The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2)

A >> Alphonse Daudet >> The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2)

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Probably Dickens, frequently as he wrenched the facts of life into
conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he
also was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how he
came to write "Fromont and Risler" that he discusses the accusation
that he was an imitator of Dickens,--an accusation which seems absurd
enough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we can
compare their complete works. Daudet records that the charge was
brought against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, and he
explains that any likeness that may exist is due not to copying but to
kinship of spirit. "I have deep in my heart," he says, "the same love
Dickens has for the maimed and the poor, for the children brought up in
all the deprivation of great cities." This pity for the disinherited,
for those that have had no chance in life, is not the only similarity
between the British novelist and the French; there is also the peculiar
combination of sentiment and humor. Daudet is not so bold as Dickens,
not so robust, not so over-mastering; but he is far more discreet, far
truer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carry
him into caricature, nor his sentiment slop over into sentimentality.

Even the minor French novelists strive for beauty of form, and would
be ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the British
story-tellers. A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recently
remarked acutely that "Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of
construction. Where, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he constructs too
well, that is to say, on the stage model, we see what a gain it was
to him to have before his eyes the Paris stage of the Second Empire,
instead of that of London in the earlier Victorian time." Where Dickens
emulated the farces and the melodramas of forgotten British
playwrights, Daudet was influenced rather by the virile dramas of Dumas
_fils_ and Augier. But in "Fromont and Risler," not only is the plot a
trifle stagy, but the heroine herself seems almost a refugee of the
footlights; exquisitely presented as Sidonie is, she fails quite to
captivate or convince, perhaps because her sisters have been seen so
often before in this play and in that. And now and again even in his
later novels we discover that Daudet has needlessly achieved the adroit
arrangement of events so useful in the theatre and not requisite in the
library. In "The Nabob," for example, it is the "long arm of
coincidence" that brings Paul de Gery to the inn on the Riviera, and to
the very next room therein at the exact moment when Jenkins catches up
with the fleeing Felicia.

Yet these lapses into the arbitrary are infrequent after all; and as
"Fromont and Risler" was followed first by one and then by another
novel, the evil influence of theatrical conventionalism disappears.
Daudet occasionally permits himself an underplot; but he acts always on
the principle he once formulated to his son: "every book is an
organism; if it has not its organs in place, it dies, and its corpse is
a scandal." Sometimes, as in "Fromont and Risler," he starts at the
moment when the plot thickens, returning soon to make clear the
antecedents of the characters first shown in action; and sometimes, as
in "Sapho," he begins right at the beginning and goes straight through
to the end. But, whatever his method, there is never any doubt as to
the theme; and the essential unity is always apparent. This severity of
design in no way limits the variety of the successive acts of his
drama.

While a novel of Balzac's is often no more than an analysis of
character, and while a novel of Zola's is a massive epic of human
endeavor, a novel of Daudet's is a gallery of pictures, brushed in with
the sweep and certainty of a master-hand,--portraits, landscapes with
figures, marines, battlepieces pieces, bits of _genre_, views of Paris.
And the views of Paris outnumber the others, and almost outvalue them
also. Mr. Henry James has noted that "The Nabob" is "full of episodes
which are above all pages of execution, triumphs of translation. The
author has drawn up a list of the Parisian solemnities, and painted the
portrait, or given a summary, of each of them. The opening day at the
Salon, a funeral at Pere la Chaise, a debate in the Chamber of
Deputies, the _premiere_ of a new play at a favorite theatre, furnish
him with so many opportunities for his gymnastics of observation." And
"The Nabob" is only a little more richly decorated than the "Immortal,"
and "Numa Roumestan," and "Kings in Exile."

These pictures, these carefully wrought masterpieces of rendering are
not lugged in, each for its own sake; they are not outside of the
narrative; they are actually part of the substance of the story. Daudet
excels in describing, and every artist is prone to abound in the sense
of his superiority. As the French saying puts it, a man has always the
defects of his qualities; yet Daudet rarely obtrudes his descriptions,
and he generally uses them to explain character and to set off or bring
out the moods of his personages. They are so swift that I am tempted to
call them flash-lights; but photographic is just what they are not, for
they are artistic in their vigorous suppression of the unessentials;
they are never gray or cold or hard; they vibrate with color and tingle
with emotion.

And just as a painter keeps filling his sketch-books with graphic hints
for elaboration later, so Daudet was indefatigable in note-taking. He
explains his method in his paper of "Fromont and Risler;" how he had
for a score of years made a practice of jotting down in little
note-books not only his remarks and his thoughts, but also a rapid
record of what he had heard with his ears ever on the alert, and what
he had seen with those tireless eyes of his. Yet he never let the dust
of these note-books choke the life out of him. Every one of his novels
was founded on fact,--plot, incidents, characters and scenery.

He used his imagination to help him to see; he used it also to peer
into and behind the mere facts. All that he needed to invent was a
connecting link now and again; and it may as well be admitted at once
that these mere inventions are sometimes the least satisfactory part of
his stories. The two young men in "The Nabob," for instance, whom Mr.
Henry James found it difficult to tell apart, the sculptor-painter in
the "Immortal," the occasional other characters which we discover to be
made up, lack the individuality and the vitality of figures taken from
real life by a sympathetic effort of interpretative imagination.
Delobelle, Gardinois, "all the personages of 'Fromont' have lived,"
Daudet declares; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinois
he gave pain to one he loved, but he "could not suppress this type of
egotist, aged and terrible."

Since the beginning of the art of story-telling, the narrators must
have gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing;
and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist
has stolen his characters ready-made,--filching them from nature's
shop-window, without so much as a by-your-leave. Daudet is bold in
committing these larcenies from life and frank in confessing them,--far
franker than Dickens, who tried to squirm out of the charge that he had
put Landor and Leigh Hunt unfairly into fiction. Perhaps Dickens was
bolder than Daudet, if it is true that he drew Micawber from his own
father, and Mrs. Nickleby from his own mother. Daudet was taxed with
ingratitude that he had used as the model of Mora, the Duke de Morny,
who had befriended him; and he defended himself by declaring that he
thought the duke would find no fault with the way Mora had been
presented. But a great artist has never copied his models slavishly; he
has utilized them in the effort to realize to his own satisfaction what
he has already imagined. Daudet maintained to his son that those who
were without imagination cannot even observe accurately. Invention
alone, mere invention, an inferior form of mental exercise, suffices to
provide a pretty fair romantic tale, remote from the facts of every-day
life, but only true imagination can sustain a realistic novel where
every reader's experience qualifies him to check off the author's
progress, step by step.

IV.

It would take too long--although the task would be amusing--to call the
roll of Daudet's novels written after "Fromont and Risler" had revealed
to him his own powers, and to discuss what fact of Parisian history had
been the starting point of each of them and what notabilities of Paris
had sat for each of the chief characters. Mr. Henry James, for
instance, has seen it suggested that Felicia Ruys is intended as a
portrait of Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt; M. Zola, on the other hand, denies
that Felicia Ruys is Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt and hints that she is rather
Mme. Judith Gautier. Daudet himself refers to the equally absurd report
that Gambetta was the original of Numa Roumestan,--a report over which
the alleged subject and the real author laughed together. Daudet's own
attitude toward his creations is a little ambiguous or at least a
little inconsistent; in one paper he asserts that every character of
his has had a living original, and in another he admits that Elysee
Meraut, for example, is only in part a certain Therion.

The admission is more nearly exact than the assertion. Every novelist
whose work is to endure even for a generation must draw from life,
sometimes generalizing broadly and sometimes keeping close to the
single individual, but always free to modify the mere fact as he may
have observed it to conform with the larger truth of the fable he shall
devise. Most story-tellers tend to generalize, and their fictions lack
the sharpness of outline we find in nature. Daudet prefers to retain as
much of the actual individual as he dares without endangering the web
of his composition; and often the transformation is very slight,--Mora,
for instance, who is probably a close copy of Morny, but who stands on
his own feet in "The Nabob," and lives his own life as independently as
though he was a sheer imagination. More rarely the result is not so
satisfactory; J. Tom Levis, for example, for whose authenticity the
author vouches, but who seems out of place in "Kings in Exile," like a
fantastic invention, such as Balzac sometimes permitted himself as a
relief from his rigorous realism.

For incident as well as for character Daudet goes to real life. The
escape of Colette from under the eyes of her father-in-law,--that
actually happened; but none the less does it fit into "Kings in Exile."
And Colette's cutting off her hair in grief at her husband's
death,--that actually happened also; but it belongs artistically in the
"Immortal." On the other hand, the fact which served as the foundation
of the "Immortal"--the taking in of a _savant_ by a lot of forged
manuscripts--has been falsified by changing the _savant_ from a
mathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter of
autographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests
of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past).
This borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but it
has its dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudet
and as imaginative. Perhaps the story of his which is most artistic in
its telling, most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a
single theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and without
rest, is "Sapho;" and "Sapho" is the novel of Daudet's in which there
seems to be the least of this stencilling of actual fact, in which the
generalization is the broadest, and in which the observation is least
restricted to single individuals.

But in "Sapho" the theme itself is narrow, narrower than in "Numa
Roumestan," and far narrower than in either "The Nabob" or "Kings in
Exile;" and this is why "Sapho," fine as it is, and subtle, is perhaps
less satisfactory. No other French novelist of the final half of the
nineteenth century, not Flaubert, not Goncourt, not M. Zola, not
Maupassant, has four novels as solid as these, as varied in incident,
as full of life, as rich in character, as true. They form the
quadrilateral wherein Daudet's fame is secure.

"Sapho" is a daughter of the "Lady of the Camellias," and a
grand-daughter of "Manon Lescaut,"--Frenchwomen, all of them, and of a
class French authors have greatly affected. But Daudet's book is not a
specimen of what Lowell called "that _corps-de-ballet_ literature in
which the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by
a veil of French gauze." It is at bottom a moral book, much as "Tom
Jones" is moral. Fielding's novel is English, robust, hearty, brutal in
a way, and its morality is none too lofty. Daudet's is French, softer,
more enervating, and with an almost complacent dwelling on the sins of
the flesh. But neither Fielding nor Daudet is guilty of sentimentality,
the one unforgivable crime in art. In his treatment of the relation of
the sexes Daudet was above all things truthful; his veracity is
inexorable. He shows how man is selfish in love and woman also, and how
the egotism of the one is not as the egotism of the other. He shows how
Fanny Legrand slangs her lover with the foul language of the gutter
whence she sprang, and how Jean when he strikes back, refrains from
foul blows. He shows how Jean, weak of will as he was, gets rid of the
millstone about his neck, only because of the weariness of the woman to
whom he has bound himself. He shows us the various aspects of the love
which is not founded on esteem, the Hettema couple, De Potter and Rose,
Dechelette and Alice Dore, all to set off the sorry idyl of Fanny and
Jean.

In "Numa Roumestan" there is a larger vision of life than in "Sapho,"
even if there is no deeper insight. The construction is almost as
severe; and the movement is unbroken from beginning to end, without
excursus or digression. The central figure is masterly,--the kindly and
selfish Southerner, easy-going and soft-spoken, an orator who is so
eloquent that he can even convince himself, a politician who thinks
only when he is talking, a husband who loves his wife as profoundly as
he can love anybody except himself, and who loves his wife more than
his temporary mistress, even during the days of his dalliance. Numa is
a native of the South of France, as was Daudet himself; and it is out
of the fulness of knowledge that the author evolves the character,
brushing in the portrait with bold strokes and unceasingly adding
caressing touches till the man actually lives and moves before our
eyes. The veracity of the picture is destroyed by no final
inconsistency. What Numa is, Numa will be. Daudet never descends at the
end of his novels like a god from the machine to change character in
the twinkling of an eye, and to convert bad men to good thoughts and
good deeds.

He can give us goodness when he chooses, a human goodness, not
offensively perfect, not preaching, not mawkish, but high-minded and
engaging. There are two such types in "Kings in Exile," the Queen and
Elysee Meraut, essentially honest both of them, thinking little of
self, and sustained by lofty purpose. Naturalistic novelists generally
(and M. Zola in particular), live in a black world peopled mainly by
fools and knaves; from this blunder Daudet is saved by his Southern
temperament, by his lyric fervor, and, at bottom, by his wisdom. He
knows better; he knows that while a weak creature like Christian II. is
common, a resolute soul like Frederique is not so very rare. He knows
that the contrast and the clash of these characters is interesting
matter for the novelist. And no novelist has had a happier inspiration
than that which gave us "Kings in Exile," a splendid subject,
splendidly handled, and lending itself perfectly to the display of
Daudet's best qualities, his poetry, his ability to seize the actual,
and his power of dealing with material such as the elder Dumas would
have delighted in with a restraint and a logic the younger Dumas would
have admired. Plot and counter-plot, bravery, treachery, death,--these
are elements for a romanticist farrago; and in Daudet's hands they are
woven into a tapestry almost as stiff as life itself. The stuff is
romantic enough, but the treatment is unhesitatingly realistic; and
"Kings in Exile," better than any other novel of Daudet's, explains his
vogue with readers of the most divergent tastes.

In "The Nabob," the romantic element is slighter than in "Kings in
Exile;" the subject is not so striking; and the movement of the story
is less straightforward. But what a panorama of Paris it is that he
unrolls before us in this story of a luckless adventurer in the city of
luxury then under the control of the imperial band of brigands! No
doubt the Joyeuse family is an obtrusion and an artistic blemish, since
they do not logically belong in the scheme of the story; and yet they
(and their fellows in other books of Daudet's) testify to his effort to
get the truth and the whole truth into his picture of Paris life. Mora
and Felicia Ruys and Jenkins, these are the obverse of the medal,
exposed in the shop-windows that every passer-by can see. The Joyeuse
girls and their father are the reverse, to be viewed only by those who
take the trouble to look at the under side of things. They are samples
of the simple, gentle, honest folk, of whom there must be countless
thousands in France and even in its capital, but who fail to interest
most French novelists just because they are not eccentric or wicked or
ugly. Of a truth, Aline Joyeuse is as typically Parisian as Felicia
Ruys herself; both are needed if the census is to be complete; and the
omission of either is a source of error.

There is irony in Daudet's handling of these humbler figures, but it is
compassionate and almost affectionate. If he laughs at Father Joyeuse
there is no harshness and no hostility in his mirth. For the Joyeuse
daughters he has indulgence and pity; and his humor plays about them
and leaves them scart-free. It never stings them or scorches or sears,
as it does Astier-Rehu and Christian II. and the Prince of Axel, in
spite of his desire to be fair toward all the creatures of his brain.

Irony is only one of the manifestations of Daudet's humor. Wit he has
also, and satire. And he is doubly fortunate in that he has both humor
and the sense-of-humor--the positive and the negative. It is the
sense-of-humor, so called, that many humorists are without, a
deprivation which allows them to take themselves so seriously that they
become a laughing-stock for the world. It is the sense-of-humor that
makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in due
proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and
emphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is the
sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humor
itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves
ridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor
chiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyere's assertion that "he who
makes us laugh rarely is able to win esteem for himself." His positive
humor,--gay, exuberant, contagious,--finds its full field for display
in some of the short stories, and more especially in the Tartarin
series.

Has any book of our time caused more laughter than "Tartarin of
Tarascon"--unless it be "Tartarin on the Alps"? I can think only of one
rival pair, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn,"--for Mark Twain and
Alphonse Daudet both achieved the almost impossible feat of writing a
successful sequel to a successful book, of forcing fortune to a
repetition of a happy accident. The abundant laughter the French
humorist excited is like that evoked by the American humorist,--clean,
hearty, healthy, self-respecting; it is in both cases what George Eliot
in one of her letters called "the exquisite laughter that comes from a
gratification of the reasoning faculty." Daudet and Mark Twain are
imaginative realists; their most amusing extravagance is but an
exaggeration of the real thing; and they never let factitious fantasy
sweep their feet off the ground. Tartarin is as typical of Provence as
Colonel Sellers--to take that figure of Mark Twain's which is most
like--is typical of the Mississippi Valley.

Tartarin is as true as Numa Roumestan; in fact they may almost be said
to be sketched from the same model but in a very different temper. In
"Numa Roumestan" we are shown the sober side of the Southern
temperament, the sorrow it brings in the house though it displays joy
in the street; and in "Tartarin" we behold only the immense comicality
of the incessant incongruity between the word and the deed. Tartarin is
Southern, it is true, and French; but he is very human also. There is a
boaster and a liar in most of us, lying in wait for a chance to rush
out and put us to shame. It is this universality of Daudet's satire
that has given Tartarin its vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. The
ingenuity of Tartarin's misadventures, the variety of them in Algiers
and in Switzerland, the obvious reasonableness of them all, the
delightful probability of these impossibilities, the frank gaiety and
the unflagging high spirits,--these are precious qualities, all of
them; but it is rather the essential humanness of Tartarin himself that
has given him a reputation throughout the world. Very rarely indeed now
or in the past has an author been lucky enough to add a single figure
to the cosmopolitan gallery of fiction. Cervantes, De Foe, Swift, Le
Sage, Dumas, have done it; Fielding and Hawthorne and Turgenef have
not.

It is no wonder that Daudet takes pride in this. The real joy of the
novelist, he declares, is to create human beings, to put on their feet
types of humanity who thereafter circulate through the world with the
name, the gesture, the grimace he has given them and who are cited and
talked about without reference to their creator and without even any
mention of him. And whenever Daudet heard some puppet of politics or
literature called a Tartarin, a shiver ran through him--"the shiver of
pride of a father, hidden in the crowd that is applauding his son and
wanting all the time to cry out 'That's my boy!'"

V.

The time has not yet come for a final estimate of Daudet's
position,--if a time ever arrives when any estimate can be final. But
already has a selection been made of the masterpieces which survive,
and from which an author is judged by the next generation that will
have time to criticise only the most famous of the works this
generation leaves behind it. We can see also that much of Daudet's
later writing is slight and not up to his own high standard, although
even his briefest trifle had always something of his charm, of his
magic, of his seductive grace. We can see how rare an endowment he has
when we note that he is an acute observer of mankind, and yet without
any taint of misanthropy, and that he combines fidelity of reproduction
with poetic elevation.

He is--to say once more what has already been said in these pages more
than once--he is a lover of romance with an unfaltering respect for
reality. We all meet with strange experiences once in our lives, with
"things you could put in a story," as the phrase is; but we none of us
have hairbreadth escapes every morning before breakfast. The romantic
is as natural as anything else; it is the excess of the romantic which
is in bad taste. It is the piling up of the agony which is disgusting.
It is the accumulation upon one impossible hero of many exceptional
adventures which is untrue and therefore immoral. Daudet's most
individual peculiarity was his skill in seizing the romantic aspects of
the commonplace. In one of his talks with his son he said that a
novelist must beware of an excess of lyric enthusiasm; he himself
sought for emotion, and emotion escaped when human proportions were
exceeded. Balance, order, reserve, symmetry, sobriety,--these are the
qualities he was ever praising. The real, the truthful, the
sincere,--this is what he sought always to attain.

Daudet may lack the poignant intensity of Balzac, the lyric sweep of
Hugo, the immense architectural strength of M. Zola, the implacable
disinterestedness of Flaubert, the marvellous concentration of
Maupassant, but he has more humor than any of them and more
charm,--more sympathy than any but Hugo, and more sincerity than
any but Flaubert. His is perhaps a rarer combination than any of
theirs,--the gift of story-telling, the power of character-drawing,
the grasp of emotional situation, the faculty of analysis, the feeling
for form, the sense of style, an unfailing and humane interest in his
fellow-men, and an irresistible desire to tell the truth about life as
he saw it with his own eyes.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

Columbia University,
in the City of New York.

CONTENTS

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