Ten Tales | Page 2

the gigantic deeds "My Friend Meurtrier" boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has been discovered in his little round of daily domestic duties, making the coffee of his good old mother and taking her poodle out for a walk.
Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, from the tragic adventure of "An Accident" to the pendent portraits of the "Two Clowns," cutting in its sarcasm, but not bitter--from "The Captain's Vices," which suggests at once George Eliot's Silas Marner and Mr. Austin Dobson's Tale of Polypheme, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk, who are prone to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic Funeral" seems to me always as though it might be a painting of M. Jean Beraud, that most Parisian of artists, just as certain stories of M. Guy de Maupassant inevitably suggest the bold freedom of M. Forain's sketches in black-and-white.
An ardent admirer of the author of the stories in The Odd Number has protested to me that M. Copp��e is not an etcher like M. de Maupassant, but rather a painter in water-colors. And why not? Thus might we call M. Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does he suggest the very bloom of color. No doubt M. Copp��e's contes have not the sharpness of M. de Maupassant's, nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's--but what of it? They have qualities of their own; they have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by those of either M. de Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Copp��e's street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the shadows of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful. They are intensely to be enjoyed by those of us who take the same keen delight in the varied phases of life in New York. They are not, to my mind, really rivalled either by those of M. de Maupassant, who is a Norman by birth and a nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a native of Provence, although now for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Copp��e is a Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose he is a poet; perhaps this is why his pictures of Paris are unsurpassable in their felicity and in their verity.
It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a finer morality in M. Copp��e's work than in M. de Maupassant's or in M. Daudet's or in that of almost any other of the Parisian story-tellers of to-day. In his tales we breathe a purer moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more bracing. It is not that M. Copp��e probably thinks of ethics rather than ?sthetics; in this respect his attitude is undoubtedly that of the others; there is no sermon in his song--or at least none for those who will not seek it for themselves; there is never a hint of a preachment. But for all that I have found in his work a trace of the tonic morality which inheres in Moli��re, for example, also a Parisian by birth, and also in Rabelais, despite his disguising grossness. This finer morality comes possibly from a wider and a deeper survey of the universe; and it is as different as possible from the morality which is externally applied and which always punishes the villain in the fifth act.
It is of good augury for our own letters that the best French fiction of to-day is getting itself translated in the United States, and that the liking for it is growing apace. Fiction is more consciously an art in France than anywhere else--perhaps partly because the French are now foremost in nearly all forms of artistic endeavor. In the short story especially, in the tale, in the conte, their supremacy is incontestable; and their skill is shown and their ?sthetic instinct exemplified partly in the sense of form, in the constructive method, which underlies the best short stories, however trifling these may appear to be, and partly in the rigorous suppression of non-essentials, due in a measure, it may be, to the example of M��rimee. That is an example we in America may study to advantage; and from the men who are writing fiction in France we may gain much. From the British fiction of this last quarter of the nineteenth century little can be learned by any one--less by us Americans in whom the English tradition is still dominant. When we look to France for