knowledge or observation made Tartarin; it was
instinct. Neither in _Tartarin de Tarascon_ nor in _Tartarin sur les
Alpes_ was Daudet for a moment inconsistent or obscure; for him,
Tartarin and his followers stood all the time in violent light. He knew
not only what they had to say in given circumstances, but also what they
would say in any circumstances that might arise.
It is not wonderful then, that Tartarin appears as a large character.
You will figure him throughout as a French bourgeois, aged about forty
in the first novel, fifty in the second, and sixty in the third.
Daudet's dates being unreliable, you must assume his adventures as
happening between 1861 and 1881, and bridge the gaps that exist between
them with a vision of Tartarin's stormily peaceful life in the sleepy
town of Tarascon. For Tartarin was too adventurous to live without
dangers and storms. When he was not shooting lions in Algeria, or
climbing the Alps, or colonising in Polynesia, Tartarin was still a
hero: he lived in his little white house with the green shutters,
surrounded with knives, revolvers, rifles, double-handed swords,
crishes, and yataghans; he read, not the local paper, but Fenimore
Cooper and Captain Cook; he learned how to fight and how to hunt, how to
follow a trail, or he hypnotised himself with the recitals of Alpine
climbs, of battles in China with the bellicose Tartar. Save under
compulsion, he never did anything, partly because there was nothing to
do at Tarascon, partly because his soul was turned rather towards
bourgeois comfort than towards glory and blood. This, however, the fiery
Southerner could not accept: if he could not do he could pretend, and
thus did Daudet establish the enormous absurdity of his character.
There was nothing to shoot at Tarascon, so Tartarin and his followers
went solemnly into the fields and fired at their caps; there was nothing
to climb, except the neighbouring Alpilles ... whose height was three
hundred feet, but Tartarin bought an alpen-stock and printed upon his
visiting-cards initials which meant 'President of the Alpine Club';
there was no danger in the town, but Tartarin never went out at night
without a dagger and several guns. He was a bourgeois, but he was a
romantic: he had to find in fiction the excitement that life refused
him, to create it where it did not exist. In the rough, Tartarin was the
jovial Frenchman of the South, short, fat, excitable, unable to see
things as they are, unable to restrain his voice, his gestures, his
imagination; he was greedy and self-deceived, he saw trifles as
enormous, he placed the world under a magnifying glass.
Because of this enormous vision of life Tartarin was driven into
adventure. Because he magnified his words he was compelled by popular
opinion to sail to Algiers to shoot lions, though he was at heart afraid
of dogs; to scale the Alps, though he shuddered when he thought of
catching cold. He had to justify himself in the eyes of his
fellow-citizens, or forgo for ever the halo of heroism. He did not have
to abandon it, for Daudet loved his Tartarin; in Algeria he was mocked,
swindled, beaten, but somehow he secured his lion's skin; and, in the
Alps, he actually scaled both the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc ... the first
without knowing that it was dangerous, the second against his will.
Tartarin won because he was vital, his vitality served him as a shield.
All his qualities were of those that make a man absurd but invincible;
his exaggeration, his histrionics, his mock heroics, his credulity, his
mild sensuality, his sentimentality, and his bumptious cowardice--all
this blended into an enormous bubbling charm which neither man nor
circumstance could in the end withstand.
Daudet brings out his traits on every page. Everywhere he makes Tartarin
strut and swell as a turkey-cock. Exaggeration, in other words lying,
lay in every word and deed of Tartarin. He could not say: 'We were a
couple of thousand at the amphitheatre yesterday,' but naturally said:
'We were fifty thousand.' And he was not exactly lying; Daudet, who
loved him well, pleaded that this was not lying but mirage, mirage
induced by the hot sun. He was not quite wrong: when Tartarin said that
he had killed forty lions he believed it; and his fellow-climber
believed the absurd story he had concocted: that Switzerland was a
fraud, that there were eiderdowns at the bottom of every crevasse, and
that he had himself climbed the Andes on his hands and knees. Likewise,
Tartarin and the people of Tarascon were deceived by their own
histrionics. The baobab (_arbos gigantea_) which Tartarin trained in a
flower-pot stood, in their imagination, a hundred feet high.
Histrionics and mock heroics pervade the three books. It is not the fact
that matters, it is the fact seen through the coloured Southern mind,
and that mind turns at once away from the fact towards the trifles that
attend it. Thus costume is everywhere a primary concern. Tartarin cannot
land at Algiers to shoot lions unless he be dressed for the part in Arab
clothes, and he must carry three rifles, drag behind him a portable
camp, a pharmacy, a patent tent, patent compressed foods. Nothing is too
absurd for him: he has a 'Winchester rifle with thirty-two cartridges in
the magazine'; he does not shrink from _a rifle with a semicircular
barrel for shooting round the corner_. To climb the Righi (instead of
using the funicular) he must wear a jersey, ice-shoes, snow goggles.
Everywhere he plays a part and plays it in costume. Nor is Tartarin
alone in this; the Tarasconnais emulate their chief: Major Bravida dons
black when he calls to compel Tartarin 'to redeem his honour' and sail
for Algiers; when Port Tarascon, the frantic colony, is formed, costumes
are designed for grandees, for the militia, for the bureaucrats.
Appearances alone matter: Tarascon is not content with the French flag,
but spread-eagles across it a fantastic local animal, _La Tarasque_, of
mythical origin.
Life in Tarascon is too easy: Tartarin helps it on with a war-whoop. He
creates adventure. Thus in 1870 he organises against the Germans the
defence of the town; mines are laid under the marketplace, the _Cafe
de la Comedie_ is turned into a redoubt, volunteers drill in the street.
Of course there is no fighting, the Germans do not come, nor do the
prudent Tarasconnais attempt to seek them out, but in its imagination
the town has been heroic. It is heroic again when it defends against the
Government the monks of Pamperigouste: the convent becomes a fortress,
but there is no fighting; when the supplies give out the heroic
defenders march out with their weapons and their banners, in their
crusaders' uniforms. The town believes. It believes anything and
anybody. Because a rogue calls himself a prince, Tartarin entrusts him
with his money and is deserted in the Sahara; because another calls
himself a duke, thousands of Tarasconnais follow Tartarin to a
non-existent colony bought by them from the pseudo-duke. Whether the
matter be general or personal Tartarin believes. He falls in love with
a Moorish girl, and innocently allows himself to be persuaded that a
substitute is the beauty whom he glimpsed through the yashmak.
Tartarin believes because he is together romantic, sentimental, and
mildly sensual: that which he likes he wants to think true. He wants to
believe that sweet Baia is his true love; when again he succumbs to
Sonia, the Russian exile, he wants to believe that he too is an
extremist, a potential martyr in the cause of Nihilism; and again he
wants to believe that Likiriki, the nigger girl, is the little creature
of charm for whom his heart has been calling. His sentimentality is
always ready--for women, for ideas, for beasts. He can be moved when he
hears for the hundredth time the ridiculous ballads that are popular in
the local drawing-rooms, weep when Bezuquet, the chemist, sings 'Oh
thou, beloved white star of my soul!' For him the lion is 'a noble
beast,' who must be shot, not caged; the horse 'the most glorious
conquest of man.' He is always above the world, never of it unless his
own safety be endangered, when he scuttles to shelter; as Daudet says,
half Tartarin is Quixote, half is Sancho ... but Sancho wins. It is
because Tartarin is a comic coward that he will not allow the heroic
crusaders of Pamperigouste to fire on the Government troops; the 'abbot'
of Port Tarascon to train the carronade on the English frigate; alone,
he is a greater coward than in public; he shivers under his weapons when
he walks to the club in the evening; he severs the rope on Mont Blanc,
sending his companion to probable death. But the burlesque does not end
tragically: nobody actually dies, all return to Tarascon in time to hear
their funeral orations.
It might be thought that Tartarin is repulsive: he is not; he is too
young, too innocent. His great, foolish heart is too open to the woes of
any damsel; his simplicity, his credulity, his muddled faith, the
optimism which no misfortune can shatter--all these traits endear him to
us, make him real. For Tartarin is real: he is the Frenchman of the
South; in the words of a character, 'The Tarasconnais type is the
Frenchman magnified, exaggerated, as seen in a convex mirror.' Tartarin
and his fellows typify the South, though some typify one side of the
Southern Frenchman rather than another; thus Bravida is military pride,
Excourbanies is the liar, and mild Pascalon is the imitator of
imitators: when Tarascon, arrested by the British captain and brought
home on board the frigate, takes up the attitude of Napoleon on the
_Bellerophon_, Pascalon begins a memorial and tries to impersonate Las
Cases. As for Tartarin, bell-wether of the flock, he has all the
characteristics, he even sings all the songs. He is the South.
The three Tartarin books constitute together the most violent satire
that has ever been written against the South. Gascony, Provence, and
Languedoc are often made the butts of Northern French writers, while
Lombards introduce in books ridiculous Neapolitans, and Catalonians
paint burlesque Andalusians, but no writer has equalled Alphonse Daudet
in consistent ferocity. So evident is this, that Tarascon to this day
resents the publications, and that, some years ago, a commercial
traveller who humorously described himself on the hotel register as
'Alphonse Daudet' was mobbed in the street, and rescued by the police
from the rabble who threatened to throw him into the Rhone. Tarascon, a
little junction on the way to Marseilles, has been made absurd for
ever. Yet, though Daudet exaggerated, he built on the truth: there is a
close connection between his preposterous figures, grown men with the
tendencies of children enormously distorted, and the Frenchmen of the
South. Indeed, the Southern Frenchman is the Frenchman as we picture him
in England; there is between him and his compatriot from Picardy or
Flanders a difference as great as exists between the Scotsman and the
man of Kent. The Northern Frenchman is sober, silent, hard, reasonable,
and logical; his imagination is negligible, his artistic taste as
corrupt as that of an average inhabitant of the Midlands. But the
Southern Frenchman is a different creature; his excitable temperament,
his irresponsibility and impetuousness run through the majority of
French artists and politicians. As the French saying goes, 'the South
moves'; thus it is not wonderful that Le Havre and Lille should not
rival Marseilles and Bordeaux.
Tartarin lives to a greater or lesser degree within every Frenchman of
the plains, born South of the line which unites Lyons and Bordeaux. It
is Tartarin who stands for hours at street corners in Arles or
Montpellier, chattering with Tartarin and, like Tartarin, endlessly
brags of the small birds he has killed, of the hearts he has won and of
his extraordinary luck at cards. It is Tartarin again who still wears
night-caps and flannel belts, and drinks every morning great bowls of
chocolate. And it is Tartarin who, light-heartedly, joins the colonial
infantry regiment and goes singing into battle because he likes the
adventure and would rather die in the field than be bored in barracks.
Daudet has maligned the South so far as courage is concerned: there is
nothing to show that the Southerners, Tarasconnais and others, are any
more cowardly than the men of the North. Courage goes in zones, and
because the North has generally proved harder the South must not be
indicted _en bloc_. Presumably Daudet felt compelled to make Tartarin a
poltroon so as to throw into relief his braggadocio; that is a flaw in
his work, but if it be accepted as the licence of a _litterateur_, it
does not mar the picture of Tartarin.
It should not, therefore, be lost sight of by the reader of _Tartarin de
Tarascon_ and of _Tartarin Sur Les Alpes_ that this is a caricature.
Every line is true, but modified a little by the 'mirage' that Alphonse
Daudet so deftly satirises; it is only so much distorted as irony
demands. _Tartarin de Tarascon_ is by far the best of the three books;
it is the most compact, and within its hundred-odd pages the picture of
Tartarin is completely painted; the sequel is merely the response of the
author to the demand of a public who so loved Tartarin as to buy five
hundred thousand copies of his adventures. As for _Port Tarascon_, the
beginning of Tartarin's end, it should not have been written, for it
closes on a new Tartarin who no longer believes in his own triumphs--a
sober, disillusioned Tartarin, shorn of his glory, flouted by his
compatriots and ready to die in a foreign town. Alphonse Daudet had
probably tired of his hero, for he understood him no longer. The real
Tartarin could not be depressed by misadventure, chastened by loss of
prestige: to cast him to earth could only bring about once more the
prodigy of Anteus. He would have risen again, more optimistic and
bombastic than ever, certain that no enemy had thrown him and that he
had but slipped. And if Tartarin had to die, which is not certain, for
Tartarin's essence is immortal, he could not die disgraced, but must
die sumptuously--like Cleopatra among her jewels, or a Tartar chief
standing on his piled arms on the crest of a funeral pyre.