Alphonse Daudet

THE French have about many matters a way of feeling that is not ours, and M. Ernest Daudet’s little volume ¹ illustrates some of these differences. He is the brother of the brilliant author of the Lettres de mon Moulin, the Rois en Exil, and Numa Roumestan, and it has seemed to him natural to celebrate his kinship with so charming a writer in a volume published while the latter is yet in his prime, and in which biography and eulogy, admiration and tenderness, are gracefully blended. In England or in America, an artist’s brother would, we think, hold himself less designated than another to discourse to the public about the great man of the family. The artist would be sure to dislike it, and the brother would have an awkward, and possibly morbid, fear of making two honest men ridiculous. But the French have never worshiped at the shrine of reticence, and it is fortunate that there should be a race of people who acquit themselves gracefully of delicate undertakings, and who have on all occasions the courage of their emotion. The French do such things because they can ; we abstain because we have not that art. M. Ernest Daudet admires his brother as much as he loves him, and as he presumably knows him better than any one else, he may have regarded himself as the ideal biographer. His delightful volume is, to speak grossly, just a trifle too much of a puff; but if he was able to settle the matter with Alphonse Daudet (for whom he claims complete irresponsibility), we see no obstacle to his settling it with the public and with his own conscience. Our principal regret is the regret expressed by the subject of the work in a letter from which, in the preface, the author quotes a passage. M. Alphonse Daudet, who was in Switzerland at the time the chapters of which the present volume is composed were put forth in a periodical, protested against “being treated as people treat only the dead. I am living, and very living,” he wrote, “ and you make me enter rather too soon into history. i know people who will say that I have got my brother to advertise me.” Alphonse Daudet is living, and very living ; that is his great attraction. But after all, his too zealous biographer has not killed him. We hold, all the same, that there is little to please us in the growing taste of the age for revelations about the private life of the persons in whose works it is good enough to be interested. In our opinion, the life and the works are two very different matters, and an intimate knowledge of the one is not at all necessary for a genial enjoyment of the other. A writer who gives us his works is not obliged to throw his life after them, as is very apt to be assumed by persons who fail to perceive that one of the most interesting pursuits in the world is to read between the lines of the best literature. Alphonse Daudet is but forty-two years of age, and we hope to read a more definitive life of him thirty years hence. By that time we shall know whether we really need it.

Once grant M. Ernest Daudet his premises, he tells his story with taste as well as with tenderness. The story is perhaps not intrinsically remarkable, but there is something so ingratiating in the personality of the hero that we follow his small adventures with a kind of affectionate interest. His youth was the youth of nineteen out of twenty French artists and men of letters, and he served the usual apprenticeship to poverty and disappointment. Born in a small provincial city, of parents more or less acquainted with chill penury, he picks up a certain amount of heterogeneous knowledge at the communal college or the lycée; becomes conscious of talents or of ambition ; struggles more or less, in a narrow interior, with a family circle which fails to appreciate these gifts; and finally, with empty pockets and immense curiosities, comes up to Paris to seek a fortune, Nineteen out of twenty of these slender beginners never get any further ; they never succeed in breaking open their little envelope of obscurity. Daudet was the twentieth, who takes all the prizes. He deserved them, if suffering is a title; for his childhood, in spite of a few happy accidents, — the brightness and sweetness both of his birthplace and of his temperament, — had been difficult, almost cruel. He was born in that wonderful Provence which he has so frequently and so vividly, though perhaps not so accurately, described; he came into the world in the picturesque old city of Nîmes, the city of Roman remains, of fragrant gardens, of beautiful views, of sun and dust, of Southern dullness and Southern animation. Much of his childhood, however, thanks to his father’s reverses and embarrassments (his family had been engaged in the weaving of silk), was spent at Lyons, among gray, damp, sordid, sickening impressions, — a period described with touching effect in M. Daudet’s first long story, the exquisite memoirs of Le Petit Chose. M. Ernest Daudet relates the annals of his family, which appears to have numbered several vigorous and even distinguished members, and makes no secret of the fact that in his own childhood its once considerable honors had been much curtailed. This period, for the two brothers, contained many dismal passages, and Alphonse, while still a mere boy (at least, in appearance), was obliged to earn a wretched livelihood as ill-paid usher in a small provincial college. We do Dot mean, however, to retrace the chapters of his life ; we take him as we find him to-day, in the full enjoyment of his powers and his rewards, and we attempt, in a few rapid strokes, to sketch his literary physiognomy.

If we were asked to describe it in two words, we should say that he is beyond comparison the most charming storyteller of the day. He has power as well as charm, but his happy grace is what strikes us most. No one is so light and keen, so picturesque ; no one pleases so by his manner, his movement, his native gayety, his constant desire to please. We confess to an extreme fondness for M. Alphonse Daudet; he is very near to our heart. The bright light, the warm color, the spontaneity and loquacity, of his native Provence have entered into his style, and made him a talker as well as a novelist. He tells his stories as a talker ; they have always something of the flexibility and familiarity of conversation. The conversation, we mean, of an artist and a Frenchman ; the conversation of a circle in which the faculty of vivid and discriminating speech exists as it has existed nowhere else. This charming temper, touched here and there with the sentiment of deeper things, is the sign of his earlier productions. As time has gone on, he has enlarged his manner, — enlarged with his field of observation. The Parisian has been added to the Provencal, fortunately without crowding him out. It is not M. Daudet’s longest things that we like best, though we profess a great fondness for Les Rois en Exil. The Lettres de mon Moulin, the Contes du Lundi, Le Petit Chose, the exquisitely amusing history of Tartarin de Tarascon, the charming series of letters entitled Robert Helmont, — these contain, to our sense, the cream of the author’s delicate and indescribable talent. Daudet sketches in perfection ; he does the little piece — il fait le mor-ceau, as the French call it — with a facility all his own. No one has such an eye for a subject; such a perception of “bits,” as the painters in water-colors say. It is indeed as if he worked in water-colors, from a rich and liquid palette ; his style is not so much a literary form as a plastic form. He is a wonderful observer of all external things, — of appearances, objects, surface, circumstances ; but what makes his peculiarity is that the ray of fancy, the tremor of feeling, always lights up the picture. This perception of material objects is not uncommon to-day, and it has never been rare among the French, in whom quickness of vision, combined with a talent for specifying and analyzing what they see, is a national characteristic. The new fashion of realism has indeed taught us all that in any description of life the description of places and things is half the battle. But to describe them we must see them, and some people see, on the same occasion, infinitely more than others. Alphonse Daudet is one of those who see most. Among the French, moreover, the gift is cultivated, and the first canon of the “young school ” of to-day is that to write a novel you must take notes on the spot. Balzac took notes, Gustave Flaubert took notes, Emile Zola takes notes. We are sure that Alphonse Daudet takes them, too, though in his constitution there is a happy faculty for which all the notes in the world are an insufficient. substitute, namely, the faculty of feeling as well as seeing. He feels what he sees, and the feeling expresses itself in quick, light irony, in jocosity, in poetry. M. Daudet never sees plain prose. He discovers everywhere the shimmer and murmur of the poetic. He has described in a great many places the Provencal turn of mind, the temperament of the man of the South ; his last novel in particular — Numa Roumestan — being an elaborate picture of this genial type, for which M. Dau-

det does not profess an unlimited respect. He feels it so strongly, perhaps, because he feels it in himself; it is not to be denied that his own artistic nature contains several of the qualities on which he has expended his most charming satire. The weak points of the man of the South, in M. Daudet’s view, are the desire to please at any cost, and, as a natural result of this, a brilliant indifference to the truth. There is a good deal of all this, in its less damaging aspects, in the author of Numa Roumestan. We have spoken of bis desire to please, which is surely not an unpardonable fault in an artist, though M. Zola holds it to be so. M. Daudet likes to entertain, to beguile, to gratify, to mystify, to purchase immediate applause. For ourselves, we give the applause without the slightest reluctance. May it be a fault in a writer of fiction to be very fond of fiction ? In this case it seems to us that M. Daudet is distinctly culpable. M. Zola, to quote him again, holds that the love of fiction is the most evil passion of the human heart; and yet he has most inconsistently found many civil things to say of his confrère Daudet, whom he would represent as one of the standard-bearers of naturalism. M. Daudet is fond of fiction as Dickens was fond of it, — he is fond of the picturesque. His taste is for oddities and exceptions, for touching dénoûments, for situations slightly factitious, for characters surprisingly genial. There is nothing uncompromising, nothing of a depressing integrity, in his love of the real. Left to himself, he takes only those parts of it that happen to commend themselves to his fancy, which, as we have already said, is, in his intellectual economy, the mistress of the house. But he has not always been left to himself. He has lived in Paris, he has become a disciple of Balzac, he has frequented Flaubert, he has known Zola, he has been made to feel that there are such things as responsibilities. There are, indeed, — those terrible responsibilities which M. Zola carries with such a ponderous tread. He himself recalls Alphonse Daudet to a sense of them in a passage which we may quote from his lately published volume, entitled Une Campagne. He is more troubled, we suspect, than he ventures to say by Daudet’s taint of the factitious, and he speaks with a good deal of point of the very different aspect which the Provence of Numa Roumestan wears from the Provence of his own young memories, — he being also a son of that soil. “Alphonse Daudet seems to me to see the country of Provence in one of the gilded falsehoods of his hero. I don’t speak of the inhabitants, whom he treats with even too much cruelty ; I speak of the look of the land, of that perpetual dream of sunshine, which he manages to fill with all the romance of the troubadours. He softens down the very mistral, which he calls ‘ the wholesome, vivifying blast, spreading its jovial influence to the furthest edge of the horizon.’ My own Provence, that of which the heated harshness still blows into my face, is a much rougher affair, and the mistral cracks my lips, burns my skin, fills the valley with a devastation so terrible that the blue sky grows pale. I remember the extinguished look of the sun in the pure, bleached air, through that roaring breath which sometimes ruins the country-side in a day. The Provence of Alphonse Daudet is therefore, for my sensations, too good-natured; I should like it stronger and more scorched, with that perfume of which the violence turns to bitterness under the hard and cloudless blue.”

It was inevitable, we suppose, that our author should sooner or later become a Parisian ; should attempt to master the great city, in the manner of successful Frenchmen. This capitalization of his talent, as we may call it, has been extremely fruitful, has produced a multitude of admirable chapters; but, on the other hand, it has made Alphonse

Daudet much less perfect. The sketches and stories we mentioned at the beginning of this article all have the stamp of perfection. There is nothing to add to them, nothing to take from them, nothing to correct in them. In his later and larger works there have been great inequalities, though the successful portions, we admit, have become more and more brilliant. It is an odd thing that though it is as a peculiarly imaginative writer that we reckon him, he is not at his best when he gives his imagination the reins. At such moments he is very apt to become false and unnatural; his charming fancy is an excellent companion, but an uncertain guide. His great successes (in his longer works) have been portraits of known individuals. Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé, the first in date of these later things, and perhaps the most popular, is by no means the one we prefer ; with all its keenness of touch, it has perhaps even more than its share of the disparities of which we speak. The accessories, the details, the setting of the scene, the art of presentation, the three or four subordinate characters, furnish the strong points of the book. The portrait of the depraved and dangerous heroine (there is a virtuous female figure to balance her) is wanting to our sense in solidity, and the main interest of the novel suffers from thinness. Sidonie Chèbe strikes us as a study at once elaborate and shallow ; and indeed the elaboration of the frivolous and perfidious wife, in French fiction, has grown to be inevitably and indefinably stale. The best figure in the book is the old humbugging tragedian Delobelle, — a type of which we have had glimpses elsewhere. In Delobelle and in his daughter Désirée, English readers find an echo, at once gratifying and tormenting, of our own inimitable Dickens. Dickens is dying, they say ; Dickens is dead (though we don’t believe it), and nothing is more generally admitted than that Dickens’s absent qualities were as striking as those he had. But on his own ground he was immeasurable, and when we are reminded of him by another writer, the comparison suggested is not likely to be to the advantage of the latter. We speak, of course, from the point of view of a generation impregnated with Dickens’s humor, and our remark has no application to French readers, who have no idea, when they smile or sigh over the fortunes of the famille Joyeuse (in Le Nabab), or drop a tear upon the childish miseries of Jack, that they are tasting of an ingenious dilution of the violent humor of Nickleby and Copperfield. We do not mean in the least that Alphonse Daudet is a conscious copyist of Dickens; he has denied the charge, we believe, in definite terms. But the English writer is certainly one of his sympathies, and we suspect that if he had never opened (even in a translation) one of those volumes which constitute the great cockney epic, one of the effective notes of his scale would be absent. In Jack the influence of Dickens is very visible, and it has not, we think, made the story more natural. That falsetto note, in pathos, which was the fatal danger of the author of Dombey and Son, is sounded with a good deal of frequency in Jack, and the portrayal of innocent suffering, through the intensification of the innocence, is also overdone. Neither do we care very much for the famille Joyeuse, in Le Nabab, finding in them, as we do, too sensible a reflection of that rather voluntary glow of satisfaction with which Dickens invites us to contemplate such people as the Brothers Cheeryble. Le Nabab, is on the whole, however, a brilliant production, and contains some of tlie author’s strongest pages. It is a gallery of portraits, like all of his later stories, — portraits of contemporary Parisian figures, in which the intelligent reader is always able to detect a more or less distinguished model. The hero himself is a study of the “ man of the South,” but in his more robust and fruitful aspects, and is an exceedingly vivid picture of a great industrial and commercial parvenu. The picture takes a tragical turn, for the great fortune of M. Daudet’s ex-dock-porter crumbles away through a series of events as remarkable as those which have helped to build it up. It is the analysis of a coarse, powerful, vulgar, jovial, florid, energetic temperament, which has known the two extremes of human experience ; and it is no secret that the author has reproduced the history — or at least the physiognomy — of the remarkable M. Bravais, whose rapid rise and fall were one of the innumerable queer incidents of the later years of the Empire.

This period is embodied even more effectively in the figure of the Due de Mora, —a thin modification of the once impressive title of the Duc de Morny, who is presented in M. Daudet’s pages in company with several members of his circle. This is the historical novel applied to the passing hour. The author has expended his best pains on the portrait of the Due de Mora, and if the picture fails of vividness it is not for want of the multiplication of fine touches. It has great color and relief, — the mark of that brush-like quality of pen which is a specialty of M. Daudet. Is Felicia Ruys intended for Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt ? The answer to the question hardly matters, for the personage belongs to the rank of the author’s halfsuccesses. We mention her, because, like the other characters, she is an example of the manner which Alphonse Daudet may be said to have invented. This manner, the reproduction of actualities under a transparent veil, the appropriation of a type embodied in a living specimen, with the peculiarities much accentuated, is an inspiration which, when it is most fruitful, Alponse Daudet induces rather to condone than to welcome. Cultivated by a writer of his tact and talent, it would probably produce a plentiful crop of vulgarities. M. Daudet is never vulgar, but he is sometimes rather false. Many of his readers doubtless hold that his best guarantee against falsity is this very practice of drawing not only from life, but from the special case. They remark, justly enough, that in Le Nabab, in the Rois en Exil, the best things are the things for which he has had chapter and verse in the world around him. When he has attempted to generalize, as in the more technically romantic episodes, he has gone astray, and become fantastic. We incline to agree to this, though it may seem to contradict what we have said about his great charm being his element of fancy. We should explain that we have not used fancy here in the sense of invention ; we have used it to denote the faculty which projects the unexpected, irresponsible, illuminating day upon material supplied out of hand. If there were nothing else to distinguish Alphonse Daudet from Emile Zola, his delicate, constant sense of beauty would suffice. Zola of course consoles himself, though he does not always console others, with his superior sense of reality. Daudet is a passionate observer, — an observer not perhaps of the deepest things of life, but of the whole realm of the immediate, the expressive, the actual. This faculty, enriched by the most abundant exercise and united with the feeling of the poet who sees all the finer relations of things and never relinquishes the attempt to charm, is what we look for in the happiest novelist of our day. Ah, the things he sees, — the various, fleeting, lurking, delicate, nameless human things! We have spoken of his remarkable vision of accessories and details ; but it is difficult to give an idea of the artistic “ go ” with which it is exercised. This beautiful vivacity finds its most complete expression in Les Rois en Exil, a book that could have been produced only in one of these later years of grace. Such a book is intensely modern, and the author is in every way an essentially modern genius. With the light, warm, frank Provencal element of him, he is, in his completeness, a product of the great French city. He has the nervous tension, the intellectual eagerness, the quick and exaggerated sensibility, the complicated, sophisticated judgment, which the friction, the contagion, the emulation, the whole spectacle, at once exciting and depressing, of our civilization at its highest, produces in susceptible natures. There are tears in his laughter, and there is a strain of laughter in his tears ; and in both there is a note of music. What could be more modern than his style, from which every shred of classicism has been stripped, and which moves in a glitter of images, of discoveries, of verbal gymnastics, animated always by the same passion for the concrete ? With his merits and shortcomings combined, Alphonse Daudet is the charming writer we began by declaring him, because he is so intensely living. He is a thoroughly special genius, and in our own sympathies he touches a very susceptible spot. He is not so serious, not to say so solemn, as Emile Zola, and we suspect that in his heart he finds the doctrine of naturalism a good deal of a bore. He is free from being as deep and wise and just as the great Turgenieff. But with his happy vision, his abundant expression, his talent for episodes and figures that detach themselves, his sense of intimate pleasures and pains, his good-humor, his gayety, his grace, and that modern quality of intensity that he throws into everything, he is really a great little novelist.

Henry James, Jr.