The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 3

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 it is that has set Daudet apart
and that has caused his vogue with readers of all sorts and
conditions,--this unique combination of imagination and verity. "His
originality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely to
unite observation and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that it
contains of the improbable and the surprising, to satisfy at the same
time the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to write
novels which are at the same time realistic and romantic, and which
seem romantic only because they are very sincerely and very

profoundly realistic."
II.
Alphonse Daudet was born in 1840, and it was at Nîmes that he first
began to observe mankind; and he has described his birthplace and his
boyhood in "Little What's-his-name," a novel even richer in
autobiographical revelation than is "David Copperfield." His father was
a manufacturer whose business was not prosperous and who was forced
at last to remove with the whole family to Lyons in the vain hope of
doing better in the larger town. After reading the account of this
parent's peculiarities in M. Ernest Daudet's book, we are not surprised
that the affairs of the family did not improve, but went from bad to
worse. Alphonse Daudet suffered bitterly in these years of desperate
struggle, but he gained an understanding of the conditions of mercantile
life, to be serviceable later in the composition of "Fromont and Risler."
When he was sixteen he secured a place as pion in a boarding school in
the Cévennes,--pion is a poor devil of a youth hired to keep watch on
the boys. How painful this position was to the young poet can be read
indirectly in "Little What's-his-name," but more explicitly in the history
of that story, printed now in "Thirty Years of Paris." From this remote
prison he was rescued by his elder brother, Ernest, who was trying to
make his way in Paris and who sent for Alphonse as soon as he had
been engaged to help an old gentleman in writing his memoirs. The
younger brother has described his arrival in Paris, and his first
dress-coat and his earliest literary acquaintances. Ernest's salary was
seventy-five francs a month, and on this the two brothers managed to
live; no doubt fifteen dollars went further in Paris in 1857 than they
will in 1899.
In those days of privation and ambition Daudet's longing was to make
himself famous as a poet; and when at last, not yet twenty years old, he
began his career as a man of letters it was by the publication of a
volume of verse, just as his fellow-novelists, M. Paul Bourget and
Signor Gabriele d'Annunzio have severally done. Immature as juvenile
lyrics are likely to be, these early rhymes of Daudet's have a flavor of
their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is more

naturally a poet than most modern literators who possess the
accomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literary life,
but who lack a spontaneous impulse toward rhythm. It may even be
suggested that his little poems are less artificial than most French verse;
they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped in numbers; and
with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously acquired. His
lyric note, although not keen and not deep, is heard again and again in
his novels, and it sustains some of the most graceful and tender of his
short stories,--"The Death of the Dauphin," for instance, and the
"Sous-préfet in the Fields."
Daudet extended poetry to include playmaking; and alone or with a
friend he attempted more than one little piece in rhyme--tiny plays of a
type familiar enough at the Odéon. He has told us how the news of the
production of one of these poetic dramas came to him afar in Algiers
whither he had been sent because of a weakness of the lungs,
threatening to become worse in the gray Parisian winter. Other plays of
his, some of them far more important than this early effort, were
produced in the next few years. The most ambitious of these was the
"Woman of Arles," which he had elaborated from a touching short
story and for which Bizet composed incidental music as beautiful and
as overwhelming as that prepared by Mendelssohn for the "Midsummer
Night's Dream."
No one of Daudet's dramatic attempts was really successful; not the
"Woman of Arles," which is less moving in the theatre than in its
briefer narrative form, not even