V
M. Daudet’s unfortunate Jack, at any rate, lives altogether at his own cost—that of his poor little juvenile constitution, and of his innocent affections and aspirations. He is sent to the horrible Gymnase Moronval, where he has no beguiling works of fiction to read. The Gymnase Moronval is a Dotheboys’ Hall in a Parisian “passage”—a very special class of academy. Nothing could be more effective than Daudet’s picture of this horrible institution, with its bankrupt and exasperated proprietors, the greasy penitentiary of a group of unremunerative children whose parents and guardians have found it convenient to forget them. The episode of the wretched little hereditary monarch of an African tribe who has been placed there for a royal education, and who, livid with cold, short rations, and rough usage, and with his teeth chattering with a sense of dishonour, steals away and wanders in the streets of Paris, and then, recaptured and ferociously punished, surrenders his little dusky soul in the pestilential dormitory of the establishment—all this part of the tale is a masterpiece of vivid description. We seem to assist at the terrible soirées where the ratés exhibit their talents (M. Moronval is of course a raté), and where the wife of the principal, a very small woman with a very big head and a very high forehead, expounds the wonderful Méthode-Décostère (invented by herself and designated by her maiden name), for pronouncing the French tongue with elegance. My criticism of this portion of the book, and indeed of much of the rest of it, would be that the pathetic element is too intentional, too voulu, as the French say. And I am not sure that the reader enters into the author’s reason for making Charlotte, Jack’s mother, a woman of the class that we do not specify in American magazines. She is an accommodating idiot, but her good nature is unfortunately not consecutive, and she consents, at the instigation of the diabolical d’Argenton, to her child’s being brought up like a pauper. D’Argenton, like Delobelle, is a study of egotism pushed to the grotesque; but the portrait is still more complete, and some of the details are inimitable. As regards the infatuated Charlotte, who sacrifices her child to the malignity of her lover, I repeat that certain of the features of her character appear to me a mistake, judged in relation to the effect that the author wishes to produce. He wishes to show us all that the boy loses in being disinherited—if I may use that term with respect to a situation in which there is nothing to inherit. But his loss is not great when we consider that his mother had, after all, very little to give him. She had divested herself of important properties. Bernard Jansoulet, in Le Nabab, is not, like the two most successful figures that Daudet has previously created, a representation of full-blown selfishness. The unhappy nabob is generous to a fault; he is the most good-natured and free-handed of men, and if he has made use of all sorts of means to build up his enormous fortune, he knows an equal number of ways of spending it. This voluminous tale had an immense success; it seemed to show that Daudet had found his manner, a manner that was perfectly new and remarkably ingenious. As I have said, it held up the mirror to contemporary history, and attempted to complete for us, by supplementary revelations, those images which are projected by the modern newspaper and the album of photographs. Les Rois en Exil is an historical novel of this pattern, in which the process is applied with still more spirit. In these two works Daudet enlarged his canvas surprisingly, and showed his ability to deal with a multitude of figures.
The distance traversed artistically from the little anecdotes of the Lettres de mon Moulin to the complex narrative of Le Nabab and its successor, are like the transformation—often so rapid—of a slim and charming young girl into a blooming and accomplished woman of the world. The author’s style had taken on bone and muscle, and become conscious of treasures of nervous agility. I have left myself no space to speak of these things in detail, and it was not part of my purpose to examine Daudet’s novels piece by piece; but I may say that it is the items, the particular touches, that make the value of writing of this kind. I am not concerned to defend the process, the system, so far as there is a system; but I cannot open either Le Nabab or Les Rois en Exil, cannot rest my eyes upon a page, without being charmed by the brilliancy of execution. It is difficult to give an idea, by any general terms, of Daudet’s style—a style which defies convention, tradition, homogeneity, prudence, and sometimes even syntax, gathers up every patch of colour, every colloquial note, that will help to illustrate, and moves eagerly, lightly, triumphantly along, like a clever woman in the costume of an eclectic age. There is nothing classic in this mode of expression; it is not the old-fashioned drawing in black and white. It never rests, never is satisfied, never leaves the idea sitting half-draped, like patience on a monument; it is always panting, straining, fluttering, trying to add a little more, to produce the effect which shall make the reader see with his eyes, or rather with the marvellous eyes of Alphonse Daudet. Le Nabab 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 Père-la-Chaise, a debate in the Chamber of Deputies, the première of a new play at a favourite theatre, furnish him with so many opportunities for his gymnastics of observation. I should like to say how rich and entertaining I think the figure of Jansoulet, the robust and good-natured son of his own works (originally a dock-porter at Marseilles), who, after amassing a fabulous number of millions in selling European luxuries on commission to the Bey of Tunis, comes to Paris to try to make his social fortune as he has already made his financial, and after being a nine-days’ wonder, a public joke, and the victim of his boundless hospitality; after being flattered by charlatans, rifled by adventurers, belaboured by newspapers, and “exploited” to the last penny of his coffers and the last pulsation of his vanity by every one who comes near him, dies of apoplexy in his box at the theatre, while the public hoots him for being unseated for electoral frauds in the Chamber of Deputies, where for a single mocking hour he has tasted the sweetness of political life. I should like to say, too, that however much or however little the Duc de Mora may resemble the Duc de Morny, the character depicted by Daudet is a wonderful study of that modern passion, the love of “good form.” The chapter that relates the death of the Duke, and describes the tumult, the confusion, of his palace, the sudden extinction of the rapacious interests that crowd about him, and to which the collapse of his splendid security comes as the first breath of a revolution—this chapter is famous, and gives the fullest measure of what Daudet can do when he fairly warms to his work.
Les Rois en Exil, however, has a greater perfection; it is simpler, more equal, and it contains much more of the beautiful. In Le Nabab there are various lacunæ and a certain want of logic; it is not a sustained narrative, but a series of almost diabolically clever pictures. But the other book has more largeness of line—a fine tragic movement which deepens and presses to the catastrophe. Daudet had observed that several dispossessed monarchs had taken up their residence in the French capital—some of them waiting and plotting for a restoration, and chafing under their disgrace; others indifferent, resigned, relieved, eager to console themselves with the pleasures of Paris. It occurred to him to suppose a drama in which these exalted personages should be the actors, and which, unlike either of his former productions, should have a pure and noble heroine. He was conscious of a dauntless little imagination, the idea of making kings and queens talk among themselves had no terror for him; he had faith in his good taste, in his exquisite powers of divination. The success is worthy of the spirit—the gallant artistic spirit—in which it was invoked. Les Rois en Exil is a finished picture. He has had, it is true, to simplify his subject a good deal to make it practicable; the court of the king and queen of Illyria, in the suburb of Saint-Mandé, is a little too much like a court in a fairy-tale. But the amiable depravity of Christian, in whom conviction, resolution, ambition, are hopelessly dead, and whose one desire is to enjoy Paris with the impunity of a young man about town; the proud, serious, concentrated nature of Frederica, who believes ardently in her royal function, and lives with her eyes fixed on the crown, which she regards as a symbol of duty; both of these conceptions do M. Daudet the utmost honour, and prove that he is capable of handling great situations—situations which have a depth of their own, and do not depend for their interest on amusing accidents. It takes perhaps some courage to say so, but the feelings, the passions, the view of life, of royal personages, differ essentially from those of common mortals; their education, their companions, their traditions, their exceptional position, take sufficient care of that. Alphonse Daudet has comprehended the difference; and I scarcely know, in the last few years, a straighter flight of imagination. The history of the queen of Illyria is a tragedy. Her husband sells his birthright for a few millions of francs, and rolls himself in the Parisian gutter; her child perishes from poverty of blood; she herself dries up in her despair. There is nothing finer in all Daudet than the pages, at the end of the book, which describe her visits to the great physician Bouchereau, when she takes her poor half-blind child by the hand, and (wishing an opinion unbiassed by the knowledge of her rank) goes to sit in his waiting-room like one of the vulgar multitude. Wonderful are the delicacy, the verity, the tenderness of these pages; we always point to them to justify our predilection. But we must stop pointing. We will not say more of Numa Roumestan than we have already said; for it is better to pass so happy a work by than to speak of it inadequately. We will only repeat that we delight in Numa Roumestan. Alphonse Daudet’s last book is a novelty at the time I write; L’Evangéliste has been before the public but a month or two. I will say but little of it, partly because my opportunity is already over, and partly because I have found that, for a fair judgment of one of Daudet’s works, the book should be read a second time, after a certain interval has elapsed. This interval has not brought round my second perusal of L’Evangéliste. My first suggests that with all the author’s present mastery of his resources the book has a grave defect. It is not that the story is painful; that is a defect only when the sources of this element are not, as I may say, abundant. It treats of a young girl (a Danish Protestant) who is turned to stone by a Medusa of Calvinism, the sombre and fanatical wife of a great Protestant banker. Madame Autheman persuades Eline Ebsen to wash her hands of the poor old mother with whom up to this moment she has lived in the closest affection, and go forth into strange countries to stir up the wicked to conversion. The excellent Madame Ebsen, bewildered, heart-broken, desperate, terrified at the imagined penalties of her denunciation of the rich and powerful bigot (so that she leaves her habitation and hides in a household of small mechanics to escape from them—one of the best episodes in the book), protests, struggles, goes down on her knees in vain; then, at last, stupefied and exhausted, desists, looks for the last time at her inexorable, impenetrable daughter, who has hard texts on her lips and no recognition in her eye, and who lets her pass away, without an embrace, for ever. The incident in itself is perfectly conceivable: many well-meaning persons have held human relationships cheap in the face of a religious call. But Daudet’s weakness has been simply a want of acquaintance with his subject. Proposing to himself to describe a particular phase of French Protestantism, he has “got up” certain of his facts with commendable zeal; but he has not felt nor understood the matter, has looked at it solely from the outside, sought to make it above all things grotesque and extravagant. Into these excesses it doubtless frequently falls; but there is a general human verity which regulates even the most stubborn wills, the most perverted lives; and of this saving principle the author, in quest of striking pictures, has rather lost his grasp. His pictures are striking, as a matter of course; but to us readers of Protestant race, familiar with the large, free, salubrious life which the children of that faith have carried with them over the globe, there is almost a kind of drollery in these fearsome pictures of the Protestant temperament. The fact is that M. Daudet has not (to my belief) any natural understanding of the religious passion; he has a quick perception of many things, but that province of the human mind cannot be fait de chic—experience, there, is the only explorer. Madame Autheman is not a real bigot; she is simply a dusky effigy, she is undemonstrated. Eline Ebsen is not a victim, inasmuch as she is but half alive, and victims are victims only in virtue of being thoroughly sentient. I do not easily perceive her spiritual joints. All the human part of the book, however, has the author’s habitual felicity; and the reader of these remarks knows what I hold that to be. It may seem to him, indeed, that in making the concession I made just above—in saying that Alphonse Daudet’s insight fails him when he begins to take the soul into account—I partly retract some of the admiration I have expressed for him. For that amounts, after all, to saying that he has no high imagination, and, as a consequence, no ideas. It is very true, I am afraid, that he has not a great number of ideas. There are certain things he does not conceive—certain forms that never appear to him. Imaginative writers of the first order always give us an impression that they have a kind of philosophy. We should be embarrassed to put our finger on Daudet’s philosophy. “And yet you have praised him so much,” we fancy we hear it urged; “you have praised him as if he were one of the very first.” All that is very true, and yet we take nothing back. Determinations of rank are a delicate matter, and it is sufficient priority for an author that one likes him immensely. Daudet is bright, vivid, tender; he has an intense artistic life. And then he is so free. For the spirit that moves slowly, going carefully from point to point, not sure whether this or that or the other will “do,” the sight of such freedom is delightful.
1883.