Histrionics and mock heroics pervade the three books. It is not the fact that matters, it is the fact seen through the coloured Southern mind, and that mind turns at once away from the fact towards the trifles that attend it. Thus costume is everywhere a primary concern. Tartarin cannot land at Algiers to shoot lions unless he be dressed for the part in Arab clothes, and he must carry three rifles, drag behind him a portable camp, a pharmacy, a patent tent, patent compressed foods. Nothing is too absurd for him: he has a 'Winchester rifle with thirty-two cartridges in the magazine'; he does not shrink from a rifle with a semicircular barrel for shooting round the corner. To climb the Righi (instead of using the funicular) he must wear a jersey, ice-shoes, snow goggles. Everywhere he plays a part and plays it in costume. Nor is Tartarin alone in this; the Tarasconnais emulate their chief: Major Bravida dons black when he calls to compel Tartarin 'to redeem his honour' and sail for Algiers; when Port Tarascon, the frantic colony, is formed, costumes are designed for grandees, for the militia, for the bureaucrats. Appearances alone matter: Tarascon is not content with the French flag, but spread-eagles across it a fantastic local animal, La Tarasque, of mythical origin.
Life in Tarascon is too easy: Tartarin helps it on with a war-whoop. He creates adventure. Thus in 1870 he organises against the Germans the defence of the town; mines are laid under the marketplace, the Café de la Comédie is turned into a redoubt, volunteers drill in the street. Of course there is no fighting, the Germans do not come, nor do the prudent Tarasconnais attempt to seek them out, but in its imagination the town has been heroic. It is heroic again when it defends against the Government the monks of Pampérigouste: the convent becomes a fortress, but there is no fighting; when the supplies give out the heroic defenders march out with their weapons and their banners, in their crusaders' uniforms. The town believes. It believes anything and anybody. Because a rogue calls himself a prince, Tartarin entrusts him with his money and is deserted in the Sahara; because another calls himself a duke, thousands of Tarasconnais follow Tartarin to a non-existent colony bought by them from the pseudo-duke. Whether the matter be general or personal Tartarin believes. He falls in love with a Moorish girl, and innocently allows himself to be persuaded that a substitute is the beauty whom he glimpsed through the yashmak.
Tartarin believes because he is together romantic, sentimental, and mildly sensual: that which he likes he wants to think true. He wants to believe that sweet Baia is his true love; when again he succumbs to Sonia, the Russian exile, he wants to believe that he too is an extremist, a potential martyr in the cause of Nihilism; and again he wants to believe that Likiriki, the nigger girl, is the little creature of charm for whom his heart has been calling. His sentimentality is always ready—for women, for ideas, for beasts. He can be moved when he hears for the hundredth time the ridiculous ballads that are popular in the local drawing-rooms, weep when Bezuquet, the chemist, sings 'Oh thou, beloved white star of my soul!' For him the lion is 'a noble beast,' who must be shot, not caged; the horse 'the most glorious conquest of man.' He is always above the world, never of it unless his own safety be endangered, when he scuttles to shelter; as Daudet says, half Tartarin is Quixote, half is Sancho ... but Sancho wins. It is because Tartarin is a comic coward that he will not allow the heroic crusaders of Pampérigouste to fire on the Government troops; the 'abbot' of Port Tarascon to train the carronade on the English frigate; alone, he is a greater coward than in public; he shivers under his weapons when he walks to the club in the evening; he severs the rope on Mont Blanc, sending his companion to probable death. But the burlesque does not end tragically: nobody actually dies, all return to Tarascon in time to hear their funeral orations.
It might be thought that Tartarin is repulsive: he is not; he is too young, too innocent. His great, foolish heart is too open to the woes of any damsel; his simplicity, his credulity, his muddled faith, the optimism which no misfortune can shatter—all these traits endear him to us, make him real. For Tartarin is real: he is the Frenchman of the South; in the words of a character, 'The Tarasconnais type is the Frenchman magnified, exaggerated, as seen in a convex mirror.' Tartarin and his fellows typify the South, though some typify one side of the Southern Frenchman rather than another; thus Bravida is military pride, Excourbaniès is the liar, and mild Pascalon is the imitator of imitators: when Tarascon, arrested by the British captain and brought home on board the frigate, takes up the attitude of Napoleon on the Bellerophon, Pascalon begins a memorial and tries to impersonate Las Cases. As for Tartarin, bell-wether of the flock, he has all the characteristics, he even sings all the songs. He is the South.
The three Tartarin books constitute together the most violent satire that has ever been written against the South. Gascony, Provence, and Languedoc are often made the butts of Northern French writers, while Lombards introduce in books ridiculous Neapolitans, and Catalonians paint burlesque Andalusians, but no writer has equalled Alphonse Daudet in consistent ferocity. So evident is this, that Tarascon to this day resents the publications, and that, some years ago, a commercial traveller who humorously described himself on the hotel register as 'Alphonse Daudet' was mobbed in the street, and rescued by the police from the rabble who threatened to throw him into the Rhone. Tarascon, a little junction on the way to Marseilles, has been made absurd for ever. Yet, though Daudet exaggerated, he built on the truth: there is a close connection between his preposterous figures, grown men with the tendencies of children enormously distorted, and the Frenchmen of the South. Indeed, the Southern Frenchman is the Frenchman as we picture him in England; there is between him and his compatriot from Picardy or Flanders a difference as great as exists between the Scotsman and the man of Kent. The Northern Frenchman is sober, silent, hard, reasonable, and logical; his imagination is negligible, his artistic taste as corrupt as that of an average inhabitant of the Midlands. But the Southern Frenchman is a different creature; his excitable temperament, his irresponsibility and impetuousness run through the majority of French artists and politicians. As the French saying goes, 'the South moves'; thus it is not wonderful that Le Havre and Lille should not rival Marseilles and Bordeaux.
Tartarin lives to a greater or lesser degree within every Frenchman of the plains, born South of the line which unites Lyons and Bordeaux. It is Tartarin who stands for hours at street corners in Arles or Montpellier, chattering with Tartarin and, like Tartarin, endlessly brags of the small birds he has killed, of the hearts he has won and of his extraordinary luck at cards. It is Tartarin again who still wears night-caps and flannel belts, and drinks every morning great bowls of chocolate. And it is Tartarin who, light-heartedly, joins the colonial infantry regiment and goes singing into battle because he likes the adventure and would rather die in the field than be bored in barracks. Daudet has maligned the South so far as courage is concerned: there is nothing to show that the Southerners, Tarasconnais and others, are any more cowardly than the men of the North. Courage goes in zones, and because the North has generally proved harder the South must not be indicted en bloc. Presumably Daudet felt compelled to make Tartarin a poltroon so as to throw into relief his braggadocio; that is a flaw in his work, but if it be accepted as the licence of a litterateur, it does not mar the picture of Tartarin.
It should not, therefore, be lost sight of by the reader of Tartarin de Tarascon and of Tartarin Sur Les Alpes that this is a caricature. Every line is true, but modified a little by the 'mirage' that Alphonse Daudet so deftly satirises; it is only so much distorted as irony demands. Tartarin de Tarascon is by far the best of the three books; it is the most compact, and within its hundred-odd pages the picture of Tartarin is completely painted; the sequel is merely the response of the author to the demand of a public who so loved Tartarin as to buy five hundred thousand copies of his adventures. As for Port Tarascon, the beginning of Tartarin's end, it should not have been written, for it closes on a new Tartarin who no longer believes in his own triumphs—a sober, disillusioned Tartarin, shorn of his glory, flouted by his compatriots and ready to die in a foreign town. Alphonse Daudet had probably tired of his hero, for he understood him no longer. The real Tartarin could not be depressed by misadventure, chastened by loss of prestige: to cast him to earth could only bring about once more the prodigy of Anteus. He would have risen again, more optimistic and bombastic than ever, certain that no enemy had thrown him and that he had but slipped. And if Tartarin had to die, which is not certain, for Tartarin's essence is immortal, he could not die disgraced, but must die sumptuously—like Cleopatra among her jewels, or a Tartar chief standing on his piled arms on the crest of a funeral pyre.
2. FALSTAFF
Like Hamlet, Tartuffe, Don Quixote, Falstaff has had his worshippers and his exegetists. The character Dr. Johnson dwelled on still serves to-day to exercise the critical capacity of the freshman; he is one of the stars in a crowded cast, a human, fallible, lovable creature, and it is not wonderful that so many have asked themselves whether there lurked fineness and piety within his gross frame. But, though 'his pyramid rise high unto heaven,' it is not everybody has fully realised his psychological enormity, his nationality; the tendency has been to look upon him rather as a man than as a type. I do not contend that it is desirable to magnify type at the expense of personality; far from it, for the personal quality is ever more appealing than the typical, but one should not ignore the generalities which hide in the individual, especially when they are evident. It is remarkable that Dr Johnson should have so completely avoided this side of Falstaff's character, so remarkable that I quote in full his appreciation of the fat Knight[5]:—
'But Falstaff, unimitated, unimitable Falstaff! how shall I describe thee? thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired, but not esteemed; of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief and a glutton, a coward and a boaster; always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous, and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the prince only as an agent of vice; but of this familiarity he is so proud, as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men, but to think his interest of importance to the Duke of Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety; by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy scapes and sallies of levity, which make sport, but raise no envy. It must be observed, that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.'