The charm of his short Tales, whether in the Lettres de Mon Moulin or in collections assuming the definite title, is undeniable. The satiric-pathetic—a not very common and very difficult kind—has few better representatives than La Chèvre de M. Séguin, and the purely comic stories are thoroughly "rejoicing." Tartarin, in his original appearances, "touches the spot," "carries off all the point" in a manner suggestive at once of Horace and Homocea; and though, as was almost inevitable, its sequels are less effective, one would have been very glad indeed of them if they had had no forerunner. In almost all the books—Robert Helmont, by the way, though not yet mentioned, has some strong partisans—the grip of actual modern society, which is the boast of the later, as opposed to the earlier, nineteenth-century novel, cannot be missed. Even those who are most disgusted by the personalities cannot deny the power of the satiric presentation from Le Nabab to Numa Roumestan. Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné is, quite independently of the definite borrowing from us, more like an English novel, in some respects, than almost any other French one known to me up to its date; and I have found persons, not in the least sentimentalists and very widely read in novels both English and French, who were absolutely enthusiastic about Jack.
L'Évangéliste is perhaps the nearest approach to a failure, the atmosphere being too alien from anything French to be favourable to the development of a good story, and perhaps the very subject being unsuited to anything, either English or French, but an episode. In more congenial matter, as in the remark in Numa Roumestan as to the peculiar kind of unholy pleasure which a man may enjoy when he sees his wife and his mistress kissing each other, Daudet sometimes showed cynic acumen nearer to La Rochefoucauld than to Laclos, and worthy of Beyle at his very best. And I have no shame in avowing real admiration for Sapho. It does not by any means confound itself with the numerous studies of the infatuation of strange women which French fiction contains; and it is almost a sufficient tribute to its power to say that it does not, as almost all the rest do, at once serve itself heir to, and enter into hopeless competition with, Manon Lescaut. Nor is the heroine in the least like either Marguerite Gautier or Iza Clémenceau, while the comparison with Nana, whose class she also shares, vindicates her individuality most importantly of all these trials. She seems to me Daudet's best single figure: though the book is of too specialised a kind to be called exactly his best book.
He never had strong health, and broke down early, so that his total production is decidedly smaller than that of most of his fellows.[416] Nor has he, I think, any pretensions to be considered a novelist of the very first class, even putting bulk out of the question. But he can be both extremely amusing and really pathetic; he is never unnatural; and if there is less to be said about him than about some others, it is certainly not because he is less good to read. On the contrary, he is so easy and so good to read, and he has been read so much, that elaborate discussion of him is specially superfluous. It is almost a pity that he was not born ten or fifteen years earlier, so that he might have had more chance of hitting a strictly distinct style. As it is, with all his pathos and all his fun, you feel that he is of the Epigoni a successor of more than one or two Alexanders, that he has a whole library of modern fiction behind—and, in more than one sense of the word, before—him.
About: Le Roi des Montagnes.
There was a time when Englishmen of worth and Englishwomen of grace thought a good deal of Edmond About. Possibly this was because he was one of the pillars of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Far be it from me to speak with the slightest disrespect of that famous periodical, to which I have myself divers indebtednesses, and which has, in the last hundred years or thereabouts, harboured and fostered many of the greatest writers of France and much of her best literary work. But persons of some age and some memory must remember a time in England when it used to be "mentioned with hor" as Policeman X mentioned something or somebody else about the same date or a little earlier. Even Matthew Arnold, in whose comely head the bump of Veneration was not the most remarkable protuberance, used to point to it—as something far above us—to be regarded with reverence and striven towards with might and main. What justification there might be for this in general we need not now consider; but at any rate About has never seemed to the present historian very much of a pillar of anything. His chief generally accepted titles to the position in novel-writing are, I suppose, Le Roi des Montagnes and Tolla, each of which, and perhaps one other, we may examine in some detail, grouping the rest (with one further exception) more summarily. They are the better suited for our purpose in that one is comedy if not farce, and the other a gradually threatening and at last accomplished tragedy.
Of course it would be a very dull or a very curmudgeonly person who should fail to see or refuse to acknowledge "fun" in the history of Hadji or Hadgi Stavros. The mixture of sense, science, stupidity, and unconscious humour[417] in the German narrator; the satire on the toleration of brigandage by government in Greece (it must be confessed that, of all the reductions to the absurd of parliamentary and constitutional arrangements in countries unsuited for them, wherein the last hundred years have been so prolific, Greece has provided the most constant and reversed-sublime examples, as Russia has the most tragic); the contrast of amiability and atrocity in the brigands themselves—all these provide excellent opportunities, by no means always missed, for the display of a sort of anticipated and Gallicised Gilbertianism. Nor need the addition of stage Englishness in Mrs. Simons and her brother and Mary Ann, of stage Americanism in Captain John Harris and his nephew Lobster, spoil the broth.
But, to the possibly erroneous taste[418] of the present taster, it does not seem to be a consummated consommé. To begin with, there is too much of it; it is watered out to over three hundred pages when it might have been "reduced" with great advantage to one hundred. Nor is this a mere easy general complaint; it would be perfectly possible to point out where reductions should take place in detail. No one skilled in the use of the blue pencil could be at a loss where to apply it in the preliminary matter; in the journey; in the Hadgi's gravely burlesqued correspondence; in the escape of the ladies; in Hermann's too prolonged yet absurdly ineffective tortures; in the civil war between the King and his subjects; in the rather transpontine victory of the two Americans and the Maltese over both; and, above all, in the Royal Ball, where English etiquette requires that the rescuer must be duly introduced to those he has rescued. Less matter (or rather less talking about matter) with more art might have made it a capital thing, especially if certain traces of vulgarity, too common in About, were removed together with the mere superfluities. At any rate, this is how it strikes, and always has struck, a younger but now old contemporary.
Tolla.
The same fault of longueurs makes itself felt in Tolla: and indeed the author seems to have been conscious of it, and confesses it in an apologetic Preface to the editions after the first. But this does not form the chief ground of accusation against it. Nor, certainly, do the facts, as summarised in a note, justify any serious charge of plagiarism,[419] though the celebrated Buloz seems for once to have been an unwise editor, in objecting to a fuller acknowledgment of indebtedness on the part of his contributor. A story of this tragical kind will bear much fuller handling than a comic tale of scarcely more than one situation, recounted with a perpetual "tongue-in-cheek" accompaniment.