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.