ALPHONSE DAUDET
“The entire work of Balzac pulsates with a fever of discovery and of impromptu.” It was Alphonse Daudet, the little David of the south, with “the head of an Arabian Christ,” who wrote that sentence, a sentence that might be aptly fitted to his own case. Daudet loved Balzac, loved Beethoven, and—this may be a surprise for some—loved Wagner, knew Wagner. Why not? Style for him was a question of intensity, and what is Wagner if not intense? And Daudet was no mean critic. He could recognize the unchanging moi of Hugo, and the miraculous gift of transforming himself that gave to Balzac the power of multitudinous creation. He could speak of Georges Rodenbach as “the most exquisite and refined of poets and prose writers, moist and dripping with his Flemish fogs, a writer whose sentence has the tender effect of belfries against the sky and the soft golden hue of reliquaries and stained glass windows.” Friedrich Nietzsche was “that admirable writer with a surprising power for destruction”; while in Ibsen’s Wild Duck he found “the india-rubber laugh, the laugh of Voltaire congealed by Pomeranian sleet.” The reading of Dostoïevsky’s Crime and Punishment was a “crisis of his mind”; and for Tolstoy he always entertained a warm admiration. After Turgénieff died some alleged souvenirs of his were published and gave Daudet exquisite unhappiness, for he had loved the man and extolled the artist. M. Halperine-Kaminsky cleared up the mystery by proving that Turgénieff had never written the offensive paragraphs. They were really not of serious import, consisting of several free criticisms about the realistic group to which Daudet belonged. As I remember, Turgénieff is reported to have said that much of the work of Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and a few others smelt of the lamp. Yet this simple phrase caused Daudet pain, for he prided himself on his spontaneity of style, his freedom from use of the file. Possibly, Turgénieff—and this is pure conjecture on my part—knew of Daudet’s opinions touching upon what he called “Russian pity, which is limited to criminals and low women.” He named it a “sentimental monstrosity,” and for that reason depreciated the “rousing fanaticism and actual hallucinations of the Russian Dickens”—Dostoïevsky.
But Alphonse Daudet and music! His son, Léon, tells us much in his filial memoirs. “His ear,” says this pious and admirable biographer, “had a delicacy and correctness most exquisite. Thence came his passion for music, which was made an aid and assistance to his labors. He sits at his table in his working room. My mother is at the piano in the next room, and the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, or Schubert follows, one after the other, and excites or calms the imagination of the writer. ‘Music is another planet.’ ‘I adore all music, the commonest as well as the loftiest.’ But no man could analyze and understand better the masters of harmony, no man lauded the genius of Wagner in more splendid terms or more brilliant images: ‘The conquest by Wagner and the philosophers.’”
Daudet often came home with wet eyes after a concert, and we are told that his voice was delicate and penetrating when he hummed the tunes of Provence. His intimate musical friends were Raoul Pugno, the pianist, Bizet, and Massenet. In later years Hahn, the “little Hahn,” a composer of songs, often visited him, and he dearly loved the mad music of the Hungarian gypsy orchestras. We all recall his fondness for the pastoral pipe, and Valmafour, that thrice unhappy Valmafour urged in the pursuit of a hopeless fantastic love by an avaricious sister! I have often wondered who sat for the portrait of De Potter in Sapho. It was possibly a composite of Gounod, Bizet, and Massenet, though the figure of the love-stricken composer seems to fit Gounod better than the others—Gounod at the epoch of Georgiana Weldon.
That Daudet’s ear for verbal harmonies was of the finest there can be no doubt, after reading this: “It seems that the phrase, as Châteaubriand uses it, has preserved the rhythm and movement of the sea; the rush of his crises comes from the farthest line of the horizon; their return is broad, quiet, majestic. Another example of sensitiveness to the period in writing, Gustave Flaubert, is the only one presenting, in the same degree as Châteaubriand, that verbal wealth which gives a sensuous satisfaction to one’s mind when reading.”
Of Wagner he said:—
Wagner was a phenomenon in this century just as he will be one in the time to come, and no one is more fruitful than he in remarks of every sort.... He was a man belonging to another age. Nevertheless, he found a way to our nerves and our brains far more easily than one would have thought. If imagination has representatives, he was one of the giants. A Northern imagination, it is true, on which all the beauties and faults of the North have left their impress. He insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so pitilessly! He is afraid that we haven’t understood. That language of motives which he has imagined, and of which he makes such magnificent use, has the fault of leaving us very often with an impression of weariness.... Still, it was absolutely necessary for him to invent that system of motives.... His characters seem clothed in sound.... In Richard Wagner the imagination is so representative and violent that it saturates his work to overflowing with all the sounds of nature and leaves a limited space for the episodes. The passion between Tristan and Isolde plunges into the tumult of the ocean which overwhelms it; then it appears on the surface, then it plunges under again. One invincible power raises the waves and the souls by a single movement. In the poem, water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow, the holy spot become the more powerful characters. In this paganism of to-day all nature has become divine.
Wagner’s pantheism has never been sufficiently realized. For me his dramas deal with the elemental forces, rather than with men and women. Daudet evidently recognized this fact. Wagner was a pagan. The romancer says: “Your generation is accustomed to these splendors, this torrent of heroism and life, but you cannot present to your fancy the impression which that music exercised on men of my age.... There is everything in Wagner.... Turning his face toward Gayety he wrote the Meistersinger; turning toward Pain, Love, Death, the Mutter of Goethe, he wrote Tristan und Isolde. He made use of the entire human pianoforte, and the entire superhuman pianoforte. Cries, tears, the distortion of despair, the trickling of water over rocks, the sough of the wind in the trees, frightful remorse, the song of the shepherd and the trumpets of war—his tremendous imagination is always at white heat, and always ready.”
Daudet wisely refuses to discuss Wagner’s methods:—
Let his methods remain in the dark like his orchestra.... That imagination of his, feverish and excessive, has not only renovated music, but has also overwhelmed poetry and philosophy. Although theories disquiet me, still I feel them trembling in Wagner behind each one of his heroes. The gods talk of their destiny and of the conflict of that destiny with the destiny of men; they talk of ancient Fate in a way that is sometimes obscure, but with a rush and a go that make one forget to question them. It is the famous wall of the Légende des Siècles, crowded with the tubas and the trumpets of Sachs, tumultuous and glittering in their mass.
It is quite possible that Wagner desired to have characters of a size suited to their surroundings, and that one would feel uncomfortable while considering ordinary men who should be victims of the Ocean of Tristan or of the Forest of Siegfried. What difference does it make? He succeeds in moving us with these superterrestrial passions. In Tristan humanity plays a larger part. These are our own wounds which are bleeding in the flesh of the lovers, wounds that the sacred spear, which the hero brings back with him, shall never heal.
It will be seen that these are the utterances of a man who has pondered music as well as felt it deeply. He knew Wagner, and was a welcome visitor at Wahnfried. “Daudet pleases me much,” Wagner once said. The openly expressed admiration of this cultured Frenchman must have flattered the composer greatly. Because Daudet admired Wagner, his perception of Beethoven’s greatness was not blurred. He puts the case succinctly: “It were better to say that the masterpiece by Beethoven being more concentrated and closely woven makes a total impression upon you in a much shorter time than does a drama with its necessary stops and changes of scenery and delays for explanation.” This in answer to his son Léon, who had asserted that the emotions aroused by a Beethoven symphony include “a deeper and rarer quality” than those evoked by the Ring.
The elder Daudet finds that Wagner is saturated by nature and nature’s sounds:—
His orchestral parts cradle and swing me to and fro. His gentleness and power cause me to pass within a few hours through the most powerful emotions—emotions, in fact, for which no one can fail to be grateful forever to the man who has excited them, because they reveal our inner depths to ourselves. I love and admire Beethoven also for the wide and peaceful landscapes which he knows how to open up in the soul of sound. Italian music enchants me, and in Rossini I experience that extraordinary impression of melancholy anguish which an excess of life gives us. There is too much frenzy, too much movement; it is as if one were trying to escape from death. I adore Mendelssohn and his delicious pictures of nature in the Scotch and Italian symphonies. There are certain hours toward nightfall when the soul of Schumann torments me.... But to number them all would be to never end. I have lived through the power of music; I am a dweller upon its planet.
Now all this is quite satisfying when one realizes that Daudet, in his love for music, steps out of the French literary tradition. French writers, even those of this century, have never been fanatics for music, Stendhal and Baudelaire excepted—Baudelaire who discovered Wagner to France. I cannot recommend Stendhal as a musical guide. Châteaubriand, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Alfred de Vigny, de Musset, Flaubert, Dumas fils, Zola, the de Goncourts—the brothers secretly abominated music—this mixed company was not fond of the heavenly maid. Catulle Mendès is a Wagnerian, and in his evanescent way Paul Verlaine was affected by melody. He wrote a magnificent and subtle sonnet on Parsifal. Perhaps it was what the despiser of Kundry stood for rather than Wagner’s music that set vibrating the verbal magic of this Chopin of the Gutter. Villier de l’Isle Adam was another crazy Wagnerian, played excerpts on the piano, had his music performed at his own deathbed, and sketched in a book of his the figure of Liszt as Triboulet Bonhomet. Huysmans, of Flemish descent, has made a close study of church music and the old ecclesiastical modes in En Route and in several others of his remarkable books. The younger Parisian writers are generally music lovers.
How well Daudet understood that elusive quantity, the artistic temperament, may be seen in this bit of analysis: “Neither sculptor, nor painter represents anything which did not exist before in the world. It is somewhat different in regard to music. But, looking at things a little closer, music is the lofty manifestation of a harmony, the models for which exist in nature. Nevertheless the writer, the painter, the poet, the sculptor, and the musician, whenever their work bears them honestly along, believe honestly that they are adding to the world something which did not exist before their time. Sublime illusion!”
On this clear, critical note let us leave the always delightful writer, the once charming man. “Oh, Daudet, c’est de la bouillabaisse!” cries the author of Evelyn Innes. Yes, but is not la bouillabaisse a fascinating dish, especially when a master chef has prepared it?