Garda Thorne is the next best thing in the book to Margaret, and she is indeed equally good in this, that she is conceived with an equal clearness. But Margaret produces her impression upon us by moving before us and doing certain things, whereas Garda is more explained, or rather she explains herself more, tells us more about herself. She says somewhere, or some one says of her, that she doesn’t narrate, but in fact she does narrate a good deal, for the purpose of making the reader understand her. This the reader does, very constantly, and Garda is a brilliant success. I must not, however, touch upon the different parts of East Angels, because in a work of so much patience and conscience a single example carries us too far. I will only add that in three places in especial the author has been so well inspired as to give a definite pledge of high accomplishment in the future. One of these salient passages is the description of the closing days of Mrs. Thorne, the little starved yet ardent daughter of the Puritans, who has been condemned to spend her life in the land of the relaxed, and who, before she dies, pours out her accumulations of bitterness—relieves herself in a passionate confession of everything she has suffered and missed, of how she has hated the very skies and fragrances of Florida, even when, as a consistent Christian, thankful for every mercy, she has pretended most to appreciate them. Mrs. Thorne is the pathetic, tragic form of the type of which Mrs. Stowe’s Miss Ophelia was the comic. In almost all of Miss Woolson’s stories the New England woman is represented as regretting the wholesome austerities of the region of her birth. She reverts to them, in solemn hours, even when, like Mrs. Thorne, she may appear for a time to have been converted to mild winters. Remarkably fine is the account of the expedition undertaken by Margaret Harold and Evert Winthrop to look for Lanse in the forest, when they believe him, or his wife thinks there may be reason to believe him, to have been lost and overtaken by a storm. The picture of their paddling the boat by torchlight into the reaches of the river, more or less smothered in the pestilent jungle, with the personal drama, in the unnatural place, reaching an acute stage between them—this whole episode is in a high degree vivid, strange, and powerful. Lastly, Miss Woolson has risen altogether to the occasion in the scene in which Margaret “has it out,” as it were, with Evert Winthrop, parts from him and, leaving him baffled and unsurpassably sore, gives him the measure of her determination to accept the necessity of her fate. These three episodes are not alike, yet they have, in the high finish of Miss Woolson’s treatment of them, a family resemblance. Moreover, they all have the stamp which I spoke of at first—the stamp of the author’s conservative feeling, the implication that for her the life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations.
1887.
VII
ALPHONSE DAUDET
I
“The novel of manners grows thick in England, and there are many reasons for it. In the first place it was born there, and a plant always flourishes in its own country.” So wrote M. Taine, the French critic, many years ago. But those were the years of Dickens and Thackeray (as a prelude to a study of the latter of whom the remark was made); and the branch of literature mentioned by M. Taine has no longer, in the soil of our English-speaking genius, so strong a vitality. The French may bear the palm to-day in the representation of manners by the aid of fiction. Formerly, it was possible to oppose Balzac and Madame Sand to Dickens and Thackeray; but at present we have no one, either in England or in America, to oppose to Alphonse Daudet. The appearance of a new novel by this admirable genius is to my mind the most delightful literary event that can occur just now; in other words Alphonse Daudet is at the head of his profession. I say of his profession advisedly, for he belongs to our modern class of trained men of letters; he is not an occasional or a desultory poet; he is a novelist to his finger-tips—a soldier in the great army of constant producers. But such as he is, he is a master of his art, and I may as well say definitely that if I attempt to sketch in a few pages his literary countenance, it will be found that the portrait is from the hand of an admirer. We most of us feel that among the artists of our day certain talents have more to say to us and others less; we have our favourites, and we have our objects of indifference. The writer of these remarks has always had a sympathy for the author of the Lettres de mon Moulin; he began to read his novels with a prejudice in their favour. This prejudice sprang from the Letters aforesaid, which do not constitute a novel, but a volume of the lightest and briefest tales. They had, to my mind, an extraordinary charm; they put me quite on the side of Alphonse Daudet, whatever he might do in the future. One of the first things he did was to publish the history of Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné. It is true that this work did not give me the pleasure that some of its successors have done, and though it has been crowned by the French Academy, I still think it weaker than Les Rois en Exil and Numa Roumestan. But I liked it better on a second reading than on a first; it contains some delightful things. After that came Jack and Le Nabab, and the two novels I have just mentioned, and that curious and interesting tale of L’Evangéliste, which appeared a few months since, and which proves that the author’s genius, though on the whole he has pressed it hard, is still nervous, fresh, and young. Each of these things has been better than the last, with the exception, perhaps, of L’Evangéliste, which, to my taste, is not superior to Numa Roumestan. Numa Roumestan is a masterpiece; it is really a perfect work; it has no weakness, no roughness; it is a compact and harmonious whole. Daudet’s other works have had their inequalities, their infirmities, certain places where, if you tapped them, they sounded hollow. His danger has always been a perceptible tendency to the factitious; sometimes he has fallen into the trap laid for him by a taste for superficial effects. In Fromont Jeune, for instance, it seems to me difficult to care much for the horrid little heroine herself, carefully as she is studied. She has been pursued, but she has not been caught, for she is not interesting (even for a coquine), not even human. She is a mechanical doll, with nothing for the imagination to take hold of. She is one more proof of the fact that it is difficult to give the air of consistency to vanity and depravity, though the portraiture of the vicious side of life would seem, from the pictorial point of view, to offer such attractions. The reader’s quarrel with Sidonie Chèbe is not that she is bad, but that she is not felt, as the æsthetic people say. In Jack the hollow spot, as I have called it, is the episode of Doctor Rivals and his daughter Cécile, which reminds us of the more genial parts of Dickens. It is perhaps because to us readers of English speech the figure of the young girl, in a French novel, is almost always wanting in reality—seems to be thin and conventional; in any case poor Jack’s love-affair, at the end of the book, does not produce the illusion of the rest of his touching history. In Le Nabab this artificial element is very considerable; it centres about the figure of Paul de Géry and embraces the whole group of M. Joyeuse and his blooming daughters, with their pretty attitudes—taking in also the very shadowy André Maranne, so touchingly re-united to his mother, who had lived for ten years with an Irish doctor to whom she was not married. In Les Rois en Exil, Tom Lévis and the diabolical Séphora seem to me purely fanciful creations, without any relation to reality; they are the inferior part of the book. They are composed by a master of composition, and the comedian Tom is described with immense spirit, an art which speaks volumes as to a certain sort of Parisian initiation. But if this artistic and malignant couple are very clever water-colour, they are not really humanity. Ruffians and rascals have a certain moral nature, as well as the better-behaved; but in the case I have mentioned M. Daudet fails to put his finger upon it. The same with Madame Autheman, the evil genius of poor Eline Ebsen, in the L’Evangéliste. She seems to me terribly, almost grotesquely, void. She is an elaborate portrait of a fanatic of Protestantism, a bigot to the point of monstrosity, cold-blooded, implacable, cruel. The figure is painted with Alphonse Daudet’s inimitable art; no one that handles the pen to-day is such a pictorial artist as he. But Madame Autheman strikes me as quite automatic; psychologically she is a blank. One does not see the operation of her character. She must have had a soul, and a very curious one. It was a great opportunity for a piece of spiritual portraiture; but we know nothing about Madame Autheman’s inner springs, and I think we fail to believe in her. I should go so far as to say that we get little more of an inside view, as the phrase is, of Eline Ebsen; we are not shown the spiritual steps by which she went over to the enemy—vividly, admirably as the outward signs and consequences of this disaster are depicted. The logic of the matter is absent in both cases, and it takes all the magic of the author’s legerdemain to prevent us from missing it. These things, however, are exceptions, and the tissue of each of his novels is, for all the rest, really pure gold. No one has such grace, such lightness and brilliancy of execution; it is a fascination to see him at work. The beauty of Numa Roumestan is that it has no hollow places; the idea and the picture melt everywhere into one. Emile Zola, criticising the work in a very friendly spirit, speaks of the episode of Hortense Le Quesnoy and the Provençal tambourinaire as a false note, and declares that it wounds his sense of delicacy. Valmajour is a peasant of the south of France; he is young, handsome, wears a costume, and is a master of the rustic fife and tambourine—instruments that are much appreciated in his part of the country. Mademoiselle Le Quesnoy, living in Paris, daughter of a distinguished member of the French judiciary—“le premier magistrat de France”—young, charming, imaginative, romantic, marked out for a malady of the chest, and with a certain innocent perversity of mind, sees him play before an applauding crowd in the old Roman arena at Nîmes, and forthwith conceives a secret, a singular but not, under the circumstances, an absolutely unnatural passion for him. He comes up to Paris to seek his fortune at the “variety” theatres, where his feeble and primitive music quite fails to excite enthusiasm. The young girl, reckless and impulsive, and full of sympathy with his mortification, writes him in three words (upon one of her little photographs) an assurance of her devotion; and this innocent missive, falling soon into the hands of his rapacious and exasperated sister (a wonderful figure, one of the most living that has ever come from Daudet’s pen), becomes a source of infinite alarm to the family of Mademoiselle Le Quesnoy, who see her compromised, calumniated and black-mailed, and finally of complete humiliation to poor Hortense herself, now fallen into a rapid consumption, and cured of her foolish infatuation by a nearer view of the vain and ignorant Valmajour. An agent of the family recovers the photograph (with the aid of ten thousand francs), and the young girl, with the bitter taste of her disappointment still in her soul, dies in her flower.
This little story, as I say, is very shocking to M. Zola, who cites it as an example of the folly of a departure from consistent realism. What is observed, says M. Zola, on the whole very justly, is strong; what is invented is always weak, especially what is invented to please the ladies. “See in this case,” he writes, “all the misery of invented episodes. This love of Hortense, with which the author has doubtless wished to give the impression of something touching, produces a discomfort, as if it were a violation of nature. It is therefore the pages written for the ladies that are repulsive—even to a man accustomed to the saddest dissections of the human corpse.” I am not of M. Zola’s opinion—delightful as it would be to be of that opinion when M. Zola’s sense of propriety is ruffled. The incident of Hortense and Valmajour is not (to my sense) a blot upon Numa Roumestan; on the contrary, it is perfectly conceivable, and is treated with admirable delicacy. “This romantic stuff,” says M. Zola, elsewhere, “is as painful as a pollution. That a young girl should lose her head over a tenor, that may be explained, for she loves the operatic personage in the interpreter. She has before her a young man sharpened and refined by life, elegant, having at least certain appearances of talent and intelligence. But this tambourinist, with his drum and penny-whistle, this village dandy, a poor devil who doesn’t even know how to speak! No, life has not such cruelties as that, I protest, I who certainly, as a general thing, am not accustomed to give ground before human aberrations!” This objection was worth making; but I should look at the matter in another way. It seems to me much more natural that a girl of the temper and breeding that M. Daudet has described should take a momentary fancy to a prepossessing young rustic, bronzed by the sun of Provence (even if it be conceded that his soul was vulgar), than that she should fasten her affections upon a “lyric artist,” suspected of pomatum and paint, and illuminated by the footlights. These are points which it is vain to discuss, however, both because they are delicate and because they are details. I have come so far simply from a desire to justify my high admiration of Numa Roumestan. But Emile Zola, again, has expressed this feeling more felicitously than I can hope to do. “This, moreover, is a very slight blemish in a work which I regard as one of those, of all Daudet’s productions, that is most personal to himself. He has put his whole nature into it, helped by his southern temperament, having only to make large draughts upon his innermost recollections and sensations. I do not think that he has hitherto reached such an intensity either of irony or of geniality.... Happy the books which arrive in this way, at the hour of the complete maturity of a talent! They are simply the widest unfolding of an artist’s nature; they have in happy equilibrium the qualities of observation and the qualities of style. For Alphonse Daudet Numa Roumestan will mark this interfusion of a temperament and a subject that are made for each other, the perfect plenitude of a work which the writer exactly fills.”