FRANÇOIS COPPÉE AND HIS WORK
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!