Ten Tales | Page 2

the horrible life he has fled from that he may
save from a like degradation and from an inevitable moral decay the
one friend he has in the world, all unworthy as this friend is--contrast
this with the story of 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. Coppée 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. Coppée'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. Coppée'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.
Coppée 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. Coppée'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. Coppée probably thinks of ethics rather than æsthetics; 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 Molière,
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 æsthetic 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 Mérimee. That is an example we in America may study
to advantage; and from the men who are writing fiction