The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 2

Yet we have ample material to enable us to trace Daudet's heredity, and to estimate the influence of his environment in the days of his youth, and to allow for the effect which certain of his own physical peculiarities must have had upon his exercise of his art. His near-sightedness, for example,--would not Sainte-Beuve have seized upon this as significant? Would he not have seen in this a possible source of Daudet's mastery of description? And the spasms of pain borne bravely and uncomplainingly, the long agony of his later years, what mark has this left on his work, how far is it responsible for a modification of his attitude,--for the change from the careless gaiety of "Tartarin of Tarascon" to the sombre satire of "Port-Tarascon"? What caused the joyous story-teller of the "Letters from my Mill" to develop into the bitter iconoclast of the "Immortal."
These questions are insistent; and yet, after all, what matters the answer to any of them? The fact remains that Daudet had his share of that incommunicable quality which we are agreed to call genius. This once admitted, we may do our best to weigh it and to resolve it into its elements, it is at bottom the vital spark that resists all examination, however scientific we may seek to be. We can test for this and for that, but in the final analysis genius is inexplicable. It is what it is, because it is. It might have been different, no doubt, but it is not. It is its own excuse for being; and, for all that we can say to the contrary, it is its own cause, sufficient unto itself. Even if we had Sainte-Beuve's scalpel, we could not surprise the secret.
Yet an inquiry into the successive stages of Daudet's career, a consideration of his ancestry, of his parentage, of his birth, of the circumstances of his boyhood, of his youthful adventures,--these things are interesting in themselves and they are not without instruction. They reveal to us the reasons for the transformation that goes so far to explain Daudet's peculiar position,--the transformation of a young Proven?al poet into a brilliant Parisian veritist. Daudet was a Proven?al who became a Parisian,--and in this translation we may find the key to his character as a writer of fiction.
He was from Provence as Maupassant was from Normandy; and Daudet had the Southern expansiveness and abundance, just as Maupassant had the Northern reserve and caution. If an author is ever to bring forth fruit after his kind he must have roots in the soil of his nativity. Daudet was no orchid, beautiful and scentless; his writings have always the full flavor of the southern soil. He was able to set Tartarin before us so sympathetically and to make Numa Roumestan so convincing because he recognized in himself the possibility of a like exuberance. He could never take the rigorously impassive attitude which Flaubert taught Maupassant to assume. Daudet not only feels for his characters, but he is quite willing that we should be aware of his compassion.
He is not only incapable of the girding enmity which Taine detected and detested in Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp, but he is also devoid of the callous detachment with which Flaubert dissected Emma Bovary under the microscope. Daudet is never flagrantly hostile toward one of his creatures; and, however contemptible or despicable the characters he has called into being, he is scrupulously fair to them. Sidonie and Félicia Ruys severally throw themselves away, but Daudet is never intolerant. He is inexorable, but he is not insulting. I cannot but think that it is Provence whence Daudet derived the precious birthright of sympathy, and that it is Provence again which bestowed on him the rarer gift of sentiment. It is by his possession of sympathy and of sentiment that he has escaped the aridity which suffocates us in the works of so many other Parisian novelists. The South endowed him with warmth and heartiness and vivacity; and what he learnt from Paris was the power of self-restraint and the duty of finish.
He was born in Provence and he died in Paris; he began as a poet and he ended as a veritist; and in each case there was logical evolution and not contradiction. The Parisian did not cease to be a Proven?al; and the novelist was a lyrist still. Poet though he was, he had an intense liking for the actual, the visible, the tangible. He so hungered after truth that he was ready sometimes to stay his stomach with facts in its stead,--mere fact being but the outward husk, whereas truth is the rich kernel concealed within. His son tells us that Daudet might have taken as a motto the title of Goethe's autobiography, "Dichtung und Wahrheit,"--Poetry and Truth. And this