As I say, however, these are details, and I have touched them prematurely. Alphonse Daudet is a charmer, and the effect of his brilliant, friendly, indefinable genius is to make it difficult, in speaking of him, to take things in their order or follow a plan. In writing of him some time ago, in another place, I so far lost my head as to remark, with levity, that he was “a great little novelist.” The diminutive epithet then, I must now say, was nothing more than a term of endearment, the result of an irresistible impulse to express a sense of personal fondness. This kind of feeling is difficult to utter in English, and the utterance of it, so far as this is possible, is not thought consistent with the dignity of a critic. If we were talking French, nothing would be simpler than to say that Alphonse Daudet is adorable, and have done with it. But this resource is denied me, and I must arrive at my meaning by a series of circumlocutions. I am not able even to say that he is very “personal”; that epithet, so valuable in the vocabulary of French literary criticism, has, when applied to the talent of an artist, a meaning different from the sense in which we use it. “A novelist so personal and so penetrating,” says Emile Zola, speaking of the author of Numa Roumestan. That phrase, in English, means nothing in particular; so that I must add to it that the charm of Daudet’s talent comes from its being charged to an extraordinary degree with his temperament, his feelings, his instincts, his natural qualities. This, of course, is a charm, in a style, only when nature has been generous. To Alphonse Daudet she has been exceptionally so; she has placed in his hand an instrument of many chords. A delicate, nervous organisation, active and indefatigable in spite of its delicacy, and familiar with emotion of almost every kind, equally acquainted with pleasure and with pain; a light, quick, joyous, yet reflective, imagination, a faculty of seeing images, making images, at every turn, of conceiving everything in the visible form, in the plastic spirit; an extraordinary sensibility to all the impressions of life and a faculty of language which is in perfect harmony with his wonderful fineness of perception—these are some of the qualities of which he is the happy possessor, and which make his equipment for the work he has undertaken exceedingly rich. There are others besides; but enumerations are ponderous, and we should avoid that danger in speaking of a genius whose lightness of touch never belies itself. His elder brother, who has not his talent, has written a little book about him in which the word modernité perpetually occurs. M. Ernest Daudet, in Mon Frère et Moi, insists upon his possession of the qualities expressed by this barbarous substantive, which is so indispensable to the new school. Alphonse Daudet is, in truth, very modern; he has all the newly-developed, the newly-invented, perceptions. Nothing speaks so much to his imagination as the latest and most composite things, the refinements of current civilisation, the most delicate shades of the actual. It is scarcely too much to say that (especially in the Parisian race), modern manners, modern nerves, modern wealth, and modern improvements, have engendered a new sense, a sense not easily named nor classified, but recognisable in all the most characteristic productions of contemporary art. It is partly physical, partly moral, and the shortest way to describe it is to say that it is a more analytic consideration of appearances. It is known by its tendency to resolve its discoveries into pictorial form. It sees the connection between feelings and external conditions, and it expresses such relations as they have not been expressed hitherto. It deserves to win victories, because it has opened its eyes well to the fact that the magic of the arts of representation lies in their appeal to the associations awakened by things. It traces these associations into the most unlighted corners of our being, into the most devious paths of experience. The appearance of things is constantly more complicated as the world grows older, and it needs a more and more patient art, a closer notation, to divide it into its parts. Of this art Alphonse Daudet has a wonderfully large allowance, and that is why I say that he is peculiarly modern. It is very true that his manner is not the manner of patience—though he must always have had a great deal of that virtue in the preparation of his work. The new school of fiction in France is based very much on the taking of notes; the library of the great Flaubert, of the brothers de Goncourt, of Emile Zola, and of the writer of whom I speak, must have been in a large measure a library of memorandum-books. This of course only puts the patience back a stage or two. In composition Daudet proceeds by quick, instantaneous vision, by the happiest divination, by catching the idea as it suddenly springs up before him with a whirr of wings. What he mainly sees is the great surface of life and the parts that lie near the surface. But life is, immensely, a matter of surface, and if our emotions in general are interesting, the form of those emotions has the merit of being the most definite thing about them. Like most French imaginative writers (judged, at least, from the English standpoint), he is much less concerned with the moral, the metaphysical world, than with the sensible. We proceed usually from the former to the latter, while the French reverse the process. Except in politics, they are uncomfortable in the presence of abstractions, and lose no time in reducing them to the concrete. But even the concrete, for them, is a field for poetry, which brings us to the fact that the delightful thing in Daudet’s talent is the inveterate poetical touch. This is what mainly distinguishes him from the other lights of the realistic school—modifies so completely in his case the hardness of consistent realism. There is something very hard, very dry, in Flaubert, in Edmond de Goncourt, in the robust Zola; but there is something very soft in Alphonse Daudet. “Benevolent nature,” says Zola, “has placed him at that exquisite point where poetry ends and reality begins.” That is happily said; Daudet’s great characteristic is this mixture of the sense of the real with the sense of the beautiful. His imagination is constantly at play with his theme; it has a horror of the literal, the limited; it sees an object in all its intermingled relations—on its sentimental, its pathetic, its comical, its pictorial side. Flaubert, in whom Alphonse Daudet would probably recognise to a certain degree a literary paternity, is far from being a simple realist; but he was destitute of this sense of the beautiful, destitute of facility and grace. He had, to take its place, a sense of the strange, the grotesque, to which Salammbo, La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, his indescribable posthumous novel of Bouvard et Pécuchet, abundantly testify. The talent of the brothers Goncourt strikes us as a talent that was associated originally with a sense of beauty; but we receive an impression that this feeling has been perverted and warped. It has ceased to be natural and free; it has become morbid and peevish, has turned mainly to curiosity and mannerism. And these two authors are capable, during a whole book (as in Germinie Lacerteux or La Fille Elisa), of escaping from its influence altogether. No one would probably ever think of accusing Emile Zola of having a perception of the beautiful. He has an illimitable, and at times a very valuable, sense of the ugly, of the unclean; but when he addresses himself to the poetic aspect of things, as in La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, he is apt to have terrible misadventures.
III
It is for the expressive talents that we feel an affection, and Daudet is eminently expressive. His manner is the manner of talk, and if the talk is sincere, that makes a writer touch us. Daudet expresses many things; but he most frequently expresses himself—his own temper in the presence of life, his own feeling on a thousand occasions. This personal note is especially to be observed in his earlier productions—in the Lettres de mon Moulin, the Contes du Lundi, Le Petit Chose; it is also very present in the series of prefaces which he has undertaken to supply to the octavo edition of his works. In these prefaces he gives the history of each successive book—relates the circumstances under which it was written. These things are ingenuously told, but what we are chiefly conscious of in regard to them, is that Alphonse Daudet must express himself. His brother informs us that he is writing his memoirs, and this will have been another opportunity for expression. Ernest Daudet, as well (as I have mentioned), has attempted to express him. Mon Frère et Moi is one of those productions which it is difficult for an English reader to judge in fairness: it is so much more confidential than we, in public, ever venture to be. The French have, on all occasions, the courage of their emotion, and M. Ernest Daudet’s leading emotion is a boundless admiration for his junior. He lays it before us very frankly and gracefully—not, on the whole, indiscreetly; and I have no quarrel whatever with his volume, for it contains a considerable amount of information on a very interesting subject. Indirectly, indeed, as well as directly, it helps us to a knowledge of his brother. Alphonse Daudet was born in Provence; he comes of an expansive, a confidential race. His style is impregnated with the southern sunshine, and his talent has the sweetness of a fruit that has grown in the warm, open air. He has the advantage of being a Provençal converted, as it were—of having a southern temperament and a northern reason. We know what he thinks of the southern temperament—Numa Roumestan is a vivid exposition of that. “Gau de carriero, doulou d’oustau,” as the Provençal has it; “joie de rue, douleur de maison—joy in the street and pain in the house”—that proverb, says Alphonse Daudet, describes and formulates a whole race. It has given him the subject of an admirable story, in which he has depicted with equal force and tenderness the amiable weaknesses, the mingled violence and levity of the children of the clime of the fig and olive. He has put before us, above all, their mania for talk, their irrepressible chatter, the qualities that, with them, render all passion, all purpose, inordinately vocal. Himself a complete “produit du Midi,” like the famille Mèfre in Numa Roumestan, he has achieved the feat of becoming objective to his own vision, getting outside of his ingredients and judging them. This he has done by the aid of his Parisianised conscience, his exquisite taste, and that finer wisdom which resides in the artist, from whatever soil he springs. Successfully as he has done it, however, he has not done it so well but that he too does not show a little of the heightened colour, the super-abundant statement, the restless movement of his compatriots. He is nothing if not demonstrative; he is always in a state of feeling; he has not a very definite ideal of reserve. It must be added that he is a man of genius, and that genius never spends its capital; that he is an artist, and that an artist always has a certain method and order. But it remains characteristic of his origin that the author of Numa Roumestan, one of the happiest and most pointed of satires, should have about him the aroma of some of the qualities satirised. There are passages in his tales and in his prefaces that are genuine “produits du Midi,” and his brother’s account of him could only have been written by a Provençal brother.
To be personnel to that point, transparent, effusive, gushing, to give one’s self away in one’s books, has never been, and will never be, the ideal of us of English speech; but that does not prevent our enjoying immensely, when we meet it, a happy example of this alien spirit. For myself, I am free to confess, half my affection for Alphonse Daudet comes from the fact that he writes in a way in which I would not write even if I could. There are certain kinds of feeling and observation, certain impressions and ideas, to which we are rather ashamed to give a voice, and yet are ashamed not to have in our scale. In these matters Alphonse Daudet renders us a great service: he expresses such things on our behalf. I may add that he usually does it much better than the cleverest of us could do even if we were to try. I have said that he is a Provençal converted, and I should do him a great injustice if I did not dwell upon his conversion. His brother relates the circumstances under which he came up to Paris, at the age of twenty (in a threadbare overcoat and a pair of india-rubbers), to seek his literary fortune. His beginnings were difficult, his childhood had been hard, he was familiar with poverty and disaster. He had no adventitious aid to success—his whole fortune consisted in his exquisite organisation. But Paris was to be, artistically, a mine of wealth to him, and of all the anxious and eager young spirits who, on the battle-field of uncarpeted cinquièmes, have laid siege to the indifferent city, none can have felt more deeply conscious of the mission to take possession of it. Alphonse Daudet, at the present hour, is in complete possession of Paris; he knows it, loves it; uses it; he has assimilated it to its last particle. He has made of it a Paris of his own—a Paris like a vast crisp water-colour, one of the water-colours of the school of Fortuny. The French have a great advantage in the fact that they admire their capital very much as if it were a foreign city. Most of their artists, their men of letters, have come up from the provinces, and well as they may learn to know the metropolis, it never ceases to be a spectacle, a wonder, a fascination for them. This comes partly from the intrinsic brilliancy and interest of the place, partly from the poverty of provincial life, and partly from the degree to which the faculty of appreciation is developed in Frenchmen of the class of which I speak. To Daudet, at any rate, the familiar aspects of Paris are endlessly pictorial, and part of the charm of his novels (for those who share his relish for that huge flower of civilisation) is in the way he recalls it, evokes it, suddenly presents it, in parts or as a whole, to our senses. The light, the sky, the feeling of the air, the odours of the streets, the look of certain vistas, the silvery, muddy Seine, the cool, grey tone of colour, the physiognomy of particular quarters, the whole Parisian expression, meet you suddenly in his pages, and remind you again and again that if he paints with a pen he writes with a brush. I remember that when I read Le Nabab and Les Rois en Exil for the first time, I said to myself that this was the article de Paris in supreme perfection, and that no reader could understand such productions who had not had a copious experience of the scene. It is certain, at any rate, that those books have their full value only for minds more or less Parisianised; half their meaning, their magic, their subtlety of intention is liable to be lost. It may be said that this is a great limitation—that the works of the best novelists may be understood by all the world. There is something in that; but I know not, all the same, whether the fact I indicate be a great limitation. It is certainly a very illustrative quality. Daudet has caught the tone of a particular pitch of manners; he applies it with the lightest, surest hand, and his picture shines and lives. The most generalised representation of life cannot do more than that.
I shrink very much from speaking of systems, in relation to such a genius as this: I should incline to believe that Daudet’s system is simply to be as vivid as he can. Emile Zola has a system—at least he says so; but I do not remember, on the part of the author of Numa Roumestan, the smallest technical profession of faith. Nevertheless, he has taken a line, as we say, and his line is to sail as close as possible to the actual. The life of Paris being his subject, his attempt, most frequently, is to put his finger upon known examples; so that he has been accused of portraying individuals instead of portraying types. There are few of his figures to which the name of some celebrity of the day has not been attached. The Nabob is François Bravais; the Duc de Mora is the Duc de Morny. The Irish Doctor Jenkins is an English physician who flourished in Paris from such a year to such another; people are still living (wonderful to say), who took his little pills à base arsénicale. Félicia Ruys is Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt; Constance Crenmitz is Madame Taglioni; the Queen of Illyria is the Queen of Naples; the Prince of Axel is the Prince of Orange; Tom Lévis is an English house-agent (not in the Rue Royale, but hard by); Elysée Méraut is a well-known journalist, and Doctor Bouchereau a well-known surgeon. Such is the key, we are told, to these ingenious mystifications, and to many others which I have not the space to mention. It matters little, to my mind, whether in each case the cap fits the supposed model; for nothing is more evident than that Alphonse Daudet has proposed to himself to represent not only the people but the persons of his time. The conspicuity of certain individuals has added to the force with which they speak to his imagination. His taste is for salient figures, and he has said to himself that there is no greater proof of being salient than being known. The temptation to “put people into a book” is a temptation of which every writer of fiction knows something, and I hold that to succumb to it is not only legitimate but inevitable. Putting people into books is what the novelist lives upon; the question in the matter is the question of delicacy, for according to that delicacy the painter conjures away recognition or insists upon it. Daudet has been accused of the impertinence of insisting, and I believe that two or three of his portraits have provoked a protest. He is charged with ingratitude for having produced an effigy of the Duke of Morny, who had been his benefactor, and employed him as a secretary. Such a matter as this is between M. Daudet and his conscience, and I am far from pretending to pronounce upon it. The uninitiated reader can only say that the figure is a very striking one—such a picture as (it may be imagined) the Duc de Morny would not be displeased to have inspired. It may fairly be conceded, however, that Daudet is much more an observer than an inventor. The invented parts of his tales, like the loves of Jack and of Paul de Géry and the machinations of Madame Autheman (the theological vampire of L’Evangéliste, to whom I shall return for a moment), are the vague, the ineffective as well as the romantic parts. (I remember that in reading Le Nabab, it was not very easy to keep Paul de Géry and André Maranne apart.) It is the real—the transmuted real—that he gives us best; the fruit of a process that adds to observation what a kiss adds to a greeting. The joy, the excitement of recognition, are keen, even when the object recognised is dismal. They are part of his spirit—part of his way of seeing things. L’Evangéliste is the saddest story conceivable; but it is lighted, throughout, by the author’s irrepressibly humorous view of the conditions in which its successive elements present themselves, and by the extraordinary vivacity with which, in his hands, narration and description proceed. His humour is of the finest; it is needless to say that it is never violent nor vulgar. It is a part of the high spirits—the animal spirits, I should say, if the phrase had not an association of coarseness—that accompany the temperament of his race; and it is stimulated by the perpetual entertainment which so rare a visual faculty naturally finds in the spectacle of life, even while encountering there a multitude of distressing things. Daudet’s gaiety is a part of his poetry, and his poetry is a part of everything he touches. There is little enough gaiety in the subject of Jack, and yet the whole story is told with a smile. To complete the charm of the thing, the smile is full of feeling. Here and there it becomes an immense laugh, and the result is a delightful piece of drollery. Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon contains all his high spirits; it is one of his few stories in which laughter and tears are not intermingled.
This little tale, which is one of his first, is, like Numa Roumestan, a satire on a southern foible. Tartarin de Tarascon is an excellent man who inhabits the old town on the Rhone over which the palace of the good King René keeps guard; he has not a fault in the world except an imagination too vivid. He is liable to visions, to hallucinations; the desire that a thing shall happen speedily resolves itself into the belief that the thing will happen—then that it is happening—then that it has happened. Tartarin accordingly presents himself to the world (and to himself) as a gentleman to whom all wonders are familiar; his experience blooms with supposititious flowers. The coveted thing for a man of his romantic mould is that he shall be the bravest of the brave, and he passes his life in a series of heroic exploits, in which, as you listen to him, it is impossible not to believe. He passes over from Marseilles to Algiers, where his adventures deepen to a climax, and where he has a desperate flirtation with the principal ornament of the harem of a noble Arab. The lady proves at the end to be a horribly improper little Frenchwoman, and poor Tartarin, abused and disabused, returns to Tarascon to meditate on what might have been. Nothing could be more charming than the light comicality of the sketch, which fills a small volume. This is the most mirthful, the most completely diverting of all Daudet’s tales; but the same element, in an infinitely subtler form, runs through the others. The essence of it is the wish to please, and this brings me back to the point to which I intended to return. The wish to please is the quality by which Daudet persuades his readers most; it is this that elicits from them that friendliness, that confession that they are charmed, of which I spoke at the beginning of these remarks. It gives a sociability to his manner, in spite of the fact that he describes all sorts of painful and odious things. This contradiction is a part of his originality. He has no pretension to being simple, he is perfectly conscious of being complex, and in nothing is he more modern than in this expressive and sympathetic smile—the smile of the artist, the sceptic, the man of the world—with which he shows us the miseries and cruelties of life. It is singular that we should like him for that—and doubtless many people do not, or think they do not. What they really dislike, I believe, is the things he relates, which are often lamentable.
IV
The first of these were slight and simple, and for the most part cheerful; little anecdotes and legends of Provence, impressions of an artist’s holidays in that strange, bare, lovely land, and of wanderings further afield, in Corsica and Algeria; sketches of Paris during the siege; incidents of the invasion, the advent of the Prussian rule in other parts of the country. In all these things there is la note émue, the smile which is only a more synthetic sign of being moved. And then such grace of form, such lightness of touch, such alertness of observation! Some of the chapters of the Lettres de mon Moulin are such perfect vignettes, that the brief treatment of small subjects might well have seemed, at first, Alphonse Daudet’s appointed work. He had almost invented a manner, and it was impossible to do better than he the small piece, or even the passage. Glimpses, reminiscences, accidents, he rendered them with the brilliancy of a violinist improvising on a sudden hint. The Lettres de mon Moulin, moreover, are impregnated with the light, with the fragrance of a Provençal summer; the rosemary and thyme are in the air as we read, the white rocks and the grey foliage stretch away to an horizon of hills—the Alpilles, the little Alps—on which colour is as iridescent as the breast of a dove. The Provence of Alphonse Daudet is a delightful land; even when the mistral blows there it has a music in its whistle. Emile Zola has protested against this; he too is of Provençal race, he passed his youth in the old Languedoc, and he intimates that his fanciful friend throws too much sweetness into the picture. It is beyond contradiction that Daudet, like Tartarin de Tarascon and Numa Roumestan, exaggerates a little; he sees with great intensity, and is very sensitive to agreeable impressions. Le Petit Chose, his first long story, reads to-day like the attempt of a beginner, and of a beginner who had read and enjoyed Dickens. I risk this allusion to the author of Copperfield in spite of a conviction that Alphonse Daudet must be tired of hearing that he imitates him. It is not imitation; there is nothing so gross as imitation in the length and breadth of Daudet’s work; but it is conscious sympathy, for there is plenty of that. There are pages in his tales which seem to say to us that at one moment of his life Dickens had been a revelation to him—pages more particularly in Le Petit Chose, in Fromont Jeune and in Jack. The heroine of the first of these works (a very shadowy personage) is never mentioned but as the “black eyes”; some one else is always spoken of as the dame de grand mérite; the heroine’s father, who keeps a flourishing china-shop, never opens his mouth without saying “C’est le cas de le dire.” These are harmless, they are indeed sometimes very happy, Dickensisms. We make no crime of them to M. Daudet, who must have felt as intelligently as he has felt everything else the fascinating form of the English novelist’s drollery. Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné is a study of life in the old quarter of the Marais, the Paris of the seventeenth century, whose stately hôtels have been invaded by the innumerable activities of modern trade. When I say a study, I use the word with all those restrictions with which it must be applied to a genius who is truthful without being literal, and who has a pair of butterfly’s wings attached to the back of his observation. If sub-titles were the fashion to-day, the right one for Fromont Jeune would be—or the Dangers of Partnership. The action takes place for the most part in a manufactory of wall-papers, and the persons in whom the author seeks to interest us are engaged in this useful industry. There are delightful things in the book, but, as I intimated at the beginning of these remarks, there are considerable inequalities. The pages that made M. Daudet’s fortune—for it was with Fromont Jeune that his fortune began—are those which relate to the history of M. Delobelle, the superannuated tragedian, his long-suffering wife, and his exquisite lame daughter, who makes butterflies and humming-birds for ladies’ head-dresses. This eccentric and pathetic household was an immense hit, and Daudet has never been happier than in the details of the group. Delobelle himself, who has not had an engagement for ten years, and who never will have one again, but who holds none the less that it is his duty not to leave the stage, “not to give up the theatre,” though his platonic passion is paid for by the weary eyesight of his wife and daughter, who sit up half the night attaching bead-eyes to little stuffed animals—the blooming and sonorous Delobelle, ferociously selfish and fantastically vain, under the genial forms of melodrama, is a beautiful representation of a vulgarly factitious nature. The book revealed a painter; all the descriptive passages, the pictorial touches, had the truest felicity. No one better than Daudet gives what we call the feeling of a place. The story illustrates, among other things, the fact that a pretty little woman who is consumed with the lowest form of vanity, and unimpeded in her operations by the possession of a heart, may inflict an unlimited amount of injury upon people about her, if she only have the opportunity. The case is well demonstrated, and Sidonie Chèbe is an elaborate study of flimsiness; her papery quality, as I may call it, her rustling dryness, are effectively rendered. But I think there is a limit to the interest which the English-speaking reader of French novels can take to-day in the adventures of a lady who leads the life of Madame Sidonie. In the first place he has met her again and again—he knows exactly what she will do and say in every situation; and in the second there always seems to him to be in her vices, her disorders, an element of the conventional. There is a receipt among French novelists for making little high-heeled reprobates. However this may be, he has at least a feeling that at night all cats are grey, and that the particular tint of depravity of a woman whose nature has the shallowness of a sanded floor is not a very important constatation. Daudet has expended much ingenuity in endeavouring to hit the particular tint of Sidonie; he has wished to make her a type—the type of the daughter of small unsuccessful shopkeepers (narrow-minded and self-complacent to imbecility), whose corruption comes from the examples, temptations, opportunities of a great city, as well as from her impure blood and the infection of the meanest associations. But what all this illustrates was not worth illustrating.
The early chapters of Jack are admirable; the later ones suffer a little, I think, from the story being drawn out too much, like an accordion when it wishes to be plaintive. Jack is a kind of younger brother of the Petit Chose, though he takes the troubles of life rather more stoutly than that delicate and diminutive hero; a poor boy with a doting and disreputable mother, whose tenderness is surpassed by her frivolity, and who sacrifices her son to the fantastic egotism of an unsuccessful man of letters with whom she passes several years of her life. She is another study of coquinerie—she is another shade; but she is a more apprehensible figure than Sidonie Chèbe—she is, indeed, a very admirable portrait. The success of the book, however, is the figure of her lover, that is of her protector and bully, the unrecognised genius aforesaid, author of Le Fils de Faust, an uncirculated dramatic poem in the manner of Goethe, and centre of a little group of ratés—a collection of dead-beats, as we say to-day, as pretentious, as impotent, as envious and as bilious as himself. He conceives a violent hatred of the offspring of his amiable companion, and the subject of Jack is the persecution of the boy by this monstrous charlatan. This persecution is triumphantly successful; the youthful hero dies on the threshold of manhood, broken down by his tribulations and miseries: he has been thrown upon the world to earn his bread, and among other things seeks a livelihood as a stoker on an Atlantic steamer. Jack has been taken young, and though his nature is gentle and tender, his circumstances succeed in degrading him. He is reduced at the end to a kind of bewildered brutishness. The story is simply the history of a juvenile martyrdom, pityingly, expansively told, and I am afraid that Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, who, in writing lately about “Modern Fiction,”[4] complains of the abuse of pathetic effects in that form of composition, would find little to commend in this brilliant paraphrase of suffering. Mr. Warner’s complaint is eminently just, and the fault of Jack is certainly the abuse of pathos. Mr. Warner does not mention Alphonse Daudet by name, but it is safe to assume that in his reflections upon the perversity of those writers who will not make a novel as comfortable as one’s stockings, or as pretty as a Christmas card, he was thinking of the author of so many uncompromising dénouements. It is true that this probability is diminished by the fact that when he remarks that surely “the main object in the novel is to entertain,” he appears to imply that the writers who furnish his text are faithless to this duty. It is possible he would not have made that implication if he had had in mind the productions of a story-teller who has the great peculiarity of being “amusing,” as the old-fashioned critics say, even when he touches the source of tears. The word entertaining has two or three shades of meaning; but in whatever sense it is used I may say, in parenthesis, that I do not agree with Mr. Warner’s description of the main object of the novel. I should put the case differently: I should say that the main object of the novel is to represent life. I cannot understand any other motive for interweaving imaginary incidents, and I do not perceive any other measure of the value of such combinations. The effect of a novel—the effect of any work of art—is to entertain; but that is a very different thing. The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life—that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience. The greater the art the greater the miracle, and the more certain also the fact that we have been entertained—in the best meaning of that word, at least, which signifies that we have been living at the expense of some one else. I am perfectly aware that to say the object of a novel is to represent life does not bring the question to a point so fine as to be uncomfortable for any one. It is of the greatest importance that there should be a very free appreciation of such a question, and the definition I have hinted at gives plenty of scope for that. For, after all, may not people differ infinitely as to what constitutes life—what constitutes representation? Some people, for instance, hold that Miss Austen deals with life, that Miss Austen represents. Others attribute these achievements to the accomplished Ouida. Some people find that illusion, that enlargement of experience, that miracle of living at the expense of others, of which I have spoken, in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. Others revel in them in the pages of Mr. Howells.