The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 6

lacks perspective; it was composed too soon after the personal experiences out of which it was made,--before Time had put the scenes in proper proportion and before his hand was firm in its stroke. "Robert Helmont" is the journal of an observer who happens also to be a poet and a patriot; but it has scarcely substance enough to warrant calling it a story. Much of the material used in the making of these books was very good indeed; but the handling was a little uncertain, and the result is not quite satisfactory, charming as both of them are, with the seductive grace which is Daudet's birthright and his trademark. In his brief tales he had shown that he had the story-telling faculty, the ability to project character, the gift of arousing interest; but it remained for him to prove that he possessed also the main strength requisite to carry him through the long labor of a full-grown novel. It is not by gentle stories like "Robert Helmont" and "Little What's-his-name" that a novelist is promoted to the front rank; and after he had written these two books he remained where he was before, in the position of a promising young author.
The promise was fulfilled by the publication of "Fromont and Risler,"--not the best of his novels, but the earliest in which his full force was displayed. Daudet has told us how this was planned originally as a play, how the failure of the "Woman of Arles" led him to relinquish the dramatic form, and how the supposed necessities of the stage warped the logical structure of the story, turning upon the intrigues of the young wife the interest which should have been concentrated upon the partnership, the business rivalry, the mercantile integrity, whence the novel derived its novelty. The falsifying habit of thrusting marital infidelity into the foreground of fiction when the theme itself seems almost to exclude any dwelling on amorous misadventure, Daudet yielded to only this once; and this is one reason why a truer view of Parisian life can be found in his pages than in those of any of his competitors, and why his works are far less monotonous than theirs.
He is not squeamish, as every reader of "Sapho" can bear witness; but he does not wantonly choose a vulgar adultery as the staple of his stories. French fiction, ever since the tale of "Tristan and Yseult" was first told, has tended to be a poem of love triumphant over every obstacle, even over honor; and Daudet is a Frenchman with French ideas about woman and love and marriage; he is not without his share of Gallic salt; but he is too keen an observer not to see that there are other things in life than illicit wooings,--business, for example, and politics, and religion,--important factors all of them in our complicated modern existence. At the root of him Daudet had a steadfast desire to see life as a whole and to tell the truth about it unhesitatingly; and this is a characteristic he shares only with the great masters of fiction,--essentially veracious, every one of them.
Probably Dickens, frequently as he wrenched the facts of life into conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he also was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how he came to write "Fromont and Risler" that he discusses the accusation that he was an imitator of Dickens,--an accusation which seems absurd enough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we can compare their complete works. Daudet records that the charge was brought against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, and he explains that any likeness that may exist is due not to copying but to kinship of spirit. "I have deep in my heart," he says, "the same love Dickens has for the maimed and the poor, for the children brought up in all the deprivation of great cities." This pity for the disinherited, for those that have had no chance in life, is not the only similarity between the British novelist and the French; there is also the peculiar combination of sentiment and humor. Daudet is not so bold as Dickens, not so robust, not so over-mastering; but he is far more discreet, far truer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carry him into caricature, nor his sentiment slop over into sentimentality.
Even the minor French novelists strive for beauty of form, and would be ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the British story-tellers. A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recently remarked acutely that "Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of construction. Where, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he constructs too well, that is to say,