The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 2

all nationalities, and
indiscretion of a friend like Edmond de Goncourt (who seems to have
acted on the theory that it is the whole duty of man to take notes of the
talk of his fellows for prompt publication). 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
Provençal poet into a brilliant Parisian veritist. Daudet was a Provençal
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 Provençal; 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