There never has been a satisfactory definition of poetry, though all
ambitious literary appraisers, from Aristotle down to Bernard Shaw,
have essayed the task. But if to be able to institute apt and beautiful
comparisons; to phrase in musical language thoughts of power, beauty,
and feeling; to discern the ideal clothed in the real; to interpret the
inner meanings of life--if this ability marks the poetic gift, then
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a poet--a poet in prose as well as
in verse.
Very early in life the young Parisian--he was born in Paris, January
12, 1842--began to write verses which showed marks of distinction,
and he was only twenty-four when _Le Reliquaire_, his first
poetic volume, appeared. Two years later, _Poèmes Modernes_ and
_La Grève des Forgerons_ were issued, establishing his place
among modern poets of his land. And when, in 1869, at the age of
twenty-seven, he produced _Le Passant_, a group of exquisite
comedies in verse, he became a celebrity.
It was inevitable that a literary dweller in the French capital, reared
among the traditions of a stage whose productions are classic, and a
poet who by both nature and environment breathed in the air of art,
should turn to the drama after having won to the forefront in lyric and
narrative expression. Successively he produced _Deux Douleurs_,
_Fais ce que dois_, _Les Bijoux de la Délivrance_, _Madame
de Maintenon_, and _Le Luthier de Crémorne_--the last-named
an especially pleasing drama, full of that human feeling which marks
Coppée in all his writings. Four volumes contain his dramatic work, all
of it good, much of it brilliant.
As a novelist, Coppée left no mark upon his times--he was so easily
surpassed in this field by his contemporaries. But as a writer of
little prose fictions, he stands well forward among that brilliant
group which includes those immortals of the short-story--Maupassant,
Daudet, Mérimée, Balzac, Gautier, Loti, Halévy, Theuriet, and France.
From the work of all these masters, Coppée’s is well distinguished.
The Norman Maupassant drew his lines with a sharper pencil, and by
that same token an infinitely harder one. Daudet, child of Provence
though he was, dipped his stylus more often in the acid of satire.
Balzac chose his “cases” from classes high and low, but rarely failed
to uncover with his sharp scalpel some malignant social growth. Gautier
was rougher, coarser, and less sympathetic, though at times we may
discern in him the sudden swelling tear and tremulous lip which now
and again reveal the tenderness latent in brusk men. Halévy was more
idyllic and pastoral. Mérimée of all this wonderful company--to whose
society other notables also come with insistent and well-sustained
claims for admission--was the nearest to Coppée in the type of his
work. Both knew intimately and with tender feeling the life of lowly
folk--Coppée finding ever in his Paris the themes, the scenes, the
types for his stories, while Mérimée’s pen was never so magic as when
the romantic Corsican airs breathed about his brow. Both these master
craftsmen produced a prose infused with the imagery, grace, and charm
of poesy; both were masters of a style nervous, firm, condensed, and
vivid.
In 1878, after having been for some years employed in the Senate
Library, Coppée was appointed Guardian of the Archives of the Comédie
Française. It was then that he began to produce that remarkable series
of some fifty short fictions by which he is best known to us. One year
after the publication of his first volume of stories, _Contes en
Prose_ (1882), he was distinguished by election to the Academy, and
in 1885 he was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.
His other collections of stories are _Vingt Contes Nouveaux_
(1883), _Contes et Recits en Prose_ (1885), _Contes Rapides_
(1888), _Contes Tout Simples_ (1894), and _Contes pour les Jours
de Fête_ (1903).
In considering Coppée’s fictional work, it seems worth while to point
out its varied types, and at the same time note the meaning of several
short fictional forms which will be referred to frequently in this
volume and in succeeding volumes of the series.
His favorite type seems to have been the tale--which is not the plotted
short-story, nor yet the sketch, but rather a straightforward narration
with little or no plot, and usually depending for its interest upon
a longer or shorter chain of incidents. The French word _conte_
sufficiently describes the tale, because _conte_ means really
just _story_, and thus the generic term includes all the shorter
fictional forms. To most English readers, the term short-story means
merely a story that is short, but modern usage limits the word--the
compound word, to be precise--to a somewhat specialized type.
The typical short-story eludes precise definition, because it is
an elastic, living thing--often the more interesting for its very
disregard of an exact technical form. Certain things, however, the
real short-story does possess: a single central dominant incident, a
single preëminent character or pair of characters, a complication (not
necessarily at all involved) the resolution or untying or dénouement
of that complication, and a treatment so compressed and unified as to
produce a singleness of impression. Here, naturally, is much latitude,
but above all the short-story must focus a white light upon one spot,
upon a crucial instance, to use Mrs. Wharton’s admirable expression,
and must not diffuse that light over a whole life, a series of loosely
related happenings, or a general condition of affairs.
But the fictional sketch presents nothing of the organization seen in
the typical short-story. It is a fragment, a detached though perhaps a
complete impression, a bit of character caught in passing, a rapidly
outlined picture, but not depending upon a complication and its
unfolding for its interest.
Like the sketch, the tale is more easily defined than the short-story.
Whether long or short, the tale--as I have just pointed out--is always
the simple narration of an incident, or a succession of incidents,
without regard to plot-complication and its consequent dénouement.
The story of a thrilling lion-hunt, the recovery of a lost child, the
adventures of a hero under strange skies, or the patient loyalty of an
old servitor, might any one of them be its theme--that and nothing
more.
* * * * *
How much a fictional masterpiece suffers in translation none knows so
well as he who enjoys its beauties in the original. How much more then
must it lose when one attempts to rehearse its story in brief synopsis.
Yet we may come to some understanding of Coppée’s typical variety
by such an examination of three of his short pieces, besides “The
Substitute,” which is given in full in translation.
“At Table” is one of the author’s characteristic sketches. It is about
twenty-five hundred words long. Fourteen are at table, the guests
of “_madame la comtesse_”--“four young women in full toilette,
and ten men belonging to the aristocracy of blood or of merit.” With
that pictorial gift which is the literary sketch-artist’s first
possession, we are shown the whole scene--“jewels, decorations of honor
or of nobility, the atmosphere of good living in the high hall,” the
glittering table, the noiseless service, the expanding social spirit as
the collation advances, the “snapping of bright words,” and everything
that made the dinner “charming as well as sumptuous.”
“Now, at that same table, at the lower end, in the most modest place, a
man still young ... a man of reverie and imagination ... sat silent.”
“He was plunged in a bath of optimism; it seemed good to him that there
should be, sometimes and somewhere in the weary world, beings almost
happy.” “But when the Dreamer had before him on his plate a portion
of the monstrous turbot, the light odor of the sea evoked in his mind
a picture of the Breton fisher folk, by grace of whose dangers this
delectation came to the feasters.”
Thus his fancy wanders on, vividly rebuilding the varied scenes peopled
by those whose labors, painful often and ill-requited, made possible
the revelry that night. The contrast stands out, white against black,
and leads at last to this mixed conclusion: Softly and stubbornly he
repeats to himself as he looks once again at the guests as, replete,
they arise from table:
“Yes; they are within their rights. But do they know, do they
comprehend, that their luxury is made from many miseries? Do they think
of it sometimes? Do they think of it as often as they should? Do they
think of it?”
Rarely does Coppée approach so closely to making a preachment; but
we need only to follow his gentle reflections--so far removed from
haranguing, from bitterness--to feel the utter sincerity of this heart
that so passionately loved “the people.”
“Two Clowns” is a sketch of a different type--less aggressively
moral, its conclusion more subtly enforced, and possessing more of
the narrative quality of the tale. It is a dual sketch--a sketch of
contrasts.
We are standing before the tent of some strolling acrobats. To lure the
bystanders to the performance a clown receives the rain of pretended
buffets from the hands of the ring-master--quite in the manner we all
know. Now an aged crone among the onlookers is seen to be weeping. On
being questioned she wails out the story that she has recognized in
this wretched clown her only son. Having robbed his master, he had
been sent away to sea, the father had died, and now after having heard
nothing of the scapegrace for years she discovers in the buffeted clown
her only child. But suddenly the old woman realizes that she is telling
the intimate sorrows of her heart to the gaping crowd, and with gesture
abrupt and imperious she pushes aside her listeners and disappears in
the night.
The second scene is in the Chamber of Deputies, at a sensational
sitting. An orator mounts the tribune to denounce some proposed
spoliation of the people. With all the arts of the
demagogue--wonderfully delineated--he begins his string of ready-made
phrases. He postures, he mouths, he prophesies, he looses the dogs of
war, “he even risks a bit of poetry, flourishes old metaphors which
were worn-out in the time of Cicero,” and amidst mingled bravos and
grumbles “soars like a goose,” and ends.
As we leave the Chamber we see an elderly woman of the
_bourgeoisie_. It is the mother of the political mountebank--she
is radiant and content.
“The Sabots of Little Wolff” is a typical tale, done in the manner of
a legend. Never was the spirit of childhood--human and divine--more
exquisitely set forth than in this wonderfully wrought story. How
_can_ it be told in other, or fewer, words than those simple and
eloquent sentences of François Coppée!
“Once upon a time--it was so long ago that the whole world has
forgotten the date--in a city in the north of Europe--whose name is so
difficult to pronounce that no one remembers it--once upon a time there
was a little boy of seven, named Wolff. He was an orphan in charge of
an old aunt who was hard and avaricious, who embraced him only on New
Year’s Day, and who breathed a sigh of regret every time she gave him a
porringer of soup.
“But the poor little fellow was naturally so good that he loved the old
woman all the same, though she frightened him greatly, and he could
never without trembling see the huge wart, ornamented with four gray
hairs, which she had on the end of her nose.”
On Christmas eve the schoolmaster took all his pupils to the midnight
mass. The winter was cold, so the lads came warmly wrapped and
shod--all except little Wolff, who shivered in thin garments, and heavy
wooden shoes, or sabots. “His thoughtless comrades made a thousand
jests over his sad looks and his peasant’s dress,” and boasted of the
wonderful times in store for them on Christmas Day. Little Wolff knew
very well that his miserly aunt would send him supperless to bed, yet
he innocently hoped that the Christ-child would not forget him on the
morrow.
On the way out little Wolff noticed sitting in a niche under the porch
a sleeping child--not a beggar child, for he was covered by a robe of
white linen. But notwithstanding the cold his feet were bare--and near
him lay the tools of a carpenter’s apprentice. None of the well-clad
scholars heeded the child, “but little Wolff, coming last out of
church, stopped, full of compassion, before the beautiful sleeping
infant,” took off his right shoe, and laid it beside the child, “so the
Christ-child could put something therein to comfort him in his misery.”
At home his aunt scolded him well for having given away his shoe, and
scornfully she placed the other sabot in the chimney, predicting that
he would find in it next morning only a rod for a whipping. And with a
couple of slaps the wicked woman drove the child to bed.
But on Christmas morning little Wolff beheld in artless ecstasy both
his little sabots overflowing with countless good things, so that the
whole chimney was full of them. But the outcries on the street outside
told them that the other children of the school had each gotten only a
rod!
Finally, in “The Substitute” we have the typical short-story. Though
the plot is simple, it is well balanced and marches forward with never
a digression nor a false step. The characters live, the setting is
adequate, and the treatment is without artificiality. The rise of
Leturc from the purlieus of Paris to the moral grandeur which leads
him to his final imprisonment is simple, unaffected and natural. There
is not a trace of the theatric in the whole story, not a suggestion of
false sentiment, not anything that mars its beauty, its symmetry, and
its power.
In the midst of so much that is sordid and gross in modern fiction,
how refreshing it is to read the pages of a master who could be
truthful without wallowing, moral without sermonizing, humorous
without buffooning, and always disclose in his stories the spirit of a
sympathetic lover of mankind!
THE SUBSTITUTE
(_LE REMPLAÇANT_)